s, as a subordinate officer, a civic
crown won for personal bravery, an unsuccessful action brought against a
citizen of high rank in the hope of forcing himself into notice, a trip
to Rhodes made to escape the disgrace of failure, and an adventure with
pirates--there, in a few words, is the story of Julius Caesar's youth, as
history tells it. But then suddenly, when his projected studies in quiet
Rhodes were hardly begun, he crosses to the mainland, raises troops,
seizes cities, drives Mithridates' governor out of the province, returns
to Rome and is elected military tribune. The change is too quick, and
one does not understand it. Truth should tell that those early years had
been spent in the profound study of philosophy, history, biography,
languages and mankind, of the genesis of events from the germ to the
branching tree, of that chemistry of fate which brews effect out of
cause, and distils the imperishable essence of glory from the rougher
liquor of vulgar success.

What strikes one most in the lives of the very great is that every
action has a cumulative force beyond what it ever has in the existence
of ordinary men. Success moves onward, passing through events on the
same plane, as it were, and often losing brilliancy till it fades away,
leaving those who have had it to outlive it in sorrow and weakness.
Genius moves upward, treading events under its feet, scaling Olympus,
making a ladder of mankind, outlasting its own activity for ever in a
final and fixed glory more splendid than its own bright path. The really
great man gathers power in action, the average successful man expends
it.

And so it must be understood that Caesar, in his early youth, was not
wasting his gifts in what seemed to be a half-voluptuous,
half-adventurous, wholly careless life, but was accumulating strength by
absorbing into himself the forces with which he came in contact,
exhausting the intelligence of his companions in order to stock his own,
learning everything simultaneously, forgetting nothing he learned till
he could use all he knew to the extreme limit of its value.

There is something mysterious in the almost unlimited credit which Caesar
seems to have enjoyed when still a very young man; and if the control of
enormous sums of money by which he made himself beloved among the people
explains, in a measure, his rapid rise from office to office, it is, on
the other hand, hard to account for the trust which his creditors placed
i