sarcasm against the "great Caesar," "the unique general,"
against the affectionate father-in-law and son-in-law,
who ruin the whole globe in order to give their dissolute favourites
opportunity to parade the spoils of the long-haired Celts
through the streets of Rome, to furnish royal banquets with the booty
of the farthest isles of the west, and as rivals showering gold
to supplant honest youths at home in the favour of their mistresses.
There is in the poems of Catullus(9) and the other fragments
of the literature of this period something of that fervour of personal
and political hatred, of that republican agony overflowing
in riotous humour or in stern despair, which are more prominently
and powerfully apparent in Aristophanes and Demosthenes.

The most sagacious of the three rulers at least saw well
that it was as impossible to despise this opposition as to suppress
it by word of command. So far as he could, Caesar tried
rather personally to gain over the more notable authors.
Cicero himself had to thank his literary reputation in good part
for the respectful treatment which he especially experienced
from Caesar; but the governor of Gaul did not disdain to conclude
a special peace even with Catullus himself through the intervention
of his father who had become personally known to him in Verona;
and the young poet, who had just heaped upon the powerful general
the bitterest and most personal sarcasms, was treated by him
with the most flattering distinction. In fact Caesar was gifted enough
to follow his literary opponents on their own domain and to publish--
as an indirect way of repelling manifold attacks--a detailed report
on the Gallic wars, which set forth before the public, with happily
assumed naivete, the necessity and constitutional propriety
of his military operations. But it is freedom alone that is absolutely
and exclusively poetical and creative; it and it alone is able
even in its most wretched caricature, even with its latest breath,
to inspire fresh enthusiasm. All the sound elements of literature
were and remained anti-monarchical; and, if Caesar himself
could venture on this domain without proving a failure, the reason
was merely that even now he still cherished at heart the magnificent
dream of a free commonwealth, although he was unable to transfer it
either to his adversaries or to his adherents. Practical politics
was not more absolutely controlled by the regents than literature
by the r