All these puzzling questions, and many more, are set to us by the character of Caius Julius Caesar. He puzzled the men who lived in his own time, and has gone on puzzling historians ever since. Brutus, who loved him, finally killed him because he thought he was doing more harm than good. Marcus Antonius, who also loved him, thought him, to the end, the noblest man that ever lived. One great historian regards him as one of the few really wise and far-seeing statesmen in the world’s story; a man who with extraordinary genius saw what the world needed and with extraordinary will carried it out. Another sees him as no more than a clever, selfish, and ambitious time-server: a man without fixed ideas or principles, whose sole object was power. Both admit his genius: but where one sees it directed steadily to great ends, the other sees nothing fixed in his character but the determination to succeed. Caesar’s speeches (and he was a great speaker) are lost. We have two volumes of his writings: his account of the conquest and settlement of Gaul, and his account of the Civil War. These two volumes of _Commentaries_ are so admirably written, in so pure and firm and lucid a style, with such mastery of narrative and of order, that their author would stand high among Roman writers had he been distinguished in no other way. Only a remarkable man could have written an account of his own doings in just this style. For there is no word of comment: the whole thing is, as Caesar himself says, bare, simple, and plain, with every kind of ornament cast aside. The language is simple, exact, concise. Every word tells. There is never a word too much. The dryness with which amazing feats of generalship, of endurance, of courage, are set down only makes them, in the end, more impressive. No mere talker, no one shifted this way and that by chance and by the opinion of others, could have written these books. They are the record of one who could both see and act. In so far as we can judge a man from his face, the busts tell the same story. They show us Caesar in middle age, when firmly set to serious purposes, the idle impulses of youth left behind. The power to think, the power to act--these are the characteristics of the familiar bust. Yet Caesar, if we can believe the stories of him, retained to beyond middle life a rare personal charm, and always had much of the quick, passionate responsiveness of the artist. There was room in his mind for all sorts of things beside the business of making men do what he wanted. Whether the almost tragic nobility of the sculptured face, which is in this respect like that of Napoleon, means that Caesar was led on by something higher than personal ambition, the desire to engrave his own will upon the stuff of life, it is impossible to say. He made history; he was, in that sense, a man of destiny, but did he know what he was doing? did he care for a good beyond his own? [Illustration: JULIUS CAESAR The Brit. Mus. bust]