Page:The Commentaries of Caesar.djvu/40

 career, fain to seek some influence in the city by joining himself in a secret compact with Cæsar, his natural enemy, and with Crassus. Cæsar, seeing all this, knowing how Marius and Sulla had succeeded and had failed, seeing what had come of the magnanimity of Pompey—resolved no doubt that, whatever might be the wars in which they should be trained, he would have trained legions at his command. When, therefore, he first found a cause for war, he was ready for war. He had not been long proconsul before there came a wicked lamb and drank at his stream.

In describing to us the way in which he conquered lamb after lamb throughout the whole country which he calls Gallia, he tells us almost nothing of himself. Of his own political ideas, of his own ambition, even of his doings in Italy through those winter months which he generally passed on the Roman side of the Alps, having left his army in winter quarters under his lieutenants, he says but a very few words. His record is simply the record of the campaigns; and although he now and then speaks of the dignity of the Republic, he hardly ever so far digresses from the narrative as to give to the reader any idea of the motives by which he is actuated. Once in these seven memoirs of seven years' battling in Gaul, and once only, does he refer to a motive absolutely personal to himself. When he succeeded in slaughtering a fourth of the emigrating Swiss, which was his first military success in Gaul, he tells us that he had then revenged an injury to himself as well as an injury to the Republic, because the grandfather of his father-in-law