"Others better may mould the life-breathing brass of the image,
And living features, I ween, draw from the marble, and better
Argue their cause in the court; may mete out the span of the heavens,
Mark out the bounds of the poles, and name all the stars in their turnings.
Thine 'tis the peoples to rule with dominion—this, Roman, remember!—
These for thee are the arts, to hand down the laws of the treaty,
The weak in mercy to spare, to fling from their high seats the haughty."

—VERGIL, Æn. vi. 847-858.

New York
Grosset & Dunlap Publishers
1900

Preface

If this book serves to show that Classical Life presented many phases akin to our own, it will not have been written in vain.

After the book was planned and in part written, it was discovered that Archdeacon Farrar had in his story of "Darkness and Dawn" a scene, "Onesimus and the Vestal," which corresponds very closely to the scene, "Agias and the Vestal," in this book; but the latter incident was too characteristically Roman not to risk repetition. If it is asked why such a book as this is desirable after those noble fictions, "Darkness and Dawn" and "Quo Vadis," the reply must be that these books necessarily take and interpret the Christian point of view. And they do well; but the Pagan point of view still needs its interpretation, at least as a help to an easy apprehension of the life and literature of the great age of the Fall of the Roman Republic. This is the aim of "A Friend of Cæsar." The Age of Cæsar prepared the way for the Age of Nero, when Christianity could find a world in a state of such culture, unity, and social stability that it could win an adequate and abiding triumph.

Great care has been taken to keep to strict historical probability; but in one scene, the "Expulsion of the Tribunes," there is such a confusion of accounts in the authorities themselves that I have taken some slight liberties.

W. S. D.

Harvard University,
January 16,1900.

Contents

1. Præneste 1
2. The Upper Walks of Society 21
3. The Privilege of a Vestal 37
4. Lucius Ahenobarbus Airs His Grievance 50
5. A Very Old Problem 73
6. Pompeius Magnus 102
7. Agias's Adventure 117
8. "When Greek Meets Greek" 146
9. How Gabinius Met with a Rebuff 159
10. Mamercus Guards the Door 172
11. The Great Proconsul 198
12. Pratinas Meets Ill-Fortune 217
13. What Befell at Baiæ 241
14. The New Consuls 262
15. The Seventh of January 277
16. The Rubicon 302
17. The Profitable Career of Gabinius 329
18. How Pompeius Stamped with His Feet 334
19. The Hospitality of Demetrius 364
20. Cleopatra 387
21. How Ulamhala's Words Came True 409
22. The End of the Magnus 433
23. Bitterness and Joy 448
24. Battling for Life 464
25. Calm after Storm 496

Chapter I

Præneste

I

It was the Roman month of September, seven hundred and four years after Romulus—so tradition ran—founded the little village by the Tiber which was to become "Mother of Nations," "Centre of the World," "Imperial Rome." To state the