was lifted up, which conceals from man the inadequacy of his working.  Prudently as he laid his plans and considered all possibilities, the feeling was never absent from his breast that in all things fortune, that is to say accident, must bestow success; and with this may be connected the circumstance that he so often played a desperate game with destiny, and in particular again and again hazarded his person with daring indifference.  As indeed occasionally men of predominant sagacity betake themselves to a pure game of hazard, so there was in Caesar’s rationalism a point at which it came in some measure into contact with mysticism.

Caesar as a Statesman

Gifts such as these could not fail to produce a statesman.  From early youth, accordingly, Caesar was a statesman in the deepest sense of the term, and his aim was the highest which man is allowed to propose to himself—­the political, military, intellectual, and moral regeneration of his own deeply decayed nation, and of the still more deeply decayed Hellenic nation intimately akin to his own.  The hard school of thirty years’ experience changed his views as to the means by which this aim was to be reached; his aim itself remained the same in the times of his hopeless humiliation and of his unlimited plenitude of power, in the times when as demagogue and conspirator he stole towards it by paths of darkness, and in those when, as joint possessor of the supreme power and then as monarch, he worked at his task in the full light of day before the eyes of the world.  All the measures of a permanent kind that proceeded from him at the most various times assume their appropriate places in the great building-plan.  We cannot therefore properly speak of isolated achievements of Caesar; he did nothing isolated.  With justice men commend Caesar the orator for his masculine eloquence, which, scorning all the arts of the advocate, like a clear flame at once enlightened and warmed.  With justice men admire in Caesar the author the inimitable simplicity of the composition, the unique purity and beauty of the language.  With justice the greatest masters of war of all times have praised Caesar the general, who, in a singular degree disregarding routine and tradition, knew always how to find out the mode of warfare by which in the given case the enemy was conquered, and which was thus in the given case the right one; who with the certainty of divination found the proper means for every end; who after defeat stood ready for battle like William of Orange, and ended the campaign invariably with victory; who managed that element of warfare, the treatment of which serves to distinguish military genius from the mere ordinary ability of an officer—­the rapid movement of masses—­with unsurpassed perfection, and found the guarantee of victory not in the massiveness of his forces but in the celerity of their movements, not in long preparation but in rapid and daring action even with inadequate means.  But all these were with Caesar mere secondary