And there was Pompey;—­real honesty in Pompey, perhaps the one true-hearted gentleman of the age:  a man of morale, and a great soldier,—­who might have done something if his general intelligence had been as great as his military genius and his sense of honor:—­surely Pompey was the best of the lot of them; only the cursed spite was that the world was out of joint, and it needed something more than a fine soldier and gentleman to set it right.—­And then Caesar—­could he not do it?  Caesar, the Superman,—­the brilliant all-round genius at last,—­the man of scandalous life—­scandalous even in that cesspool Rome,—­the epileptic who dreamed of world-dominion,—­the conqueror of Gaul, says H.P.  Blavatsky, because in Gaul alone the Sacred Mysteries survived in their integrity, and it was his business, on behalf of the dark forces against mankind, to quench their life and light for ever;—­could not this Caesar do it?  No; he had the genius; but not that little quality which all greatest personalities,—­all who have not passed beyond the limits of personality:  tact, impersonality, the power that the disciple shall covet, to make himself as nothing in the eyes of men:—­ and because he lacked that for armor, there were knives sharpened which should reach his heart before long.—­And then, in literature, two figures mentionable:  Lucretius, thinker and philosopher in poetry:  a high Roman type, and a kind of materialist, and a kind of God’s warrior, and a suicide.  And Catullus:  no noble type; neither Roman nor Greek, but Italian perhaps; singing in the old Saturnian meters with a real lyrical fervor, but with nothing better to sing than his loves.—­And then, in politics again, Brutus:  type, in sentimental history of the Republican School, of the high old roman and republican virtues; Brutus of the “blood-bright splendor,” the tyrant-slayer and Roman Harmodios-Aristogeiton; the adored of philosophic French liberty-equality-fraternity adorers; Shakespeare’s “noblest Roman of them all";—­O how featly Cassius might have answered, when Brutus accused him of the “itching palm,” if he had only been keeping au fait with the newspapers through the preceding years! "Et tu, Brute," I hear him say, quoting words that should have reminded his dear friend of the sacrd ties of friendship,—­

“Art thou the man will rate thy Cassius thus?  This is the most unkindest cut of all; For truly I have filched a coin or two:—­ Have been, say, thrifty; gathered here and there Pickings, we’ll call them; but, my Brutus, thou—­ Didst thou not shut the senators of Rhodes (I think ’twas Rhodes) up in their senate-house, And keep them there unfoddered day by day.  Until starvation forced them to disgorge All of their million to thee?  Didst not thou—­”

Brutus is much too philosophical, much to studious, to listen to qualities of that kind, and cuts the conversation short right there.  Cassius was right:  that about starving the senators of his