Portugal
and Gallicia were still unsubdued. Bands of robbers lay everywhere in the
fastnesses of the mountain ranges. Caesar was already favorably known in
Spain for his service as quaestor. He now completed the conquest of the
peninsula. He put down the banditti. He reorganized the administration
with the rapid skill which always so remarkably distinguished him. He sent
home large sums of money to the treasury. His work was done quickly, but
it was done completely. He nowhere left an unsound spot unprobed. He never
contented himself with the superficial healing of a wound which would
break out again when he was gone. What he began he finished, and left it
in need of no further surgery. As his reward, he looked for a triumph, and
the consulship, one or both; and the consulship he knew could not well be
refused to him, unwelcome as it would be to the Senate.
Pompey meanwhile was at last coming back. All lesser luminaries shone
faint before the sun of Pompey, the subduer of the pirates, the conqueror
of Asia, the glory of the Roman name. Even Cicero had feared that the fame
of the saviour of his country might pale before the lustre of the great
Pompey. "I used to be in alarm," he confessed with naive simplicity, "that
six hundred years hence the merits of Sampsiceramus[4] might seem to
have been more than mine.
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