Cæsar was, in fact, an extremely unscrupulous man. I do not find it possible to accept the opinion of his character held by most historians, or to suppose him to have been an heroic figure who lived and died for his lofty and patriotic principles. There was immense good in him, and he had the unquestionable merit of being a great man with vast ambitions for the orderly governance of the nations of the earth; but when he threw himself with such enthusiasm into the task of winning the heart of the harum-scarum young Queen of Egypt, it seems to me that he was very well qualified to deceive her, and to play upon her emotions with all the known arts and wiles of a wicked world. So notorious was his habit of leading women astray, that when he returned to Rome from his Gallic Wars his soldiers sang a marching song in which the citizens were warned to protect their ladies from him lest he should treat them as he had treated all the women of Gaul. “_Urbani, servate uxores_,” they sang; “_Calvum moechum adducimus_.”
He had no particular religion, not much honour, and few high principles; and in this regard all that can be said in his favour is that he was perfectly free from cant, never pretended to be virtuous, nor attempted to hide from his contemporaries the multitude of his sins. As a young man he indulged in every kind of vice, and so scandalous was his reputation for licentiousness that it was a matter of blank astonishment to his Roman friends when, nevertheless, he proved himself so brave and strenuous a soldier. His relationship with the mother of Brutus, who was thought to be his own son, shows that he prosecuted love intrigues while yet a boy. At one time he passed through a phase of extreme effeminacy, with its attendant horrors; and there was a period when he used to spend long hours each day in the practice of the mysteries of the toilet, being scented and curled and painted in the manner prescribed by the most degenerate young men of the aristocratic classes. Indeed so effeminate was he, that after staying with his friend Nicomedes, the King of Bithynia, he was jestingly called Queen of Bithynia; and on another occasion in Rome a certain wag named Octavius saluted Pompey as King and Cæsar as Queen of Rome. His intrigues with the wives of his friends had been as frequent as they were notorious. No good-looking woman was safe from him, least of all those whom he had the opportunity of seeing frequently, owing to his friendship for their husbands or other male relatives. Not even political considerations checked his amorous inclinations, as may be judged from the fact that he made a victim of Mucia, the wife of Pompey, whose friendship he most eagerly desired at that time. “He was the inevitable co-respondent in every fashionable divorce,” writes Oman; “and when we look at the list of the ladies whose names are linked with his, we can only wonder at the state of society in Rome which permitted him to survive unscathed to middle age. The marvel is that he did not end in some dark corner, with a dagger between his ribs, long before he attained the age of thirty.” Being a brilliant opportunist he made use of his success with women to promote his own interests, and at one time he is said to have conducted love intrigues with the wives of Pompey, Crassus, and Gabinius, all leaders of his political party. Even the knowledge of the habits of the young fops of the period, which he had acquired while emulating their mode of life, was turned to good account by him in after years. At the battle of Pharsalia, which had been fought but a few weeks before his arrival in Egypt, he had told his troops who were to receive the charges of the enemy’s patrician cavalry that they should not attempt to hamstring the horses or strike at their legs, but should aim their blows at the riders’ faces, “in the hopes,” as Plutarch says, “that young gentlemen who had not known much of battles and wounds, but came, wearing their hair long, in the flower of their age and height of their beauty, would be more apprehensive of such blows and not care for hazarding both a danger at present and a blemish for the future. And so it proved, for they turned about, and covered their faces to safeguard them.”