Above all he designed an expedition against the Parthians, to avenge the day of Carrhae; he had destined three years for this war, and was resolved to settle accounts with these dangerous enemies once for all and not less cautiously than thoroughly.

In like manner he had projected the scheme of attacking Burebistas king of the Getae, who was greatly extending his power on both sides of the Danube,( 37) and of protecting Italy in the north-east by border-districts similar to those which he had created for it in Gaul.

On the other hand there is no evidence at all that Caesar contemplated like Alexander a career of victory extending indefinitely far; it is said indeed that he had intended to march from Parthia to the Caspian and from this to the Black Sea and then along its northern shores to the Danube, to annex to the empire all Scythia and Germany as far as the Northern Ocean--which according to the notions of that time was not so very distant from the Mediterranean--and to return home through Gaul; but no authority at all deserving of credit vouches for the existence of these fabulous projects.

In the case of a state which, like the Roman state of Caesar, already included a mass of barbaric elements difficult to be controlled, and had still for centuries to come more than enough to do with their assimilation, such conquests, even granting their military practicability, would have been nothing but blunders far more brilliant and far worse than the Indian expedition of Alexander.

Judging both from Caesar's conduct in Britain and Germany and from the conduct of those who became the heirs of his political ideas, it is in a high degree probable that Caesar with Scipio Aemilianus called on the gods not to increase the empire, but to preserve it, and that his schemes of conquest restricted themselves to a settlement of the frontier--measured, it is true, by his own great scale--which should secure the line of the Euphrates, and, instead of the fluctuating and militarily useless boundary of the empire on the north-east, should establish and render defensible the line of the Danube.
Attempts of Caesar to Avert Military Despotism But, if it remains a mere probability that Caesar ought not to be designated a world-conqueror in the same sense as Alexander and Napoleon, it is quite certain that his design was not to rest his new monarchy primarily on the support of the army nor generally to place the military authority above the civil, but to incorporate it with, and as far as possible subordinate it to, the civil commonwealth.