Cæsar has had many worshippers and admirers, and comparatively few calumniators and belittlers. Unquestionably he was one of the most extraordinary geniuses that ever lived, equally great as a general and as a statesman, as an orator and as a historian. In the whole range of history there is but one man--Napoleon--who, in the vastness of his conceptions and the masterly perfection of their execution, can be justly compared with him. All other men whom national vanity has occasionally placed by Cæsar’s side only suffer from the comparison; their immense inferiority appears on even superficial investigation. He was in fact the foremost man the world had seen to his day, and, but for his equally great rival in modern times, would still occupy the pinnacle of human greatness alone. Very likely, if he had lived, Rome would have been the happier. CHAPTER IV TIBERIUS, CALIGULA, CLAUDIUS, NERO [Illustration: CALIGULA] CHAPTER IV ASSASSINATIONS OF TIBERIUS, CALIGULA, CLAUDIUS, NERO (A. D. 37-68.) At the time of the assassination of Julius Cæsar, the Roman people, and especially the higher classes, had reached a degree of perversity and degeneracy which appears to the modern reader almost incredible. They had become utterly unfit for self-government. The most atrocious public and private vices in both sexes had taken the place of the civic virtues and the private honor for which the ancient Roman had been famous the world over. In public life, corruption, venality, and bribery were general; a public office-holder was synonymous with a robber of the public treasury. Nepotism prevailed to an alarming degree, and the ablest men were unceremoniously pushed aside for the incapable descendants of the nobility. In times like those, only the very strongest hand and the sternest character and mind can restrain the masses from falling into anarchy and civil war, and impose on society moderation and the rule of law. The assassination of Cæsar had a most demoralizing effect on the Roman people. The hand of the master who might have controlled the unruly masses and restrained the degenerate nobility lay palsied in death; the giant intellect, which had embraced the civilized world in its dream of establishing a universal monarchy, thought no more; and the results were chaos, anarchy, and civil war. The absence of the master mind was lamentably felt; his heirs were unable to control the wild elements which the assassins had set free; and for many years, rapine, bloodshed, murder, and spoliation ruled supreme throughout the vast extent of the Roman Republic, until finally, in the year 30 B.C., Octavianus Augustus, Cæsar’s nephew, succeeded in establishing that imperium of which Cæsar had dreamed, and for which his genius and his victories had paved the way.