Julius Caesar

​By these means he made them both most devoted to himself and most brave. At the beginning of the civil war, the centurions of each legion offered each a horseman from their own savings, and the soldiers as a body offered their services without pay and without rations or wages, the wealthier taking upon themselves the care of the poorer. Nor in so long a period did anyone at all desert, and most of those who were captured refused their lives, which were offered them on condition that they would serve against him. They bore hunger and other hardships so resolutely, not only when they were besieged but also if they themselves were besieging others, that during the blockade at Dyrrachium, when Pompey saw the kind of bread made of herbs on which they supported themselves, he said that he had to do with wild beasts, and ordered it to be quickly removed and not shown to anyone, lest the spirits of his own men should be broken by the endurance and obstacy of the enemy. With what great courage they fought is proved by the fact that, when they suffered their only defeat at Dyrrachium, they voluntarily demanded punishment for themselves, so that their commander had to console rather than punish them. In all other battles they easily overcame countless forces of their adversaries, though they themselves were far fewer in number. Finally, a single cohort of the sixth legion, which was placed in charge of a fort, held off four of Pompey’s legions for several hours, almost all of them being pierced by a multitude of enemy arrows, of which a hundred and thirty thousand were found within the rampart. Nor is this surprising, if one looks at the deeds of individuals, either of the centurion Cassius Scaeva or of the soldier Gaius Acilius, not to mention more. Scaeva, with one eye struck out, pierced in the thigh and shoulder, and his shield perforated by a hundred and twenty blows, maintained the guard of the gate of the fort committed to him. Acilius, in a naval battle at Massilia, having thrown his right hand onto the stern of an enemy ship and had it cut off, imitating that memorable example of Cynegirus among the Greeks, leaped into the ship, driving those in his way before him with the boss of his shield.

​During the ten years of the Gallic wars they raised no mutiny at all, and during the civil wars they raised some, but they returned quickly to their duty, not so much by the indulgence of their general as by his authority. For he never yielded to mutineers and indeed always confronted them; and indeed, he disbanded the entire ninth legion with ignominy at Placentia, although Pompey was still in arms, and restored it with difficulty only after many suppliant prayers, and not without inflicting punishment on the guilty.

​Moreover, when the soldiers of the tenth legion in Rome, with huge threats and even to the greatest danger of the city, were demanding their discharge and rewards, while the war in Africa was then raging, he did not hesitate to go to them, although his friends tried to deter him, nor did he hesitate to discharge them. But with a single word, by which he addressed them as “Quirites” instead of “soldiers,” he so easily turned and bent them that they immediately replied that they were his soldiers, and followed him of their own accord to Africa, although he refused; and even so, he punished each of the most mutinous by depriving them of a third part both of the booty and of the land intended for them.

​Zeal and loyalty toward his clients did not fail him even as a young man. When he had defended Masintha, a noble youth, against King Hiempsal with such vigor that in the dispute he seized the beard of King Juba’s son, he snatched him away from those who were dragging him off the moment he was declared a tributary, hid him at his house for a long time, and soon afterward, departing for Spain after his praetorship, carried him away in his own litter among the crowd of those paying their respects and the fasces of the lictors.

​He always treated his friends with such kindness and indulgence that, when Gaius Oppius, who was accompanying him through a wooded path, was seized with sudden illness, he gave up to him the only little inn that there was, and himself slept on the ground and in the open air. And when he was in power, he advanced some of the lowest class even to the highest honors, and when he was blamed for this, he declared openly that if he had used the help of bandits and assassins in defending his own dignity, he would show equal gratitude even to such men.

​On the other hand, he never harbored any animosities so severe that he would not gladly lay them aside when an opportunity offered. He was soon even a supporter of Gaius Memmius in his candidacy for the consulship, though he had replied to Memmius’s most bitter speeches with equal sharpness. When Gaius Calvus, after his defamatory epigrams, was negotiating for a reconciliation through friends, Caesar voluntarily wrote to him first. When Valerius Catullus, by whom he did not deny that everlasting stains had been branded upon him by his verses about Mamurra, made satisfaction, Caesar invited him to dinner on that very same day, and continued to enjoy the hospitality of Catullus’s father, just as he had been accustomed.