e opulent
undertaking for the maintenance of the needy. Their disinterested love
for Caesar appeared in another and more difficult illustration: it was a
traditionary anecdote in Rome that the majority of those amongst
Caesar's troops who had the misfortune to fall into the enemy's hands
refused to accept their lives under the condition of serving against
_him_.

In connexion with this subject of his extraordinary munificence, there
is one aspect of Caesar's life which has suffered much from the
misrepresentations of historians, and that is--the vast pecuniary
embarrassments under which he laboured, until the profits of war had
turned the scale even more prodigiously in his favour. At one time of
his life, when appointed to a foreign office, so numerous and so
clamorous were his creditors that he could not have left Rome on his
public duties had not Crassus come forward with assistance in money, or
by guarantees, to the amount of nearly two hundred thousand pounds. And
at another he was accustomed to amuse himself with computing how much
money it would require to make him worth exactly nothing (_i.e._ simply
to clear him of debts); this, by one account, amounted to upwards of two
millions sterling. Now, the error of historians has been to represent
these debts as the original ground of his ambition and his revolutionary
projects, as though the desperate condition of his private affairs had
suggested a civil war to his calculations as the best or only mode of
redressing it. Such a policy would have resembled the last desperate
resource of an unprincipled gambler, who, on seeing his final game at
chess, and the accumulated stakes depending upon it, all on the brink of
irretrievable sacrifice, dexterously upsets the chess-board, or
extinguishes the lights. But Julius, the one sole patriot of Rome, could
find no advantage to his plans in darkness or in confusion. Honestly
supported, he would have crushed the oligarchies of Rome by crushing in
its lairs that venal and hunger-bitten democracy which made oligarchy
and its machineries resistless. Caesar's debts, far from being
stimulants and exciting causes of his political ambition, stood in an
inverse relation to the ambition; they were its results, and represented
its natural costs, being contracted from first to last in the service of
his political intrigues, for raising and maintaining a powerful body of
partisans, both in Rome and elsewhere. Whosoever indeed will take the