of valour the adversaries of Caesar felt themselves humbled by the unchangeable and touching fidelity with which his soldiers clung to their general.  It is perhaps without a parallel in history, that when the general summoned his soldiers to follow him into the civil war, with the single exception already mentioned of Labienus, no Roman officer and no Roman soldier deserted him.  The hopes of his opponents as to an extensive desertion were thwarted as ignominiously as the former attempts to break up his army like that of Lucullus.(4) Labienus himself appeared in the camp of Pompeius with a band doubtless of Celtic and German horsemen but without a single legionary.  Indeed the soldiers, as if they would show that the war was quite as much their matter as that of their general, settled among themselves that they would give credit for the pay, which Caesar had promised to double for them at the outbreak of the civil war, to their commander up to its termination, and would meanwhile support their poorer comrades from the general means; besides, every subaltern officer equipped and paid a trooper out of his own purse.

Field of Caesar’s Power
Upper Italy

While Caesar thus had the one thing which was needful—­ unlimited political and military authority and a trustworthy army ready for the fight—­his power extended, comparatively speaking, over only a very limited space.  It was based essentially on the province of Upper Italy.  This region was not merely the most populous of all the districts of Italy, but also devoted to the cause of the democracy as its own.  The feeling which prevailed there is shown by the conduct of a division of recruits from Opitergium (Oderzo in the delegation of Treviso), which not long after the outbreak of the war in the Illyrian waters, surrounded on a wretched raft by the war-vessels of the enemy, allowed themselves to be shot at during the whole day down to sunset without surrendering, and, such of them as had escaped the missiles, put themselves to death with their own hands during the following night.  It is easy to conceive what might be expected of such a population.  As they had already granted to Caesar the means of more than doubling his original army, so after the outbreak of the civil war recruits presented themselves in great numbers for the ample levies that were immediately instituted.

Italy

In Italy proper, on the other hand, the influence of Caesar was not even remotely to be compared to that of his opponents.  Although he had the skill by dexterous manoeuvres to put the Catonian party in the wrong, and had sufficiently commended the rectitude of his cause to all who wished for a pretext with a good conscience either to remain neutral, like the majority of the senate, or to embrace his side, like his soldiers and the Transpadanes, the mass of the burgesses naturally did not allow themselves to be misled by these things and, when the commandant of