resented. His youth
appears almost always to be totally disconnected from his maturity. The
first success, the conquest of Gaul, comes as a surprise, because its
preparation is not described. After it everything seems natural, and
conquest follows victory as daylight follows dawn; but when we try to
think backwards from that first expedition, we either see nothing
clearly, or we find Caesar an insignificant unit in a general disorder,
as hard to identify as an individual ant in a swarming ant-hill. In the
lives of all 'great men,' which are almost always totally unlike the
lives of the so-called 'great,'--those born, not to power, but in
power,--there is a point which must inevitably be enigmatical. It may be
called the Hour of Fate--the time when in the suddenly loosed play of
many circumstances, strained like springs and held back upon themselves,
a man who has been known to a few thousands finds himself the chief of
millions and the despot of a nation.

Things which are only steps to great men are magnified to attainments in
ordinary lives, and remembered with pride. The man of genius is sure of
the great result, if he can but get a fulcrum for his lever. What
strikes one most in the careers of such men as Caesar and Napoleon is the
tremendous advance realized at the first step--the difference between
Napoleon's half-subordinate position before the first campaign in Italy
and his dominion of France immediately after it, or the distance which
separated Caesar, the impeached Consul, from Caesar, the conqueror of
Gaul.

It must not be forgotten that Caesar came of a family that had held great
positions, and which, though impoverished, still had credit,
subsequently stretched by Caesar to the extreme limit of its borrowing
power. At sixteen, an age when Bonaparte was still an unknown student,
Caesar was Flamen Dialis, or high priest of Jupiter, and at one and
twenty, the 'ill-girt boy,' as Sylla called him from his way of wearing
his toga, was important enough to be driven from Rome, a fugitive. His
first attempt at a larger notoriety had failed, and Dolabella, whom he
had impeached, had been acquitted through the influence of friends. Yet
the young lawyer had found the opportunity of showing what he could do,
and it was not without reason that Sylla said of him, 'You will find
many a Marius in this one Caesar.'

Twenty years passed before the prophecy began to be realized with the
commencement of Caesar's career in G