not cross, turning soldiers into
marines, infantry into cavalry, building roads that are roads to-day,
fighting with one hand and writing an epic with the other, dictating
love-letters, chronicles, dramas; finding time to make a collection of
witticisms; overturning thrones while he decorated Greece; mingling
initiate into orgies of the Druids, and, as the cymbals clashed,
coquetting with those terrible virgins who awoke the tempest; not only
conquering, but captivating, transforming barbarians into soldiers and
those soldiers into senators, submitting three hundred nations and
ransacking Britannia for pearls for his mistresses' ears.

Each epoch has its secret, and each epoch-maker his own. Caesar's
secret lay in the power he had of projecting a soul into the ranks of
an army, of making legions and their leader one. Disobedience only he
punished; anything else he forgave. After a victory his soldiery did
what they liked. He gave them arms, slaves to burnish them, women,
feasts, sleep. They were his comrades; he called them so; he wept at
the death of any of them, and when they were frightened, as they were
in Gaul before they met the Germans, and in Africa before they
encountered Juba, Caesar frightened them still more. He permitted no
questions, no making of wills. The cowards could hide where they liked;
his old guard, the Tenth, would do the work alone; or, threat still
more sinister, he would command a retreat. Ah, that, never! Fanaticism
returned, the legions begged to be punished.

Michelet says he would like to have seen him crossing Gaul, bareheaded,
in the rain. It would have been as interesting, perhaps, to have
watched him beneath the shade of the velarium pleading the cause of
Masintha against the Numidian king. Before him was a crowd that covered
not the Forum alone, but the steps of the adjacent temples, the roofs
of the basilicas, the arches of Janus, one that extended remotely to
the black walls of the Curia Hostilia beyond. And there, on the
rostrum, a musician behind him supplying the la from a flute, the air
filled with gold motes, Caesar, his toga becomingly adjusted, a
jewelled hand extended, opened for the defence. Presently, when through
the exercise of that art of his which Cicero pronounced incomparable,
he felt that the sympathy of the audience was won, it would have been
interesting, indeed, to have heard him argue point after
point--clearly, brilliantly, wittily; insulting the plaintiff in