Caesar.  That “consecration of the dagger” to the cause of liberty has been the fruitful parent of too much evil ever since to make its use anything but hateful.  That Cicero was among the actual conspirators is probably not true, though his enemies strongly asserted it.  But at least he gloried in the deed when done, and was eager to claim all the honours of a tyrannicide.  Nay, he went farther than the actual conspirators, in words at least; it is curious to find him so careful to disclaim complicity in the act.  “Would that you had invited me to that banquet on the Ides of March! there would then have been no leavings from the feast",—­he writes to Cassius.  He would have had their daggers turned on Antony, at all events, as well as on Caesar.  He wishes that “the gods may damn Caesar after he is dead;” professing on this occasion a belief in a future retribution, on which at other times he was sceptical.  It is but right to remember all this, when the popular tide turned, and he himself came to be denounced to political vengeance.  The levity with which he continually speaks of the assassination of Caesar—­a man who had never treated him, at any rate, with anything but a noble forbearance—­is a blot on Cicero’s character which his warmest apologists admit.

The bloody deed in the Capitol was done—­a deed which was to turn out almost what Goethe called it—­“the most absurd that ever was committed”.  The great Dictator who lay there alone, a “bleeding piece of earth”, deserted by the very men who had sought of late to crown him, was perhaps Rome’s fittest master; certainly not the worst of the many with whom a personal ambition took the place of principle.  Three slaves took up the dead body of their master, and carried it home to his house.  Poor wretches! they knew nothing about liberty or the constitution; they had little to hope, and probably little to fear; they had only a humble duty to do, and did it.  But when we read of them, and of that freedman who, not long before, sat by the dead body of Pompey till he could scrape together wreck from the shore to light some sort of poor funeral-pile, we return with a shudder of disgust to those “noble Romans” who occupy at this time the foreground of history.

Caesar had been removed, but it is plain that Brutus and Cassius and their party had neither the ability nor the energy to make any real use of their bloody triumph.  Cicero soon lost all hope of seeing in them the liberators of his country, or of being able to guide himself the revolution which he hoped he had seen begun.  “We have been freed”, he writes to Atticus, “but we are not free”.  “We have struck down the tyrant, but the tyranny survives”.  Antony, in fact, had taken the place of Caesar as master of Rome—­a change in all respects for the worse.  He had surrounded himself with guards; had obtained authority from the Senate to carry out all decrees and orders left by the late Dictator; and when he could not find, amongst