Caesar

Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the original language

Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna who had held sole power, Sulla, once he had gained control, could persuade Caesar to give up neither by hopes nor by fears, and so he confiscated her dowry. The cause of Caesar's hostility to Sulla was his kinship with Marius. For Julia, the sister of Caesar's father, was married to the elder Marius, and from her had been born the younger Marius, who was Caesar's cousin.

At first, amid the great number of killings and being overlooked by Sulla because of his many occupations, Caesar was not content to stay quiet, but came forward before the people as a candidate for a priesthood, though he was not yet quite a young man. From this Sulla, opposing him, contrived to have him rejected; and when deliberating about putting him to death, some said that it made no sense to kill a boy so young, but Sulla answered that it was foolish to overlook the many Mariuses lurking within this one boy.

When this remark was reported to Caesar, for a considerable time he wandered about among the Sabines, keeping himself hidden. Then, being moved because of illness to another house at night, he ran across a detachment of Sulla's troops who were combing that district and seizing anyone found in hiding. Their commander Cornelius he persuaded with two talents to let him go, and going down at once to the sea he sailed off to Bithynia, to King Nicomedes,

with whom he spent no great length of time; then, sailing back, he was captured near the island of Pharmacusa by pirates, who even at that time held the sea with great fleets and countless vessels.

First, when he was asked by them for a ransom of twenty talents, he laughed at them for not knowing whom they had taken, and himself agreed to give fifty. Then, sending various members of his party to various cities to raise the money, he was left among the most murderous of men, the Cilicians, with only one friend and two attendants, yet he held them in such contempt that whenever he wished to sleep he would send orders for them to keep quiet.

For thirty-eight days, as though he were not under guard but rather attended by a bodyguard, he joined in their games and exercises with great freedom from care. He wrote poems and speeches and used them as his audience, and those who did not admire his work he openly called uneducated and barbarous, and often with laughter he threatened to hang them;

and they were delighted, attributing this frankness to a kind of simplicity and playfulness. When the ransom came from Miletus and, having paid it, he was released, he immediately manned ships from the harbor of Miletus and put out against the pirates, and catching them still anchored by the island he overpowered most of them, and he made booty of their money, while the men themselves he lodged in prison at Pergamum and went himself to Junius, the governor of Asia, since it belonged to him as praetor to punish the captives.

But when that man cast covetous eyes on the money — for it was no small amount — and said he would consider the matter of the prisoners at his leisure, Caesar, leaving him to his own devices, went off to Pergamum, and bringing out all the pirates he had them crucified, just as he had often told them, when they thought he was joking, on the island.

After this, since Sulla's power was already fading and those at home were calling him back, he took ship for Rhodes, meaning to become a pupil of Apollonius son of Molon, a teacher Cicero too had studied under, a man distinguished as a teacher of rhetoric and thought to be of a reasonable character. It is said that Caesar was by nature extremely gifted for political oratory, and cultivated his natural gift most ambitiously, so that he held the second place without dispute; but the first place — being more occupied with how to be first in power and arms — he let go,

the very thing toward which his nature had led him, a formidable skill in speaking, he did not fully attain, being prevented by his campaigns and his political career, by which he won his supremacy. He himself, at any rate, later in his reply to Cicero's work on Cato, asks pardon for not measuring the language of a soldier against the eloquence of a naturally gifted orator who devotes much leisure to it.

Returning to Rome, he brought charges against Dolabella for misgoverning his province, and numerous Greek cities came forward with testimony supporting the case. Dolabella escaped conviction, but Caesar, repaying Greece for its zeal, spoke on its behalf when it prosecuted Publius Antonius for bribery before Marcus Lucullus, the praetor of Macedonia,

and had such influence that Antonius appealed to the tribunes of the people, pretending that he could not get equal treatment in Greece against Greeks. At Rome, meanwhile, much goodwill shone forth on account of his eloquence in advocacy, and much favor from the people met him because of the graciousness of his greetings and his manner in company, he being unusually attentive to people for his age.

There was also a power growing for him little by little in politics, arising from his dinners and his table and altogether the splendor of his way of living; those envious of him at first supposed that once his resources ran out it would quickly wither away, and so they overlooked it as it flourished among the many. Too late they perceived that it had become great and hard to overturn, and was making straight for the transformation of the whole state — as one ought to consider no beginning of a matter small, which persistence quickly makes great, once it has met with no resistance out of being despised.

In any case, the one credited with being earliest to view Caesar's political rise with suspicion and alarm — as one fears the smiling surface of the sea — and to have discerned the formidable quality of character hidden beneath his kindliness and cheerfulness, Cicero, said that in all his other schemes and policies he could see a tyrannical intent, "but," he said, "when I see that hair of his arranged with such elaborate care, and him scratching his head with one finger, it does not seem to me that this man could ever put into his mind so great an evil as the destruction of the Roman constitution." This, however, was said later.

Of the people's goodwill toward him he received a first proof when, contending against Gaius Popilius for a military tribuneship, he was elected ahead of him; and a second, still more evident, when, upon the death of Julia, the wife of Marius, being her nephew, he delivered a splendid eulogy for her in the forum, and at her funeral procession he dared to bring out images of Marius, on view now for the first time since Sulla's regime, when those men had been declared enemies of the state.

For when some cried out against Caesar over this, the people responded loudly in his favor, receiving him with applause and admiring him, as one bringing back, as it were from Hades after so long a time, the honors of Marius into the city. Now it was the ancestral Roman custom to deliver funeral orations over elderly women, but it was not customary for young women; Caesar was the first to speak one over his own wife when she died, and this brought him some measure of goodwill and helped, together with the sentiment of the occasion, to win over the many to love him as a gentle man and one full of feeling.

After burying his wife, he went out as quaestor to Iberia with one of the praetors, Vetus, whom he continued always to honor, and whose son, when he himself later held office, he in turn made quaestor. Having come from that office, he married as his third wife Pompeia, having by Cornelia a daughter who was later married to Pompey the Great.

Spending his money without stint, and seeming to purchase a fleeting and brief reputation at the price of great expenditures, while in truth buying the greatest things at a small cost, it is said that before he entered upon any office he had become a debtor to the amount of thirteen hundred talents.

Then, having been appointed overseer of the Appian Way, he spent a great deal of his own money in addition; and again, as aedile, he put on three hundred twenty gladiator pairs, and with his other lavish outlays for theatrical shows, processions, and banquets he overwhelmed the ambitions of those before him, so that he disposed the people to seek new offices and new honors with which to reward him.

There being two factions in the city, the one deriving great power from Sulla, the other the Marian faction, which at that time was cowed and utterly scattered, faring quite low — wishing to revive and win over this latter faction, at the height of his lavish displays as aedile he had images of Marius made secretly, along with Victories bearing trophies, and carrying them by night he set them up on the Capitol.

At daybreak those who saw them, all gleaming with gold and worked with extraordinary art, and inscribed with the record of the Cimbrian victories, marveled at the audacity of whoever had put them there — and it was no secret who that was — and word spread rapidly, drawing crowds eager to view the display.

But some shouted out that Caesar was plotting a bid for tyranny, reviving honors long since suppressed by statute and decree, and that this amounted to a test of the populace, to see whether, tamed by his largesse, they would let him play at such things and introduce innovations; while the Marians, encouraging one another, showed themselves suddenly to be amazing in number, and

they filled the Capitol with applause, and many, at the sight of Marius's image, were moved to tears of joy, and Caesar was greatly exalted with praises, as being the man most worthy, above all others, of his kinship with Marius. When the senate assembled about this matter, Catulus Lutatius, a man at that time held in the highest esteem of the Romans, rose and denounced Caesar, uttering the remembered words: "No longer by tunnels, Caesar," he said, "but now by siege-engines you are taking the state." But when Caesar, defending himself against this, won over the senate, those who admired him were roused still more, and urged him to yield his resolve to no one, since he would prevail over the whole people willingly and hold the first place.

Meanwhile, when Metellus the high priest died, and the priesthood, much contested, was being sought by Isauricus and Catulus, men of the highest distinction and of the greatest power in the senate, Caesar did not yield to them, but went down before the people and stood as a rival candidate.

As the contest appeared evenly balanced, Catulus, being the more fearful of the uncertainty because of his greater standing, sent to Caesar urging him to withdraw from the ambition for a large sum of money. But Caesar, borrowing still more, said he would fight it out. When the day arrived and his mother was escorting him to the door, not without tears, he embraced her and said, "Mother, today

you will see your son either high priest or an exile." The vote being contested and a close struggle taking place, he won, leaving the senate and its foremost men fearful that he might now embolden the populace toward any rash act whatsoever. Because of this, Piso, Catulus, and those around them faulted Cicero for letting Caesar go unpunished, since during the Catiline business he had furnished grounds enough to seize him,

for Catiline had intended not simply to alter the constitution but to overthrow the entire government and plunge everything into chaos, was himself driven out, having been caught in lesser proofs before his final designs were uncovered; but he left behind in the city Lentulus and Cethegus as successors of the conspiracy. Whether Caesar secretly gave them any encouragement and support is unclear; but when they had been thoroughly convicted before the senate, and Cicero the consul was asking each senator's opinion as to their punishment,

the others, up to Caesar, urged death; but Caesar, rising, delivered a carefully considered speech, saying that to kill without trial men distinguished in rank and family did not seem to him ancestral or just, except under the most extreme necessity; but that if they were kept in confinement, bound, in cities of Italy which Cicero himself should choose, until Catiline should be finally defeated, then later, in peace and quiet, the senate might decide about each man individually.

So humane did this opinion appear, and so powerfully was the speech delivered in its support, that it won over not just those who spoke afterward but even many who had spoken earlier, who now abandoned their prior positions and joined his; until the matter came round to Cato and Catulus, and these opposed him vigorously, Cato reinforcing the suspicion together with his speech and rising up against him with great vigor,

The men were handed over to be executed, and as Caesar was leaving the senate, a crowd of young men then guarding Cicero rushed together with swords drawn and barred his way. Yet Curio, so the story goes, wrapped his own toga around Caesar and got him clear unharmed; and Cicero, for his part, when those same men looked to him expecting a signal, merely gave a refusing shake of the head—whether out of dread of the populace, or from a conviction that the killing would be altogether unjust and contrary to law.

This, then—I do not know why, if it were true, Cicero did not write about it in his book On His Consulship. He was blamed afterward for not having made the best use of the opportunity that presented itself against Caesar at that time, but for having shrunk back, in awe of the people's extraordinary devotion to Caesar—who indeed, only a few days later, when he had come into the senate and was defending himself against the suspicions held of him, and was meeting with hostile uproar, since the session was running on longer than usual, came up with a shout and surrounded the assembly, demanding the man and ordering them to release him.

For this reason Cato, fearing above all the revolutionary spirit of the destitute—who were the tinder for the whole mass of the poor, given that Caesar was where they pinned their hopes—won the senate over to voting them a monthly grain allowance, from which an annual expense of seven million five hundred thousand [sesterces] was added to the other outlays; yet this policy visibly extinguished the great fear of the moment, and broke off and dispersed the greater part of Caesar's power at the critical time, just as he was about to become praetor and more formidable through his office.

Nothing troublesome came of it, however; but a piece of ill fortune did befall Caesar concerning his household. Publius Clodius was a man of noble birth, brilliant in wealth and eloquence, but second to none of those notorious for insolence and shamelessness in all forms of depravity.

This man was in love with Pompeia, Caesar's wife, though she herself had no knowledge of it; but the watch kept over the women's quarters was strict, and Caesar's mother Aurelia, a woman of good sense, attending closely upon the young bride, made any meeting between them difficult and dangerous.

Among the Romans there is a divinity known as the Good Goddess, corresponding to what the Greeks name the Women's Goddess. The Phrygians lay claim to her as their own, holding that she was King Midas's mother; the Romans hold instead that she was a wood-nymph, consort of Faunus; while the Greeks identify her as that Dionysus-mother who must not be named. On account of this the women marking her feast cover their tents over with vine-shoots, and, following the myth, a sacred snake is placed beside the goddess. No male may come near, nor even remain under the same roof while the holy rites go forward; the women, left entirely to themselves, are said to carry out during the ceremony a good many practices resembling the Orphic mysteries.

So whenever the time of the festival comes round, while a man holds the consulship or the praetorship, he himself withdraws along with every male, and his wife takes over the house and arranges it, and the greatest rites are performed at night, with play mixed into the all-night vigils, and much music present as well.

At that time, when Pompeia was celebrating this festival, Clodius, who was not yet bearded and for that reason thought he would go unnoticed, took on the dress and equipment of a lute-girl and went in, looking like a young woman. Finding the doors open, he was admitted without fear by a servant-girl who was in on the secret,

but she ran ahead to tell Pompeia, and as time passed while he waited where he had been left, Clodius could not endure it, and while wandering through the great house and avoiding the lights, one of Aurelia's attendants came upon him and, as woman to woman, invited him to play, and when he did not wish to, dragged him into the open, and asked who he was and where he came from.

When Clodius said he was waiting for Abra—Pompeia's own maid, called by that very name—and was betrayed by his voice, the attendant at once sprang back with a cry into the crowd near the lights, shouting that she had come upon a man; the women were seized with terror, and Aurelia halted the goddess's sacred rites and had them concealed, then ordered the doors barred and moved through the household carrying torches, hunting for Clodius.

He was found to have fled into the room of the slave-girl with whom he had come in, and being discovered by the women he was driven out through the doors; and the matter, that very night, the women, as they departed, told to their own husbands, and by day a story went through the city that Clodius had laid hands on unlawful things, and owed a penalty not only to those he had wronged but to the city and to the gods.

One of the tribunes, then, indicted Clodius for impiety, and the most powerful men from the senate combined against him, bearing witness to other terrible acts of licentiousness, and also to adultery with his sister, who was married to Lucullus. Against their zeal the people set themselves in opposition and defended Clodius, and this was of great advantage before the jurors, who were struck with fear and dread of the crowd.

Caesar at once sent Pompeia away, but when called as a witness for the trial, said he knew nothing of what was charged against Clodius. When this statement seemed strange, the prosecutor asked, "Why then did you send your wife away?" "Because," he said, "I held that my own household ought not even to be suspected." Some say Caesar spoke this as his true opinion; others say it was to gratify the people, who were eager to save Clodius.

In any case he escaped the charge, since most of the jurors gave their verdicts in confused, illegible writing, so that they might neither risk danger by condemning him before the multitude nor lose reputation among the best men by acquitting him.

Caesar, immediately after his praetorship, took Spain as his province; but since it was troublesome for him, as his creditors, pestering and shouting at him, made his departure difficult, he took refuge with Crassus, the richest of the Romans, who needed Caesar's vigor and heat in his political rivalry with Pompey. Crassus took upon himself the most harsh and implacable of the creditors and guaranteed eight hundred and thirty talents, and so Caesar set out for his province.

The story goes that while making his way across the Alps, on passing a tiny native settlement whose inhabitants were few and squalid, his companions, half in jest and half in earnest, said, "Surely even here there are ambitions for office and struggles for first place and jealousies of the powerful against one another?" And Caesar, speaking to them in earnest, said, "For my part I would rather be first among these men than second among the Romans."

Likewise again in Spain, when he had leisure and was reading something written about Alexander, he became lost in thought with himself for a long time, and then even wept; and when his friends wondered at the cause, he said, "Do you not think it a matter worthy of grief, that at my age Alexander was already king over so many peoples, while I have as yet accomplished nothing splendid?"

As soon as he set foot in Spain he was at once active, so that within a few days he gathered together ten cohorts in addition to the twenty already existing, and marching against the Callaici and the Lusitanians he conquered them, and advanced as far as the outer sea, subduing peoples who had not previously been subject to Rome. Having managed the affairs of war well, he administered the affairs of peace no less ably, establishing concord among the cities, and healing above all the disputes between debtors and creditors.

For he ordained that of the revenues coming in to debtors, the creditor should take two parts each year, while the debtor should use the remainder, until the debt was thus paid off. Winning good repute by these measures, he departed from the province, having himself become rich and having benefited his soldiers from the campaigns, and having been hailed by them as imperator.

But since those seeking a triumph had to remain outside the city, while those canvassing for the consulship had to be present in the city to do so, Caesar, finding himself caught in such a conflict, and having arrived right at the time of the consular elections, sent to the senate asking to be allowed to canvass for the consulship in absentia through his friends. Cato at first stood firmly on the law against this request; then, seeing that many had been won over by Caesar, he blocked the matter by using up the time, wearing away the day in speaking, so that Caesar chose in the end to forgo the triumph and seize instead upon the consulship.

And having entered the city, he immediately took up a policy that deceived everyone except Cato: this was the reconciliation of Pompey and Crassus, the two men of greatest power in the city, whom Caesar brought together in friendship out of their quarrel, and, gathering to himself the combined strength of both, under an action that had the name of kindness, he unnoticed transformed the constitution.

Indeed it was not, as most people imagine, the falling-out between Caesar and Pompey that gave rise to the civil wars, but on the contrary their alliance, given that the two men first combined to bring down the aristocratic party, and only later fell out against each other in the manner described. Cato, whose predictions of coming events proved frequently accurate, earned at the time a name for being troublesome and interfering, though afterward he was remembered as a sound, if luckless, adviser.

Nevertheless, Caesar, escorted in the midst of the friendship of Crassus and Pompey, was brought down to the consulship; and having been proclaimed with great splendor, together with Calpurnius Bibulus, and having entered upon his office, he immediately introduced laws not befitting a consul but some most audacious tribune, proposing, to please the multitude, certain allotments of land and distributions.

When in the senate the party of the good and honorable men opposed him, he—long wanting a pretext—cried out and called them to witness that he was being driven against his will out to the people, forced by the arrogance and harshness of the senate to court their favor out of necessity, and he rushed out toward them, and stationing Crassus on one side and Pompey on the other, asked them whether they approved of the laws.

When they said they approved, he called on them to help him against those who threatened to oppose them with swords. They promised to do so; and Pompey even added that he would come against the swords bringing a sword of his own and a shield as well. By this he vexed the aristocratic party, who heard a speech unworthy of the respect due him and unbefitting the deference owed to the senate, but rather mad and boyish; the people, however, were delighted.

Caesar, laying still greater hold upon Pompey's power—for he had a daughter, Julia, already promised in marriage to Servilius Caepio—broke that engagement and gave her to Pompey in his stead, promising Servilius that he would instead receive Pompey's own daughter, though she too was not unbetrothed, but promised to Faustus, the son of Sulla.

A little later Caesar married Calpurnia, daughter of Piso, and made Piso consul for the coming year; at this Cato protested and cried out loudly that it was intolerable, that the government was being pimped out through marriages, and that men were bringing each other into provinces, armies, and positions of power through the agency of little women.

Bibulus, Caesar's colleague in office, since he accomplished nothing by opposing the laws, but was often in danger of being killed in the forum along with Cato, shut himself up at home and spent the rest of his term of office there. Pompey, no sooner married than he packed the forum with armed men and lent his weight to pushing the popular laws through; and to Caesar he assigned Cisalpine Gaul and all of Transalpine Gaul as well, adding Illyricum, with four legions, for five years.

As for Cato, when he attempted to speak against these measures, Caesar had him hauled off to prison, expecting Cato to lodge a plea with the tribunes for release; yet Cato went along without uttering a word, and Caesar, noting that not only the foremost citizens were troubled but the ordinary people too trailed after in silent, downcast respect for Cato's character, quietly arranged through one of the tribunes to have him set free.

Of the other senators very few came together with him at all for a session; the rest, in their displeasure, kept out of the way. When a certain Considius, one of the very old men, said that the others did not assemble because they feared the arms and the soldiers, Caesar said, "Then why don't you, who also fear these things, stay home?" And Considius said, "Because my old age is what keeps me from being afraid: the life still left to me is short and needs little forethought."

The most shameful of the political acts of that time was thought to be the election, during Caesar's consulship, of that Clodius as tribune, by whom the laws concerning marriage and the secret nocturnal rites were violated. He was elected for the purpose of bringing down Cicero; and Caesar did not set out for his army until he had helped Clodius stir up factional strife against Cicero and join in driving him out of Italy.

Such, then, are said to have been the events before the Gallic campaigns. But the time of the wars which he waged after this, and of the campaigns by which he tamed Celtic territory, as though he had taken up another beginning and entered upon some other path of life and of new undertakings, showed him to be a warrior and a general leaving nothing lacking of those most admired for command and become the greatest,

but whether one should compare the Fabii and the Scipios and the Metelli, and those living in his own generation or shortly before it — Sulla and Marius both, and the Luculli, or Pompey himself, whose fame for every kind of excellence in war then flourished up to the heavens — Caesar's achievements surpass them: one in the harshness of the regions where he campaigned, another in how much territory he added to Rome, another in the number and violence of the enemies he conquered,

another in the strangeness and untrustworthiness of the customs he came to deal with familiarly, another in his fairness and gentleness toward those taken captive, another in his gifts and favors toward those who campaigned with him, and all of them in the sheer number of battles he fought and of enemies drawn up against him that he destroyed. For in less than ten years of warring in Gaul he seized by force upwards of eight hundred towns, brought some three hundred peoples under submission, and, having fought pitched battles at various times against three million men in all, he destroyed one million of them in hand-to-hand combat and took just as many more captive.

He enjoyed such goodwill and eagerness from his soldiers toward himself that men who in other campaigns were no different from anyone else became invincible and irresistible, rushing at every danger for the sake of Caesar's glory. Such a man was Acilius, who in the sea battle near Massalia, having boarded an enemy ship, had his right hand cut off by a sword, but did not let go of his shield with the other hand; instead, striking the enemies in the face with it, he turned them all back and gained control of the vessel. Such too was Cassius Scaeva,

who, in the battle near Dyrrhachium, had an eye knocked out by an arrow, his shoulder pierced through by one javelin and his thigh by another, and had received a hundred and thirty blows of missiles on his shield, and yet called out to the enemy as if he were ready to give himself up. When two of them came forward, he sliced through one man's shoulder with his sword, and struck the other in the face and turned him back, while he himself was saved when his own men closed around him.

And in Britain, when the enemy fell upon the leading centurions who had gotten into a marshy place full of water, and a soldier — with Caesar himself watching the battle — pushed his way into their midst and, performing many conspicuous deeds of daring, saved the centurions when the barbarians fled, he himself, coming across last of all with difficulty, threw himself into the muddy currents, and, without his shield, swimming part of the way and wading part of the way, barely made it across.

When Caesar's men marveled and met him with joy and shouting, he himself, quite downcast and in tears, fell at Caesar's feet, begging pardon for having let go of his shield. And in Libya, when Scipio's men took a ship of Caesar's on which Granius Petro, appointed quaestor, was sailing, they made booty of the others but said they would grant safety to the quaestor; but he said that it was the custom of Caesar's soldiers not to receive safety but to give it, and struck himself with his sword and killed himself.

Such daring and such ambitions Caesar himself nurtured and built up, first by showing, through unstinting generosity and honors, that he did not amass riches from his campaigns for his own extravagance or for any personal indulgence, but kept it as a common prize for valor laid up with him, and that he shared in wealth only to the extent that he gave it to the deserving among his soldiers; and second, by willingly undergoing every danger himself and refusing none of the hardships.

Now his love of danger was not something they marveled at, on account of his ambition; but his endurance of hardships beyond what his bodily strength seemed able to bear astonished them, because, though he was lean in build, white and soft-fleshed, and subject to headaches and to epileptic fits — the affliction having first befallen him, it is said, at Corduba — he did not use his ill health as an excuse for softness,

but instead made his campaigning the treatment for his illness, fighting off the affliction with unwearying marches, plain fare, and continual sleeping in the open and enduring hardship, and so kept his body hard to overcome. For he slept, for the most part, in wagons or litters, turning his rest into action, and by day he was carried to the forts, the cities, and the entrenchments, with one slave sitting beside him who was trained to write down what he dictated even as they went along, and one soldier standing behind him holding a sword,

and he drove on so hard that, on his first setting out from Rome, he reached the Rhone on the eighth day. Now horsemanship had come naturally to him since childhood, since he had trained himself to ride at full speed with his hands clasped behind his back. On that campaign he also practiced, while riding, dictating letters and keeping two secretaries writing at once, or, as Oppius says, even more.

It is said too that Caesar was the first to devise communicating with friends by letter, since face-to-face meetings about urgent matters of the moment could not wait, given the press of business and the size of the city. And they also give this as a mark of the ease of his diet: when his host Valerius Leo, entertaining him at dinner at Mediolanum, served asparagus and poured myrrh-oil over it instead of olive oil, Caesar himself ate it without fuss, and scolded his companions for showing their displeasure at it.

"It would have been enough," he said, "not to eat what one dislikes; the man who finds fault with such rusticity is himself the boor." And once, on the road, driven by a storm into the cottage of a poor man, when he found nothing more than a single room barely able to hold one person, he said to his friends that honors ought to go to the strongest, while necessities belong to the weakest, and told Oppius to rest there; he himself slept with the others under the porch of the door.

The first of his Celtic wars was against the Helvetii and the Tigurini, who, having burned their own twelve cities and four hundred villages, were advancing through the part of Gaul subject to Rome, just as the Cimbri and Teutones had done long before, seeming no less bold than they and equal in numbers — amounting altogether to three hundred thousand persons, one hundred ninety thousand of whom could bear arms.

Of these, the Tigurini were crushed not by Caesar himself but by Labienus, sent by him, near the river Arar; but when the Helvetii, as he was leading his army toward a friendly city, fell upon him unexpectedly along the road, he got ahead of them to a strong position and took refuge there, and there, gathering and drawing up his forces, when a horse was brought to him he said, "This I will use for the pursuit once I have won; but let us now advance against the enemy," and, setting out on foot, charged in.

After a long time and with difficulty he pushed back their fighting men near the wagons and the entrenchment, and had the greatest struggle there, since not only did the men themselves stand and fight there, but their children and wives too, defending themselves, were cut down along with them to the death, so that the battle barely came to an end at midnight.

To the fine achievement of the victory he added a still greater one: resettling those of the surviving barbarians who had escaped from the battle, and compelling them to take back the land they had abandoned and the cities they had destroyed — more than one hundred thousand of them. His reasoning was that, should the land be left empty, he feared the Germans might cross over and seize it.

Second, he fought directly against the Germans on behalf of the Celts, although he had earlier made their king Ariovistus an ally at Rome; but they were unbearable neighbors to his subjects, and, should the occasion offer, they did not seem likely to stay quiet with what they had, but

were likely to overrun and hold Gaul. Seeing that his commanders were losing heart, especially those of high rank and the young men who had gone out with him expecting to enjoy luxury and profit from campaigning with Caesar, he called an assembly and bade them go home and not risk their lives against their own judgment, being so unmanly and soft; he himself declared that he alone would take the Tenth Legion with him and advance upon the barbarians, since the enemies he faced were no better than the Cimbri, nor was he himself a worse general than Marius.

At this, the Tenth Legion sent envoys to him to express their thanks, while the other legions abused their own commanders; and, all becoming full of eagerness and enthusiasm, they followed for many days' march, until they encamped within two hundred stadia of the enemy. Now Ariovistus's confidence had already been somewhat shaken even by the mere advance itself. For, not expecting the Romans to assault the Germans, whose charge he believed they could not withstand, he marveled at Caesar's daring and saw his own army thrown into confusion.

They were blunted still further by the prophecies of the holy women, who, gazing at the eddies of rivers and reading omens from the windings and sounds of the currents, foretold and would not allow battle to be joined before the new moon appeared. When Caesar learned of this and saw that the Germans were keeping quiet, it seemed to him best to attack them while they had no heart for it, rather than to sit waiting for the moment they preferred.

And by making assaults on the fortifications and hills on which they were encamped, he provoked and goaded them into coming down to fight it out in anger. When a brilliant rout of them followed, he pursued them for four hundred stadia all the way to the Rhine, filling that whole plain with corpses and spoils; Ariovistus got ahead of the rest with a few men and crossed the Rhine. They say the number of the dead came to eighty thousand.

Having accomplished this, he left his forces among the Sequani to winter, while he himself, wishing to keep an eye on affairs at Rome, went down into the Gaul around the Po, a portion of the province that had been allotted to him; for the river known as the Rubicon marks the boundary between the rest of Italy and the Celtic land under the Alps.

Settling there, he played the popular leader, with many people coming to him, giving each what he asked, and sending all away, some already in possession of what they had from him, others in hope of it; and throughout the rest of the time of his command he kept it hidden from Pompey that, in turn, he was now subduing enemies with the arms of citizens, now winning over and mastering citizens with money taken from enemies.

When he heard that the Belgae, the most powerful of the Celts and holding a third of all Gaul, had revolted, having gathered many tens of thousands of armed men, he turned about at once and advanced with great speed, and, descending upon the enemy while they were plundering the allied Gauls, he routed and destroyed the largest and most massed of them after they fought disgracefully, so that lakes and deep rivers became passable for the Romans, filled as they were with the multitude of the dead,

and of those who had revolted, all who lived along the ocean came over without a fight; but against the fiercest and most warlike of the peoples there, the Nervii, who dwelt in tangled forests and had stored their wives, children, and belongings deep within the woodland farthest from the enemy, he made an expedition. These men, sixty thousand in number, suddenly fell upon Caesar while he was making a camp and not expecting battle at that time, and routed his cavalry, and, surrounding the twelfth and the seventh legions, killed all their centurions,

and if Caesar had not snatched up a shield and, forcing his way through those fighting in front of him, charged the barbarians, and if the Tenth had not run down from the heights when he was in danger and cut through the enemy's ranks, it seems no one would have survived; but as it was, through Caesar's daring, fighting a battle said to be beyond human strength, they still did not rout the Nervii even so, but slaughtered them even as the Nervii fought back: for it is said that five hundred survived out of sixty thousand, and three senators out of four hundred.

When the senate learned of this, it voted fifteen days of thanksgiving to the gods and public holiday for festivals — more than had ever been decreed for any victory before. For the danger had appeared great, with so many nations rising up at once, and the victory was rendered more brilliant because it was Caesar who had won it, since the goodwill of the many toward him worked in his favor. Caesar himself, having settled affairs in Gaul, again wintered in the region around the Po, preparing the ground in the city,

for not only were those canvassing for offices employing him as their paymaster, using his cash to buy over the populace and doing everything likely to increase his power, but also most of the most eminent and greatest men gathered to meet him at Luca: Pompey, Crassus, Appius who governed Sardinia, and Nepos who held the proconsulship of Spain. The result was a hundred and twenty lictors' rods assembled in one place, and upward of two hundred senators.

Having held a council, they resolved on the following terms: Pompey and Crassus were to be declared consuls, and Caesar was to be granted money and another five years added to his command — a thing that seemed most absurd to men of sense. For those who were receiving so much money from Caesar were persuading the senate to vote it to him as though he had none to give, or rather compelling it, groaning as it voted what was demanded, Cato not being present,

for they had deliberately packed him off to Cyprus, and though Favonius, who was an emulator of Cato, accomplished nothing by speaking against it, leaping out through the doors and shouting to the crowd, no one paid him any heed — some out of deference to Pompey and Crassus, but most because they were gratifying Caesar and living on the hopes he offered, and so they kept quiet.

Caesar, turning back again to his forces in Gaul, found a great war under way in the country, two large German nations having just crossed the Rhine to seize land — they call one people the Usipetes, the other the Tencteri.

Concerning the battle that took place against these, Caesar himself has written in his commentaries that the barbarians, while negotiating with him under a truce, attacked him on the march, and that for this reason they routed his cavalry of five thousand with their own eight hundred, catching them off guard; then that they sent others to him again to deceive him, whom he held back and marched his forces against the barbarians, judging that to keep faith with men so faithless and treaty-breaking would be nothing but naivety.

But Tanusius says that when the senate was voting festivals and sacrifices for the victory, Cato declared his opinion that Caesar ought to be handed over to the barbarians, so as to purify the city of the breach of faith by turning the curse upon the one responsible. Of those who had crossed the river, four hundred thousand were cut down, and the few who managed to get back over the river found refuge among the Sugambri, a nation of Germans.

Taking this as a pretext against them, and also being otherwise eager for glory and to be the first of men to cross the Rhine with an army, Caesar bridged it, though it was very wide at that point and, precisely there, most in flood and rough and swift, delivering blows and tearing loose the piles that were driven in to support the bridge from the tree-trunks and timber swept downstream against it,

but he met these by driving in great timber piles as breakwaters across the river, and by curbing the onrushing current with the framework he displayed a spectacle beyond all expectation — the bridge completed in ten days.

Having ferried his army across, with no one daring to meet him, but even the most powerful of the German Suebi withdrawing their goods into deep, wooded ravines, he burned the enemy's country, encouraged those who had always welcomed the Romans, and, after passing eighteen days on German soil, crossed back once more into Gaul.

The expedition against the Britons had a famous boldness to it, for he was the first to put out into the western Ocean with a fleet, and sailed through the Atlantic sea bringing an army for war; and an island disbelieved in on account of its size, and one that had furnished much dispute to a great many writers, some claiming that its name and account were fabricated and that it did not exist — this he attempted to seize and thereby carried the Roman dominion beyond the inhabited world.

Sailing across to the island twice from the Gaul on the opposite shore, and doing much harm to the enemy in many battles rather than benefiting his own men — for men who lived in such poverty and hardship had nothing worth plundering — he did not bring the war to the conclusion he wished, but taking hostages from the king and imposing tribute he set sail from the island.

And letters reached him there, dispatched by his friends in Rome and just then delivered across the water, announcing that his daughter had died; she died in childbirth at Pompey's house. Great grief seized Pompey, and great grief seized Caesar as well, and their friends were thrown into confusion, thinking that the kinship which, in peace and concord, had been guarding a commonwealth otherwise diseased in all else, was now dissolved — for the infant too died shortly after, not surviving its mother by many days. The people, over the resistance of the tribunes, took up Julia by force and carried her to the Field of Mars, and there she lies, given burial.

While Caesar was dividing his now great army of necessity into many winter quarters, and had himself turned toward Italy as was his custom, all Gaul again broke into revolt, and great armies going about were cutting up the winter camps and attacking the Roman fortifications; and the most numerous and strongest of the rebels, under Ambiorix, destroyed Cotta and Titurius along with their entire legion,

and they surrounded the legion under Cicero with sixty thousand men and besieged it, and came within a little of taking it by storm, all the men being wounded and defending themselves beyond their strength through sheer eagerness. When this was reported to Caesar, who was far away, he turned back quickly and, gathering seven thousand men in all, hastened to rescue Cicero from the siege. The besiegers did not fail to notice him, but went out to meet him intending to snatch him up, contemptuous of his small numbers.

And he, feigning flight, kept withdrawing, and having taken up a position suited to a man fighting many with few, he fortified a camp, and kept his men from all fighting, forcing them, by drawing up the rampart and rebuilding the gates as though in fear, to be held in contempt for lack of generalship, until, once the enemy came at him in scattered and reckless fashion, he burst out, put them to flight, and cut down a great number of them.

This put down the many revolts of the Gauls in that region, and Caesar himself, going about everywhere through the winter and attending sharply to every uprising. For three legions had come to him from Italy to replace those he had lost, two of them lent by Pompey from his own forces, one newly levied from Gaul around the Po.

Far beyond these, the seeds long since sown in secret and cultivated by the most powerful men among the most warlike tribes were now showing themselves as the opening moves of what would be the largest and most perilous war fought there, strengthened by a great multitude of fighting men gathered together in arms from every side, by great wealth brought together to the same end, by strong cities, and by country hard to invade.

At that time, too, in the season of winter, rivers were frozen and forests hidden under snow, and plains flooded by winter torrents; in places the paths were untraceable in the depth of the snow, in others there was great obscurity of the route through marshes and diverted streams — all of which seemed to make the doings of the rebels wholly unassailable for Caesar. Many tribes had revolted; the Arverni and the Carnutes made the pretext, but the whole conduct of the war, once he was chosen, was held by Vercingetorix, a man whose own father the Gauls had executed for reaching after tyranny,

This man, then, dividing his forces into many parts and setting many commanders over them, was winning over the whole surrounding region as far as the peoples inclined toward the Saone, intending, now that a faction in Rome was already forming against Caesar, to rouse all Gaul together to the war. Had he waited only a little longer, until Caesar was embroiled in civil war, no lighter terrors than those of the Cimbri would have gripped Italy.

But as it was, Caesar, who by nature was best able to use every resource for war, and above all to seize the moment, no sooner heard of the revolt than he set forth, pressing along the identical roads he had used before, and by the force and speed of his march through so great a winter he showed the barbarians that an army was coming against them that was invincible and unconquerable. For in places where it had long seemed incredible that even a messenger or letter-carrier of his could get through, there, all at once, he and his entire army were seen laying waste their land and razing their strongholds,

subduing cities, taking back those who changed sides, until even the nation of the Aedui was provoked into war against him — they who at other times called themselves brothers of the Romans and were conspicuously honored, but who now, going over to the rebels, brought great discouragement upon Caesar's army. For this reason, moving on from there, he crossed into Lingones territory, intending to make his way to that of the Sequani, who were friends and lay before Italy on the way to the rest of Gaul.

There the enemy attacked and encircled him with forces numbering many tens of thousands, and, throwing himself into the decisive struggle, he prevailed, after long time and much slaughter, forcing the barbarians down by main strength, though at the outset it seemed he had also suffered some setback, and the Arverni show a small sword hanging in a temple, said to be a trophy taken from Caesar. When he himself later saw it he smiled, and when his friends bade him take it down he would not allow it, considering it sacred.

Be that as it may, at that time most of those who had escaped fled together with the king to the city of Alesia. And as Caesar was besieging this place, which appeared impregnable both because of how massive its walls were and how numerous its defenders, a danger greater than any words can tell fell upon him from outside.

For the finest force that Gaul possessed, gathered from all its nations, came in arms against Alesia, three hundred thousand strong; and those within the city who were fighting men were no fewer than a hundred and seventy thousand, so that Caesar, caught in the midst of so great a war and himself besieged, was forced to throw up a double wall, one facing the city, the other facing those who had come against him from outside, on the ground that, should the two forces join, his own affairs would be utterly undone.

For many reasons, then, the danger at Alesia was reasonably held in high repute, as exhibiting feats of daring and skill such as no other of his contests had displayed, but one might marvel above all that Caesar's engagement with and mastery of so many tens of thousands from outside went unnoticed by those in the city — and even more, that it went unnoticed by the very Romans who were guarding the wall facing the city.

For they did not perceive the victory until wailing of men and lamentation of women were heard from Alesia, as those within saw, on the other side, many shields adorned with silver and gold, and many breastplates smeared with blood, and also cups and Gallic tents, all of it hauled off by the Romans back to their own camp. That enormous host had, in so short a span, dissolved and scattered like some vision or dream, since most of that multitude had perished in combat,

and those holding Alesia, after giving no small trouble to themselves and to Caesar, at last surrendered themselves; and Vercingetorix, the leader of the whole war, taking up the finest of his arms and adorning his horse, rode out through the gates and made a circuit around Caesar as he sat, then leapt down from his horse, cast off his full armor, and himself sat down at Caesar's feet and remained quiet, until he was handed over to be kept under guard for the triumph.

Caesar had for a long while been determined to bring Pompey down, exactly as Pompey, naturally, had determined the same regarding him; for since Crassus, who had been a counterweight to both, had perished among the Parthians, what remained for the one who wished to become greatest was to put down the man who now held that place, and for the other, in order not to suffer this himself, to destroy beforehand the man he feared.

Pompey, for his part, had begun after a while to be afraid, having until then looked down on Caesar, thinking it no hard task to pull down again a man whom he himself had helped raise up; but Caesar, having from the start made this his design, withdrew far from his rivals like an athlete and trained himself in the Celtic wars, sharpening his forces,

and increasing his reputation, being lifted by his deeds to a rank rivaling Pompey's own achievements, taking his opportunities partly from Pompey himself and partly from the times and the corrupt politics at Rome, on account of which men seeking office set up tables in the open and bribed the crowds shamelessly, and the people came down to vote for hire, contending not with ballots on behalf of the one who had paid them, but with bows and swords and slings.

Often staining the speaker's platform with blood and corpses, they parted ways, abandoning the city to be swept along by anarchy like a rudderless ship, so that sensible men were content if things came to nothing worse than that affairs should fall, out of such madness and so great a storm, into monarchy; and there were many who already dared to say openly that the constitution could be cured by nothing but monarchy, and that this medicine ought to be accepted from the gentlest of physicians, hinting at Pompey.

But when Pompey too, while professing in word to decline it, was in fact working with all his might toward being proclaimed dictator, Cato and his party, taking counsel together, persuaded the senate to appoint him consul alone, so that, soothed by a more lawful sort of sole rule, he would not push his own way through to a dictatorship; some also voted him a further span of years over his provinces — he held two, all Iberia and Libya, governing them through legates he sent out and armies he kept up, drawing from the public treasury, for this purpose, a thousand talents annually.

After this Caesar dispatched a message seeking the consulship, together with a further span of years over his own provinces; and though Pompey held his peace at first, Marcellus and Lentulus and their faction opposed the request, hating Caesar on other grounds as well and heaping upon what was necessary things not necessary, for his dishonor and humiliation.

For they stripped the people of Novum Comum, recently settled by Caesar in Gaul, of their citizenship; and Marcellus, while consul, had one of the councilmen there, who had come to Rome, beaten with rods, saying as he did so that he was adding these marks to show that the man was not a Roman, and bidding him go show them to Caesar. But after Marcellus, once Caesar had already begun letting the wealth of Gaul flow freely to all who were active in politics, and had freed Curio, then tribune of the people, from many debts,

and had given Paulus, then consul, fifteen hundred talents, out of which that man adorned the Forum with the famous monument of the Basilica, built in place of the Fulvia — Pompey, thoroughly alarmed at this combination, now openly, both on his own account and through his friends, worked to have a successor appointed to Caesar's command, and sent to demand back the soldiers he had lent him for the Celtic campaigns; and Caesar sent them back, presenting each man with two hundred and fifty drachmas.

But those who brought these soldiers to Pompey sowed among the multitude reports about Caesar neither fair nor kindly, and destroyed Pompey himself with empty hopes, telling him that he was longed for by Caesar's own army, and that though matters here were with difficulty kept in hand through jealousy of a corrupt government, the force there was already at his disposal, and would come over to him the moment they crossed into Italy — so much had Caesar, they said, become burdensome to his soldiers through the multitude of his campaigns, and suspect to them through fear of monarchy.

Puffed up by this, Pompey neglected preparation of soldiers, as one who felt no fear, and instead tried to out-politick Caesar with speeches and resolutions, voting down measures which Caesar in fact cared nothing for. There is also a story that a certain centurion, sent to Pompey from Caesar's army, stood before the senate house and learning that the senate would not grant Caesar an extension of his command, said, "But this will grant it," striking with his hand the hilt of his sword.

Nevertheless, the claim put forward on Caesar's behalf had a splendid show of justice about it. For he demanded that he himself lay down his arms, and that Pompey, having done the same, both becoming private citizens, should find some good at the hands of their fellow citizens; for men who stripped him of his forces while confirming Pompey in the power he held were, he said, slandering one man while setting up the other as tyrant.

Putting forward these proposals before the people on Caesar's behalf, Curio was applauded brilliantly; some even threw garlands on him as on a victorious athlete. Antony, then tribune of the people, brought before the assembly a dispatch Caesar had sent concerning these matters and, against the consuls' wishes, had it read out publicly; in the senate, however, Scipio, Pompey's father-in-law, proposed that unless Caesar gave up his arms by a fixed date, he be pronounced an enemy of the state,

and when the consuls put it to a vote whether Pompey ought to disband his troops, and then whether Caesar ought to do likewise, hardly anyone agreed to the first while nearly everyone assented to the second; but when Antony and his party again proposed that both should lay down their commands, all alike came over to that view. But as Scipio pressed his point by force, and Lentulus the consul shouted that arms, not votes, were needed against a brigand, the senators then broke up and changed into mourning garb on account of the strife.

But when letters came from Caesar seeming to show moderation — for he asked only that, surrendering all his other claims, he be left Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum along with a pair of legions, until the time came for him to stand for a second consulship — and Cicero the orator, just then arrived from Cilicia and working for reconciliation, was softening Pompey, who was ready to concede the rest but insisted on taking away his soldiers; and Cicero was persuading Caesar's friends to agree to a settlement on the terms mentioned, with only six thousand soldiers,

and Pompey was bending and yielding — Lentulus and his fellow consuls refused to permit this, and went so far as to expel Antony and Curio from the senate amid abuse and disgrace, themselves contriving the most plausible of pretexts for Caesar, and the one by which he most inflamed his soldiers, by showing them men of note and holders of office who had fled on hired carts wearing the clothing of slaves. For it was in this guise, disguising themselves out of fear, that they had stolen away from Rome.

Now the troops actually at his side numbered a mere three hundred cavalry and five thousand infantry; the remainder of his army, left behind across the Alps, was to be brought up by the officers sent for it. But seeing that the beginning of the enterprise he was undertaking, and the onset itself, called for daring and speed of opportunity rather than a great multitude of hands at the present moment,

since it would be easier, he thought, to strike terror by being unexpected than to force his way through after full preparation, he ordered his commanders and centurions, taking only their swords and no other weapons, to seize Ariminum, a great city of Gaul, sparing bloodshed and disturbance as much as possible; and he handed over the army to Hortensius.

He himself spent the day openly, attending and watching gladiators at their exercises; and a little before evening, having attended to his body and gone into the men's hall and spent a little time with those invited to dinner, he rose up just as it was growing dark, and, having been friendly to the rest and bidden them wait for him as one who would return, told a few of his friends beforehand not all to follow together, but each by a different road.

He himself, mounting one of the hired carts, drove first by a different road, then turned toward Ariminum; and when he reached the river marking the border between Cisalpine Gaul and the remainder of Italy — the Rubicon, as it is named — the nearer he drew to the peril and the more he weighed in his mind the enormity of the venture he was risking, the more a sober reckoning overtook him,

and he checked his course, and, halting his march, debated much within himself in silence, his judgment shifting to both sides, and his resolve then underwent the greatest number of turns; and he also discussed the matter at length with those of his friends present, among whom was Asinius Pollio, weighing how great the evils would be for all mankind that this crossing would set in motion, and how much would be said of it by those who came after.

At last, as though casting himself out of calculation and toward what was to come, with a kind of passion, uttering that phrase common to those who plunge into ventures of desperate daring, "Let the die be cast," he set out upon the crossing, and using a running pace from then on, he burst into Ariminum before daybreak and seized it. It is said that on the night before the crossing he saw a monstrous dream: he seemed to himself to be lying with his own mother, in unspeakable union.

Once Ariminum had been seized, it was as though the gates of war had been thrown open wide upon the whole earth and sea together, and the city's laws were thrown into disorder together with the province's borders; it seemed no longer that mere men and women, as had happened before, were wandering in panic across Italy, but that whole cities themselves had risen and were on the move

and being carried in flight through one another, while Rome itself was, as it were, filled to overflowing by streams of fugitives and migrations from the surrounding towns, a city neither easily persuaded by any magistrate nor held in check by argument, in a great swell and surge all but overturned by its own force. For contrary passions and violent movements possessed every quarter,

for not even those who rejoiced kept quiet, but, meeting in many places in so great a city with those who were afraid and grieved, grew bold about the future and fell into quarrels; and Pompey himself, thunderstruck, was troubled by one man from one side and another from another, some accusing him of having built up Caesar against himself and against the state, and being called to account for it, others charging that he had allowed Lentulus and his party to insult Caesar when Caesar was yielding and offering fair terms of settlement.

Favonius bade him stamp the ground with his foot, since once, boasting before the senate, he had told them not to trouble or concern themselves over preparation for the war, for he himself, whenever the time came, needed only to strike the ground with his foot to fill Italy with armies.

And indeed even then Pompey surpassed Caesar in the size of his forces; but no one allowed the man to use his own judgment, but, giving way to many false reports and fears, as though the war were already upon them and holding everything, and swept along with the general rush, he declared he saw confusion everywhere, and left the city, ordering the senate to follow him, and that none of those who had chosen their country and their freedom before tyranny should remain behind.

The consuls, then, fled without even offering the sacrifices required by law before setting out, and most of the senators fled too, snatching up in a sort of plunder whatever came to hand from their own goods as though it belonged to someone else; and there were some who, though they had been strongly on Caesar's side before, were then, out of sheer bewilderment, thrown out of their reckoning and swept along quite needlessly by the current of that rush,

and most pitiable was the sight the city presented, with so great a storm bearing down upon it, being carried, as it were, like a ship whose pilots have given up hope of steering it, wherever chance might cast it. Yet, pitiable as this change was, men counted their flight as being for their country, because of Pompey, and abandoned Rome as though it were now Caesar's camp; where indeed even Labienus, a man among Caesar's closest friends and one who had served as his legate and fought most eagerly at his side in all the Celtic wars, at that time deserted him and came over to Pompey.

But to him Caesar sent on his money and his baggage all the same. As for Domitius, who commanded thirty cohorts and held Corfinium, Caesar came up and encamped beside him. Domitius, giving up hope for himself, begged poison from his own physician, a household slave, and, having received and taken what was given him, drank it expecting to die.

But shortly after, hearing that Caesar was showing a wonderful humanity toward those who were captured, he bewailed his own fate and blamed the rashness of his resolve. And when his physician reassured him, telling him that what he had drunk was a sleeping draught, not a deadly poison, he rose up overjoyed and went to Caesar, and, having received his right hand in pledge, went over once more to Pompey. When this news was reported at Rome, it made people happier, and some who had fled turned back.

Caesar took over Domitius's army along with all the others whom he managed to overtake still being levied for Pompey in the various towns. Having grown large and formidable, he now marched against Pompey himself. Pompey did not accept the attack, but fled to Brundisium, sending the consuls ahead with a force to Dyrrachium, while he himself sailed away shortly after, when Caesar came up — as will be shown in detail in the account written about him.

Caesar wished to pursue at once, but lacked ships, and so turned back to Rome, having become master of the whole of Italy, without bloodshed, in sixty days. When he found the city more settled than he had expected, and many senators still in it, he spoke to them in a moderate and popular vein, urging them to send men to Pompey to negotiate suitable terms. But no one obeyed — whether they feared Pompey after having deserted him, or simply doubted that Caesar's words matched his real intentions and thought them merely fine talk for show.

When the tribune Metellus attempted to block him from removing funds from the state treasury, appealing to certain statutes, Caesar replied that weapons and statutes did not share the same moment: "If you are troubled by what is being done, get out of the way for now. War has no need of free speech. But when I have laid down my arms once terms are reached, then you may come forward and address the people — and this," he said, "I say while giving up what is properly my own right; for you are mine to dispose of, you and all the others I have taken who rose up against me."

Having said this to Metellus, he walked toward the doors of the treasury, and since the keys were nowhere to be found, he summoned metalworkers and had them force the doors open. When Metellus objected once more, with some bystanders applauding him for it, Caesar drew himself up and warned that he would put him to death unless he ceased being troublesome. "And this too, young man," he said, "you should not fail to know: it is harder for me to say it than to do it." This speech made Metellus withdraw in fear, and made everything else easily and quickly supplied for the war.

He marched first into Iberia, having resolved to drive out Afranius and Varro, Pompey's legates, and to bring the forces and provinces there under his own control, so that he might then march against Pompey leaving no enemy at his back. Though he was often in personal danger from ambushes, and his army suffered greatly from hunger, he did not let up in pursuing, challenging, and encircling the men with trenches until he had forcibly become master of their camps and their forces, while their commanders fled to Pompey.

Once Caesar was back in Rome, his father-in-law Piso pressed him to dispatch envoys who would arrange terms with Pompey, but Isauricus, seeking to please Caesar, argued against it. Named dictator by the senate, Caesar brought back exiles, gave back civic standing to the offspring of men ruined in Sulla's time, eased debtors' burdens with a set reduction of interest, and took up a few other such measures of policy — but in eleven days he laid down the monarchy, had himself declared consul together with Servilius Isauricus, and turned to the campaign.

He left the bulk of his troops behind and pushed forward by land, taking along five legions and six hundred handpicked cavalrymen; in the dead of winter, as January began (Poseideon by the Athenian calendar), he put to sea, crossed the Ionian Gulf, seized both Oricum and Apollonia, and then sent the ships once more toward Brundisium to retrieve the men who had lagged behind on the march.

As long as they were still on the march, being by now worn down in body and worn out by the sheer number of wars, they held Caesar to blame: "To what end, and for what purpose, will this man ever set us down, carrying us about and using us as if we were untiring and inanimate? Even iron grows weary from blows, and even a shield has some...

...sparing, in so long a time, and a breastplate too — does Caesar not reckon, even from our wounds, that he rules over mortal men, and that we are born to suffer and to feel pain as mortals do? Even a god cannot force the season of winter and of storm-wind upon the sea — yet this man risks everything as if he were not pursuing enemies but fleeing them." Saying such things, they went on their way toward Brundisium at a leisurely pace.

But when they arrived and found that Caesar had already put out to sea, they quickly changed their tune again and reproached themselves, calling themselves traitors to their commander, and they reproached their officers too for not having hastened the march. Sitting on the heights, they scanned the sea and Epirus beyond it for the ships on which they were to cross over to him.

At Apollonia, Caesar, not having with him a force adequate for battle, and as the troops from there were slow in coming, in his perplexity and distress conceived a desperate plan: unknown to everyone, he boarded a boat of only twelve oars to sail across to Brundisium, though the sea all around was held by the enemy's great fleets.

So, by night, disguising himself in a servant's clothing, he boarded, and throwing himself down like one of no account, kept still. As the Aous river carried the boat down toward the sea, the morning breeze, which usually at that hour brought calm at the river mouth by pushing back the swell, was overpowered by a strong gale blowing in from the open sea through the night, which extinguished it.

The river, raging against the incoming tide of the sea and the opposing surge, growing rough and being battered back with a great crash and hard eddies, could not be forced by the helmsman, who ordered the sailors to turn about and reverse course. But Caesar, perceiving this, revealed himself, and taking the helmsman's hand — the man being terrified at the sight of him — said, "Go on, good man, be bold and fear nothing: you carry Caesar, and Caesar's Fortune sailing with you."

The sailors forgot the storm, and gripping their oars, strained with all their eagerness against the river. Yet it could not be done — the boat had shipped a large amount of water and was in peril at the river's mouth — so, very much against his will, he yielded and let the helmsman bring the boat about. As he came back up, the soldiers came out to meet him in crowds, complaining bitterly and taking it hard that he was not convinced he could win with them alone, but was distressed and risked himself for the sake of those absent, as though he distrusted the men present.

After this, Antony sailed over from Brundisium bringing the forces, and Caesar, now emboldened, challenged Pompey, who was well entrenched and abundantly supplied both by land and by sea, while Caesar himself, though not lacking provisions at first, was later hard pressed by shortage of necessities — to the point that his men would dig a particular root out of the ground, blend it with milk, and eat it.

And once they even shaped loaves out of it, and running up to the enemy's outposts, threw them inside and scattered them about, declaring that they would keep Pompey under siege for as long as the ground kept producing such roots. Pompey, for his part, refused to let either the loaves or that message reach his troops at large, for his soldiers were losing heart, dreading the harshness and indifference of the enemy as if they were dealing with wild beasts.

There were constant scattered skirmishes around Pompey's fortifications, and Caesar had the better of all of them except one, in which, after a great rout occurred, he came close to losing his camp entirely. For when Pompey attacked, no one held his ground, but the trenches were filled with the slain, and men fell around their own ramparts and walls, driven headlong in flight.

Caesar, meeting them, tried to turn back those who were fleeing, but accomplished nothing; when he grabbed at the standards, the standard-bearers let them drop, with the result that the enemy seized thirty-two of them, and Caesar himself came close to being killed. For laying his hand on a large and powerful man who was fleeing past him, he ordered him to stay and turn to face the enemy; the man, full of panic at the danger, raised his sword as if to strike him, but Caesar's shield-bearer got there first and cut off the man's shoulder.

Caesar despaired of his own situation so completely that, when Pompey — out of some caution, or by fortune — did not press his great success to its conclusion, but shut the fleeing men up within their rampart and withdrew, Caesar, as he departed, said to his friends, "Today the victory would have belonged to the enemy, if they had had a man who knew how to win."

He himself went into his tent and, lying down, passed that night, of all nights, the most painful, in helpless reckonings — reckoning that he had led badly, since fertile land lay open before him, with Macedonia's and Thessaly's flourishing towns there for the taking, and yet he had let the war be dragged elsewhere while he sat here by the sea, with the enemy in command of it, besieged by lack of necessities rather than himself besieging with arms.

Tossed about in this way and distressed at the difficulty and harshness of his present situation, he roused his army, having resolved to advance against Scipio in Macedonia — for either he would draw Pompey after him to fight where he was not equally supplied from the sea, or he would overpower Scipio while he stood alone.

This encouraged Pompey's army and the officers around him to press Caesar as a beaten man in flight. Pompey himself was cautious about risking a battle over stakes so great, and, being excellently supplied in everything for the long term, thought it best to wear down and let wither the enemy's vigor, which was of short duration. For the most warlike part of Caesar's force had experience and irresistible daring for battle,

but in the wanderings and encampments, the assaults on walls and the broken nights, they were worn out by age, and their bodies were heavy under hardship, their eagerness failing along with their strength. And at that time, it was said, a kind of plague as well, originating from the strangeness of their diet, was going around in Caesar's army, and worst of all, being neither strong in money nor well supplied with food, it seemed that in a short time he would be undone on his own.

For these reasons, Cato alone praised Pompey for not wanting to fight, out of sparing regard for the citizens — Cato, who, seeing the enemy's dead from the battle, numbering about a thousand, went away covering his face and weeping. But all the others reviled Pompey for avoiding battle, and provoked him, calling him Agamemnon and King of Kings, as though he did not wish to give up his sole command, but delighted in having so many commanders dependent on him and coming to attend at his tent.

Favonius, imitating Cato's bluntness, complained loudly that once again, on account of Pompey's fondness for command, they would miss out on tasting the figs of Tusculum this year. Afranius — who had lately come from Iberia after a poor showing there in command, and stood accused of having sold out the army for money — asked why they were not fighting the trader who had purchased the provinces off him. Pressed on every side by such talk, Pompey, most reluctantly, advanced into battle in pursuit of Caesar.

Caesar accomplished the rest of the march with difficulty, since no one would provide him a market, everyone despising him because of his recent defeat; but upon capturing Gomphi, a Thessalian town, he managed not only to feed his troops but also, against all expectation, to cure them of their illness. For the men came upon abundant wine, and drinking without restraint, then holding revels and behaving like bacchants along the road, they shook off the sickness through their drunkenness and passed beyond it, their bodies falling into a different condition.

When both armies had entered Pharsalia and encamped there, Pompey again fell back into his original way of thinking, especially as inauspicious omens occurred, along with a dream in which he seemed to see himself in the theater being applauded by the Romans. But the men around him were so bold, and had so far anticipated victory in their hopes, that Domitius, Spinther, and Scipio quarreled with one another over Caesar's office of high priest,

and many were sending to Rome to hire and secure in advance houses suitable for men about to hold the consulship and praetorship, expecting to take office immediately after the war. Above all, the cavalry were eager for the battle, having been trained to excess in splendor of arms, in the feeding of their horses, and in beauty of body, and they thought a great deal of themselves also because of their numbers, being seven thousand against Caesar's one thousand. The infantry too were far from evenly matched, forty-five thousand drawn up against twenty-two thousand.

Caesar gathered his soldiers together, and having told them beforehand that two legions under Corfinius were close by, and fifteen more cohorts under Calenus were stationed around Megara and Athens, put it to them whether they preferred to hold off for those reinforcements, or to face the danger on their own; and they cried out, begging him not to wait, but rather to use whatever stratagem and generalship would bring them into contact with the enemy as quickly as possible.

As he carried out the lustral purification of his troops and the first victim had been offered up, the diviner immediately announced that battle against the enemy would be decided within three days. Caesar then asked whether the sacrifice also showed some favorable token of the outcome, to which the man replied, "That question you yourself are better placed to answer. What the gods point to is a sweeping reversal, a turn into its very opposite of how things now stand, so that if you presently think your affairs prosper, look for the worse to come, but if they go badly, expect improvement."

On the night before the battle, as he was going about inspecting the watches around midnight, a torch of heavenly fire was seen, which, carried over Caesar's camp, blazing and flame-like, seemed to fall into Pompey's. At the morning watch they also perceived that a panic-stricken confusion had arisen among the enemy; still he did not expect that they would give battle on that day, but was breaking camp to march toward Scotussa.

But the tents were already down when riders from his scouting parties came galloping to report that the enemy was descending to give battle. Overjoyed, and having prayed to the gods, he drew up the phalanx, making the line threefold: over the center he set Domitius Calvinus, of the wings Antony held the one, and he himself the right, intending to fight in the tenth legion.

There, seeing the enemy's cavalry arrayed opposite, and fearing their splendor and their numbers, he secretly ordered six cohorts to come around to him from the rear of the line and stationed them behind the right wing, instructing them what they must do whenever the enemy's cavalry should charge. Pompey himself held one of the wings, Domitius the left, and Scipio, his father-in-law, commanded the center.

All the cavalry bore down upon the left, so as to encircle the enemy's right and bring about a brilliant rout around the commander himself; for they thought no depth of a hoplite phalanx would hold, but that everything would be crushed and shattered against the enemy the moment so great a mass of horsemen made its assault together.

When both sides were about to give the signal for the charge, Pompey ordered his hoplites, standing with weapons leveled and remaining firmly in place, to receive the enemy's onrush until they should come within range of a javelin's throw. But Caesar says that in this too he erred, being ignorant that the clash that comes with a run and a rush at the outset adds force to the blows and kindles the spirit further, fanned up out of everything.

He himself, about to set the phalanx in motion and already advancing to the task, first saw one of the captains, a man loyal to him and experienced in wars, encouraging those under him and challenging them to a contest of valor; calling this man by name, he said, "What do we hope for, Gaius Crassinius, and how much confidence do we have?"

Crassinius, stretching out his right hand and shouting loudly, said, "We shall win, Caesar, gloriously; and you will praise me today, whether living or dead." Having said this, he was the first to charge the enemy at a run, sweeping along with him the hundred and twenty soldiers around himself. Cutting through the front ranks and pressing forward with great slaughter and force, he was checked, struck by a sword through the mouth, so that the point stood out above the back of his neck.

So the infantry clashed in the center and fought; but from the wing Pompey's cavalry came riding on proudly, pouring out their squadrons to encircle the right; and before they could charge, the cohorts ran out from Caesar's line, not, as they were accustomed, using their javelins as throwing-spears,

nor striking at the thighs or shins of the enemy from close at hand, but aiming at their faces and wounding them there, having been taught by Caesar to do this, in the hope that men not much accustomed to wars or wounds, but young and vain of their beauty and bloom of youth, would above all shrink from blows of this kind and not stand their ground, fearing at once the present danger and the future disgrace.

And this is indeed what happened; for they could not endure the javelins being raised against them, nor did they dare to look upon the steel before their eyes, but turned away and covered their faces, sparing them, and at last, having thrown themselves into such confusion, they turned to flee most shamefully, ruining the whole battle; for at once the victors surrounded these infantry and, falling upon them from behind, cut them down.

Pompey, when he saw from the other wing his cavalry scattered in flight, he lost all command of himself, forgetting that he was the great Pompey, and instead, like someone whose wits a god had violently smitten, walked off to his tent without a word, and sitting down waited to see what would happen, until, when the rout of all had come about, the enemy mounted the rampart and fought with those guarding it.

Then, as though coming to his senses, and uttering, they say, only this one word, "So, even as far as the camp?" he took off his general's and combatant's dress, and putting on clothing fitting for a fugitive, slipped away. But what fortunes he later met with, and how he gave himself over to the men of Egypt and was killed, we shall show in the writings concerning him.

Caesar, when he had come into Pompey's camp and saw the enemy's dead already lying there, and those still being killed, is said to have groaned and said, "This is what they wished, to this necessity they drove me, that Gaius Caesar, who had brought the greatest wars to a successful end, would have been condemned, if I had dismissed my armies."

Asinius Pollio says that Caesar uttered these words in Latin at that time, but that they were written down by himself in Greek; and that of those who died, most were servants killed in the taking of the camp, and that no more than six thousand soldiers fell. Of those taken alive, Caesar incorporated most into his legions; and to many of the distinguished he granted pardon, among whom was Brutus, who later killed him — concerning whom it is said that Caesar was distressed when he was not to be seen, but was extraordinarily pleased when he was found safe and came to him.

Of the many signs that occurred concerning the victory, the most notable reported is the one at Tralles. In a shrine dedicated to Victory a statue of Caesar had been erected, and the pavement surrounding it, though naturally firm and set with hard stone, is said to have from this very spot put forth a palm shoot beside the base of the statue. And at Patavium, Gaius Cornelius, a man of good repute in divination, a fellow citizen and acquaintance of the historian Livy, happened to be sitting that day observing the birds.

According to Livy's account, he first worked out when the engagement was occurring and told the bystanders that the affair stood on a knife's edge even then, with the two sides closing for combat; then, returning his gaze to the omens before him, he sprang up as though possessed and cried out, "Caesar, victory is yours!" As the onlookers stood amazed, he lifted the crown from his own head and vowed he would set it there again only once his craft had been vindicated by events. Livy insists that matters unfolded in just this fashion.

Caesar, having granted freedom to the nation of the Thessalians, pursued Pompey as a trophy of victory; and on reaching Asia, as a favor to Theopompus, the compiler of the myths, he freed the people of Cnidus, and to all who dwelt in Asia he remitted a third of their tribute.

Having put in at Alexandria after Pompey had already died, he turned away from Theodotus, who brought him Pompey's head, but on receiving the man's signet ring he wept; and as many of Pompey's companions and acquaintances as had been captured by the king while wandering about the country, he treated all of them well and drew them to himself. And he wrote to his friends in Rome that of his victory this was the greatest and sweetest thing he enjoyed, to be able always to save some of the citizens who had fought against him.

As for that war, some hold that it need never have happened, and that his passion for Cleopatra alone made it both shameful and perilous for him, while others blame the king's men, and especially Pothinus the eunuch, who, having the greatest power, and having lately killed Pompey and driven out Cleopatra, was secretly plotting against Caesar; and for this reason, they say, Caesar from that point on began to spend his nights in drinking parties for the sake of his own safety. Openly Pothinus was not to be endured, saying and doing many things full of envy and insult toward Caesar.

For he ordered the soldiers to put up with and be content with the worst and oldest grain being measured out to them, eating what belonged to others, and for their dinners he used wooden and earthenware vessels, the excuse being that Caesar had seized every piece of gold and silver plate against a debt still owing; for the reigning king's father had been in arrears to Caesar for seventeen million five hundred thousand drachmas, a sum of which Caesar had already forgiven the balance to the man's children, keeping back only a portion of it —

he then demanded to receive it and maintain the army with it. And when Pothinus told him for the present to go away and attend to his great affairs, saying he would receive it later with thanks, and that he had very little need of Egyptian counselors, Caesar secretly sent for Cleopatra from the country.

And she, taking with her only Apollodorus the Sicilian of her friends, embarked in a small boat and put in at the palace when it was already growing dark. Since there was no other way to escape notice, she got into a bed-sack and stretched herself out at full length, and Apollodorus, tying up the bed-sack with a strap, carried it in through the doors to Caesar,

and it is said that Cleopatra was first captured by this very device, appearing bold, and then, overcome by the charm and grace of her further company, reconciled her to her brother so that she should reign jointly with him. Then, afterward, during the reconciliation, while all were feasting together, a servant of Caesar's, a barber, through the cowardice by which he surpassed all men, leaving nothing uninvestigated, but listening in and prying into everything, understood that a plot was being carried out against Caesar by Achillas the general and Pothinus the eunuch,

and Caesar, having discovered it, set a guard around the men's quarters and put Pothinus to death; but Achillas, fleeing to the army camp, raised up against him a heavy and hard-to-manage war, defending so great a city and force with very few men. In this war, first, he was endangered by being cut off from water; for the aqueducts were walled up by the enemy; and second, when his fleet was being cut off, he was compelled to ward off the danger by fire, which also spread from the shipyards and destroyed

the great library. Third, when a battle was joined near Pharos, he sprang from the breakwater down into a skiff to bring aid to his men in the fight, but as the Egyptians closed in on him from every side by sea, he flung himself into the water and made his escape by swimming, though with great difficulty. It is said that on this occasion, clutching a bundle of documents, he refused to abandon them even as missiles struck around him and he was dragged under; instead he kept the papers clear of the water in one hand while paddling himself along with the other, and meanwhile the skiff went straight to the bottom.

Finally, when the king had withdrawn to the enemy, Caesar attacked, joined battle, and won, many having fallen and the king himself having disappeared; and leaving Cleopatra ruling as queen of Egypt, and not long after, once she had borne him a son the people of Alexandria named Caesarion, Caesar departed for Syria,

and pressing on from there through Asia, he received word that Pharnaces son of Mithridates had defeated Domitius, driving him out of Pontus in flight with only a handful of followers, and that Pharnaces, using his victory insatiably and holding Bithynia and Cappadocia, was reaching out for the so-called Lesser Armenia, and was stirring up all the kings and tetrarchs in that region.

So without delay he marched against him with three legions, and, engaging in a major battle by the city of Zela, chased him out of Pontus in headlong retreat and wiped out his army entirely. And announcing the swiftness and speed of this battle to Rome, to a certain friend named Amantius, he wrote three words: "I came, I saw, I conquered." In Latin the words, ending in a like grammatical form, have a terseness that is not without effect.

After this he crossed over into Italy and went up to Rome, the year in which he had been chosen dictator for the second time now drawing to a close — that office had never before lasted a full year. For the following year he was appointed consul, and he came under criticism because, when Cosconius and Galba, two men holding praetorian rank, were slain by his own mutinying troops, his only reproach to them was to call them citizens rather than soldiers, and distributed to each a thousand drachmas and allotted them a great tract of land in Italy.

Further discredit fell on him from Dolabella's wild extravagance, Amantius's love of money, Antony's drunkenness, and Corfinius's scheming over Pompey's house, which he was remodeling as though it were not grand enough for him. These were the things the Romans found hard to bear. Caesar, for his part, was not ignorant of the character of these men, nor did he wish to employ them, but the necessities of the state compelled him to make use of those who served him.

When the party of Cato and Scipio, after the battle at Pharsalus, fled to Libya, and there, with the help of King Juba, had gathered forces worth reckoning with, Caesar resolved to march against them. Crossing over to Sicily about the winter solstice, and wishing at once to cut off from the commanders under him all hope of delay and postponement, he pitched his own tent right at the water's edge, and once a wind came up he set sail, taking along three thousand foot-soldiers and a small body of cavalry,

and having disembarked these without being noticed, he put out again, being anxious on account of the greater part of his force still at sea; but meeting them already under way he brought them all safely down to the camp. Learning that the enemy took courage from some old oracle declaring that victory in Libya was forever destined to belong to the Scipio line, it is hard to say whether in mockery — since a Scipio commanded the enemy — or in earnest, appropriating the omen for himself,

for he had with him a certain man otherwise contemptible and disregarded, yet who came from the Africanus household and bore the name Scipio Sallustio; this fellow he repeatedly stationed at the army's forefront during engagements as though he were its commander, being thereby often forced to provoke the enemy and to court engagements.

For there was neither grain in abundance for the men nor fodder for the pack animals, but they were forced to feed the horses on seaweed, washed free of its brine, mixed with a little grass as a relish; for the Numidians, appearing often and swiftly, kept control of the countryside. And once, when Caesar's horsemen were at leisure,

it happened that a Libyan man was giving a display, dancing and at the same time playing the single pipe in a marvelous way, and the men, delighting in it, had sat down, having handed their horses over to the boys; suddenly the enemy came around and fell upon them, killing some on the spot, and falling in together with the rest as they were driven headlong toward the camp.

Had not Caesar himself, and along with Caesar Asinius Pollio, come to the rescue from the rampart and checked the flight, the war would have been decided then and there. There was also another battle in which, when it came to close fighting, the enemy had the advantage; in it Caesar is said to have seized the standard-bearer as he fled by the neck, turned him around, and said, "The enemy are over there."

Elated by these successes, Scipio was eager to have the matter decided by battle, and leaving Afranius camped apart, and Juba likewise camped apart at a little distance, he himself began to fortify, above a lake, a stronghold for his camp near the city of Thapsus, so that it might serve all of them as a base of operations and a refuge for the battle.

While he was occupied with this work, Caesar, passing with unimaginable speed through wooded places offering no visible approach, surrounded a portion of the enemy while striking the rest head-on; having routed these he seized the opportunity and the momentum of fortune, by which he captured Afranius's camp at the first shout, and at the first shout, as Juba fled, sacked the camp of the Numidians; and having in the space of a single day gained possession of a small part of three camps and destroyed fifty thousand of the enemy, he lost not even fifty of his own men.

Some report these things about that battle; while others claim he took no part in the fighting himself, and that instead while he was drawing up and arranging the army his usual affliction seized him, and that as soon as he felt it beginning, before he was thrown into confusion and his consciousness was altogether overtaken by the malady, already trembling, he was carried into one of the nearby towers and spent the time quietly there, while of the men of consular and praetorian rank who had fled from the battle, some destroyed themselves when they were about to be captured, while many others Caesar put to death after they were taken.

Eager to take Cato alive, he hastened toward Utica; for Cato, guarding that city, had taken no part in the battle. When he learned that the man had made away with himself, he was clearly stung by it, though for what reason is unclear. At any rate he said, "O Cato, I begrudge you your death, for you begrudged me the saving of your life." Now the speech he afterward wrote against the dead Cato does not seem to be a sign of a gentle or forgiving disposition. For how could he have shown mercy to him living, when he poured out such anger even on one who could no longer feel it?

But his fairness toward Cicero and Brutus and countless others who had fought against him leads people to judge that even that speech was composed not out of hatred but from political rivalry, for the following reason. Cicero had written an encomium of Cato, giving the speech the title "Cato"; and the speech, as one might expect, was eagerly read by many, being composed by the most powerful of orators on the noblest of subjects.

This irritated Caesar, who regarded the praise of the dead man, given on his account, as an accusation against himself. He therefore wrote a piece gathering together many charges against Cato; the book is entitled the Anticato. And each of the two speeches has, for the sake of Caesar and Cato respectively, many devoted readers.

But indeed, when he returned to Rome from Libya, he first boasted greatly to the people about his victory, saying that he had subdued so much territory that it would yield the public treasury, year after year, grain amounting to two hundred thousand Attic bushels along with three million pounds of oil. Then he celebrated triumphs — the Egyptian, the Pontic, the African — the last not over Scipio but ostensibly over King Juba,

and on that occasion Juba's son, then quite an infant, was led along in the triumph, having met with the most fortunate of captures, seeing that, born a Numidian and a foreigner, he ended up ranked among the most erudite of Greek authors. After the triumphs he gave great gifts to the soldiers and won the populace over through feasts and public shows, seating them together for a banquet spread across twenty-two thousand couches, and providing spectacles both of gladiators and of men fighting sea-battles in honor of his daughter Julia, long since dead.

After the spectacles, a census was taken, and instead of the former three hundred twenty thousand the total was found to be only one hundred fifty thousand. Such was the calamity that civil strife had wrought, and so great a portion of the people it had consumed away, not even reckoning the misfortunes that had befallen the rest of Italy and the provinces.

When these matters were completed, now serving his fourth term as consul, he launched a campaign into Spain to face the sons of Pompey, who, though still young, had gathered together an astonishing number of troops and were displaying a boldness worthy to command, so that they brought Caesar into the greatest danger he had yet faced.

The great battle was fought near the city of Munda, in which Caesar, seeing his own men being pressed hard and holding out poorly, ran through the ranks and among the weapons, crying out that if they felt no shame, they should hand him over to these mere boys. With great effort and eagerness he finally pushed back the enemy, destroying more than thirty thousand of them, but losing a thousand of his own, the best of his men,

and afterward, on withdrawing from the battle, he told his friends that on many prior occasions he had fought to win, yet only this once he had fought for his life. He won this battle on the festival of the Dionysia, on which day, it is said, Pompey the Great also had gone forth to war; the time between the two was an interval of four years. Of Pompey's sons, the younger escaped, but a few days later Didius brought back the head of the elder.

This was the last war Caesar waged. The triumph celebrated for it distressed the Romans more than anything else. For it was not over foreign generals nor barbarian kings that he had triumphed, but having utterly destroyed the sons and family of a man who had been the foremost of the Romans in his fortunes, it was not fitting to parade this in a procession over the calamities of the fatherland, exulting in deeds whose only defense before gods and men alike is that they were done under necessity — and this too, though before now he had sent neither messenger nor public dispatch announcing victory from the civil wars, but had thrust away the glory of it out of shame.

Nevertheless, having bent to the man's fortune and accepted the bridle, and considering monarchy a breathing-space from the civil wars and their evils, they appointed him dictator for life — and this was an acknowledged tyranny, since to the unaccountability of monarchy was now added permanence.

When Cicero proposed to the senate the first honors, the greatness of which had at least something human about it, others, adding excesses and vying with one another, brought it about that the man became burdensome and distasteful even to the gentlest, on account of the extravagance and strangeness of what was being voted; in this those who hated Caesar are thought to have contributed no less than his flatterers,

so that they might have as many grounds against him as possible and might seem to be attacking him on the gravest charges. For in other respects, now that his civil wars had come to an end, he offered himself blameless; and it does not seem unfitting that they voted a temple of Clemency as a thank-offering for his gentleness. For he granted pardon to many who had opposed him in arms, and even bestowed offices and honors on some, among them Brutus and Cassius, who at the time held praetorships.

The statues of Pompey that had been thrown down he did not overlook, but had them set up again, at which Cicero remarked that by setting up Pompey's statues Caesar had firmly fixed his own. And when his friends urged him to keep a bodyguard, and many offered themselves for this purpose, he refused, remarking that dying a single time beat living in constant dread of death.

Wrapping himself in the goodwill of the people as the finest and at the same time surest safeguard, he again won over the populace with feasts and distributions of grain, and the soldiery with colonies, of which the most notable were Carthage and Corinth — cities which, as it happened, had earlier met their destruction, and now, at one and the same time, both received their restoration.

To the powerful he promised consulships and praetorships for the future, to others he offered comfort with various other offices and honors, and in all he instilled hope, courting their willing obedience — so much so that when the consul Maximus died, he appointed Caninius Rebilus consul for the one remaining day of the term. To him, as it happened, when many were going to greet and escort him, Cicero said, "Let us hurry, before the man goes out of office."

But since his many successes did not turn his naturally grand and ambitious spirit toward enjoyment of what he had accomplished, but rather, serving as kindling and confidence for what lay ahead, gave birth to conceptions of greater undertakings and a longing for new glory, as though he had used up the old, the feeling was nothing other than a rivalry with himself, as if he were another man, and a kind of contention between what was to come and what had already been done,

and his preparation and design were to march against the Parthians, and having subdued them, to pass through Hyrcania along the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus, come round past the Pontus, and invade Scythia; then, having overrun the lands neighboring the Germans and Germany itself, to return through Gaul into Italy, and so close the circle of his empire, bounded on every side by the Ocean.

In the midst of his campaigning he also undertook to cut through the Corinthian Isthmus, appointing Anienus to the task, and to take the Tiber in hand at once from the city itself with a deep channel, bending it around toward Circeium so as to discharge it into the sea near Tarracina, contriving thereby both safety and ease for those who traveled to Rome for trade,

and besides this, to drain the marshes around Pomentium and Setia and turn them into a plain fit for the work of many tens of thousands of men, and to bring bars across the sea nearest Rome by means of moles, and to clear out the blind and treacherous places of the Ostian shore, so as to make harbors and roadsteads worthy of trust for so great a shipping traffic. These things were still in preparation.

The arrangement and correction of the calendar, the irregularity of time set right by him with such graceful learning, proved of the most refined usefulness. For not only in very ancient times had the Romans used disordered cycles of the months in relation to the year, so that the sacrifices and festivals, being shifted little by little, fell in the end into seasons opposite to the times they belonged to,

but even concerning the solar year then in use, most people had no reckoning of it at all, while the priests alone, knowing the season, would suddenly and without anyone's foreknowledge insert the intercalary month, calling it Mercedonius — a device King Numa, as tradition holds, was the very first to introduce, though he had devised only a slight remedy, one reaching but a short way toward correcting the fault, as has been written in his Life.

Caesar, setting the problem before the best of the philosophers and mathematicians, blended out of the methods already available a correction of his own, more precisely worked out, which the Romans use down to the present day, and by which they seem to err less than others regarding the irregularity of time. Yet even this gave occasion to those who envied him and resented his power. Cicero the orator, at any rate, it seems, when someone remarked that Lyra would rise tomorrow, said, "Yes, by edict" — as though even this were something men had to accept under compulsion.

But the hatred that was most openly displayed against him, and that proved fatal, was brought about by his desire for kingship — to most people the first cause of it, but to those who had long harbored ill will a most seemly pretext, although those who were courting this honor for Caesar had also sown a certain story among the people, that according to the Sibylline writings Parthia could be conquered by the Romans if they campaigned against it with a king, otherwise being unconquerable.

Now while Caesar was descending toward the city from Alba, some ventured to greet him as king; but when the people were thrown into confusion, he, displeased, said that he was called not king but Caesar. And when at this a silence fell over everyone, he passed on, not altogether cheerful nor gracious.

And when the Senate voted him certain extravagant honors, he happened to be seated above the rostra, and as the consuls and praetors approached, with the whole senate following as well, he did not rise, but as though transacting business with private citizens, he replied that the honors needed curtailing rather than increase. And this vexed not only the senate but the people too, feeling that the city was being insulted in the person of the senate, and those who were free to withdraw at once went away in terrible dejection,

so that he, on realizing it, immediately turned toward home and cried out to his friends, pulling his garment away from his throat, that anyone who so desired might strike his bared throat and kill him — though later he made his illness his excuse, saying that those in such a condition cannot bear to keep their senses steady when they stand and address a crowd, but instead their senses are quickly shaken and set spinning and seized by dizziness.

But this was not really the case; rather, they say, though he was quite willing to rise for the senate, he was held back by one of his friends, or rather flatterers, Cornelius Balbus, who said, "Will you not remember that you are Caesar, and not think it proper that you be paid court to as one greater?" — splendidly, O—

Upon these offenses there followed the insult done by the tribunes of the people. For it was the festival of the Lupercalia, concerning which many write that it was in ancient times a festival of shepherds, and it has some connection also with the Arcadian Lycaea.

Many of the young men of noble birth and of the magistrates run naked through the city, striking with shaggy strips of hide those in their way, in sport and laughter; and many of the women of rank purposely come to meet them and offer their hands to the blows, as though to a schoolmaster, being persuaded that it is good for those with child toward an easy delivery, and for the barren toward conceiving.

Caesar was watching these things, seated above the rostra on a golden chair, adorned in triumphal dress. Antony was one of those running the sacred course, for he was consul. So when he burst into the forum and the crowd made way for him, carrying a diadem wreathed with a laurel crown, he held it out to Caesar, and there arose applause — not loud, but slight, and prearranged,

but when Caesar pushed it away the whole people applauded again; and when he offered it a second time, few applauded, and when he refused it again, everyone did; and so, the attempt having been thus refuted, Caesar rose, ordering the crown to be carried off to the Capitol. And statues of him were seen bound with royal diadems, and two of the tribunes, Flavius and Marullus, went and tore them down, and once they tracked down the men who had first hailed Caesar as king, marched them away and had them locked up.

And the people followed applauding, and called the men Brutuses, because it was Brutus who had put an end to the succession of kings and had established the power in the senate and people out of monarchy. At this Caesar, provoked, removed the office from Marullus and his colleagues, and in accusing them, at the same time insulting the people too, repeatedly called the men Brutuses and Cumaeans.

So then the many turned toward Marcus Brutus, who was thought to be descended on his father's side from that line, and on his mother's from the Servilii, another distinguished house, and was, besides, Cato's nephew as well as his son-in-law. The honors and favors bestowed on him by Caesar had blunted any impulse of his own to move against the monarchy,

for he had not merely been saved after the rout at Pharsalus, nor merely had many of his friends saved through his intercession, but he also enjoyed great trust with Caesar. He had received the most distinguished praetorship of that time, and was to be consul four years hence, being preferred over Cassius when the two contended for it; for Caesar is said to have remarked that Cassius made the more just case, but that he himself would not pass over Brutus.

And once, when certain men were slandering him, the conspiracy already being under way, Caesar paid no heed, but laying his hand upon his own body said to those slandering him, "This skin will wait for Brutus" — meaning that Brutus was worthy of power on account of his virtue, but that for power's sake he would not become thankless and base.

But those who longed for a change of government, and looked to him alone, or to him first, did not dare speak with him directly, but under cover of darkness they covered his tribunal and the praetor's seat where he dispensed justice with scrawled messages, the bulk of them along these lines: "You are asleep, Brutus," and "You are no true Brutus." Cassius, perceiving through these that his ambition was being quietly stirred, pressed and provoked him more than before, having himself besides a private hatred toward Caesar for reasons we have set forth in the Life of Brutus.

Caesar, however, held him too under suspicion, so much so that he remarked once to his companions, "What is it, do you think, that Cassius is after? For my part I do not much like him, being so pale." And again it is said that, when a report of a plot came to him concerning Antony and Dolabella, that they were stirring up revolution, he said, "It is not these fat, long-haired men I fear so much, but rather those pale, thin ones" — meaning Cassius and Brutus.

But it seems that fate is not so much unexpected as unguarded against, since they say wondrous signs and apparitions appeared. As for lights in the sky and crashing sounds carried about in many places by night, and birds of ill omen settling in the forum, these are perhaps not worth recording in connection with a calamity of such magnitude,

but Strabo the philosopher relates that many men all on fire were seen going about, and that a soldier's slave shot forth a great flame from his hand, so that he seemed to onlookers to be burning, but when it ceased the man had suffered no harm; and that at a sacrifice Caesar himself was performing, the victim's heart could not be found within it, and this was a terrible portent, for by nature no animal could exist without a heart.

It is also possible to hear from many who tell this story, that a certain seer had warned him to be on guard against a grave danger on that day in March the Romans name the Ides; and once the day had arrived, Caesar, on his way to the senate, greeted the seer and jested with him, saying, "Well, the Ides of March have come," and the man quietly replied to him, "Yes, they have come,

but they have not yet passed." The day before, while dining at the house of Marcus Lepidus, he happened to be signing letters while reclining, as was his custom, and when a discussion arose as to what kind of death was best, he cried out before anyone else, "The unexpected one."

After this, sleeping as was his custom beside his wife, when all the doors and windows of the bedchamber flew open at once, he was startled by the noise together with the light of the moon shining in, and perceived that Calpurnia, though sound asleep, was uttering indistinct sounds and inarticulate groans in her sleep; for it seemed that she was weeping as she held him in her arms, slain.

Others say that this was not the vision that came to the woman, but that there was a certain ornament attached to Caesar's house, one which, for the sake of adornment and dignity, the senate had voted to be set upon it, as Livy relates; this Calpurnia, seeing in a dream being broken to pieces, seemed to wail and weep over. When day came, then, she begged Caesar, if it were at all possible, not to go forth, but to put off the senate; and if he cared nothing at all for her dreams, to inquire through some other divination and through sacrifices concerning the future. And he too had

as it seems, some suspicion and fear of his own, for he had never before detected in Calpurnia any womanish tendency to superstition, but now he saw her in great distress; and when, after sacrificing many victims, the seers told him the signs were unfavorable, he decided to dispatch Antony to send the senate home,

Meanwhile Decimus Brutus, called also Albinus, a man Caesar trusted enough to have named him second in line among his heirs, yet who was nonetheless party to the plot alongside the other Brutus and Cassius, grew afraid that putting off the day would let the whole scheme come to light, mocked the seers and reproached Caesar,

saying that he was bringing accusations and slanders upon himself in the eyes of the senate, which would think itself being mocked; for it had come at his own bidding, and all were eager to vote that he be proclaimed king of the provinces outside Italy and wear the diadem

going over the rest of the earth and sea. But if someone were to tell them, sitting there now, to break up and come back again once he had met with better dreams — Calpurnia — what would the talk of his enviers be? Or which of his friends would put up with hearing it taught that this was slavery and tyranny? "But if you are altogether resolved," he said, "to discharge the day's obligation, it would be better for you to go yourself, greet the senate, and then postpone the matter."

So saying, Brutus took Caesar by the hand and led him along. And when he had gone forward only a little from the doors, a slave belonging to someone else, eager to reach him but overwhelmed by the crowd and press of people around him, forced his way into the house and gave himself over to Calpurnia, bidding her keep him under guard until Caesar returned, for he carried word of weighty affairs meant for Caesar's ears.

Artemidorus, by birth a native of Cnidus and a professor of Greek eloquence, being on friendly terms, through that profession, with certain men of Brutus's circle, and so having come to know most of what was being done, arrived carrying in a little scroll the things he meant to disclose. Seeing Caesar taking each of the little scrolls handed to him and passing them on to the attendants around him, he came up very close and said, "Caesar, read this one alone, and quickly: for it is written concerning great matters that concern you."

Caesar took it, but the crowds pressing to meet him kept him from reading it, though he tried again and again to do so; holding it in his hand and keeping just that one apart from the rest, he went on into the senate house. Some, however, say that another man handed him this scroll, and that Artemidorus did not manage to approach at all, but was squeezed out along the whole route.

But these things, no doubt, even chance itself brings about. As for the place that received that murder and that struggle — the place into which the senate had then been gathered, which held a standing statue of Pompey and had been a dedication of Pompey's among the things that adorned the theater — it made it altogether clear that some divinity was guiding and calling the deed to happen there.

And indeed it is said that Cassius, looking toward the statue of Pompey before the attempt, called upon it in silence, even though he was not a stranger to the doctrines of Epicurus; but the moment, it seems, with the terrible thing now at hand, produced in him an inspired passion in place of his former reasonings.

As for Antony, who was loyal to Caesar and physically strong, Brutus Albinus kept him occupied outside, purposely engaging him in a long conversation. When Caesar entered, the senate rose partway in deference to him, while of Brutus's men some stationed themselves behind his chair, and others went to meet him, as though to join Tillius Cimber in pleading for his exiled brother, and they kept pressing their plea together as they accompanied him all the way to his chair.

When he had sat down and kept brushing aside their pleas, and grew angry with each of them as they pressed more forcefully, Tillius grabbed hold of his toga with both hands and dragged it down away from his neck — this being the agreed signal for the attempt — and Casca struck first with his sword, a blow beside the neck, not fatal nor deep, but as was natural at the start of so great a daring deed, he was thrown into confusion, so that Caesar turned and

seized and held the dagger. At the same moment somehow they both cried out — the one struck, in Latin, "Casca, you villain, what are you doing?" and the one who struck, in Greek, to his brother, "Brother, help!" Once the attack had begun in this way, those who had no part in the plot were seized with terror and shuddering at what was happening, not daring to flee, nor to defend him, nor even to utter a sound, while each of those prepared for the murder bared his sword,

and, hemmed in on all sides, wherever he turned his gaze meeting blows and the iron driving at him, both against his face and against his eyes, he was entangled like a wild beast in the hands of them all — for all had to take part and taste of the murder. For this reason Brutus too struck him once, in the groin. Some accounts claim that as he struggled against the rest and twisted his body one way and another, crying out, when he saw Brutus with his sword drawn, he pulled his cloak down over his head and let himself go,

whether by chance or pushed there by those killing him, toward the base on which Pompey's statue stood. And the murder drenched it thoroughly with blood, so that it seemed as though Pompey himself were presiding over the vengeance upon his enemy, who lay fallen beneath his feet and convulsing from the multitude of his wounds — for he is reported to have taken twenty-three wounds, and a number of the plotters cut one another as they crowded so many strokes onto a single body.

When the man had been dispatched, the senate — even though Brutus stepped forward as though about to explain what had taken place — could not bear to stay, but burst out through the doors and fled, filling the people with helpless confusion and fear, so that some shut up their houses, others abandoned their counters and business tables, and some ran toward the place to see the calamity, others away from it, having already seen it.

Antony and Lepidus, who were Caesar's closest friends, slipped away and took refuge in other houses. Brutus's men, still hot from the murder, showing their bared swords, all together in a body left the senate house and made for the Capitoline, looking not like men fleeing, but very cheerful and confident, calling on the crowd to embrace freedom and welcoming the best of those they met,

and some even went up with them and mingled themselves in, as if they too had played a part in the deed, and staked a claim to its renown — among them Gaius Octavius and Lentulus Spinther. These men afterward paid dearly for their pretense, for Antony and the young Caesar had them executed, and they gained not even the fame for which they were dying, since others did not believe them; for those who punished them exacted the penalty not for the deed itself, but for the intention.

When day had come and Brutus's men had come down and made speeches, the people neither showed displeasure nor, as it were, approval of what had been done, but by their heavy silence they made clear that they pitied Caesar while feeling shame before Brutus. The senate, meanwhile, working out certain amnesties and settlements for everyone, voted to honor Caesar as a god and to alter not the smallest of the measures he had decreed while he ruled, while to Brutus's party it distributed provinces and awarded fitting honors, so that everyone believed that affairs had achieved stability and the best possible reconciliation.

But once Caesar's will had been opened and men learned that a considerable sum had been left to every Roman, and once they saw his corpse being borne through the forum, marred by its wounds, the crowd threw off all restraint and order; piling up around the body whatever benches, rails, and stalls stood nearby in the forum, they set the pile ablaze and burned him on the spot; then, snatching up blazing brands, they ran to the houses of the killers to burn them down, while others roamed everywhere through the city seeking to seize and tear apart the men.

But none of those men came out to meet them, since all had well barricaded themselves. A certain Cinna, one of Caesar's companions, happened, it is said, to have seen a strange vision the previous night: he dreamed that he was being invited by Caesar to dinner, and that he refused to be led by the hand, not wishing to go, but resisting. But when he heard that Caesar's body was being burned in the forum, he got up and went out of respect, even though he was uneasy about the vision and also had a fever.

And when he was seen, one of the crowd told another man who asked his name, and that man told another, and at once it went through everyone that this was the man who had killed Caesar — for indeed there was among the conspirators another man of the same name, Cinna, and taking this man to be that one, they rushed at him at once and tore the man apart in their midst.

It was mainly for fear of this that Brutus and Cassius left the city not many days afterward. Their subsequent actions and the sufferings that preceded their deaths are set down in the Life of Brutus.

Caesar died at the age of fifty-six in all, having outlived Pompey by not much more than four years, and of that rule and dominion which he had pursued through so many dangers over his whole life, and had barely won, he reaped nothing but the name alone and an invidious glory in the eyes of his fellow citizens.

His great guardian spirit, however, which he had made use of throughout his life, followed after him even in death as an avenger of the murder, driving and tracking down over all the earth and sea until it left none of his killers unpunished, but pursued even those who in any way had either touched the deed with their hand or shared in the intention.

Among the human events, the most astonishing was what befell Cassius: once beaten in the battle at Philippi, he ended his own life using that very same dagger with which he had struck Caesar. Of the divine signs there was the great comet, which appeared brilliant for seven nights after Caesar's murder and then vanished, and the dimming of the sun's brightness.

For throughout that whole year the disk rose pale and without its usual radiance, and the warmth it sent down to earth was faint and feeble, so that the air, weakened in its power to warm and clarify, became dark and heavy, and the crops, half-ripened and incomplete, withered and faded away before their time because of the coldness of the surrounding air.

But above all it was the apparition that came to Brutus that revealed that Caesar's murder had not been pleasing to the gods. It was of this kind: when he was on the point of ferrying his forces over from Abydos to the continent opposite, he was lying down within his tent as night fell, following his usual habit, awake rather than asleep and turning over in his mind what lay ahead — for this man is said to have been the least given to sleep of all generals, and to have used the greatest amount of time for himself while awake,

by nature. He thought he perceived some noise near the entrance, and looking toward the light of the lamp, now dying down, he saw a dreadful apparition of a man, huge beyond nature and grim in aspect. Fear gripped him at first, yet once he noticed it neither moved nor uttered a word, but stood silently beside his couch, he asked who it was.

The apparition answered him, "I am your evil spirit, Brutus; you will see me at Philippi." Then Brutus, undaunted, said, "I shall see you," and the spirit at once departed out of sight. When the time came, at Philippi, drawn up against Antony and Caesar, in the first battle he prevailed over the forces opposite him, routed them, and drove through, sacking Caesar's camp,

yet when he was on the verge of the second engagement, that identical apparition visited him once more by night, saying nothing this time, but Brutus, understanding his fate, threw himself into the danger, carrying himself forward. He did not, however, fall in the fighting, but when the rout came he fled to a certain rocky place, and, pressing his bare sword against his chest — with a friend, they say, also helping to drive the blow home — he died.

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