ficer--the rapid movement
of masses--with unsurpassed perfection, and found the guarantee
of victory not in the massiveness of his forces but in the celerity
of their movements, not in long preparation but in rapid
and daring action even with inadequate means. But all these were
with Caesar mere secondary matters; he was no doubt a great orator,
author, and general, but he became each of these merely because
he was a consummate statesman. The soldier more especially
played in him altogether an accessory part, and it is
one of the principal peculiarities by which he is distinguished
from Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon, that he began his political
activity not as an officer, but as a demagogue. According
to his original plan he had purposed to reach his object, like Pericles
and Gaius Gracchus, without force of arms, and throughout eighteen years
he had as leader of the popular party moved exclusively amid
political plans and intrigues--until, reluctantly convinced
of the necessity for a military support, he, when already forty years
of age, put himself at the head of an army. It was natural
that he should even afterwards remain still more statesman
than general--just like Cromwell, who also transformed himself
from a leader of opposition into a military chief and democratic king,
and who in general, little as the prince of Puritans seems to resemble
the dissolute Roman, is yet in his development as well as
in the objects which he aimed at and the results which he achieved
of all statesmen perhaps the most akin to Caesar. Even in his mode
of warfare this improvised generalship may still be recognized;
the enterprises of Napoleon against Egypt and against England
do not more clearly exhibit the artillery-lieutenant who had risen
by service to command than the similar enterprises of Caesar exhibit
the demagogue metamorphosed into a general. A regularly trained
officer would hardly have been prepared, through political
considerations of a not altogether stringent nature, to set aside
the best-founded military scruples in the way in which Caesar did
on several occasions, most strikingly in the case of his landing
in Epirus. Several of his acts are therefore censurable
from a military point of view; but what the general loses,
the statesman gains. The task of the statesman is universal
in its nature like Caesar's genius; if he undertook things
the most varied and most remote one from another, they had all
without