‘FACTA DUCIS VIVENT, OPEROSAQUE GLORIA RERUM.’ --_OVID._
‘THE HERO’S DEEDS AND HARD-WON FAME SHALL LIVE.’
Caesar was the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path that he marked out for it until its sun went down.
Whatever he undertook and achieved was pervaded and guided by the cool sobriety which constitutes the most marked peculiarity of his genius. To this he owed the power of living energetically in the present, undisturbed either by recollection or by expectation: to this he owed the capacity of acting at any moment with collected vigour, and of applying his whole genius even to the smallest and most incidental enterprise. Gifts such as these could not fail to produce a statesman.
+Caesar as a statesman.+--From early youth Caesar was a statesman in the deepest sense of the term, and his aim was the +political, military, intellectual, and moral regeneration of his own deeply decayed nation, and of the still more deeply decayed Hellenic nation intimately akin to his own+. According to his original plan, he had proposed to reach his object, like Pericles and Gaius Gracchus, without force of arms, until, reluctantly convinced of the necessity for a military support, he, when already forty years of age, put himself at the head of an army.
+His talent for organisation was marvellous.+--No statesman has ever compelled alliances, no general has ever collected an army out of unyielding and refractory elements with such decision, and kept them together with such firmness, as Caesar displayed in constraining and upholding his coalitions and his legions; never did regent judge his instruments and assign each to the place appropriate for him with so accurate an eye.
+He was monarch; but he never played the king.+--‘I am no king, but Caesar.’ Even when absolute lord of Rome, he retained the deportment of the party-leader; perfectly pliant and smooth, easy and charming in conversation, complaisant towards everyone, it seemed as if he wished io be nothing but the first among his peers.
Caesar ruled as king of Rome for five years and a half, not half as long as Alexander: in the intervals of seven great campaigns, which allowed him to stay not more than fifteen months altogether in the capital of his empire, +he regulated the destinies of the world for the present and the future+. The outlines were laid down, and thereby the new State was defined for all coming time: the boundless future alone could complete the structure. But precisely because the building was an endless one, the master so long as he lived restlessly added stone to stone, with always the same dexterity and always the same elasticity busy at work. Thus he worked and created as never did any man before or after him: and as a worker and creator he still, after well-nigh two thousand years, lives in the memory of the nations--the first and withal unique Imperator Caesar.