Caesar even as general
practically dropped the bodyguard, he still, less as king tolerated
a guard round his person. Although constantly beset by lurking
assassins and well aware of it, he yet rejected the proposal
of the senate to institute a select guard; dismissed,
as soon as things grew in some measure quiet, the Spanish escort
which he had made use of at first in the capital; and contented himself
with the retinue of lictors sanctioned by traditional usage
for the Roman supreme magistrates.

Impracticableness of Ideal

However much of the idea of his party and of his youth--
to found a Periclean government in Rome not by virtue of the sword,
but by virtue of the confidence of the nation--Caesar had been obliged
to abandon in the struggle with realities, he retained even now
the fundamental idea--of not founding a military monarchy--
with an energy to which history scarcely supplies a parallel.
Certainly this too was an impracticable ideal--it was the sole illusion,
in regard to which the earnest longing of that vigorous mind
was more powerful than its clear judgment. A government, such as Caesar
had in view, was not merely of necessity in its nature highly personal,
and so liable to perish with the death of its author just as
the kindred creations of Pericles and Cromwell with the death
of their founders; but, amidst the deeply disorganized state
of the nation, it was not at all credible that the eighth king of Rome
would succeed even for his lifetime in ruling, as his seven predecessors
had ruled, his fellow-burgesses merely by virtue of law and justice,
and as little probable that he would succeed in incorporating
the standing army--after it had during the last civil war
learned its power and unlearned its reverence--once more
as a subservient element in civil society. To any one who calmly
considered to what extent reverence for the law had disappeared
from the lowest as from the highest ranks of society, the former hope
must have seemed almost a dream; and, if with the Marian reform
of the military system the soldier generally had ceased
to be a citizen,(39) the Campanian mutiny and the battle-field
of Thapsus showed with painful clearness the nature of the support
which the army now lent to the law. Even the great democrat
could only with difficulty and imperfectly hold in check the powers
which he had unchained; thousands of swords still at his signal
flew from the scabbard, but they were no longer e