with horror. Caesar Octavianus, the future master of the world, was a
delicate boy of twenty, already an object of dislike and distrust to
nearly all his allies. Virgil, a poet still voiceless, was twenty-seven.




VII.

PROSE OF THE CICERONIAN AGE: CAESAR AND SALLUST.


Fertile as the Ciceronian age was in authorship of many kinds, there was
only one person in it whose claim to be placed in an equal rank with
Cicero could ever be seriously entertained; and this was, strangely
enough, one who was as it were only a man of letters by accident, and
whose literary work is but among the least of his titles to fame--Julius
Caesar himself. That anything written by that remarkable man must be
interesting and valuable in a high degree is obvious; but the combination
of literary power of the very first order with his unparallelled military
and political genius is perhaps unique in history.

It is one of the most regrettable losses in Latin literature that
Caesar's speeches and letters have almost completely perished. Of the
latter several collections were made after his death, and were extant in
the second century; but none are now preserved, except a few brief notes
to Cicero, of which copies were sent by him at the time to Atticus. The
fragments of his speeches are even less considerable; yet, according to
the unanimous testimony both of contemporary and of later critics, they
were unexcelled in that age of great oratory. He used the Latin language