and with this may be connected the circumstance
that he so often played a desperate game with destiny, and in particular
again and again hazarded his person with daring indifference.
As indeed occasionally men of predominant sagacity betake themselves
to a pure game of hazard, so there was in Caesar's rationalism a point
at which it came in some measure into contact with mysticism.

Caesar as a Statesman

Gifts such as these could not fail to produce a statesman.
From early youth, accordingly, Caesar was a statesman in the deepest
sense of the term, and his aim was the highest which man is allowed
to propose to himself--the political, military, intellectual,
and moral regeneration of his own deeply decayed nation,
and of the still more deeply decayed Hellenic nation intimately akin
to his own. The hard school of thirty years' experience changed
his views as to the means by which this aim was to be reached; his aim
itself remained the same in the times of his hopeless humiliation
and of his unlimited plenitude of power, in the times when as demagogue
and conspirator he stole towards it by paths of darkness,
and in those when, as joint possessor of the supreme power
and then as monarch, he worked at his task in the full light of day
before the eyes of the world. All the measures of a permanent kind
that proceeded from him at the most various times assume their
appropriate places in the great building-plan. We cannot
therefore properly speak of isolated achievements of Caesar;
he did nothing isolated. With justice men commend Caesar the orator
for his masculine eloquence, which, scorning all the arts
of the advocate, like a clear flame at once enlightened and warmed.
With justice men admire in Caesar the author the inimitable simplicity
of the composition, the unique purity and beauty of the language.
With justice the greatest masters of war of all times have praised
Caesar the general, who, in a singular degree disregarding routine
and tradition, knew always how to find out the mode of warfare
by which in the given case the enemy was conquered, and which
was thus in the given case the right one; who with the certainty
of divination found the proper means for every end; who after defeat
stood ready for battle like William of Orange, and ended the campaign
invariably with victory; who managed that element of warfare,
the treatment of which serves to distinguish military genius
from the mere ordinary ability of an of