air of legality on its master, and at the same time he had occupied the whole recruiting ground where Pompey had intended to raise those legions which were "to start from the earth when he stamped his foot."

Yet this was but the first act of the drama. Cæsar's position was most precarious: there was a widespread impression that his first success would be followed by massacres, in the style of those by which Marius and Sulla had celebrated their capture of Rome. No one had forgotten that Cæsar's name had once been linked with that of Catiline. To cast a glance around the circle of his lieutenants was anything but reassuring. Assembled around him were all the notorious profligates and bankrupts of the day, Mark Antony and Curio, Cælius and Dolabella, Vatinius and the rest. They were a sinister crowd: Cicero called them the vervía, the troop of vampires. That any conqueror with such a past as Cæsar, surrounded by such a gang of reprobates, could be intending less than wholesale murder and confiscation seemed hardly possible. It took a long time to convince the Romans that they were not to expect "red ruin and the breaking up of laws," and meanwhile public opinion would have welcomed the return of the respectable Pompey, even though his Optimate friends were certain to make a clean sweep of the Cæsarians when they came back victorious.

It was necessary to strike a second blow, as hard as the first had been, if Cæsar was to retain what he had won. If he lingered at Rome the seven Pompeian legions from Spain would soon be heard of in the valley of the Po, and Pompey himself, the moment that he had collected a respectable army in Epirus, might descend from his ships on some unexpected point of the Italian seaboard. Cæsar had but two advantages-the central position, and the fact that he had a veteran army already mobilised, while

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his foes were but drawing their levies together. More than most generals he appreciated the value of time. His one chance was to beat his adversaries in detail before they could combine,-even before they could get into communication and settle on a common plan of campaign. It was certain that Pompey could not be ready for many months; on the other hand, the army in Spain was fit to move at once, but was commanded by men whose measure Cæsar had taken long beforecommonplace soldiers without a stroke of genius. Hence came the dictator's determination to make a dash at Spain in the spring, with the hope of destroying, or at least of defeating and disabling, Afranius and Petreius, before Pompey could assemble an army in Epirus with which a general of his cautious character would dare to assault Italy.

It was a most hazardous plan, for if Pompey had but risen to the occasion and cast off his methodical ways, he would have found Rome and Italy weakly garrisoned against an attack. But fortune was, as usual, in Cæsar's camp. Afranius and Petreius advanced almost to the foot of the Pyrenees to meet him, and allowed themselves to be out-manovured, beaten, and taken prisoners at Ilerda (July 2, 49). The Pompeian army of Spain was almost annihilated: only in remote corners of the Iberian peninsula did resistance linger on. Completely freed from the fear of an attack upon his rear by the Pompeians of the West, Cæsar could hurry back to Italy to face the Optimate army in Epirus, which was at last growing formidable in numbers, and beginning to acquire a certain military value. It mattered little to him that, while he was victorious at Ilerda, his lieutenant Curio had lost his life and his army while executing a daring but unlucky attack on the Pompeians in Africa.

The Spanish business had been hazardous, for all

might have gone wrong for Cæsar if only his opponents had refused to fight him, and had adopted guerilla tactics after the fashion of Sertorius. Had they refused battle, and withdrawn into the mountains with their forces intact, Cæsar would have been left in a quandary. If he pursued them and was drawn into a long campaign, Italy might well have been lost behind his back. If, on the other hand, he had refused to commit himself to operations in the interior of Spain, and had gone back to Italy with his reserves, he could not have spared an army sufficient to hold back the Pompeian generals. They would have driven in any covering force that he might leave behind, and have once more begun to threaten his rear. But they fought and were annihilated. Again Cæsar had been granted the one stroke of fortune that could save him.

Yet he had to hurry from risk to risk. If there had been dangerous possibilities in Spain, those which followed in Epirus were still more threatening. Some of the dangers were of his own making; nothing can excuse the recklessness with which he flung his troops across the sea before he had transports enough to carry them all at one voyage. It was, no doubt, an advantage to be able to cross the straits before Pompey's admirals, who fancied that all armies must necessarily go into winter quarters in November, had begun to suspect him of any such intention. But the compensating disadvantage of being obliged to leave behind nearly half his army for want of shipping was greater. The second division could not follow him, when the Optimate fleet proceeded to blockade Brundisium. Cæsar had to maintain himself in Epirus, with seven weak legions and a handful of cavalry, for nearly three months. By land the superior forces of Pompey held him in check. On the side of the sea he was watched by the squadron which

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cut his communication with Italy. It was a miracle that he was not destroyed; it required all his good luck to aid his consummate generalship. Once he thought that even his luck had failed him; this was on the occasion when he made his celebrated attempt to run across to Italy in a small open boat, in order to hurry up his reserves at any risk and at all costs. He got out to sea, but his sailors could not face the storm, in spite of his well-known adjuration to them to "fear nothing, for they carried Cæsar and his fortunes." The vessel was beaten back to shore, and the great general had to stave off apparently inevitable disaster for some weeks more, till, in the middle of February, Antony at last succeeded in eluding the Pompeian fleet, and came over to Epirus. How nearly the squadron of the future triumvir came to disaster we have told in an earlier chapter. But after suffering the extreme of peril he reached Epirus and joined his master. Even then the game was not won. There followed the long and well-contested struggle at the lines in front of Dyrrhachium, the most wonderful piece of spade-work in the wars of the ancient world. Modern history has nothing to compare to it except the long contest in 186465 between Grant and Lee, in their interminable entrenchments around Richmond and Petersburg, which stretched out to even greater length than those of Cæsar and Pompey. But the struggle in Epirus differed in one extraordinary point from the struggle in Virginia; here it was the general with the smaller veteran army who tried to enclose his opponent by running field-works round his flanks and reducing him to starvation. Even Cæsar could not carry out such an astonishing plan. He failed with heavy loss, and Pompey broke loose, and seemed for a moment victorious. It was perhaps the greatest of all Cæsar's military achievements that he succeeded in drawing off from his shattered lines without

a fatal disaster. But the moment must have been a bitter one to him; it was his first defeat on a large scale, and it was hard to see how it could be retrieved. He had no base on which to retreat, he had no large reinforcements to expect, he was still cut off from Italy by the Pompeian fleet. The sudden march into Thessaly with which he ended the campaign round Dyrrhachium must have been the council of despair. If Pompey failed to follow him into the interior, and chose instead to ship himself over into undefended Italy, the game was lost. Cæsar had no fleet in which to follow his rival, and it would have profited him little to take Thessalonica or to ravage Greece.

But once more fortune came to the aid of the great adventurer. Pompey refused to make the bold stroke and to sail for Italy; he followed his enemy across the mountains and offered him battle at Pharsalus. Ruined by the misbehaviour of his numerous cavalry, with which he had hoped to ride down the Gallic legions, he saw his army break and fly, and rode off the field a ruined man.

Pharsalus made Cæsar master of the world. The game was at last in his hands, and he had but to hunt down the scattered remnants of the Pompeian party, who maintained a hopeless resistance in the remoter provinces. That the Civil War lingered on for another three years was due not so much to the truly Roman obstinacy of the surviving Optimates, as to Cæsar's inexplicable divagation to Egypt. There was no need to chase the forlorn little band which followed Pompey down to the mouth of the Nile; but if the enterprise were taken in hand, it was foolhardy to set out with but one single legion. The East might have been safely neglected for the present; the real objective for the Cæsarian host was Africa, the one region where the enemy had still a considerable force under arms. If the victor of Pharsalus had started at