A slave tried to poison him.
Suetonius says he merely put the slave to death. The "merely" is
to the point. Cato would have tortured him first. After Pharsalus
he forgave everyone. When severe, it was to himself. It is true he
turned over two million people into so many dead flies, their legs
in the air, creating, as Tacitus has it, a solitude which he
described as Peace; but what antitheses may not be expected in a
man who, before the first century was begun, divined the fifth,
and who in the Suevians--that terrible people beside whom no
nation could live--foresaw Attila!
Save in battle his health was poor. He was epileptic, his strength
undermined by incessant debauches; yet let a nation fancying him
months away put on insurgent airs, and on that nation he descended
as the thunder does. In his campaigns time and again he overtook
his own messengers. A phantom in a ballad was not swifter than he.
Simultaneously his sword flashed in Germany, on the banks of the
Adriatic, in that Ultima Thule where the Britons lived. From the
depths of Gaul he dominated Rome, and therewith he was penetrating
impenetrable forests, trailing legions as a torch trails smoke,
erecting walls that a nation could not cross, turning soldiers
into marines, infantry into cavalry, building roads that are roads
to-day, fighting with one hand and writing an epic with the other,
dictating love-letters, chronicles, dramas; finding time to make a
collection of witticisms; overturning thrones while he decorated
Greece; mingling initiate into orgies of the Druids, and, as the
cymbals clashed, coquetting with those terrible virgins who awoke
the tempest; not only conquering, but captivating, transforming
barbarians into soldiers and those soldiers into senators,
submitting three hundred nations and ransacking Britannia for
pearls for his mistresses' ears.
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