LVIII.  To some of the nobles he promised consulships and praetorships for the future, and others he pacified with certain other offices and honours, and he gave hopes to all, seeking to make it appear that he ruled over them with their own consent, so that when Maximus[582] the consul died, he appointed Caninius Revilius consul for the one day that still remained of the term of office.  When many persons were going, as was usual, to salute the new consul and to form part of his train Cicero said, “We must make haste, or the man will have gone out of office.”  Caesar’s great success did not divert his natural inclination for great deeds and his ambition to the enjoyment of that for which he had laboured, but serving as fuel and incentives to the future bred in him designs of greater things and love of new glory, as if he had used up what he had already acquired; and the passion was nothing else than emulation of himself as if he were another person, and a kind of rivalry between what he intended and what he had accomplished; and his propositions and designs were to march against the Parthians,[583] and after subduing them and marching through Hyrkania and along the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus, and so encompassing the Euxine, to invade Scythia, and after having overrun the countries bordering on the Germans and Germany itself to return through Gaul to Italy, and so to complete his circle of the empire which would be bounded on all sides by the ocean.  During this expedition he intended also to dig through the Corinthian Isthmus,[584] and he had already commissioned Anienus to superintend the work; and to receive the Tiber[585] immediately below the city in a deep cut, and giving it a bend towards Circaeum to make it enter the sea by Tarracina, with the view of giving security and facility to those who came to Rome for the purpose of trade:  besides this he designed to draw off the water from the marshes about Pomentium and Setia,[586] and to make them solid ground, which would employ many thousands of men in the cultivation; and where the sea was nearest to Rome he designed to place barriers to it by means of moles, and after clearing away the hidden rocks and dangerous places on the shore of Ostia[587] to make harbours and naval stations which should give security to the extensive shipping.  And all these things were in preparation.

LIX.  But the arrangement of the Kalendar[588] and the correction of the irregularity in the reckoning of time were handled by him skilfully, and being completed were of the most varied utility.  For it was not only in very ancient times that the Romans had the periods of the moon in confusion with respect to the year, so that the feasts and festivals gradually changing at last fell out in opposite seasons of the year, but even with respect to the solar year at that time nobody kept any reckoning except the priests, who, as they alone knew the proper time, all of a sudden and when nobody expected it, would insert the intercalary