as the thunder does. In his campaigns time and again he overtook
his own messengers. A phantom in a ballad was not swifter than he.
Simultaneously his sword flashed in Germany, on the banks of the
Adriatic, in that Ultima Thule where the Britons lived. From the
depths of Gaul he dominated Rome, and therewith he was penetrating
impenetrable forests, trailing legions as a torch trails smoke,
erecting walls that a nation could not cross, turning soldiers
into marines, infantry into cavalry, building roads that are roads
to-day, fighting with one hand and writing an epic with the other,
dictating love-letters, chronicles, dramas; finding time to make a
collection of witticisms; overturning thrones while he decorated
Greece; mingling initiate into orgies of the Druids, and, as the
cymbals clashed, coquetting with those terrible virgins who awoke
the tempest; not only conquering, but captivating, transforming
barbarians into soldiers and those soldiers into senators,
submitting three hundred nations and ransacking Britannia for
pearls for his mistresses' ears.

Each epoch has its secret, and each epoch-maker his own. Caesar's
secret lay in the power he had of projecting a soul into the ranks
of an army, of making legions and their leader one. Disobedience
only he punished; anything else he forgave. After a victory his
soldiery did what they liked. He gave them arms, slaves to burnish
them, women, feasts, sleep. They were his comrades; he called them
so; he wept at the death of any of them, and when they were
frightened, as they were in Gaul before they met the Germans, and
in Africa before they encountered Juba, Caesar frightened them
still more. He permitted no questions, no making of wills. The
cowards could hide where they liked; his old guard, the Tenth,
would do the work alone; or, threat still more sinister, he would