When news of this plan trickled through Rome the common people, who love glory, applauded; the business classes, smelling war orders and provincial loot, licked their chops; the aristocracy, foreseeing its extinction on Caesar’s return, resolved to kill him before he could go.
He had treated these bluebloods with such generosity as to stir Cicero’s eloquence in his praise. He had forgiven all surrendering foes and had condemned to death only a few officers who, defeated and pardoned, had fought against him again. He had burned unread the correspondence he had found in the tents of Pompey and Scipio. He had sent the captured daughter and grandchildren of Pompey to Pompey’s son Sextus, who was still in arms against him; and he had restored the statues of Pompey which his followers had thrown down. He had given provincial governorships to Brutus and Cassius, and high office to many others of their class. He bore silently a thousand slanders, and instituted no proceedings against those whom he suspected of plotting against his life. To Cicero, who had trimmed his wind to every sale, he offered not only pardon but honor, and refused nothing that the orator asked for himself or his Pompeian friends; he even forgave, at Cicero’s urging, the unrepentant Marcus Marcellus. In a pretty speech For Marcellus (46) Cicero acclaimed Caesar’s “unbelievable liberality,” and admitted that Pompey, victorious, would have been more vengeful. “I have heard with regret,” he said, “your celebrated and highly philosophical remark, lam satis vixi, ‘I have lived enough, whether for nature or for fame.’ . . . Put aside, I beg you, that wisdom of the sage; do not be wise at the cost of our peril. . . . You are still far from the completion of your greatest labors; you have not yet laid their foundations.” And he solemnly promised Caesar, in the name of all the Senate, that they would watch over his safety and oppose with their own bodies any attack upon him.57 Cicero now prospered so well that he planned to buy still another palace—no less than that of Sulla himself. He enjoyed the dinners to which he was invited by Antony, Balbus, and others of Caesar’s aides; never before had his letters been so gay.58 Caesar was not deceived; he wrote to Matius: “If anyone is gracious, it is Cicero; but I doubt not that he hates me bitterly.”59 When reassured Pompeians resumed their opposition, this unctuous Talleyrand of the pen fell in with their hopes and wrote a eulogy of the younger Cato that should have put Caesar on his guard. Caesar contented himself with writing a reply, the Anti-Cato, which did not show the dictator at his best; in this duel he had given Cicero the choice of weapons, and the orator had won. Public opinion praised Cicero’s style, and the mildness of a ruler who composed a pamphlet when he might have signed a death warrant.
Men who have been deprived of wonted power cannot be mollified by pardoning their resistance; it is as difficult to forgive forgiveness as it is to forgive those whom we have injured. The aristocrats fretted in a Senate that dared not reject the proposals that Caesar so constitutionally submitted to them. They patriotically denounced the destruction of a liberty that had fattened their purses, and would not admit that the restoration of order required the limitation of their freedom. They looked with horror upon the presence of Cleopatra and Caesarion in Rome; it was true that Caesar was living with his wife Calpurnia apparently in mutual affection; but who could say—who would not say—what happened on his frequent visits to the gorgeous queen? Rumors persisted that he would make himself king, marry her, and place the capital of their united empires in the East. Had he not ordered his statue to be erected on the Capitol next to those of Rome’s ancient kings? Had he not stamped his own image upon Roman coins—an unprecedented insolence? Did he not wear robes of purple, usually reserved for kings? At the Lupercalia, on February 15, 44, the consul Antony, sacerdotally naked V and impiously drunk, tried thrice to place a royal crown upon Caesar’s head. Thrice Caesar refused; but was it not because the crowd murmured disapproval? Did he not dismiss from office the tribunes who removed from his statue the royal diadem placed upon it by his friends? When the Senate approached him as he sat in the Temple of Venus, he did not rise to receive them. Some explained that he had been overcome by an epileptic stroke; others, that he was suffering from diarrhea and had remained seated to avoid a movement of his bowels at so unpropitious a moment.60 But many patricians feared that any day might see him proclaimed a king.
Shortly after the Lupercalia, Gaius Cassius, a sickly man—“pale and lean,” as Plutarch describes him61—approached Marcus Brutus and suggested the assassination of Caesar. He had already won to his plan several senators, some capitalists whose provincial pillage had fallen with Caesar’s restriction of the publicans, even some of Caesar’s generals, who felt that the spoils and offices awarded them had not quite equaled their deserts. Brutus was needed as the front of the conspiracy, for he had won a wide reputation as the most virtuous of men. He was supposedly descended from the Brutus who had expelled the kings 464 years before. His mother Servilia was Cato’s half sister; his wife Portia was Cato’s daughter and the widow of Caesar’s enemy Bibulus. “It was thought,” says Appian, “that Brutus was Caesar’s son, as Caesar was the lover of Servilia about the time of Brutus’ birth”;62 Plutarch adds that Caesar believed Brutus to be his son.63 Possibly Brutus himself shared this opinion, and hated the dictator for having seduced his mother and made him, in the gossip of Rome, a bastard instead of a Brutus. He had always been moody and taciturn, as if brooding over a secret wrong; at the same time he carried himself proudly, as one who in any case bore noble blood in his veins. He was a master of Greek and a devotee of philosophy; in metaphysics a follower of Plato, in ethics, of Zeno. It was not lost upon him that Stoicism, like Greek and Roman opinion, approved tyrannicide. “Our ancestors,” he wrote to a friend, “thought that we ought not to endure a tyrant even if he were our own father.”64 He composed a treatise on Virtue and was later confused with that abstraction. Through intermediaries he lent money at forty-eight per cent to the citizens of Cyprian Salamis; when they balked at paying the accumulated interest he urged Cicero, then proconsul in Cilicia, to enforce the collection with Roman arms.65 He governed Cisalpine Gaul with integrity and competence and, returning to Rome, was made urban praetor by Caesar (45).
Every generous element in his nature rebelled against Cassius’ proposal. Cassius reminded him of his rebel ancestry, and perhaps Brutus felt challenged to prove it by imitation. The sensitive youth blushed when he saw, affixed to statues of the older Brutus, such inscriptions as “Brutus, are you dead?”—or, “Your posterity is unworthy of you.”66 Cicero dedicated to him several treatises written in these years. Meanwhile it was whispered among the patricians that at the next meeting of the Senate, on March 15, Lucius Cotta would move that Caesar be made king, on the ground that according to the Sibylline oracle the Parthians would be conquered only by a king.67 A Senate half filled with Caesar’s appointees, said Cassius, would pass the measure, and all hope of restoring the Republic would be lost. Brutus yielded, and the conspirators then made definite plans. Portia drew the secret from her husband by stabbing her thigh to show that no physical injury could make her speak against her will. In a moment of unprophetic sentiment Brutus insisted that Antony should be spared.
On the evening of March 14, to a gathering at his home, Caesar proposed as topic of conversation, “What is the best death?” His own answer was, “A sudden one.” The next morning his wife begged him not to go to the Senate, saying that she had dreamed of seeing him covered with blood. A like-minded servant sought to provide a deterrent omen by causing an ancestral picture to fall from the wall. But Decimus Brutus, who was one of his closest friends and was also one of the conspirators—urged him to attend the Senate if only to adjourn it courteously in person. A friend who had learned of the plot came to warn him, but Caesar had already left. On his way to the Senate he met a soothsayer who had once whispered to him, “Beware the ides of March”; Caesar remarked, smiling, that the ides had come and all was well. “But they have not passed,” answered Spurinna. While Caesar was offering the usual presession sacrifice before Pompey’s theater, where the Senate was to meet, a tablet informing him of the conspiracy was put into his hands. He ignored it, and tradition says that it was found in his hand after his death.VI
Trebonius, a conspirator who had been a favored general of Caesar, detained Antony from the meeting by conversation. When Caesar entered the theater and took his seat, the “Liberators” flung themselves upon him without delay. “Some have written,” reports Suetonius, “that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him he said, in Greek, kai su teknon—‘You, too, my child?’ ”69 When Brutus struck him, says Appian, Caesar ended all resistance; drawing his robe over his face and head, he submitted to the blows and fell at the foot of Pompey’s statue.70 One wish had been granted to the most complete man that antiquity produced.
I It was already an ancient mode of birth, being mentioned in the laws ascribed to Numa. Caesar’s cognomen was not derived from the operation (caesus ab utero matris); long before him there had been Caesars among the Julii.
II Ten miles west of the Rhine, 160 miles south of Cologne.
III The speech as it has come down to us was much revised. It differed so much from the actual address—which had been confused by hostile disturbances—that when Milo read it he exclaimed: “O Cicero! If you had only spoken as you have written I should not now be eating the very excellent fish of Marseilles.”23
IV Our only authority for this embassy is Caesar.36
V Cf. p. 65.
VI These stories of the ides of March appear in Suetonius, Plutarch, and Appian;68 but they may be legend nevertheless.