Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/318

 310 MAKCUS BRUTUS. Neither was Csesar wholly without suspicion of him, nor wanted informers that accused Brutus to him ; but he feared, indeed, the high spirit and the great character and the friends that he had, but thought himself secure in his moral disposition. When it was told him that Antony and Dolabella designed some disturbance, " It is not," said he, " the fat and the long-haired men that I fear, but the pale and the lean, " meaning Brutus and Cassius. And when some maligned Brutus to him, and advised him to beware of him, taking hold of his flesh with his hand, " What," he said, " do you think that Brutus will not wait out the time of this little body ? " as if he thought none so fit to succeed him in his power as Brutus. And indeed it seems to be without doubt that Brutus might have been the first man in the commonwealth, if he had had patience but a little time to be second to Cte- sar, and would have suffered his power to decline after it was come to its highest pitch, and the fame of his great actions to die away by degrees. But Cassius, a man of a fierce disposition, and one that out of private malice, rather than love of the public, hated Ctesar, not the tyrant, continually fired and stirred him up. Brutus felt the rule an oppression, but Cassius hated the ruler; and, among other reasons on which he grounded his quarrel against Caesar, the loss of his hons which ho had procured when he was edile elect was one: for Ccesar, finding these in Megara, when that city was taken by Calenus, seized them to himself These beasts, they say, were a great calamity to the Megarians ; for, when their city was just taken, they broke open the lions' dens, and pulled off their chains and let them loose, that they might run upon the enemy that was entering the city ; but the lions turned upon them themselves, and tore to pieces a great many unarmed persons running about, so