Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/707

Rh of tlio Mediterranean Sea, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the innermost bays of the Levant, and over the coasts for fifty miles inland. Under him were twenty-five praetors of senatorial rank chosen by himself. He had ample authority for levying troops and raising money. By the Manilian law he obtained in addition command over the whole of the East, &quot;so that there remained scarcely a spot of land within the wide Roman dominions that had not obeyed him.&quot; These laws were opposed by the friends of the senate and by those who still cherished respect for the old constitution of the city. They were supported by Ciesar and by Cicero, and were carried by the public voice. We need not see in this action of Caesar s a desire either to get rid of Pompeius as a rival, or to earn future favour by present support ; we may rather conclude that he saw more clearly than the statesmen of his time the growth of a new order and the decay of the old, and the necessity of fresh and even perilous expedients to meet wants which had not before arisen. After the departure of Pompeius, Caesar held the sedile- ship with Bibulus. His business in this office was to take charge of the public buildings, to repair the old, to furnish such new ones as were required, and to keep the multitude in good temper by a due magnificence in their national games, This office was to Csesar the occasion of fresh triumphs. Bibulus supplied the money, but Caesar showed how it might best be spent, and gained the whole credit of the generosity displayed. He decorated the forum, that small space under the Capitoline hill, on which every successive master of Rome has for good or for evil left his mark. He built, either at this or at a later time, the basilica Julia, which has again come to light in our generation, the first of those imperial erections which were imitated by his successors, and which extended the long line of colonnades and halls of justice far beyond the narrow limits of the Septimontium. He built porticoes under the Capitol for the reception of works of art, the plunder of Grecian cities ; and he struck a deeper chord in the hearts of his country men when by his order the trophies won by Marius from barbaric kings and peoples glittered one morning freshly adorned and gilded in the place from which they had been removed by Sulla, The defenceless city was terrified at the number of gladiators which he proposed to exhibit in the Great Games, and restricted him to three hundred and twenty pairs, but he made amends by arming them with accoutrements of silver, an act of magnificence remembered even in times when the city was sated with profusion. In the following year, G4 B.C., he was concerned in measures which show the consistency of his political cha racter He supported the agrarian law of Rullus (which, as far as we know its provisions, proposed to settle the poorer citizens in the waste lands of Campania and else where), because, although its provisions might be defective, its principles were good, and calculated to lessen the ine quality between the different members of the state. Cicero may, with the responsibility which attached to him as consul, have been right in procuring its rejection as ill-digested and premature. Caesar s support of the impeachment of Rabirius for the murder of Saturninus thirty-seven years before, was perhaps intended to show that party feeling should never be suffered to cover the commission of a crime, to assert again the principles of democracy which had been long unpopular, and also to deter young aristocrats from imitating the excesses of Sulla. These principles once asserted, there was no need to carry the prosecution to extremities. In the year following, 63 B.C., he was elected Pontifex Maximus, a signal mark of his popularity. This office placed him at the head of the state religion. Although he did not obtain it without bribery, yet we cannot believe that he would have been elected unless the psople had felt confidence in the dignity and integrity of his character, and if he had been the frivolous and abandoned libertine which some historians represent him to have been at this time. De Quincey has remarked that we are presented with a touching picture of his home life on the morning of his candidature. His mother Aurelia accompanied him to the portico of the house, with a mingled feeling of hope for his success and fear for his safety, and he answered to her expressed anxieties that he would return a conqueror or a corpse. We may believe that to his mother he owed many of his most commanding qualities. Throughout her life he treated her with deep affection and respect, and we have abundant proof that Caesar possessed to the full that strong family affection which always accompanies a noble nature, and which the Romans of that day have by some writers been so strangely supposed to have been without. An event was at hand of sufficient seriousness to try the mettle of the strongest. The conspiracy of Catiline has perhaps been exaggerated by the vanity of Cicero ; but allowing for this exaggeration, it threatened serious danger to the state, and it affords a conclusive proof of the impotence of the Roman government at this time. We shall find the closest parallel in the military pronunciamientos of modern Spain. Catiline had probably little design beyond obtaining the best places of government for himself and his friends at any cost. If Caesar had joined this movement he might have mastered it and directed it to his own purposes ; had he been an unprincipled adventurer he might have framed for himself combinations more likely to succeed. There is no proof that Caesar was an accomplice in this villany. Probability is against it. What we do know is that on December 5th he spoke against the execu tion of the conspirators. In this we have evidence of his strong common sense and political foresight. He saw that it was bad policy to break the laws in order to punish their violation. He knew also that the dead alone come back to haunt the living. &quot; If an adequate punishment,&quot; he said, &quot; can be devised for these men s offences let it be inflicted ; if their offence transcends all punishment, let us punish them by the laws of our country.&quot; It would have been well for Cicero if he had followed this advice. Such language was thoroughly consistent in the mouth of a man who had done his best to remedy the excesses of Sulla, from which he himself had suffered, and who had lost no opportunity of inculcating political moderation. The next year, 62 B.C., Caesar was prsetor. At the close of it Pompeius returned from the conquest of Mithridates, and quietly disbanded his army. The time had not arrived for Caesar to lay aside the toga. In 61 B.C., at the age of forty, he assumed as propraetor his first important military command, and laid the foundation of a reputation as the greatest of generals, which should never be allowed to overshadow his higher merit as a statesman and the regenerator of Ins country. Before Caesar could leave Rome for his province it was necessary that he should clear himself from the load of debt which oppressed him, and this he was enabled to do by the assistance of Crassus. A charge of insolvency has bee a allowed to weigh too heavily upon the character of Caesar, and has received too much importance as a motive for his actions. It can be accounted for by supposing an over-recklessness of means to gain important public ends, and a culpable carelessness in his private interests, which are not without a parallehin statesmen of modern times, whose character is above suspicion. We have little positive information about his campaign in the Peninsula, the main operations of which were carried on in Galicia and Portugal. Caesar appears to have exhibited on a small field the same qualities which distinguished him in a large sphere. Ho was proclaimed impcrator by his soldiers, was voted a 