rowing himself on the friendship, or mercy, of Orodes. He had hopes,
perhaps, of enlisting the Parthian battalions in his cause, and of
recovering power by means of this foreign aid. But his friends combated
his design, and persuaded him that the risk, both to himself and to his
wife, Cornelia, was too great to be compatible with prudence. Pompey
yielded to their representations; and Orodes escaped the difficulty
of having to elect between repulsing a suppliant, and provoking the
hostility of the most powerful chieftain and the greatest general of the
age.

Caesar quitted the East in B.C. 47 without entering into any
communication with Orodes. He had plenty of work upon his hands; and
whatever designs he may have even then entertained of punishing the
Parthian inroad into Syria, or avenging the defeat of Carrhae, he was
wise enough to keep his projects to himself and to leave Asia without
exasperating by threats or hostile movements the Power on which the
peace of the East principally depended. It was not until he had brought
the African and Spanish wars to an end that he allowed his intention of
leading an expedition against Parthia to be openly talked about. In
B.C. 34, four years after Pharsalia, having put down all his domestic
enemies, and arranged matters, as he thought, satisfactorily at Rome, he
let a decree be passed formally assigning to him "the Parthian War," and
sent the legions across the Adriatic on their way to Asia. What plan of
campaign he may have contemplated is uncertain; but there cannot be
a doubt that an expedition under his auspices would have been a most
serious danger to Parthia, and might have terminated in her subjection.
The military talents of the Great Dictator were of the most splendid
description; his powers of organization and consolidation enormous;
his prudence and caution equal to his ambition and his courage. Once
launched on a career of conquest in the East, it is impossible to say
whither he might not have carried the Roman eagles, or what countries
he might not have added to the Empire. But Parthia was saved from
the imminent peril without any effort of her own. The daggers of "the
Liberators" struck down on the 15th of March, B.C. 44, the only man whom
she had seriously to fear; and with the removal of Julius passed
away even from Roman thought for many a years the design which he had
entertained, and which he alone could have accomplished.

In the civil war that followed on t