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76 Cassius. He would have had their daggers turned on Antony, at all events, as well as on Cæsar. He wishes that "the gods may damn Cæsar 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 Cæsar—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.