Three years later the fortunes of war brought Caesar to northern Africa, and he traversed a part of the region where Curio's luckless campaign had been carried on. With the stern eye of the trained soldier, he marked the fatal blunders which Curio had made, but he recalled also the charm of his personal qualities, and the defeat before Utica was forgotten in his remembrance of the great victory which Curio had won for him, single-handed, in Rome. Even Lucan, a partisan of the senate which Curio had flouted, cannot withhold his admiration for Curio's brilliant career, and his pity for Curio's tragic end. As he stands in imagination before the fallen Roman leader, he exclaims:[144] "Happy wouldst thou be, O Rome, and destined to bless thy people, had it pleased the gods above to guard thy liberty as it pleased them to avenge its loss. Lo! the noble body of Curio, covered by no tomb, feeds the birds of Libya. But to thee, since it profiteth not to pass in silence those deeds of thine which their own glory defends forever 'gainst the decay of time, such tribute now we pay, O youth, as thy life has well deserved. No other citizen of such talent has Rome brought forth, nor one to whom the law would be indebted more, if he the path of right had followed out. As it was, the corruption of the age ruined the city when desire for office, pomp, and the power which wealth gives, ever to be dreaded, had swept away his wavering mind with sidelong flood, and the change of Curio, snared by the spoils of Gaul and the gold of Caesar, was that which turned the tide of history. Although mighty Sulla, fierce Marius, the blood-bespattered Cinna, and all the line of Caesar's house have held our throats at their mercy with the sword, to whom was e'er such power vouchsafed? All others bought, he sold the state."
Gaius Matius, a Friend of Caesar
"Non enim Caesarem ... sum secutus, sed amicum."
Gaius Matius, the subject of this sketch, was neither a great warrior, nor statesman, nor writer. If his claim to remembrance rested on what he did in the one or the other of these roles, he would long ago have been forgotten. It is his genius for friendship which has kept his memory green, and that is what he himself would have wished. Of his early life we know little, but it does not matter much, because the interest which he has for us centres about his relations to Caesar in early manhood. Being of good birth, and a man of studious tastes, he probably attended the University at Athens, and heard lectures there as young Cicero and Messala did at a later period. He must have been a man of fine tastes and cultivation, for Cicero, in writing to a friend, bestows on Matius the title "doctissimus," the highest literary compliment which one Roman could pay another, and Apollodorus of Pergamum dedicated to him his treatise on rhetoric. Since he was born about 84 B.C., he returned from his years of study at Athens about the time when Caesar was setting out on his brilliant campaign in Gaul. Matius joined him, attracted perhaps by the personal charms of the young proconsul, perhaps by the love of adventure, perhaps, like his friend Trebatius, by the hope of making a reputation.
At all events he was already with Caesar somewhere in Gaul in 53 B.C., and it is hard to think of an experience better suited to lay bare the good and the bad qualities in Caesar's character than the years of camp life which Matius spent with him in the wilds of Gaul and Britain. As aide-de-camp, or orderly, for such a position he probably held, his place was by Caesar's side. They forded the rivers together, walked or rode through woodland or open side by side, shared the same meagre rations, and lay in the same tent at the end of the day's march, ready to spring from the ground at a moment's warning to defend each other against attack from the savage foe. Caesar's narrative of his campaigns in Gaul is a soldier's story of military movements, and perhaps from our school-boy remembrance of it we may have as little a liking for it as Horace had for the poem of Livius Andronicus, which he studied under "Orbilius of the rods," but even the obscurities of the Latin subjunctive and ablative cannot have blinded us entirely to the romance of the desperate siege of Alesia and the final struggle which the Gauls made to drive back the invader. Matius shared with Caesar all the hardships and perils of that campaign, and with Caesar he witnessed the final scene of the tragedy when Vercingetorix, the heroic Gallic chieftain, gave up his sword, and the conquest of Gaul was finished. It is little wonder that Matius and the other young men who followed Caesar were filled with admiration of the man who had brought all this to pass.
It was a notable group, including Trebatius, Hirtius, Pansa, Oppius, and Matius in its number. All of them were of the new Rome. Perhaps they were dimly conscious that the mantle of Tiberius Gracchus had fallen upon their leader, that the great political struggle which had been going on for nearly a century was nearing its end, and that they were on the eve of a greater victory than that at Alesia. It would seem that only two of them, Matius and Trebatius, lived to see the dawning of the new day. But it was not simply nor mainly the brilliancy of Caesar as a leader in war or in politics which attracted Matius to him. As he himself puts it in his letter to Cicero: "I did not follow a Caesar, but a friend." Lucullus and Pompey had made as distinguished a record in the East as Caesar had in the West, but we hear of no such group of able young men following their fortunes as attached themselves to Caesar. We must find a reason for the difference in the personal qualities of Caesar, and there is nothing that more clearly proves the charm of his character than the devotion to him of this group of men. In the group Matius is the best representative of the man and the friend. When Caesar came into his own, Matius neither asked for nor accepted the political offices which Caesar would gladly have given him. One needs only to recall the names of Antony, Labienus, or Decimus Brutus to realize the fact that Caesar remembered and rewarded the faithful services of his followers. But Matius was Caesar's friend and nothing more, not his master of the horse, as Antony was, nor his political and financial heir, as Octavius was. In his loyalty to Caesar he sought for no other reward than Caesar's friendship, and his services to him brought with them their own return. Indeed, through his friend he suffered loss, for one of Caesar's laws robbed him of a part of his estate, as he tells us, but this experience did not lessen his affection. How different his attitude was from that of others who professed a friendship for Caesar! Some of them turned upon their leader and plotted against his life, when disappointed in the favors which they had received at his hands, and others, when he was murdered, used his name and his friendship for them to advance their own ambitious designs. Antony and Octavius struggle with each other to catch the reins of power which have fallen from his hands; Dolabella, who seems to regard himself as an understudy of Caesar, plays a serio-comic part in Rome in his efforts to fill the place of the dead dictator; while Decimus Brutus hurries to the North to make sure of the province which Caesar had given him.