AN HISTORICAL COMPARISON.

341

when he was reproached with having promoted some men of the very lowest extraction to the highest places of honour, inasmuch as he replied, that if assassins and robbers had been serviceable to him in the maintenance of his power and dignity, he would reward even such persons as these in the very same manner. It was universally believed that he had, on a certain occasion, despatched by poison a hired suborner, because the project failed. In his first consulship he stole three thousand pounds of gold from the Capitol, and placed the same quantity of gilt ore in its place; he sold alliances and bartered away kingdoms. He often plundered temples and consecrated places; he destroyed innocent cities for the mere sake of booty. He only defrayed, by these and similar spoliations, the expenses of civil war, and the expenditure required for his triumphs, for his public spectacles and works.

Cato, who wished rather to be than to appear good, who in all things acted with strict morality, in accordance with old Roman virtue, because he, in conformity with his character, could not act otherwise, was quite equal to and a match for Cæsar in greatness of soul, though of an antithetical nature. Cæsar heartily hated him for it, since he could not despise him. The commencement of their open feud was that great day, when the thunders of Catonian eloquence dashed in pieces and crushed the half triumphant treacherous council of the crafty Cæsar concerning the Catiline conspirators, and filled the sinking senate with the old Roman enthusiasm. How paltry it was in the victor to display the image of this man in his triumph, who by a voluntary death, properly speaking, in the higher sense had triumphed over him, for the information of a witness in other things not over worthy of belief, is credible in this instance, that the death of Cato really vexed Cæsar, because it deprived him of an expected triumph, although he made no allusion whatever to it, until he at last broke out into the exclamation that cost him nothing of his mild views, which he declared he had entertained with respect to him. It is still more petty, that even when dictator, like a vacant quarrelsome speaker, he wrote invectives against him, which were so pitiful that even the republicans wished to publish them, in order by that means to exalt by so much the more

the fame of Cato, and to render ridiculous Cæsar's design of censuring Cato. Alexander gave to the age he lived in a direction perfectly appropriate, nay, the very best possible one even for the Greek mental culture, and its diffusion over Asia. He had no share in the horrors committed by the despots who succeeded him, and no blame attaches to him; they were totally opposed to his great nature. Cæsar did not profit by the fall of old free Rome to shape it into something better; he only hurried it on and prepared it for still worse, for the very worst; for other unworthy tyrants, succeeding him, enjoyed the fruits of his deeds. The whole amount of his Herculean labours was in the end only a further contribution to the fortunes of Augustus. Cæsar would have overcome legions of men, such as Sylla and Augustus were, in that ample sense of the word; but in the more refined art of ruling, he was a mere tyro compared with Augustus, who knew how, with such masterly skill, to be the concealed monarch of a seeming republic. In the organic genius of a legislator, he was very far surpassed by even Sylla, who, it is true, was an absolute dictator, but still only such in a perfectly republican spirit and sense. For a republican imperator, Cæsar was too tyrannical; for an absolute despotic monarch, too republican, too free and careless in his own manners and life.

This was not in a manner the consequence of an accidental false step, which would have drawn on the others unavoidably after it. It was not his crossing the Rubicon at the outset almost of his public life. It was, on the contrary, an original incapability and defect in his being to enable him to perform the mighty task of that period with the requisite consummation. He was naturally disposed to be tyrannical, and full of monarchical pride; but without the inward worth appropriate to such a form, without the moral restraint and strictness over himself. At a very early age, in the funeral oration he delivered over his father's sister Julia, he boasted of his supposed royal race and eulogized the exaltedness of such a descent. Such expressions were very unwise and unseemly for the citizen of a free state, for a party chief in the Roman world of that time, and could only lead to such a catastrophe. This, however, is easily forgotten, so long as the god of the day

AN HISTORICAL COMPARISON.

343

still stands on the pinnacle of fortune; the transition is irresistibly rapid and easy from a demagoguical victor to a tyrannical despot. Cæsar was not perfectly clear also with himself about his ambitious sentiments, and constantly had in his mouth the saying of Eteocles in Euripides: "For the sake of sovereignty one may act wrong, in other things not." As victor, he shrank so little from the name of absolute ruler and tyrant, that he rather seemed to desire it. "Sylla," he said, "did not understand the rudiments of the governing art, by his having laid down the dictatorship. The republic was nothing but an empty name; men might speak more reserved with him, and honour his words as laws." Towards the end

of his life, he was wont to start in his sleep. He was doomed inevitably to fall, great as he was, and he had a prescient feeling of it. He was indeed great, as he fell, since he found Brutus one of his worthy opponents and avengers.

Cæsar paved the way for far worse tyrants than himself, —for a Tiberius, Caligula, Nero; he was in his fall an instructive warning, example, and type for them, but in vain. If the republic at that time could no longer exist, the new monarchical constitution should nevertheless have been founded altogether more solidly, morally, and justly. There are times equally capable of a twofold direction, where the fate of mankind hangs as it were by a thread, by a hair. If now the age of Cæsar and Augustus had been such? If it could be shown to be probable that the history of mankind would now be clear of some atrocious centuries, if Cæsar had either not conquered or had used this victory more wisely and greatly? The sophists will hear nothing of this, they who think they know so accurately why everything bad that has ever come to pass was necessary and forced to come to pass. Notwithstanding this, these are useful, instructive questions and problems for a more exalted historical standard of morals and judgment.

Weighed together in this balance, the preponderance inclines to the side of the youthfully inspired Alexander, whose historical causality and action were more fruitful for the future than destructive for the present. If nation too be compared with nation, the dissolution of Hellenic freedom and civilization presents a less austere and joyless spectacle than the moral fall

of the old strict Roman world. We are in the one case still exalted in our minds by the last glorious soaring flight of beautiful Grecian enthusiasm; whereas here, in the Roman western land, everything sinks down into monotonous lethargy, until the new sun of a sublimer and divine faith rises above the old ruins of dilapidated and fallen paganism.

ON THE

BEGINNING OF OUR HISTORY,

AND

THE LAST REVOLUTION OF THE EARTH;

AS THE PROBABLE EFFECT OF A COMET.

(A Critique on Rhode's Work,* published at Breslau, 1819.)

Ar all times, amongst all nations and classes, the origin of history and of man has always been, as it still is, before every other, that branch of study which most interests us and evokes our faculty of research. The knowledge of antiquity, which partly and in its ultimate object is similarly directed to the gratification of this natural and ineradicable inquisitiveness, occupies a very important place in our present German literature, it is promoted zealously from the most different sides, it is cultivated with corresponding success. While new treasures and sources are being continually opened for us in Indian, Persian, Egyptian documents and monuments, or important elucidations of them given to us; while even Grecian antiquity, with all that is intimately allied to it, is drawn forth from the narrow circle of ordinary philology by the deep acumen of Creuzer, leading us back to the sources of all heathen theology, we are no less conducted by a geography, that really embraces both earth and men, in Ritter's genial mode of treating it, as well as by other discoveries, whether geognostic or relating to the natural history of the earth, or by a new arrangement and utilization of what was previously known, to that point where history may undoubtedly become a science, no longer having merely a middle, but a beginning and end also. This is, however,

* J. G. Rhode Ueber den Anfang unserer Geschichte und die letzte Revolution der Erde, als wahrscheinliche Wirkung eines Kometen.