184 ROMAN HISTORY: 



statements of all that regarded his demeanour in private 

 life. Making every allowance for such over-colouring, how- 

 ever, we are still unable to dismiss the general imputation. 

 Temperament, temptation, opportunity, were all on one side, 

 without a single aid from religion or moral discipline on the 

 other. Two or three small incidents are presented to us as 

 proofs of superstitious feeling ; but we believe them to have 

 depended rather on a politic or careless conformity to popular 

 sentiment ; for Caesar lived, as Virgil did, 



Al tempo degli Dei falsi e bugiardi ; 



and it was impossible that an acute intellect like his should 

 have submitted itself for a moment to the puerile absurdities 

 of the Grecian or Roman belief, or derived motives to virtue 

 from sources thus scanty and impure. He lived without 

 religion, on the very verge of that time which brought new 

 light and truth into the world. 



As to the intellectual qualities of Caesar, it is needless to 

 say more. They are inscribed on every page of his life and 

 history, and are the subject of constant admiration to his 

 contemporaries as well as to succeeding writers. A single 

 sentence of Cicero, than whom no man was better entitled to 

 judge, is a relation to all future time of that combination of 

 faculties which has rarely, if ever, had its parallel : ' Fuit in 

 illo ingenium, ratio, memoria, litterce, cura, cogitatio, dili- 

 gentia.'' Pliny, in his Natural History, recording the most 

 noted examples of intellectual power, instances Caesar as 

 possessed of an innate vigour of mind transcending all others ; 

 able without confusion to embrace various subjects at once, 

 to dictate clearly on each, and to pass .with the celerity of 

 lightning from one to another. Omitting the many other 

 testimonies of the same age, we may take the eulogy by 

 Drumann as a brief and just statement of what was achieved 

 in various ways by this wonderful force and capacity of mind. 



