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BETWEEN the 1st of January, 710 (44 B. C.), and the fatal 15th of March we have barely a word from Cicero's pen. There are a couple of notes to that Curius who had been so kind to the beloved freedman Tiro, when he was ill at Patræ, in Achaia, on his way home from the East, in one of which Cicero alludes, in a tone of resigned sarcasm, to what seems to us a comparatively trifling act of aggression on Cæsar's part, and adds that he wishes he were out of his country for good and all. There is a third letter, dated early in January, to a certain Acilius, in Achaia, recommending Curius to his especial favor. And then there is dead silence until three weeks after the assassination of Cæsar.

1

The general course of events during that memorable winter is well enough known. Already at the New Year Casar was virtually king. He realized as clearly as other usurpers have done the necessity of maintaining his prestige by fresh military successes, and he was presently to depart for the Parthian war. But he had made Antony his colleague in the consulship; Dolabella,

1 For an admirable résumé of the precise nature and extent of Cæsar's political usurpations see Duruy's history. "Comme dictateur à vie et consul pour dix ans, il avait la puissance exécutive avec le droit de puiser dans le trésor; comme imperator, la puissance militaire. La puissance tribunétienne lui donna le véto sur le pouvoir législatif; prince du sénat, il dirigeait les débats de cette assemblée; préfet

somewhat against Antony's will, was to act as his own substitute while he should be away, and his particular friends, Hirtius and Pansa, were consuls designate for the next year. Brutus and Cassius, too, had been made prætors, with whatever show of popular election was still preserved. The former, Cæsar's lifelong favorite, received the distinguished post of prætor urbanus. Yet, as though there really lurked a vague suspicion of that intractable pair under Cæsar's light remark about "misliking the companionship of the pale and lean,” both had also received foreign appointments which would presently remove them from the scene of action, Brutus the governorship of Macedonia, and Cassius that of Syria. Every few weeks now some new feeler was put forth to test the temper of the people concerning the definite assumption by their master of the title and insignia of that royalty which he already possessed in fact. The first experiment tried by Caesar was that of not rising from his chair of state when waited on by a deputation of senators. The discourtesy was plainly resented. One morning the statues of the great

des mœurs, il la composait à son gré; grand pontife, il faisait parler la religion selon ses intérêts et surveillait ses ministres. Les finances, l'armée, la religion, le pouvoir exécutif, une partie de l'autorité judiciare, la moitié du pouvoir électoral, et indirectement presque toute la puissance législative étaient donc réunis dans ses mains." (Histoire des Romains, par Victor Duruy, vol. ii. chap. xxxii. p. 501.)

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man were found bedecked with the bandeau of royalty, and during the grand annual function upon the Alban Mount (when will the world behold again so stately a ceremony upon so superb a theatre?), among the shouts that hailed the Dictator as he passed the word rex was clearly distinguishable. "Not king, but Cæsar," was the proud reply, and the tribunes felt encouraged to arrest the indiscreet bawlers; but they were promptly rebuked by Cæsar for their officiousness, and informed that it lay with himself to punish the offense. In February came that indecent festival of the Lupercalia, the carnival of ancient Rome, during which Antony, the consul, who was at least too old for the tomfooleries of the occasion, and who must have been like a Bacchus of Rubens in the traditional costume, "thrice did offer him a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse." Directly afterward, apropos of the preparations for the Parthian expedition, which were now being pushed rapidly forward, the rumor began to circulate of a passage opportunely discovered in one of the sibylline books, which announced that the Parthians could be subdued by none other than a king; and it was understood that action was to be taken in the Senate, upon the Ides of March, on the propriety of making all safe by investing Cæsar with the necessary dignity before he went away.

So far as we are able to judge, it was this rumor which suddenly brought to a head the smouldering designs against the life of Cæsar. The very silence, during the late winter, of a man like Cicero, so prone to relieve excited feeling by pungent speech, indicates that the exasperation against the Dictator of those who now called themselves the Boni had passed from the sentimental into the dangerous phase. The midnight portents, true offspring of heated brains, and the inflammatory placards, like those which called upon M. Brutus

to be worthy of his great ancestor, the king-slayer (who was, however, not his direct ancestor), seem all to belong to the early days of March. But when it comes to a careful search among the authentic records of the most dramatic and notorious of public crimes, we find both the preliminary arrangements and the actual circumstances of the deed involved in a good deal of mystery. Cassius was unquestionably the prime mover of the plot. Brutus, whose sister he had married, required considerable persuasion before he could be induced to engage in it. Cicero was not let into the secret at all. It was not that men doubted his approval of the act; and how enthusiastically he did at first approve it we shall presently see. It was an article in the creed of these men of the past that the assassination of a tyrant is, under certain conditions, a pious and a glorious act. The old Roman constitution distinctly provided for the case. The only doubt would be whether these desperate circumstances had now arrived; and when Plutarch tells us, in his Brutus, that Cicero was excluded from the councils of the conspirators because of the ingrain tendency, which had grown on him with his white hairs, to dally and deliberate, and endlessly to balance the pros and cons of every possible course of action, we perceive the justice of the remark, and cannot doubt that the most picturesque of historians is here speaking the simple truth. What was to be done had to be done quickly. It would never do to let that question of the royal title come up before a subservient Senate, backed by an ostensibly religious sanction. Everything goes to show that the last arrangements were hurriedly made, the rash act clumsily, if boldly, executed, and the subsequent policy of the confederates left altogether to that shaping of circumstance whereby they were so signally betrayed.

They were sixty in all,

some say

-

eighty, but even the former number seems incredibly large. Their most distinguished recruit, after the two chiefs, was Decimus Brutus, one of Cæsar's ablest generals, a man whom the latter trusted so implicitly that he had appointed him guardian of the young Octavian, in the will which was afterward read to the populace with such terrible effect. Decimus was actually present at a dinner given by Lepidus, the future triumvir, to Cæsar on the evening of March 14th, during which the conversation turned on the kind of death most to be desired, and Cæsar gave his voice for a sudden one. There was another gathering the same night at the house of Cassius, which may perhaps have broken up with the singing of a favorite old Greek banqueting song, the spir

ited scholion of Harmodius and Aristogeiton :

"Wreathed with myrtle be my glave, Wreathed like yours, brave hearts, when ye Death to the oppressor gave,

And to Athens liberty."

And so the midnight closed which beset with such phantasms of horror the pillow of Cæsar's wife, and the March morning dawned, as the early spring mornings now dawn upon Rome.

What was the exact spot where the daggers did their ferocious work? Pompey's Curia, of course, the Senate House, adjoining, or more probably connected by an open portico with, the magnificent theatre which the great rival of Cæsar had built and surrounded by plantations of plane-trees, near the modern Campo di Fiori.

But what portion of the Curia? The name was plainly applied both to the senate chamber itself and to the portico aforesaid, on which the hall of assembly undoubtedly opened. The story ran like wild-fire over Rome, that afternoon, that Cæsar had been assassinated in full Senate, in the face and eyes of all the Fathers; and so it would probably have done had he been killed anywhere on

name.

the premises which went by Pompey's The tendency even of truthful people, in times of high public excitement, to add a touch of horror in repeating such a tale is all but irresistible. We are not yet a generation removed from that foul deed which was done in the theatre at Washington, whose histrionic perpetrator also made a merit of having nourished his soul on classical precedents; yet in how many different ways has the sad story been told, and which of us knows just how the thing befell? The truth is that men's own senses play them false at such a time. In this case, moreover, the murderers were never brought to trial, nor was any attempt made properly to sift the evidence concerning the details of their grim achievement. The result is that our three principal authorities for what took place upon the Ides of March Suetonius, Plutarch, and Appian — are materially at variance with one another, and Plutarch is hardly consistent with himself. He speaks as though the Senate were sitting in the portico, or colonnade, which one would think impossible. "The very place, too, where the Senate was to meet seemed to be, by divine appointment, favorable to their purpose. It was a portico, one of those adjoining the theatre, with a large exhedra, or recess, in which there stood a statue of Pompey, erected to him by the commonwealth when he adorned that part of the city with the portico and the theatre."

This appears perfectly explicit, and brings vividly before the mind a place altogether apt for the crime which had been resolved upon; and I am half tempted to question, upon repeated comparison of the three narratives named, whether it were not after all here, outside, in what served as a sort of vestibule to the senate chamber, that the deed was done. Here the conspirators may well have waited, as men lounge in the lobby of the House, until the

slaves had set down Cæsar's litter; here Tullius Cimber presented his petition, and Cinna gave the preconcerted signal by plucking at the purple robe. It was from his litter,1 not from his chair of state, that the doomed man sprang forward at the cold touch of Casca's steel, the only necessarily mortal wound, so said the physicians, among the twentythree which he received, and that heartsickening drawing up" of the robe was but an instinctive attempt to readjust the drapery deranged by his sudden movement.

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The Conscript Fathers, and Cicero among them, were all assembled and waiting the tardy arrival of their perpetual president within a stone's-throw of the spot, within easy hearing of the struggle, no doubt, had it not been so terribly brief and silent. This would explain why Brutus should have shouted out Cicero's name when Cæsar had fallen; and with the rest of the horrified Senate Cicero probably came rushing out, and saw, as he afterward observed to Atticus, "the righteous end of a tyrant."

"They burst forth of the doors," says Plutarch, "and, flying, filled the people with confusion and mad fear; so that men left their houses, abandoning their tables and their goods, and some came running to the place to see the tragedy, while others, having seen it, fled away." Suetonius also says that as soon as Cæsar had ceased to breathe "they all fled, and he lay for some time, until three slaves placed him upon the litter with his arm hanging down, and carried him to his house." And Appian, too, with a touch of strong feeling: "They flying like madmen, three servants only stayed by, who, placing the body upon the litter, bore it home, strangely, since there

1 Appian says he was seated on his throne (Opovov), but the word which Plutarch uses (dopoy) is applied both to the cushioned seat of a litter and to the vehicle itself. Suetonius says only that he leaped forward.

were but three to carry him who only a little while before had been lord of earth and sea.”

I have dwelt too long, perhaps, on what is after all only a possible theory of the facts concerning Cæsar's death. I must pass rapidly over the well-known events of the next few days: the retirement of the assassins to the Capitol, accompanied by Cicero, who in vain entreated them at once to convoke the scattered Senate there; their indecision and divided counsels; the ambiguous reception of Brutus's noble yet frigid address to the people from the Forum; the quick recovery of Antony from the panic which had first overtaken him, when he fled the city in a woman's dress; his return, and bold seizure not only of the public treasure, but of Cæsar's enormous private hoards, and of the will whose provisions he used so adroitly; the ominous movement among Cæsar's veterans quartered in the town; the popular demonstration against the conspirators which followed the funeral.

From the republican point of view, Cæsar should never have been taken and Antony left; and Cicero, over and above his unconquerable personal aversion for Antony, was enough of a statesman to know it. But Cassius was a haughty soldier, and Brutus an unpractical theorist brought up in the school of Cato. They wished to give their deed the air of an act of divine retribution, single and passionless, and undefaced by aught that might savor of private vengeance or needless cruelty; and Cicero, stifling his own misgivings, threw himself ardently into their design. It was Antony, after all, who convened the Senate in the temple of Tellus on the 17th of March, and it seems almost as strange to us as it must have done to the senators them

2 Suetonius mentions merely as a current rumor Cæsar's having exclaimed in Greek, when he saw Brutus's weapon lifted, "And you, my child!" Others, he says, maintain that the victim spoke not a word.