Imperial Purple | Page 4

the republic they
announced, the foundation of Imperial Rome.
There was a hush, then a riot which frightened a senate that frightened
the world. Caesar was adored. A man who could give millions away
and sup on dry bread was apt to conquer, not provinces alone, but

hearts. Besides, he had begun well and his people had done their best.
The House of Julia, to which he belonged, descended, he declared,
from Venus. The ancestry was less legendary than typical. Cinna
drafted a law giving him the right to marry as often as he chose. His
mistresses were queens. After the episodes in Gaul, when he entered
Rome his legions warned the citizens to have an eye on their wives. At
seventeen he fascinated pirates. A shipload of the latter had caught him
and demanded twenty talents ransom. "Too little," said the lad; "I will
give you fifty, and impale you too," which he did, jesting with them
meanwhile, reciting verses of his own composition, calling them
barbarians when they did not applaud, ordering them to be quiet when
he wished to sleep, captivating them by the effrontery of his assurance,
and, the ransom paid, slaughtering them as he had promised.
Tall, slender, not handsome, but superb and therewith so perfectly sent
out that Cicero mistook him for a fop from whom the republic had
nothing to fear; splendidly lavish, exquisitely gracious, he was born to
charm, and his charm was such that it still subsists. Cato alone was
unenthralled. But Cato was never pleased; he laughed but once, and all
Rome turned out to see him; he belonged to an earlier day, to an
austerer, perhaps to a better one, and it may be that in "that woman," as
he called Cassar, his clearer vision discerned beneath the plumage of
the peacock, the beak and talons of the bird of prey. For they were there,
and needed only a vote of the senate to batten on nations of which the
senate had never heard. Loan him an army, and "that woman" was to
give geography such a twist that today whoso says Caesar says history.
Was it this that Cato saw, or may it be that one of the oracles which had
not ceased to speak had told him of that coming night when he was to
take his own life, fearful lest "that woman" should overwhelm him with
the magnificence of his forgiveness? Cato walks through history, as he
walked through the Forum, bare of foot--too severe to be simple, too
obstinate to be generous--the image of ancient Rome.
In Caesar there was nothing of this. He was wholly modern; dissolute
enough for any epoch, but possessed of virtues that his contemporaries
could not spell. A slave tried to poison him. Suetonius says he merely
put the slave to death. The "merely" is to the point. Cato would have
tortured him first. After Pharsalus he forgave everyone. When severe, it
was to himself. It is true he turned over two million people into so

many dead flies, their legs in the air, creating, as Tacitus has it, a
solitude which he described as Peace; but what antitheses may not be
expected in a man who, before the first century was begun, divined the
fifth, and who in the Suevians--that terrible people beside whom no
nation could live--foresaw Attila!
Save in battle his health was poor. He was epileptic, his strength
undermined by incessant debauches; yet let a nation fancying him
months away put on insurgent airs, and on that nation he descended as
the thunder does. In his campaigns time and again he overtook his own
messengers. A phantom in a ballad was not swifter than he.
Simultaneously his sword flashed in Germany, on the banks of the
Adriatic, in that Ultima Thule where the Britons lived. From the depths
of Gaul he dominated Rome, and therewith he was penetrating
impenetrable forests, trailing legions as a torch trails smoke, erecting
walls that a nation could not cross, turning soldiers into marines,
infantry into cavalry, building roads that are roads to-day, fighting with
one hand and writing an epic with the other, dictating love-letters,
chronicles, dramas; finding time to make a collection of witticisms;
overturning thrones while he decorated Greece; mingling initiate into
orgies of the Druids, and, as the cymbals clashed, coquetting with those
terrible virgins who awoke the tempest; not only conquering, but
captivating, transforming barbarians into soldiers and those soldiers
into senators, submitting three hundred nations and ransacking
Britannia for pearls for his mistresses' ears.
Each epoch has its secret, and each epoch-maker his own. Caesar's
secret lay in the power he had of projecting a soul into the ranks of an
army, of making legions and their leader one. Disobedience only he
punished; anything else he forgave.