that Caesar with Scipio Aemilianus called on the gods not to increase the empire, but to preserve it, and that his schemes of conquest restricted themselves to a settlement of the frontier—­measured, it is true, by his own great scale—­which should secure the line of the Euphrates, and, instead of the fluctuating and militarily useless boundary of the empire on the north-east, should establish and render defensible the line of the Danube.

Attempts of Caesar to Avert Military Despotism

But, if it remains a mere probability that Caesar ought not to be designated a world-conqueror in the same sense as Alexander and Napoleon, it is quite certain that his design was not to rest his new monarchy primarily on the support of the army nor generally to place the military authority above the civil, but to incorporate it with, and as far as possible subordinate it to, the civil commonwealth.  The invaluable pillars of a military state, those old and far-famed Gallic legions, were honourably dissolved just on account of the incompatibility of their esprit de corps with a civil commonwealth, and their glorious names were only perpetuated in newly-founded urban communities.  The soldiers presented by Caesar with allotments of land on their discharge were not, like those of Sulla, settled together—­as it were militarily—­ in colonies of their own, but, especially when they settled in Italy, were isolated as much as possible and scattered throughout the peninsula; it was only in the case of the portions of the Campanian land that remained for disposal, that an aggregation of the old soldiers of Caesar could not be avoided.  Caesar sought to solve the difficult task of keeping the soldiers of a standing army within the spheres of civil life, partly by retaining the former arrangement which prescribed merely certain years of service, and not a service strictly constant, that is, uninterrupted by any discharge; partly by the already-mentioned shortening of the term of service, which occasioned a speedier change in the personal composition of the army; partly by the regular settlement of the soldiers who had served out their time as agricultural colonists; partly and principally by keeping the army aloof from Italy and generally from the proper seats of the civil and political life of the nation, and directing the soldier to the points, where according to the opinion of the great king he was alone, in his place—­to the frontier stations, that he might ward off the extraneous foe.

Absence of Corps of Guards

The true criterion also of the military state—­the development of, and the privileged position assigned to, the corps of guards—­ is not to be met with in the case of Caesar.  Although as respects the army on active service the institution of a special bodyguard for the general had been already long in existence,(38) in Caesar’s system this fell completely into the background; his praetorian cohort seems to have essentially consisted merely of orderly