The Caesars by Thomas De Quincey
page 35 of 206 (16%)
page 35 of 206 (16%)
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with which he faced the whole extent of a calamity when palliation could
do no good, "non negando, minuendove, sed insuper amplificando, _ementiendoque_;" as when, upon finding his soldiery alarmed at the approach of Juba, with forces really great, but exaggerated by their terrors, he addressed them in a military harangue to the following effect: "Know that within a few days the king will come up with us, bringing with him sixty thousand legionaries, thirty thousand cavalry, one hundred thousand light troops, besides three hundred elephants. Such being the case, let me hear no more of conjectures and opinions, for you have now my warrant for the fact, whose information is past doubting. Therefore, be satisfied; otherwise, I will put every man of you on board some crazy old fleet, and whistle you down the tide--no matter under what winds, no matter towards what shore." Finally, we might seek for the _characteristic_ anecdotes of Caesar in his unexampled liberalities and contempt of money. [Footnote: Middleton's Life of Cicero, which still continues to be the most readable digest of these affairs, is feeble and contradictory. He discovers that Caesar was no general! And the single merit which his work was supposed to possess, viz. the better and more critical arrangement of Cicero's Letters, in respect to their chronology, has of late years been detected as a robbery from the celebrated Bellenden, of James the First's time.] Upon this last topic it is the just remark of Casaubon, that some instances of Caesar's munificence have been thought apocryphal, or to rest upon false readings, simply from ignorance of the heroic scale upon which the Roman splendors of that age proceeded. A forum which Caesar built out of the products of his last campaign, by way of a present to the Roman people, cost him--for the ground merely on which it stood--nearly eight hundred thousand pounds. To the _citizens_ of Rome (perhaps 300,000 persons) he presented, in one _congiary_, about two guineas and a half a |
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