the error of historians has been--to represent these debts as the original
ground of his ambition and his revolutionary projects, as though the
desperate condition of his private affairs had suggested a civil war to
his calculations as the best or only mode of redressing it. But, on the
contrary, his debts were the product of his ambition, and contracted from
first to last in the service of his political intrigues, for raising and
maintaining a powerful body of partisans, both in Rome and elsewhere.
Whosoever indeed will take the trouble to investigate the progress of
Caesar's ambition, from such materials as even yet remain, may satisfy
himself that the scheme of revolutionizing the Republic, and placing
himself at its head, was no growth of accident or circumstances; above
all, that it did not arise upon any so petty and indirect an occasion as
that of his debts; but that his debts were in their very first origin
purely ministerial to his ambition; and that his revolutionary plans were
at all periods of his life a direct and foremost object. In this there was
in reality no want of patriotism; it had become evident to every body that
Rome, under its present constitution, must fall; and the sole question
was--by whom? Even Pompey, not by nature of an aspiring turn, and prompted
to his ambitious course undoubtedly by circumstances and the friends who
besieged him, was in the habit of saying, "Sylla potuit, ego non potero?"
And the fact was, that if, from the death of Sylla, Rome recovered some
transient show of constitutional integrity, that happened not by any
lingering virtue that remained in her republican forms, but entirely
through the equilibrium and mechanical counterpoise of rival factions.

In a case, therefore, where no benefit of choice was allowed to Rome as to
the thing, but only as to the person--where a revolution was certain, and
the point left open to doubt simply by whom that revolution should be
accomplished--Caesar had (to say the least) the same right to enter the
arena in the character of candidate as could belong to any one of his