if the land were withdrawn, the Ionian would break on the Aegean.

Thus when Crassus, who kept those fierce competitors apart, died

pitifully, drenching Syrian Carrhae with Roman blood, that defeat

by Parthia let loose the furies on Rome. In that battle the Parthians

wrought better than they knew, visiting civil war on the defeated.

Power was divided by the sword; the wealth of an imperial people

who ruled the sea, the land, possessed the globe, was not enough

for two. For now, when Julia, Caesar’s daughter, Pompey’s wife,

was cut down by fate, she bore with her to the Shades the bonds

of affinity, and a marriage turned, by that dread omen, to mourning.

She, if fate had granted her longer life, might alone have restrained

her husband’s anger on the one side, and her father’s on the other.

She might have struck aside their swords, made them clasp hands,

as the Sabine women stood between their husbands and their fathers

and brought about reconciliation. But at her death bonds of loyalty

were broken, and the generals freed to pursue armed conflict.

A powerful rivalry drove them on: for Pompey feared fresh exploits

might obscure his former triumphs, his ridding the seas of pirates

yielding second place to Caesar’s victories in Gaul; while Caesar,

used to battle, inured to endless effort, was driven by an ambition

that yearned for supremacy; Caesar could accept none above him,

Pompey no equal. It is wrong to ask who had the greatest right

to seek war; each had great authority to support him: if the victor

had the gods on his side, the defeated had Cato. The contest was

unequal, Pompey being somewhat past his prime, long used

to the toga and forgetting in peace how to play a general’s part;

courting adulation, lavish with his gifts to the people of Rome,

swayed by popularity, overjoyed by the clamour that greeted him

in the theatre he had built, trusting in former claims to greatness,

he did nothing to establish wider power, and stood as the mere

shadow of a mighty name. So some oak-tree towers in a rich grove,

hung with a nation’s ancient trophies, sacred gifts of the victors,

and though its clinging roots have lost their strength, their weight

alone holds it, spreading naked branches to the sky, casting shade

not with leaves but its trunk alone, and though it quivers, doomed

to fall at the next gale, among the host of sounder trees that rise

around it, still it alone is celebrated. But Caesar possessed more

than mere name and military fame: his energies were un-resting,

his only shame in battle not to win; alert and unrestrained, every

summons of anger or ambition his strength answered, he never

shrank from an opportunistic use of the sword; intent on pursuing

each success, grasping the gods’ favour, pushing aside every

obstacle to his supremacy, happy to clear a path through ruin.