[44 B.C.]

had passed, made haste to the island in the river, where he had a legion; which he drew into the Field of Mars, that he might be in readiness to execute the orders of Antony; for he yielded to him, both in the quality of Cæsar's friend and consul.

"The soldiers would very willingly have revenged Cæsar's death so basely murdered, but that they feared the senate, who favoured the murderers, and expected the issue of things. Cæsar had no soldiery with him, for he loved not guards, but contented himself with ushers; besides, he was accompanied by a great number of people of the robe, and whole troops of as well citizens as strangers, with freedmen and slaves, followed him from his house to the palace; but in a moment all these crowds were vanished, there remained with him only three unhappy slaves; who putting him in his litter, and taking it upon their shoulders, carried him, who but a little before was master of both sea and land. The conspirators after the execution had a mind to have said something to the senate; but nobody staying to hear them, they twisted their robes about their left arms instead of bucklers, and with their bloody daggers in their hands ran through the streets, crying out, that they had slain the king and the tyrant; causing to march before them a man carrying a cap on the head of a pike, which is the badge of liberty; they exhorted likewise the people to the restoring of the commonwealth; putting them in mind of the first Brutus, and the oath wherein he had engaged the citizens, and with them their posterity."g

CESAR was assassinated in his fifty-sixth year. He fell pierced with twenty-three wounds, only one of which, as the physician who examined his body affirmed, was in itself mortal. In early life his health had been delicate, and at a later period he was subject to fits of epilepsy, which attacked him in the campaign of Africa, and again before the battle of Munda. Yet the energy and habitual rapidity of all his movements seem to prove the robustness of his constitution, at least in middle life. It may be presumed that if he had escaped the dagger of the assassin, he might, in the course of nature, have attained old age; and against any open attack his position was impregnable. He might have lived to carry out himself the liberal schemes which he was enabled only to project. But it was ordained, for inscrutable reasons, that their first originator should perish, and leave them to be eventually effected by a successor, within a quarter of a century.

The judgment of the ancients upon this famous deed varied according to their interests and predilections. If, indeed, the republic had been permanently re-established, its saviour would have been hailed, perhaps, with unmingled applause, and commanded the favour of the Romans to a late posterity. Cicero, though he might have shrunk from participating in the deed, deemed it expedient to justify it, and saluted its authors in exulting accents, as tyrannicides and deliverers. But the courtiers of the later Cæsars branded it as a murder, or passed it over in significant silence. Virgil, who ventures to pay a noble compliment to Cato, and glories in the eternal punishment of Catiline, bestows not a word on the exploit of Brutus. Even Lucan, who beholds in it a stately sacrifice to the gods, admits the detestation with which it was generally regarded. Augustus, indeed, wisely tolerant, allowed Messalla to speak in praise of Cassius; but Tiberius would not suffer Cremutius to call him with impunity the last of the Romans.

Velleius, Seneca, and, above all, Valerius Maximus, express their abhorrence of the murder in energetic and manly tones. It was the mortification, they said, of the conspirators at their victim's superiority, their disappointment at the slowness with which the stream of honours flowed to them, their envy, their vanity, anything rather than their patriotism, that impelled them to it. The Greek writers, who had less of prejudice to urge them to extenuate the deed, speak of it without reserve as a monstrous and abominable crime. Again, while Tacitus casts a philosophic glance on the opinions of others, and abstains from passing any judgment of his own, Suetonius allows that Cæsar was, indeed, justly slain, but makes no attempt to absolve his assassins. From Livy and Florus, and the epitomiser of Trogus, we may infer that the sentiments expressed by Plutarch were the same which the most reasonable of the Romans generally adopted; he declared that the disorders of the body politic required the establishment of monarchy, and that Cæsar was sent by providence, as the mildest physician, for its conservation. On the whole, when we consider the vices of the times and the general laxity of principle justly ascribed to the later ages of Greek and Roman heathenism, it is interesting to observe how little sympathy was extended by antiquity to an exploit which appealed so boldly to it.b

The following extract from Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars is our chief source of knowledge as to Cæsar's personality.

He is said to have been tall, of a fair complexion, round limbed, rather full faced, with eyes black and lively, very healthful, except that, towards the end of his life, he would suddenly fall into fainting-fits, and be frightened in his sleep. He was likewise twice seized with the falling sickness in the time of battle. He was so nice in the care of his person that he had not only the hair of his head cut and his face shaved with great exactness, but likewise had the hair on other parts of the body plucked out by the roots, a practice with which some persons upbraidingly charged him. His baldness gave him much uneasiness, having often found himself upon that account exposed to the ridicule of his enemies. He therefore used to bring forward his hair from the crown of his head; and of all the honours conferred upon him by the senate and people, there was none which he either accepted or used with greater pleasure than the right of wearing constantly a laurel crown. It is said that he was particular in his dress. For he used the latus clavus1 with fringes about the wrists, and always had it girded about him but loosely. This circumstance gave origin to the expression of Sulla, who often advised the nobility to beware of "the loose-coated boy."

He first lived in Subura in a small house; but, after his advancement to the pontificate, in a house belonging to the state in the Sacred way. Many writers say that he affected neatness in his person, and niceness in his entertainments: that he entirely took down again a country-seat, near the grove of Aricia, which he erected from the foundation, and finished at a vast expense, because it had not exactly suited his fancy, though he was at that time poor and in debt; and that he carried about in his expeditions marble pavement for his tent.

They likewise report that he invaded Britain in hopes of finding pearls, the bigness of which he would compare together, and examine the weight by poising them in his hand; that he would purchase at any cost gems, carved works, and pictures, executed by the eminent masters of antiquity; and

1 The latus clavus was a broad stripe of purple, in the form of a ribbon, sewed to the tunic on the fore part. There were properly two such; and it was broad, to distinguish it from that of the equites, who wore a narrow one.

that he would give for handsome young slaves a price so extravagant that he was ashamed to have it entered in the diary of his expenses.

The same authors inform us that he constantly kept two tables in the provinces, one for the officers of the army, or the gentlemen of the provinces, and the other for such of the Roman gentry as had no commission in the troops, and provincials of the first distinction. He was so very exact in the management of his domestic affairs, both small and great, that he once put a baker in fetters, for serving him with a finer sort of bread than his guests; and put to death a freedman, and a particular favourite, for debauching the lady of a Roman knight, though no complaint had been made to him of the affair.

It is admitted by all that he was much addicted to women, as well as very expensive in his intrigues with them, and that he debauched many ladies of the highest quality; among whom were Postumia the wife of Servius Sulpicius, Lollia the wife of Aulus Gabinius, Tertulla the wife of M. Crassus, and likewise Mucia the wife of Cn. Pompeius. For it is certain that the Curios, father and son, and many others, objected to Pompey in reproach, "that to gratify his ambition, he married the daughter of a man upon whose account he had divorced his wife, after having had three children by her, and whom he used, with a heavy sigh, to call Ægisthus." But the mistress whom of all he most loved was Servilia, the mother of M. Brutus; for whom he purchased in his consulship, next after the commencement of their intrigue, a pearl which cost him six millions of sesterces; and in the Civil War, besides other presents, consigned to her, for a trifling consideration, some valuable estates in land, which were exposed to public auction. When many persons wondered at the lowness of the price, Cicero facetiously observed, "To let you know how much better a purchase this is than ye imagine, Tertia is deducted"; for Servilia was supposed to have prostituted her daughter Tertia to Cæsar.

That he had intrigues likewise with married women in the provinces appears from a distich, which was much repeated in the Gallic triumph.

In the number of his mistresses were also some queens, such as Eunoe, a Moor, the wife of Bogudes, to whom and her husband he made, as Naso reports, many large presents. But his greatest favourite was Cleopatra, with whom he often revelled all night till daybreak, and would have gone with her through Egypt in a pleasure-boat, as far as Ethiopia, had not the army refused to follow him. He afterwards invited her to Rome, whence he sent her back loaded with honours and presents, and gave her permission to call by his name a son, who, according to the testimony of some Greek historians, resembled Cæsar both in person and gait. Mark Antony declared in the senate that Cæsar had acknowledged the child as his own; and that C. Matius, C. Oppius, and the rest of Cæsar's friends knew it to be true. On which occasion Oppius, as if it had been an imputation which he was called upon to refute, published a book to show that the child which Cleopatra fathered upon Cæsar was not his. Helvius Cinna, tribune of the commons, told several persons as a fact that he had a bill ready drawn up, which Cæsar had ordered him to get enacted in his absence, that, with the view of procuring issue, he might contract marriage with any one female, or as many as he pleased.

It is acknowledged even by his enemies that in respect of wine he was abstemious. A remark is ascribed to M. Cato, "that he was the only sober man amongst all those who were engaged in a design to subvert the government." For in regard to diet, C. Oppius informs us, he was so indifferent

for his own part, that when a person in whose house he was entertained had served him, instead of fresh oil, with oil which had some sort of seasoning in it, and which the rest of the company would not touch, he alone ate very heartily of it, that he might not seem to tax the master of the house with inelegance or want of attention.

He never discovered any great regard to moderation, either in his command of the army, or civil offices; for we have the testimony of some writers that he requested money of the proconsul his predecessor in Spain, and the Roman allies in that quarter, for the discharge of his debts; and some towns of the Lusitanians, notwithstanding they attempted no resistance to his arms and opened to him their gates, upon his arrival before them he plundered in a hostile manner. In Gaul, he rifled the chapels and temples of the gods, which were filled with rich presents; and demolished cities oftener for the sake of plunder than for any offence they had given him. By this means gold became so plentiful with him that he exchanged it through Italy and the provinces of the empire for three thousand sesterces the pound. In his first consulship he stole out of the Capitol three thousand pounds' weight of gold, and placed in the room of it the same weight of gilt brass. He bartered likewise to foreign nations and princes, for gold, the titles of allies and kings; and squeezed out of Ptolemy alone near six thousand talents, in the name of himself and Pompey. He afterwards supported the expense of the Civil Wars and of his triumphs and public shows, by the most flagrant rapine and sacrilege.

In point of eloquence and military achievements, he equalled at least, if he did not surpass, the greatest men. After his prosecution of Dolabella, he was indisputably esteemed among the most distinguished pleaders. Cicero, in recounting to Brutus the famous orators, declares "he does not see that Cæsar was inferior to any one of them; that he had an elegant, splendid, noble, and magnificent vein of eloquence." And in a letter to C. Nepos, he writes of him in the following terms: "What! which of all the orators, who, during the whole course of their lives, have done nothing else, can you prefer before him? Which of them is ever more pointed in expression, or more often commands your applause?" In his youth he seems to have chosen Strabo Cæsar as his model; out of whose oration for the Sardinians he has transcribed some passages literally into his Divinatio. He is said to have delivered himself with a shrill voice, and an animated action which was graceful. He has left behind him some speeches, among which are a few not genuine; as that for Q. Metellus. These Augustus supposes, and with reason, to be the production of blundering writers of shorthand, who were not able to follow him in the delivery, rather than anything published by himself. For I find in some copies the title is not "for Metellus," but "what he wrote to Metellus"; whereas the speech is delivered in the name of Cæsar, vindicating Metellus and himself from the aspersions cast upon them by their common defamers. The speech addressed "to his soldiers in Spain," Augustus considers likewise as spurious. Under this title we meet with two; one made, as is pretended, in the first battle, and the other in the last; at which time Asinius Pollio says, he had not leisure to address the soldiers, on account of the sudden assault of the enemy.

He has likewise left commentaries of his own transactions both in the Gallic and the civil war with Pompey; for the author of the Alexandrian, African, and Spanish wars is not known with any certainty. Some think they are the production of Oppius, and some of Hirtius; the latter of whom composed the last book, but an imperfect one, of the Gallic War. Of those