is beyond expression. Nothing is left for us
but to deem those fortunate who beheld this perfection, and to gain
some faint conception of it from the reflected lustre which rests
imperishably on the works that were the creation of this great nature.
These also, it is true, bear the stamp of the time. The Roman hero
himself stood by the side of his youthful Greek predecessor
not merely as an equal, but as a superior; but the world had meanwhile
become old and its youthful lustre had faded. The action of Caesar
was no longer, like that of Alexander, a joyous marching onward
towards a goal indefinitely remote; he built on, and out of, ruins,
and was content to establish himself as tolerably and as securely
as possible within the ample but yet definite bounds once assigned
to him. With reason therefore the delicate poetic tact
of the nations has not troubled itself about the unpoetical Roman,
and on the other hand has invested the son of Philip with all
the golden lustre of poetry, with all the rainbow hues of legend.
But with equal reason the political life of the nations has during
thousands of years again and again reverted to the lines
which Caesar drew; and the fact, that the peoples to whom the world
belongs still at the present day designate the highest of their monarchs
by his name, conveys a warning deeply significant and, unhappily,
fraught with shame.

Setting Aside of the Old Parties

If the old, in every respect vicious, state of things was to be
successfully got rid of and the commonwealth was to be renovated,
it was necessary first of all that the country should be
practically tranquillized and that the ground should be cleared
from the rubbish with which since the recent catastrophe it was
everywhere strewed. In this work Caesar set out from the principle
of the reconciliation of the hitherto subsisting parties or,
to put it more correctly--for, where the antagonistic principles
are irreconcilable, we cannot speak of real reconciliation--
from the principle that the arena, on which the nobility and the populace
had hitherto contended with each other, was to be abandoned
by both parties, and that both were to meet together on the ground
of the new monarchical constitution. First of all therefore
all the older quarrels of the republican past were regarded as done away
for ever and irrevocably. While Caesar gave orders that the statues
of Sulla which had been thrown down by the mob of the capital
on