1/60 CHAPTER XI. 47.] I know of no great fact in history so impalpable, so shadowy, so unreal, as the First Triumvirate. Every school-boy, almost every school-girl, knows that there was a First Triumvirate, and that it was a political combination made by three great Romans of the day, Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, and Crassus the Rich, for managing Rome among them. Beyond this they know little, because there is little to know. That it was a conspiracy against the ordained government of the day, as much so as that of Catiline, or Guy Faux, or Napoleon III., they do not know generally, because Caesar, who, though the youngest of the three, was the mainspring of it, rose by means of it to such a galaxy of glory that all the steps by which he rose to it have been supposed to be magnificent and heroic. |