Of mighty creative power and yet at the same time of the most penetrating judgment; no longer a youth and not yet an old man; of the highest energy of will and the highest capacity of execution; filled with republican ideals and at the same time born to be a king; a Roman in the deepest essence of his nature, and yet called to reconcile and combine in himself as well as in the outer world the Roman and the Hellenic types of culture--Caesar was the entire and perfect man. Accordingly we miss in him more than in any other historical personage what are called characteristic features, which are in reality nothing else than deviations from the natural course of human development. What in Caesar passes for such at the first superficial glance is, when more closely observed, seen to be the peculiarity not of the individual, but of the epoch of culture or of the nation; his youthful adventures, for instance, were common to him with all his more gifted contemporaries of like position, his unpoetical but strongly logical temperament was the temperament of Romans in general. It formed part also of Caesar's full humanity that he was in the highest degree influenced by the conditions of time and place; for there is no abstract humanity-- the living man cannot but occupy a place in a given nationality and in a definite line of culture. Caesar was a perfect man just because he more than any other placed himself amidst the currents of his time, and because he more than any other possessed the essential peculiarity of the Roman nation--practical aptitude as a citizen--in perfection: for his Hellenism in fact was only the Hellenism which had been long intimately blended with the Italian nationality. But in this very circumstance lies the difficulty, we may perhaps say the impossibility, of depicting Caesar to the life. As the artist can paint everything save only consummate beauty, so the historian, when once in a thousand years he encounters the perfect, can only be silent regarding it. For normality admits doubtless of being expressed, but it gives us only the negative notion of the absence of defect; the secret of nature, whereby in her most finished manifestations normality and individuality are combined, is beyond expression. Nothing is left for us but to deem those fortunate who beheld this perfection, and to gain some faint conception of it from the reflected lustre which rests imperishably on the works that were the creation of this great nature. These also, it is true, bear the stamp of the time. The Roman hero himself stood by the side of his youthful Greek predecessor not merely as an equal, but as a superior; but the world had meanwhile become old and its youthful lustre had faded. The action of Caesar was no longer, like that of Alexander, a joyous marching onward towards a goal indefinitely remote; he built on, and out of, ruins, and was content to establish himself as tolerably and as securely as possible within the ample but yet definite bounds once assigned to him. With reason therefore the delicate poetic tact of the nations has not troubled itself about the unpoetical Roman, and on the other hand has invested the son of Philip with all the golden lustre of poetry, with all the rainbow hues of legend. But with equal reason the political life of the nations has during thousands of years again and again reverted to the lines which Caesar drew; and the fact, that the peoples to whom the world belongs still at the present day designate the highest of their monarchs by his name, conveys a warning deeply significant and, unhappily, fraught with shame.
Setting Aside Of The Old Parties
If the old, in every respect vicious, state of things was to be successfully got rid of and the commonwealth was to be renovated, it was necessary first of all that the country should be practically tranquillized and that the ground should be cleared from the rubbish with which since the recent catastrophe it was everywhere strewed. In this work Caesar set out from the principle of the reconciliation of the hitherto subsisting parties or, to put it more correctly--for, where the antagonistic principles are irreconcilable, we cannot speak of real reconciliation-- from the principle that the arena, on which the nobility and the populace had hitherto contended with each other, was to be abandoned by both parties, and that both were to meet together on the ground of the new monarchical constitution. First of all therefore all the older quarrels of the republican past were regarded as done away for ever and irrevocably. While Caesar gave orders that the statues of Sulla which had been thrown down by the mob of the capital on the news of the battle of Pharsalus should be re-erected, and thus recognized the fact that it became history alone to sit in judgment on that great man, he at the same time cancelled the last remaining effects of Sulla's exceptional laws, recalled from exile those who had been banished in the times of the Cinnan and Sertorian troubles, and restored to the children of those outlawed by Sulla their forfeited privilege of eligibility to office. In like manner all those were restored, who in the preliminary stage of the recent catastrophe had lost their seat in the senate or their civil existence through sentence of the censors or political process, especially through the impeachments raised on the basis of the exceptional laws of 702. Those alone who had put to death the proscribed for money remained, as was reasonable, still under attainder; and Milo, the most daring condottiere of the senatorial party, was excluded from the general pardon.
Discontent Of The Democrats
Far more difficult than the settlement of these questions which already belonged substantially to the past was the treatment of the parties confronting each other at the moment--on the one hand Caesar's own democratic adherents, on the other hand the overthrown aristocracy. That the former should be, if possible, still less satisfied than the latter with Caesar's conduct after the victory and with his summons to abandon the old standing-ground of party, was to be expected.