personal ambition, or unless this had been the best course which the loftiest human wisdom could devise. Mommsen justifies the act of Cæsar in substituting his own rule for that of the Senate by precisely the same reasoning which he employs to justify the Senate of an earlier period for superseding the rule of the people. In each case the usurpation was rendered legitimate by "exclusive ability to govern."
Now it is perfectly true that the Senate, as Cæsar found it at the end of the Civil War, had become incapable of governing. The question is whether Cæsar, armed with the powers of the dictatorship, could not have reformed the Senate on a firmer basis than that selected, at the last opportunity, by Sulla—on the basis, namely, not of oligarchy, but of true aristocracy—of the Conservative Republic; and whether, when Cæsar, instead of doing this, established "the military monarchy"—that is, made himself military autocrat—he was obeying the dictates of necessity or of ambition. For our part, we believe that, as all Cæsar's abilities united to make him a consummate impersonation of the Roman faculty of command, so the sovereign motive of his nature was the love of power. Very possibly he may have brought himself to believe that no other course was open to him than that which he adopted. Such a mental phenomenon has not been rare when supreme gifts have had to struggle with supreme temptation. But when it is asserted that there was nothing else possible for him
