consul. Their fears were verified by the event: from the day that he became consul, he gained an unconstitutional force, from which nothing but civil war could rescue the state. Yet Mr. Merivale is amazed at their audacity! Moreover, he asserts that Cato actively aided in their bribery; of which there is no proof. Of these events we have absolutely no information but from Suetonius;* who merely tells us that when the nobles had given this advice to Bibulus, many of them contributed money, and even Cato could not deny that such a largess (largitio) was for the public interest.' We have no reason to think that Cato even approved it. He might allow that they were actuated by patriotic designs, and were doing a thing of public utility, without either doing or advising it himself when he saw it to be a private immorality.

6

But how greedily does Mr. Merivale clutch at the idea of universal agreement that revolution was inevitable; thus paving the way to exculpate a usurper! Though, what if it had been so? If our parent must die, shall we therefore kill him before the time? Moreover, to effect the inevitable' catastrophe, needed all the energies, all the combination of moral and material resources, which Cæsar, by fifteen years of bloodshed, plunder, and universal confusion, was able to wield. In the plea before us, he is permitted to get the advantage of his own wrong. He has spent two millions sterling of borrowed money in corrupting the voters;-the other side at last begin to imitate him; and the historian forthwith claps his hands at the confession of this audacious cabal,' that law is impotent and revolution inevitable! Moreover, because Dr. Arnold, in words of calm, but profound intensity, denounces the wickedness of Cæsar's career and the infinite miseries which it caused, Mr. Merivale regards him to have been prejudiced' against Cæsar !

But we have abandoned chronological order in following the topic of bribery. We recur to Cæsar's earlier conduct. Suetonius and Dion believe that this youth underwent a sudden change of character, from indolence and effeminacy to that of energetic ambition, while he was in Spain; and this seems every way probable. A young man of talent and energy, after trying all modes of sensuality and voluptuousness, becomes tired and sated with indulgences so finite, and begins to aspire after political greatness. But Mr. Merivale wishes to make him a politician from boyhood.

There is really no trace of any such conversion in Cæsar's history. His morals were from the first as lax as those of the youth of the time

Suet. Jul. Cæs. 19. This also is Mr. Merivale's own reference.

generally; and his devotion to sensual pleasures continued through life to be little worthy of one who had so much both within and without him to exalt and purify his character. From the very outset of his career, he placed an object of political ambition before his eyes; nor was he at any time more thoroughly in earnest than when he defied the dictation of Sulla in his earliest youth.'-Ib. p. 118.

No doubt he was in earnest when, at the age of eighteen, he refused to give up his youthful bride at Sulla's order; but we see no politics there: to that we have adverted already. Nor can we allow the excuse for Cæsar's vices, that his morals were (only) as lax as those of the youth of the time generally. We must again protest that it is not true, unless he be compared with the Catilinarians, or with his own Clodian faction. In the list of Cæsar's assassins (younger men than he), there is not one on whom such ill repute of licentiousness rests as on Cæsar; and if we look to the list of consuls who preceded him, we find the result of comparison equally unfavourable: had it been otherwise, the taunts of his political adversaries could have been retorted, and, indeed, would never have been cast at him. No public man in Rome of those days, except Catilina, Clodius, and M. Antonius, appears to come near to Cæsar in the heartlessness of his amours. He cannot possibly have loved the numerous ladies whose homes he desolated. Mr. Merivale admits that, though he had three lawful wives in succession, he seduced the wives of Pompeius,† Lucullus, Crassus, Sulpicius, and Gabinius; five consulars, including three most eminent names. How little would such a man spare humbler husbands! His very soldiers, in songs too coarse for our language, warned the Italians to be beware of the baldheaded adulterer, who, after spending his Gaulish gold in provincial whoredoms, had been borrowing more at Rome.' So far, then, Mr. Merivale is right, that Cæsar never abandoned his youthful excesses; his conversion' consisted in becoming an energetic politician, who no longer made sensuality the whole meal of life, but only its ordinary sauce. Indeed, the immense risks of life and empire which Cæsar at

* As when Curio the elder publicly called Cæsar omnium mulierum virum et omnium virorum mulierem. The last words perhaps meant only effeminacy, but were purposely ambiguous.

† Merivale, vol. ii. p. 491. This is opposed to vol. i. p. 187, where he gives the reader to suppose that Pompeius divorced an innocent wife for an absurd political scheme.

The English reader may need to know, that as the marriage custom of Rome was in revolt against the ancient law, a Roman husband of those days had no legal redress. One of Cæsar's mistresses, Servilia, is imagined by Mr. Merivale to have been his original corrupter (vol. ii. p. 490). But she had a good reputation in B.C. 64, when she was married by Lucullus. She began her intrigue with Cæsar only in 63, when he was thirty-seven years old.

*

the age of fifty-two ran for Cleopatra, imply that for once his habitually pampered passions had overcome his discretion; nor do we see reason to disbelieve the statement of Helvius Cinna,† that, at Cæsar's order, he had prepared the draught of a law, which was to allow Cæsar to take for his wives as many ladies as he pleased, and whomever he pleased,' though the death of Cæsar intervened before it could be carried. To increase our abhorrence, we read that he, by his own private authority, put to death one of his freedmen for having been guilty of an adultery of which the husband did not complain; and while this high priest, dictator, and consul, was ordering a tribune to prepare the law which would have made it legitimate for him to tears any wife he pleased from her husband, he was imagining that he could restrain public licentiousness by his severe laws against adultery! It amazes us that an amiable and respectable man, such as we understand Mr. Merivale to be, shows no hearty hatred for such conduct, and manages to protest only in that faint tone which decorum exacts from a clergyman. What it was that Cæsar had both within and without him' to purify his character, we do not know; but this we see, that whatever there was of virtue, purity, moderation, among the public men of Rome, revolved in the same circles as Catulus, Pompeius, Cicero, Cato; and all that was worst in impurity, thievishness, and atrocity, revolved round Caius Cæsar: yet Mr. Merivale loses no opportunity of throwing odium and contempt on the constitutional party representing them as selfish, overbearing, or tyrannical and cruel oligarchs-and exerts himself to varnish and recommend to the reader's interest and admiration, as a friend (forsooth) of the middle classes and of extended freedom, a man who knew not what virtue or religion meant, and who made freedom and constitutional law impossible in Europe, until the Roman armies and Roman civilization were swept away by

We cannot perceive that Mr. Merivale feels with us anything peculiarly revolting in Cæsar's marrying Cleopatra to a little boy, her king-brother, while keeping her as his public mistress. (Dion, 42-44.) Mr. Merivale's notion of Cleopatra's 'fatal effect' on Cæsar's moral nature, will be derided even by those who cannot discern his enormous inaccuracies of fact.Vol. ii. p. 344.

+ Sueton. Jul. Cæs. 52.-Helvius Cinna was tribune of the people, and was killed by the mob through mistake after Cæsar's funeral. But this does not make anachronism in Suetonius, as Mr. Merivale hints. Cinna outlived Cæsar by full two days.

Suet. Jul. Cæs. 48.

If any one thinks that it is too much to build on the words of Cinna's proposed law, quas et quot vellet uxores,' it is enough to say, that Cæsar's uniform conduct shows that he would (when in supreme power) assuredly have made as free with the wives and daughters of all his subjects, as did the imperatores who followed him, from M. Antonius and Augustus downwards.

a torrent of barbarous invaders, to the infinite suffering of humanity.

It might appear that whatever the aristocracy do, or whatever law is carried, Merivale sees in it some mark of Cæsar's greatness, and some contumely put on him by his adversaries. Intriguers at Rome pretended that Ptolemy Alexander had bequeathed his kingdom to the Romans. The story is obscure and controverted. One thing at least is clear, that Crassus and Cæsar each of them endeavoured to clutch Egypt as a Roman possession, and the aristocracy thwarted them both; yet, this (it seems) must have been intended as an express insult to Cæsar! Let us hear Mr. Merivale :

Cæsar was now anxious to reap the first fruits of the fame (!) he had acquired, and relieve himself from some part of the load of his immense pecuniary obligations. He solicited the appointment to an extraordinary mission, for the purpose of constituting the country [Egypt] a province of the empire, and arranging its administration. The senate (?) however, in its jealousy of Pompeius (!), and of all who appeared to side with him, conceived (!) that Cæsar proposed to strengthen the hands of its general in the East, by adding to his enormous powers the control of one of the granaries of the city. Accordingly, it peremptorily rejected the demand,† and proceeded, in addition to this insult (!), for the claim was fair and reasonable (!!), to make another move against its indignant enemy. It made use of one of the tribunes, named Papius, to introduce a plebiscitum, decreeing the removal of all aliens from Rome. The pretence was, that strangers from the provinces flocked into the city and interfered with the popular elections.... But this blow was more particularly aimed at the Transpadane Gauls, who were anxious to exchange their Latin fran

To write positively on such a subject would be absurd; yet we will here venture our own version of the facts. Mr. Merivale assumes that Alexander I. is intended by Cicero; we rather believe it was Alexander II. This young man was captured by Mithridates in B.C. 88, but escaped to Sulla, and went with him to Rome. When the throne of Egypt became vacant in 81, Sulla sent him thither to claim the crown. He was received by the Egyptians on condition of marrying queen Cleopatra, but was slain by them the next year for murdering her. It was natural to Romans to assume that a kingdom was theirs, to which they had sent a king; and it is even possible that Sulla had exacted a promise from Alexander, that he would bequeath the kingdom to them, if he gained it. Of course the Romans would have ignored the rights of the Egyptians, if a genuine will had been produced; and they could now pretend that the king's murderers had destroyed the will. The senate actually did send ambassadors to Tyre to claim a sum of money which Alexander had there deposited, and had bequeathed to them; but though Crassus often pressed it, the senate felt that to seize the kingdom of Egypt on such a pretext, would be an outrage too scandalous.

This is not what Suetonius says; but, that Cæsar could not carry a bill with the people by means of a tribune, because the aristocracy opposed it. Catulus, no doubt, convinced the people that it was a scandalous wickedness.

chise for that of Rome. Cæsar, while passing through their country on his return from Spain, had listened affably to their representations, and they had gladly connected themselves with him as their patron and political adviser (?). This measure, therefore, seemed calculated to gall the popular leader, &c.'-Ib. p. 122.

On this we remark: 1. That Crassus, this same year, B.C. 65, as censor, desired to make Egypt tributary, but was hindered by the positive refusal of his colleague Catulus. Plutarch (Crassus, 13), calls it a shameful and violent proposal. 2. We see in Cæsar's Alexandrian war, that the Egyptians felt themselves to be wholly independent of Rome; nor does Cæsar then pretend anything about this will, but bases his intervention on other grounds. 3. In the debates about restoring Ptolemy Auletes, which hung over Rome for several years, it is manifest that the Romans knew they had no right to interfere with the Egyptians. 4. What kind of conscience has Mr. Merivale,* when he calls it a fair and reasonable proposal of Cæsar, to invade Egypt, revolutionize its institutions, eject its officers, and levy tribute from it, barely because a king of Egypt (if that be conceded) had chosen to bequeath it, against the will of his people, and for no public benefits done to them? 5. Where is the historian's fairness towards Catulus and the rest, when he does not know that any such will ever existed, or (if it did), that it was not made treacherously, before Alexander II. left Rome?

Then as to the Papian law, we notice: 1. There is no evidence that Papius was the tool of the senate, or that the senate was more unwilling than the people to extend the popular franchise. 2. The people were ordinarily indisposed to lessen the value of their own privileges by extending them; to attribute, therefore, the Lex Papia to the personal spite of the aristocracy against C. Cæsar is a gratuitous fancy. 3. It does not appear that Cæsar had as yet any patronage of the Transpadani. Crassus and Pompeius already desired to introduce them into the full franchise; and Crassus, as censor, might perhaps have effected it summarily, only that Catulus resisted. Cæsar, like other

We are happy to add (though Mr. Merivale does not seem to be aware that he contradicts his former view), the following words from vol. ii. p. 331 :'The whole of this episode in his eventful history,' viz. Cæsar's Alexandrian war, his arrogant dictation to the rulers of a foreign people, his seizing and keeping in captivity the person of the sovereign, his discharging him on purpose that he might compromise himself by engaging in direct hostilities, and his taking advantage of his death to settle the succession and intrude a foreign army on the new monarch, form altogether a pregnant example of the craft and unscrupulousness of Roman ambition.' This is true, except that the Romans had men in plenty who abhorred such conduct. Such were not only Pompeius, Catulus, Cicero, Cato, but Lucullus, Hortensius, and the vulgar mass of the people, whenever they were made to understand the facts.