himself by similar means, he found less complaisance. Caesar was now
eighteen, his daughter Julia having been lately born. He had seen his
party ruined, his father-in-law and young Marius killed, and his nearest
friends dispersed or murdered. He had himself for a time escaped
proscription; but the Dictator had his eye on him, and Sylla had seen
something in "the youth with the loose girdle" which struck him as
remarkable. Closely connected though Caesar was both with Cinna and
Marius, Sylla did not wish to kill him if he could help it. There was a
cool calculation in his cruelties. The existing generation of democrats
was incurable, but he knew that the stability of the new constitution must
depend on his being able to conciliate the intellect and energy of the
next. Making a favor perhaps of his clemency, he proposed to Caesar to
break with his liberal associates, divorce Cinna's daughter, and take such
a wife as he would himself provide. If Pompey had complied, who had made a
position of his own, much more might it be expected that Caesar would
comply. Yet Caesar answered with a distinct and unhesitating refusal. The
terrible Sylla, in the fulness of his strength, after desolating half the
homes in Italy, after revolutionizing all Roman society, from the
peasant's cottage in the Apennines to the senate-house itself, was defied
by a mere boy! Throughout his career Caesar displayed always a singular
indifference to life. He had no sentimental passion about him, no Byronic
mock-heroics. He had not much belief either in God or the gods. On all
such questions he observed from first to last a profound silence. But one
conviction he had. He intended, if he was to live at all, to live master
of himself in matters which belonged to himself. Sylla might kill him if
he so pleased. It was better to die than to put away a wife who was the
mother of his child, and to marry some other woman at a dictator's
bidding. Life on such terms was not worth keeping.

So proud a bearing may have commanded Sylla's admiration, but it taught