It is not doubtful that Caesar was a type of the sensuality of his age.
His worshippers even feel it necessary to gird at characters deficient
in sensual passion with a friskiness which is a little amusing when you
connect it with the spectacles and the blameless life of a learned
professor. So gifted a nature will absorb a good deal of mere sensual
vice, it is true, but a sensualist could hardly be a pure and noble
organ of humanity. In this I have the Positivists with me. Even in
Caesar's lifetime the world had a taste of the vicissitudes of empire
while he was revelling in the palace of Cleopatra and leaving affairs to
Antony and Dolabella. Perhaps the satiety of the voluptuary had
something to do with the recklessness with which at the last he
neglected to guard his life. He was the greatest patron of gladiatorial
shows and signalized his accession to power by magnificent scenes of
carnage in the arena--a strange dawn for the day of a new civilization.
Must we not a little doubt the consistency of his policy and even his
insight when we find him after all this enacting sumptuary laws?
Still Caesar was a very great man and he played a dazzling part, as all
men do who come just at the fall of an old system, when society is as
clay in the hands of the potter, and found a new system in its place,
while the less dazzling task of making the new system work, by probity
and industry, and of restoring the shattered allegiance of a people to
its institutions, descends upon unlaurelled heads. But that the men of
his time were bound to recognise in him a Messiah, to use the phrase of
the Emperor of the French, and that those who opposed him were Jews
crucifying their Saviour, is an impression which I venture to think will
in time subside. No golden scales were hung out in heaven to shew the
republicans that the balance of Divine will had turned, and that their
duty was submission. "Momentumque fuit mutatus Curio rerum--" The only
sign vouchsafed to them was the conversion of an unprincipled debauchee.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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