Imperial Purple | Page 5

After a victory his soldiery did
what they liked. He gave them arms, slaves to burnish them, women,
feasts, sleep. They were his comrades; he called them so; he wept at the
death of any of them, and when they were frightened, as they were in
Gaul before they met the Germans, and in Africa before they
encountered Juba, Caesar frightened them still more. He permitted no
questions, no making of wills. The cowards could hide where they
liked; his old guard, the Tenth, would do the work alone; or, threat still
more sinister, he would command a retreat. Ah, that, never! Fanaticism
returned, the legions begged to be punished.

Michelet says he would like to have seen him crossing Gaul,
bareheaded, in the rain. It would have been as interesting, perhaps, to
have watched him beneath the shade of the velarium pleading the cause
of Masintha against the Numidian king. Before him was a crowd that
covered not the Forum alone, but the steps of the adjacent temples, the
roofs of the basilicas, the arches of Janus, one that extended remotely to
the black walls of the Curia Hostilia beyond. And there, on the rostrum,
a musician behind him supplying the la from a flute, the air filled with
gold motes, Caesar, his toga becomingly adjusted, a jewelled hand
extended, opened for the defence. Presently, when through the exercise
of that art of his which Cicero pronounced incomparable, he felt that
the sympathy of the audience was won, it would have been interesting,
indeed, to have heard him argue point after point-- clearly, brilliantly,
wittily; insulting the plaintiff in poetic terms; consigning him
gracefully to the infernal regions; accentuating a fictitious and
harmonious anger; drying his forehead without disarranging his hair;
suffocating with the emotions he evoked; displaying real tears, and
with them a knowledge, not only of law, rhetoric, philosophy, but of
geometry, astronomy, ethics and the fine arts; blinding his hearers with
the coruscations of his erudition; stirring them with his tongue, as with
the point of a sword, until, as though abruptly possessed by an access
of fury, he seized the plaintiff by the beard and sent him spinning like a
leaf which the wind had caught.
It would have bored no one either to have assisted at his triumph when
he returned from Gaul, when he returned after Spain, after Pharsalus,
when he returned from Cleopatra's arms.
On that day the Via Sacra was curtained with silk. To the blare of
twisted bugles there descended to it from the turning at the hill a troop
of musicians garmented in leather tunics, bonneted with lions' heads.
Behind them a hundred bulls, too fat to be troublesome, and decked for
death, bellowed musingly at the sacrifants, who, naked to the waist, a
long-handled hammer on the shoulder, maintained them with colored
cords. To the rumble of wide wheels and the thunder of spectators the
prodigious booty passed, and with it triumphs of war, vistas of
conquered countries, pictures of battles, lists of the vanquished,
symbols of cities that no longer were; a stretch of ivory on which shone
three words, each beginning with a V; images of gods disturbed, the

Rhine, the Rhone, the captive Ocean in massive gold; the glitter of
three thousand crowns offered to the dictator by the army and allies of
Rome. Then came the standards of the republic, a swarm of eagles, the
size of pigeons, in polished silver upheld by lances which ensigns bore,
preceding the six hundred senators who marched in a body, their togas
bordered with red, while to the din of incessant insults, interminable
files of prisoners passed, their wrists chained to iron collars, which held
their heads very straight, and to the rear a litter, in which crouched the
Vercingetorix of Gaul, a great moody giant, his menacing eyes nearly
hidden in the tangles of his tawny hair.
When they had gone the street was alive with explosions of brass,
aflame with the burning red cloaks of laureled lictors making way for
the coming of Caesar. Four horses, harnessed abreast, their manes dyed,
their forelocks puffed, drew a high and wonderfully jewelled car; and
there, in the attributes and attitude of Jupiter Capitolinus, Caesar sat,
blinking his tired eyes. His face and arms were painted vermilion;
above the Tyrian purple of his toga, above the gold work and palms of
his tunic, there oscillated a little ball in which there were charms
against Envy. On his head a wreath concealed his increasing baldness;
along his left arm the sceptre lay; behind him a boy admonished him
noisily to remember he was man, while to the rear for miles and miles
there rang the laugh of trumpets, the click of castanets, the shouts of
dancers, the roar of the multitude,