self this question: Given the Caesarean
environment, which of the Caesars would this person resemble--Julius,
Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero? I take each trait of
character, each mental and emotional bias, each little oddity, and
magnify them a thousand times. The resulting image gives me his
Caesarean formula."

"And which of the Caesars do you resemble?" asked Gombauld.

"I am potentially all of them," Mr. Scogan replied, "all--with the
possible exception of Claudius, who was much too stupid to be a
development of anything in my character. The seeds of Julius's courage
and compelling energy, of Augustus's prudence, of the libidinousness and
cruelty of Tiberius, of Caligula's folly, of Nero's artistic genius and
enormous vanity, are all within me. Given the opportunities, I might
have been something fabulous. But circumstances were against me. I was
born and brought up in a country rectory; I passed my youth doing a
great deal of utterly senseless hard work for a very little money. The
result is that now, in middle age, I am the poor thing that I am. But
perhaps it is as well. Perhaps, too, it's as well that Denis hasn't
been permitted to flower into a little Nero, and that Ivor remains only
potentially a Caligula. Yes, it's better so, no doubt. But it would
have been more amusing, as a spectacle, if they had had the chance to
develop, untrammelled, the full horror of their potentialities. It would
have been pleasant and interesting to watch their tics and foibles and
little vices swelling and burgeoning and blossoming into enormous and
fantastic flowers of cruelty and pride and lewdness and avarice. The
Caesarean environment makes the Caesar, as the special food and the
queenly cell make the queen bee. We differ from the bees in so far that,
given the proper food, they can be sure of making a queen every time.
With us there is no such certainty; out of every ten men placed in the
Caesarean environment one will be temperamentally good, or intelligent,
or great. The rest will blossom into Caesars; he will not. Seventy and
eighty years ago simple-minded people, reading of the exploits of the
Bourbons in South Italy, cried out in amazement: To think that such
things should be happening in the nineteenth century! And a few years
since we too were astonished to find that in our still more astonishing
twentieth century, unhappy blackamoors on the Congo and the Amazon were
being treated as English serfs were tr