C. Julius Caesar. We do not agree with him when
he speaks of the "judicial murder" of the Catilinarians. Of all the many victims of civil strife in Rome, Catiline and his friends best deserved their fate. His translation of the "De Bello Civili " is excellent. A more idiomatic version we have seldom seen. Here is a passage from Caesar's speech in vindication of himself at the meeting with Afranius in 49 B.C. :--" No, it was against himself that all these preparations had been for so long directed ; it was to cripple him that an unprecedented type of command was to be created, which permitted a man to control the administration of the capital from his residence outside the gates of Rome, and at the same time to retain year after year the absentee governorship of two provinces stocked with fighting races ; it was solely to checkmate himself that a violent change was now to be wrought in the constitution of the magistracies, whereby governors were sent out to provinces no longer, as before, at the expiration of their consulship or praetorship, but upon the interested selection of a clique." The book is illustrated with some useful plans of battlefields.
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