vision discerned beneath the plumage of the peacock, the beak and
talons of the bird of prey. For they were there, and needed only a
vote of the senate to batten on nations of which the senate had
never heard. Loan him an army, and "that woman" was to give
geography such a twist that today whoso says Caesar says history.

Was it this that Cato saw, or may it be that one of the oracles
which had not ceased to speak had told him of that coming night
when he was to take his own life, fearful lest "that woman" should
overwhelm him with the magnificence of his forgiveness? Cato walks
through history, as he walked through the Forum, bare of foot--too
severe to be simple, too obstinate to be generous--the image of
ancient Rome.

In Caesar there was nothing of this. He was wholly modern;
dissolute enough for any epoch, but possessed of virtues that his
contemporaries could not spell. A slave tried to poison him.
Suetonius says he merely put the slave to death. The "merely" is
to the point. Cato would have tortured him first. After Pharsalus
he forgave everyone. When severe, it was to himself. It is true he
turned over two million people into so many dead flies, their legs
in the air, creating, as Tacitus has it, a solitude which he
described as Peace; but what antitheses may not be expected in a
man who, before the first century was begun, divined the fifth,
and who in the Suevians--that terrible people beside whom no
nation could live--foresaw Attila!

Save in battle his health was poor. He was epileptic, his strength
undermined by incessant debauches; yet let a nation fancying him
months away put on insurgent airs, and on that nation he descended