CHAPTER XXII. REFLECTIONS UPON CÆSAR'S ASSASSINATION. HIS PERSON, CHARACTER, AND ABILITIES.-CÆSAR REPRESENTS THE VIRTUES AND DEFECTS OF HIS AGE.INFLUENCE OF THE OLD ETRUSCAN DISCIPLINE UPON THE ROMANS: IT IS GRADUALLY SUPPLANTED BY THE CIVILIZATION OF THE GREEKS.-CHARACTER OF GREEK CIVILIZATION IN ITS DECAY.-PHILOSOPHY AND FREE-THINKING INTRODUCED INTO ROME.-DECAY OF THE OLD ITALIAN FAITH, AND RISE OF ORIENTAL SUPERSTITIONS.-INFLUENCE OF GREEK IDEAS UPON THE PRINCIPLES OF ROMAN LAW.-LIBERAL TENDENCIES OF CICERO AND THE CONTEMPORARY JURISCONSULTS.-INFLUENCE OF GREEK LITERATURE UPON THE ROMANS.-CONFLICT BETWEEN THE GREEK AND ITALIAN SPIRIT: ENNIUS, NÆVIUS, LUCILIUS.-SPIRIT OF IMITATION DIFFUSED OVER ROMAN LITERA TURE.-STUDY OF THE GREEK RHETORICIANS: ITS EFFECT UPON ROMAN ELOQUENCE.-DECAY OF MILITARY DISCIPLINE.-FAMILIARITY WITH THE COURTS AND STANDING ARMIES OF THE EAST DEMORALIZES THE PROCONSULS AND THE LEGIONS.-FATAL EFFECTS OF THE OBSERVATION OF ROYALTY ABROAD.CONCLUDING REMARKS ESAR 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, Caesar's premawas in itself mortal.' In early life his health had ture death. 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 1 Suet. Jul. 86. "Suet. Jul. 45.; Plut. Cæs. 17.; Dion, xliii. 32.; Appian, B. C. ii. 101. Comp. Sir Henry Halford's Essays, p. 61.: “Many attacks of epilepsy are symptomatic only of some irritation in the alimentary canal, or of some eruptive disease about to declare itself, or of other occasional passing ills. So far Julius Cæsar was epileptic. . . . . But these attacks were of no consequence in deteriorating his masculine mind." Napoleon, as is well known, had more VOL. II.-25 ..... 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. Judgment of the ancients on his assassination. 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 denounced 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 Catilina, bestows not a word on the exploit of Brutus. Even Lucan, who beholds in it a stately sacrifice to the than one attack of the same kind. Michelet's description is picturesque (Hist. de France, i. 50.): "J'aurais voulu voir cette blanche et pâle figure, fanée avant l'âge par les débauches de Rome, cet homme délicat épileptique, marchant sous les pluies de la Gaule, à la tête des légions, traversant nos fleuves à la nage, ou bien à cheval, entre les litières où ses secrétaires étoient portés." Suetonius adds that Cæsar was disturbed in his latter years by nocturnal ter rors. 1 Cic. ad Att. xiv. 4. 6. 14., Philipp. i. 14., de Off. i. 31., ii. 7., iii. 4. : "Num se astrinxit scelere si qui tyrannum occidit quamvis familiarem? Populo quidem Romano non videtur, qui ex omnibus præclaris factis illud pulcherrimum existimat." 2 Virg. Æn. viii. 668.: "Et te, Catilina, minaci Pendentem scopulo Furiarumque ora trementem; gods, admits the detestation with which it was generally regarded.1 Augustus, indeed, wisely tolerant, allowed Messala 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 palliate the deed, speak of it without reserve as a monstrous and hateful atrocity. Again, while Tacitus casts a philosophic glance on the opinions of others, and abstains from passing any judgment of his own, Suetonius, in saying that Cæsar perished by a just retribution, imputes to him no legal crime, nor extenuates the guilt of his assassins. From Livy and Florus, and the epitomizer of ว Lucan, vii. 596.: "Vivat, et ut Bruti procumbat victima, regnet." Comp. vi. 791., and viii. 609. 2 Tac. Ann. iv. 34. ' Vell. ii. 56.; Senec. de Ira, iii. 30.; Val. Max. i. 7. 2., iii. 1. 3., &c. 5 Suet. Jul. 76.: "Jure cæsus existimetur." As this writer's judgment ' has been cited in justification of the assassination, it may be well to examine it more closely. On referring to the context of this passage, it will be seen that Suetonius had no idea of vindicating the obsolete principle of a barbarous antiquity, that regal usurpation authorized murder (see Liv. ii. 8.),—a principle which the opponents of senatorial ascendency repudiated and resented; but only expressed his own personal indignation at the extravagant vanity of the usurper. Suetonius knew and cared but little for the legal traditions of the commonwealth; but he indulged in splenetic mortification at greatness and its outward distinctions. At the conclusion of his biography he repeats the common remark that all the assassins perished by violent deaths, evidently with the complacency of one who thought them jure cœsi, quite as much as their victim. I subjoin the whole passage. 66 "Prægravant tamen cætera facta dictaque ejus, ut et abusus dominatione et jure cæsus existimetur. Non enim honores modo nimios recepit, ut continuum consulatum, perpetuam dictaturam, præfecturamque morum, insuper Trogus, we may infer that the sentiments expressed by Plutarch were the same which the most reasonable of the Romans generally adopted; the moralizing sage 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. Cæsar's person. The accounts we have received of Cæsar's person describe him as pale in complexion, of a tall and spare figure, with dark piercing eyes and an aquiline nose, with scanty hair, and without a beard. His appearance, at least in youth, was remarkably handsome, and of a delicate and almost feminine character. He continued, even in later years, to be vain of his person, and was wont to hint that he inherited his beauty from his divine ancestress. His baldness, which he strove to conceal by combing his locks over the crown of his head, was regarded by the ancients as a deformity, and a slight puffing of the under lip, which may be traced in some of his best busts, must undoubtedly have detracted from the admirable contour of his countenance. We prænomen imperatoris, cognomen Patris Patriæ, statuam inter reges, suggestum in orchestra; sed et ampliora etiam humano fastigio decerni sibi passus est: sedem auream in curia, et pro tribunali, tensam et ferculum Circensi pompa, templa, aras, simulacra juxta Deos, pulvinar, flaminem, Lupercos, appellationem mensis a suo nomine." It was not the dominatio itself, but the abusus dominationis, that Suetonius deemed worthy of death; his truculent virtue was inflamed, not by the successive consulships, the perpetual dictatorship, &c., least of all by the surname of Father of his Country, which a Camillus and a Cicero had borne, but by the divine honours affected by Cæsar. The words jure casus may be borrowed from a legal formula, but the writer, I repeat, uses them with no reference to a legal, but to a moral retributive justice. 1 Senec. Qu. Nat. v. 18.: "A Tito Livio positum in incerto esse utrum eum magis nasci reipublicæ profuerit an non nasci." Flor. iv. 2. 92.; Eutrop. vi. fin.; Plut. Cæs. 69. can only infer indistinctly his appearance in early life from the busts and medals which remain of him; for all of these belong to the period of his greatness and more advanced age. In the traits which these monuments have preserved to us, there is also great diversity. Indeed, it may be said that there is a marked discrepancy between the expression of the busts and that of the medals. The former, which are assuredly the most life-like of the two, represent a long thin face, with a forehead rather high than capacious, furrowed with strong lines, giving to it an expression of patient endurance and even suffering, such as might be expected from frequent illness, and from a life of toil not unmingled with dissipation. It is from the more dubious evidence of the latter that we derive our common notions of the vivid animation and heroic majesty of Cæsar's lineaments. His loose The temptations to which the spirited young noble was exposed from the graces of his person were not combated by any strictness of moral principle, perhaps not even by a sense of personal dignity. In periods morality. of great social depravity, such as especially degraded the class to which Cæsar belonged, it is by the women even more than by the men that profligacy is provoked and encouraged. The early age at which he became notorious as the gallant of the matron Servilia may show that he imbibed the rudiments of vice in the school of a proficient in intrigue. From that time he persisted without shame or scruple in the pursuit of pleasure in whatever shape it seemed to court him. His amours were celebrated in verse and prose, in the epigrams of Catullus and the satires of Cæcina and Pitholaus. His countrymen enumerated with horror the connexions which shocked their national prejudices. When they repeated from mouth to mouth that Cæsar intrigued with the consorts of a Crassus, a Pompeius, a Gabinius, or a Sulpicius, they manifested neither sympathy for the injured husband nor indignation at the heartless seducer, still less disgust at the sensual indulgence. But the corruption of a Roman matron, of a wife by the sacred rite of the broken bread, was a public scandal, |