officers or non-military attendants, and never to have been in the proper sense a select corps, consequently never an object of jealousy to the troops of the line.  While Caesar even as general practically dropped the bodyguard, he still, less as king tolerated a guard round his person.  Although constantly beset by lurking assassins and well aware of it, he yet rejected the proposal of the senate to institute a select guard; dismissed, as soon as things grew in some measure quiet, the Spanish escort which he had made use of at first in the capital; and contented himself with the retinue of lictors sanctioned by traditional usage for the Roman supreme magistrates.

Impracticableness of Ideal

However much of the idea of his party and of his youth—­ to found a Periclean government in Rome not by virtue of the sword, but by virtue of the confidence of the nation—­Caesar had been obliged to abandon in the struggle with realities, he retained even now the fundamental idea—­of not founding a military monarchy—­ with an energy to which history scarcely supplies a parallel.  Certainly this too was an impracticable ideal—­it was the sole illusion, in regard to which the earnest longing of that vigorous mind was more powerful than its clear judgment.  A government, such as Caesar had in view, was not merely of necessity in its nature highly personal, and so liable to perish with the death of its author just as the kindred creations of Pericles and Cromwell with the death of their founders; but, amidst the deeply disorganized state of the nation, it was not at all credible that the eighth king of Rome would succeed even for his lifetime in ruling, as his seven predecessors had ruled, his fellow-burgesses merely by virtue of law and justice, and as little probable that he would succeed in incorporating the standing army—­after it had during the last civil war learned its power and unlearned its reverence—­once more as a subservient element in civil society.  To any one who calmly considered to what extent reverence for the law had disappeared from the lowest as from the highest ranks of society, the former hope must have seemed almost a dream; and, if with the Marian reform of the military system the soldier generally had ceased to be a citizen,(39) the Campanian mutiny and the battle-field of Thapsus showed with painful clearness the nature of the support which the army now lent to the law.  Even the great democrat could only with difficulty and imperfectly hold in check the powers which he had unchained; thousands of swords still at his signal flew from the scabbard, but they were no longer equally ready upon that signal to return to the sheath.  Fate is mightier than genius.  Caesar desired to become the restorer of the civil commonwealth, and became the founder of the military monarchy which he abhorred; he overthrew the regime of aristocrats and bankers in the state, only to put a military regime in their place, and the commonwealth continued as before to be tyrannized