and who already possessed practical proofs(26) of the inexorable use which the oligarchy proposed to make of these against the Transpadanes.  Such were the listeners before whom such an orator set forth the facts—­ the thanks for the conquest of Gaul which the nobility were preparing for the general and his army; the contemptuous setting aside of the comitia; the overawing of the senate; the sacred duty of protecting with armed hand the tribunate of the people wrested five hundred years ago by their fathers arms in hand from the nobility, and of keeping the ancient oath which these had taken for themselves as for their children’s children that they would man by man stand firm even to death for the tribunes of the people.(27) And then, when he—­ the leader and general of the popular party—­summoned the soldiers of the people, now that conciliatory means had been exhausted and concession had reached its utmost limits, to follow him in the last, the inevitable, the decisive struggle against the equally hated and despised, equally perfidious and incapable, and in fact ludicrously incorrigible aristocracy—­there was not an officer or a soldier who could hold back.  The order was given for departure; at the head of his vanguard Caesar crossed the narrow brook which separated his province from Italy, and which the constitution forbade the proconsul of Gaul to pass.  When after nine years’ absence he trod once more the soil of his native land, he trod at the same time the path of revolution.  “The die was cast.”

Chapter X

Brundisium, Ilerda, Pharsalus, and Thapsus

The Resources on Either Side

Arms were thus to decide which of the two men who had hitherto jointly ruled Rome was now to be its first sole ruler.  Let us see what were the comparative resources at the disposal of Caesar and Pompeius for the waging of the impending war.

Caesar’s Absolute Power within His Party

Caesar’s power rested primarily on the wholly unlimited authority which he enjoyed within his party.  If the ideas of democracy and of monarchy met together in it, this was not the result of a coalition which had been accidentally entered into and might be accidentally dissolved; on the contrary it was involved in the very essence of a democracy without a representative constitution, that democracy and monarchy should find in Caesar at once their highest and ultimate expression.  In political as in military matters throughout the first and the final decision lay with Caesar.  However high the honour in which he held any serviceable instrument, it remained an instrument still; Caesar stood, in his own party without confederates, surrounded only by military-political adjutants, who as a rule had risen from the army and as soldiers were trained never to ask the reason and purpose of any thing, but unconditionally to obey.  On this account especially, at the decisive moment when the civil war began, of all the officers and soldiers of Caesar one alone refused him obedience; and the circumstance that that one was precisely the foremost of them all, serves simply to confirm this view of the relation of Caesar to his adherents.