armies, secured Egypt and Upper Asia and annexed Numidia to the Republic,
carried out the unification of Italy, reestablished public order and
public credit, and left at his death the foundations of the Empire
securely laid for his successor.

The loyal and capable officer, Aulus Hirtius (who afterwards became
consul, and was killed in battle before Mutina a year after Caesar's
murder), did his best to supplement his master's narrative. He seems to
have been a well-educated man, but without any particular literary
capacity. It was uncertain, even to the careful research of Suetonius,
whether the narrative of the campaigns in Egypt and Pontus, known as the
_Bellum Alexandrinum_, was written by him or by another officer of
Caesar's, Gaius Oppius. The books on the campaigns of Africa and Spain
which follow are by different hands: the former evidently by some
subaltern officer who took part in the war, and very interesting as
showing the average level of intelligence and culture among Roman
officers of the period; the latter by another author and in very inferior
Latin, full of grammatical solecisms and popular idioms oddly mixed up
with epic phrases from Ennius, who was still, it must be remembered, the
great Latin school-book. It is these curious fragments of history which
more than anything else help us to understand the rapid decay of Latin
prose after the golden period. Under the later Republic the educated
class and the governing class had, broadly speaking, been the same. The
Civil wars, in effect, took administration away from their hands,
transferring it to the new official class, of which these subalterns of
Caesar's represent the type; and this change was confirmed by the Empire.
The result was a sudden and long-continued divorce between political
activity on the one hand and the profession of letters on the other. For
a century after the establishment of the Empire the aristocracy, which
had produced the great literature of the Republic, remained forcibly or