Introduction - Page 2

accessisse sobrium ad rempublicam delendam)_....

Great as Caesar was by the benefit of his original nature, there can be
no doubt that he, like others, owed something to circumstances; and
perhaps amongst those which were most favourable to the premature
development of great self-dependence we must reckon the early death of
his father. It is, or it is not, according to the nature of men, an
advantage to be orphaned at as early age. Perhaps utter orphanage is
rarely or never such: but to lose a father betimes may, under
appropriate circumstances, profit a strong mind greatly. To Caesar it
was a prodigious benefit that he lost his father when not much more than
fifteen. Perhaps it was an advantage also to his father that he died
thus early. Had he stayed a year longer, he might have seen himself
despised, baffled, and made ridiculous. For where, let us ask, in any
age, was the father capable of adequately sustaining that relation to
the unique Caius Julius--to him, in the appropriate language of
Shakespeare

"The foremost man of all this world?"

And, in this fine and Caesarean line, "this world" is to be understood
not of the order of co-existences merely,' but also of the order of
successions; he was the foremost man not only of his contemporaries, but
also, within his own intellectual class, of men generally--of all that
ever should come after him, or should sit on thrones under the
denominations of Czars, Kesars, or Caesars of the Bosphorus and the
Danube; of all in every age that should inherit his supremacy of mind,
or should subject to themselves the generations of ordinary men by
qualities analogous to his. Of this infinite superiority some part must
be ascribed to his early emancipation from paternal control. There are
very many cases in which, simply from considerations of sex, a female
cannot stand forward as the head of a family, or as its suitable
representative. If they are even ladies paramount, and in situations of
command, they are also women. The staff of authority does not annihilate
their sex; and scruples of female delicacy interfere for ever to unnerve
and emasculate in their hands the sceptre however otherwise potent.
Hence we see, in noble families, the merest boys put forward to
represent the family dignity, as fitter supporters of that burden than
their mature mothers. And of Caesar's mother, though little is recorded,
and that little incidentally, this much at least we learn--that, if she
looked down upon him with maternal pride and delight, she looked up to
him with female ambition as the re-edifier of her husband's honours,--
looked with reverence as to a column of the Roman grandeur and with fear
and feminine anxieties as to one whose aspiring spirit