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$Title{Julius Caesar
Chapter XI: The Conspiracy}
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$Author{Abbott, Jacob}
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$Subject{caesar
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$Date{1900}
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Title:       Julius Caesar
Author:      Abbott, Jacob
Date:        1900

Chapter XI: The Conspiracy

     Caesar's greatness and glory came at last to a very sudden and violent
end.  He was assassinated.  All the attendant circumstances of this deed, too,
were of the most extraordinary character, and thus the dramatic interest which
adorns all parts of the great conqueror's history marks strikingly its end.

     His prosperity and power awakened, of course, a secret jealousy and ill
will.  Those who were disappointed in their expectations of his favor
murmured.  Others, who had once been his rivals, hated him for having
triumphed over them.  Then there was a stern spirit of democracy, too, among
certain classes of the citizens of Rome which could not brook a master.  It is
true that the sovereign power in the Roman commonwealth had never been shared
by all the inhabitants.  It was only in certain privileged classes that the
sovereignty was vested; but among these the functions of government were
divided and distributed in such a way as to balance one interest against
another, and to give all their proper share of influence and authority.
Terrible struggles and conflicts often occurred among these various sections
of society, as one or another attempted from time to time to encroach upon the
rights or privileges of the rest.  These struggles, however, ended usually in
at last restoring again the equilibrium which had been disturbed. No one power
could ever gain the entire ascendency; and thus, as all monarchism seemed
excluded from their system, they called it a republic. Caesar, however, had
now concentrated in himself all the principal elements of power, and there
began to be suspicions that he wished to make himself in name and openly, as
well as secretly and in fact, a king.

     The Romans abhorred the very name of king.  They had had kings in the
early periods of their history, but they made themselves odious by their pride
and their oppressions, and the people had deposed and expelled them. The
modern nations of Europe have several times performed the same exploit, but
they have generally felt unprotected and ill at ease without a personal
sovereign over them and have accordingly, in most cases, after a few years,
restored some branch of the expelled dynasty to the throne.  The Romans were
more persevering and firm.  They had managed their empire now for five hundred
years as a republic, and though they had had internal dissensions, conflicts,
and quarrels without end, had persisted so firmly and unanimously in their
detestation of all regal authority, that no one of the long line of ambitious
and powerful statesmen, generals, or conquerors by which the history of the
empire had been signalized, had ever dared to aspire to the name of king.

     There began, however, soon to appear some indications that Caesar, who
certainly now possessed regal power, would like the regal name.  Ambitious
men, in such cases, do not directly assume themselves the titles and symbols
of royalty.  Others make the claim for them, while they faintly disavow it,
till they have opportunity to see what effect the idea produces on the public
mind.  The following incidents occurred which it was thought indicated such a
design on the part of Caesar.

     There were in some of the public buildings certain statues of kings; for
it must be understood that the Roman dislike to kings was only a dislike to
having kingly authority exercised over themselves.  They respected and
sometimes admired the kings of other countries, and honored their exploits,
and made statues to commemorate their fame.  They were willing that kings
should reign elsewhere, so long as there were no king of Rome.  The American
feeling at the present day is much the same.  If the Queen of England were to
make a progress through this country, she would receive, perhaps, as many and
as striking marks of attention and honor as would be rendered to her in her
own realm.  We venerate the antiquity of her royal line; we admire the
efficiency of her government and the sublime grandeur of her empire, and have
as high an idea as any, of the powers and prerogatives of her crown - and
these feelings would show themselves most abundantly on any proper occasion.
We are willing, nay, wish that she should continue to reign over Englishmen;
and yet, after all, it would take some millions of bayonets to place a queen
securely upon a throne over this land.

     Regal power was accordingly, in the abstract, looked up to at Rome, as it
is elsewhere, with great respect; and it was, in fact, all the more tempting
as an object of ambition, from the determination felt by the people that it
should not be exercised there.  There were, accordingly,statues of kings at
Rome.  Caesar placed his own statue among them.  Some approved, others
murmured.

     There was a public theater in the city, where the officers of the
government were accustomed to sit in honorable seats prepared expressly for
them, those of the Senate being higher and more distinguished than the rest.
Caesar had a seat prepared for himself there, similar in form to a throne, and
adorned it magnificently with gilding and ornaments of gold, which gave it the
entire pre-eminence over all the other seats.

     He had a similar throne placed in the senate chamber, to be occupied by
himself when attending there, like the throne of the King of England in the
House of Lords.

     He held, moreover, a great many public celebrations and triumphs in the
city in commemoration of his exploits and honors; and, on one of these
occasions, it was arranged that the Senate were to come to him at a temple in
a body; and announce to him certain decrees which they had passed to his
honor.  Vast crowds had assembled to witness the ceremony Caesar was seated in
a magnificent chair, which might have been called either a chair or a throne
and was surrounded by officers and attendants When the Senate approached,
Caesar did not rise to receive them, but remained seated, like a monarch
receiving a deputation of his subjects.  The incident would not seem to be in
itself of any great importance, but, considered as an indication of Caesar's
designs, it attracted great attention, and produced a very general excitement.
The act was adroitly managed so as to be somewhat equivocal in its character,
in order that it might be represented one way or the other on the following
day, according as the indications of public sentiment might incline.  Some
said that Caesar was intending to rise, but was prevented, and held down by
those who stood around him.  Others said that an officer motioned to him to
rise, but he rebuked his interference by a frown, and continued his seat.
Thus while, in fact, he received the Roman Senate as their monarch and
sovereign, his own intentions and designs in so doing were left somewhat in
doubt, in order to avoid awakening a sudden and violent opposition.

     Not long after this, as he was returning in public from some great
festival, the streets being full of crowds, and the populace following him in
great throngs with loud acclamations, a man went up to his statue as he passed
it, and placed upon the head of it a laurel crown, fastened with a white
ribbon, which was a badge of royalty.  Some officers ordered the ribbon to be
taken down, and sent the man to prison.  Caesar was very much displeased with
the officers, and dismissed them from their office.  He wished, he said, to
have the opportunity to disavow, himself, such claims, and not to have others
disavow them for him.

     Caesar's disavowals were, however, so faint, and people had so little
confidence in their sincerity, that the cases became more and more frequent in
which the titles and symbols of royalty were connected with his name.  The
people who wished to gain his favor saluted him in public with the name of
Rex, the Latin word for king.  He replied that his name was Caesar, not Rex,
showing, however, no other signs of displeasure.  On one great occasion, a
high public officer, a near relative of his, repeatedly placed a diadem upon
his head, Caesar himself, as often as he did it, gently putting it off.  At
last he sent the diadem away to a temple that was near, saying that there was
no king in Rome but Jupiter.  In a word, all his conduct indicated that he
wished to have it appear that the people were pressing the crown upon him when
he himself was steadily refusing it.

     This state of things produced a very strong and universal, though
suppressed excitement in the city.  Parties were formed.  Some began to be
willing to make Caesar king; others were determined to hazard their lives to
prevent it.  None dared, however, openly to utter their sentiments on either
side.  They expressed them by mysterious looks and dark intimations.  At the
time when Caesar refused to rise to receive the Senate, many of the members
withdrew in silence, and with looks of offended dignity.  When the crown was
placed upon his statue or upon his own brow, a portion of the populace would
applaud with loud acclamations; and whenever he disavowed these acts, either
by words or counter-actions of his own, an equally loud acclamation would
arise from the other side.  On the whole, however, the idea that Caesar was
gradually advancing toward the kingdom steadily gained ground.

     And yet Caesar himself spoke frequently with great humility in respect to
his pretensions and claims; and when he found public sentiment turning against
the ambitious schemes he seems secretly to have cherished, he wou'd present
some excuse or explanation for his conduct plausible enough to answer the
purpose of a disavowal.  When he received the Senate, sitting like a king, on
the occasion before referred to, when they read to him the decrees which they
had passed in his favor, he replied to them that there was more need of
diminishing the public honors which he received than of increasing them.  When
he found, too, how much excitement his conduct on that occasion had produced,
he explained it by saying that he had retained his sitting posture on account
of the infirmity of his health, as it made him dizzy to stand.  He thought,
probably, that these pretexts would tend to quiet the strong and turbulent
spirits around him, from whose envy or rivalry he had most to fear, without at
all interfering with the effect which the act itself would have produced upon
the masses of the population.  He wished, in a word, to accustom them to see
him assume the position and the bearing of a sovereign, while, by his apparent
humility in his intercourse with those immediately around him, he avoided as
much as possible irritating and arousing the jealous and watchful rivals who
were next to him in power.

     If this were his plan, it seemed to be advancing prosperously toward its
accomplishment.  The population of the city seemed to become more and more
familiar with the idea that Caesar was about to become a king.  The opposition
which the idea had at first awakened appeared to subside, or, at least, the
public expression of it, which daily became more and more determined and
dangerous, was restrained.  At length the time arrived when it appeared safe
to introduce the subject to the Roman Senate.  This, of course, was a
hazardous experiment.  It was managed, however, in a very adroit and ingenious
manner.

     There were in Rome, and, in fact, in many other cities and countries of
the world in those days, a variety of prophetic books, called the Sibylline
Oracles, in which it was generally believed that future events were foretold.
Some of these volumes or rolls, which were very ancient and of great
authority, were preserved in the temples at Rome, under the charge of a board
of guardians, who were to keep them with the utmost care, and to consult them
on great occasions, in order to discover beforehand what would be the result
of public measures or great enterprises which were in contemplation.  It
happened that at this time the Romans were engaged in a war with the
Parthians, a very wealthy and powerful nation of Asia.  Caesar was making
preparations for an expedition to the East to attempt to subdue this people.
He gave orders that the Sibylline Oracles should be consulted.  The proper
officers, after consulting them with the usual solemn ceremonies, reported to
the Senate that they found it recorded in these sacred prophecies that the
Parthians could not be conquered except by a king.  A senator proposed,
therefore, that, to meet the emergency, Caesar should be made king during the
war.  There was at first no decisive action on this proposal.  It was
dangerous to express any opinion.  People were thoughtful, serious, and
silent, as on the eve of some great convulsion.  No one knew what others were
meditating, and thus did not dare to express his own wishes or designs. There
soon, however, was a prevailing understanding that Caesar's friends were
determined on executing the design of crowning him, and that the fifteenth of
March, called, in their phraseology, the Ides of March, was fixed upon as the
coronation day.

     In the mean time, Caesar's enemies, though to all outward appearance
quiet and calm, had not been inactive.  Finding that his plans were now ripe
for execution, and that they had no open means of resisting them, they formed
a conspiracy to assassinate Caesar himself, and thus bring his ambitious
schemes to an effectual and final end.  The name of the original leader of
this conspiracy was Cassius.

     Cassius had been for a long time Caesar's personal rival and enemy.  He
was a man of a very violent and ardent temperament, impetuous and fearless,
very fond of exercising power himself, but very restless and uneasy in having
it exercised over him.  He had all the Roman repugnance to being under the
authority of a master, with an additional personal determination of his own
not to submit to Caesar.  He determined to slay Caesar rather than to allow
him to be made a king, and he went to work, with great caution, to bring other
leading and influential men to join him in this determination.  Some of those
to whom he applied said that they would unite with him in his plot provided he
would get Marcus Brutus to join them.

     Brutus was the praetor of the city.  The praetorship of the city was a
very high municipal office.  The conspirators wished to have Brutus join them
partly on account of his station as a magistrate, as if they supposed that by
having the highest public magistrate of the city for their leader in the deed,
the destruction of their victim would appear less like a murder, and would be
invested, instead, in some respects, with the sanctions and with the dignity
of an official execution.

     Then, again, they wished for the moral support which would be afforded
them in their desperate enterprise by Brutus's extraordinary personal
character.  He was younger than Cassius, but he was grave, thoughtful,
taciturn, calm - a man of inflexible integrity, of the coolest determination,
and, at the same time, of the most undaunted courage.  The conspirators
distrusted one another, for the resolution of impetuous men is very apt to
fail when the emergency arrives which puts it to the test; but as for Brutus,
they knew very well that whatever he undertook he would most certainly do.

     There was a great deal even in his name.  It was a Brutus that five
centuries before had been the main instrument of the expulsion of the Roman
kings.  He had secretly meditated the design, and, the better to conceal it,
had feigned idiocy, as the story was, that he might not be watched or
suspected until the favorable hour for executing his design should arrive. He
therefore ceased to speak, and seemed to lose his reason; he wandered about
the city silent and gloomy, like a brute.  His name had been Lucius Junius
before.  They added Brutus now, to designate his condition.  When at last,
however, the crisis arrived which he judged favorable for the expulsion of the
kings, he suddenly reassumed his speech and his reason, called the astonished
Romans to arms, and triumphantly accomplished his design.  His name and memory
had been cherished ever since that day as of a great deliverer.

     They, therefore, who looked upon Caesar as another king, naturally turned
their thoughts to the Brutus of their day, hoping to find in him another
deliverer.  Brutus found, from time to time, inscriptions on his ancient
namesake's statue expressing the wish that he were now alive.  He also found
each morning, as he came to the tribunal where he was accustomed to sit in the
discharge of the duties of his office, brief writings, which had been left
there during the night, in which few words expressed deep meaning, such as
"Awake, Brutus, to thy duty;" and "Art thou indeed a Brutus?"

     Still it seemed hardly probable that Brutus could be led to take a
decided stand against Caesar, for they had been warm personal friends ever
since the conclusion of the civil wars.  Brutus had, indeed, been on Pompey's
side while that general lived; he fought with him at the battle of Pharsalia,
but he had been taken prisoner there, and Caesar, instead of executing him as
a traitor, as most victorious generals in a civil war would have done, spared
his life, forgave him for his hostility, received him into his own service,
and afterward raised him to very high and honorable stations.  He gave him the
government of the richest province, and, after his return from it, loaded with
wealth and honors, he made him praetor of the city.  In a word, it would seem
that he had done every thing which it was possible to do to make him one of
his most trustworthy and devoted friends.  The men, therefore, to whom Cassius
first applied, perhaps thought that they were very safe in saying that they
would unite in the intended conspiracy if he would get Brutus to join them.

     They expected Cassius himself to make the attempt to secure the
co-operation of Brutus, as Cassius was on terms of intimacy with him on
account of a family connection.  Cassius's wife was the sister of Brutus. This
had made the two men intimate associates and warm friends in former years,
though they had been recently somewhat estranged from each other on account of
having been competitors for the same offices and honors.  In these contests
Caesar had decided in favor of Brutus.  "Cassius," said he, on one such
occasion, "gives the best reasons; but I can not refuse Brutus any thing he
asks for." In fact, Caesar had conceived a strong personal friendship for
Brutus, and believed him to be entirely devoted to his cause.

     Cassius, however, sought an interview with Brutus, with a view of
engaging him in his design.  He easily effected his own reconciliation with
him, as he had himself been the offended party in their estrangement from each
other.  He asked Brutus whether he intended to be present in the Senate on the
Ides of March, when the friends of Caesar, as was understood, were intending
to present him with the crown.  Brutus said he should not be there. "But
suppose," said Cassius, "we are specially summoned." "Then," said Brutus, "I
shall go, and shall be ready to die if necessary to defend the liberty of my
country."

     Cassius then assured Brutus that there were many other Roman citizens, of
the highest rank, who were animated by the same determination, and that they
all looked up to him to lead and direct them in the work which it was now very
evident must be done.  "Men look," said Cassius, "to other praetors to
entertain them with games, spectacles, and shows, but they have very different
ideas in respect to you.  Your character, your name, your position, your
ancestry, and the course of conduct which you have already always pursued,
inspire the whole city with the hope that you are to be their deliverer.  The
citizens are all ready to aid you, and to sustain you at the hazard of their
lives; but they look to you to go forward, and to act in their name and in
their behalf, in the crisis which is now approaching."

     Men of a very calm exterior are often susceptible of the profoundest
agitations within, the emotions seeming to be sometimes all the more permanent
and uncontrollable from the absence of outward display.  Brutus said little,
but his soul was excited and fired by Cassius's words.  There was a struggle
in his soul between his grateful sense of his political obligations to Caesar
and his personal attachment to him on the one hand, and, on the other, a
certain stern Roman conviction that every thing should be sacrificed, even
friendship and gratitude, as well as fortune and life, to the welfare of his
country.  He acceded to the plan, and began forthwith to enter upon the
necessary measures for putting it into execution.

     There was a certain general, named Ligurius, who had been in Pompey's
army, and whose hostility to Caesar had never been really subdued.  He was now
sick.  Brutus went to see him.  He found him in his bed.  The excitement in
Rome was so intense, though the expressions of it were suppressed and
restrained, that every one was expecting continually some great event, and
every motion and look was interpreted to have some deep meaning.  Ligurius
read in the countenance of Brutus, as he approached his bedside, that he had
not come on any trifling errand.  "Ligurius," said Brutus, "this is not a time
for you to be sick." "Brutus," replied Ligurius, rising at once from his
couch, "if you have any enterprise in mind that is worthy of you, I am well."
Brutus explained to the sick man their design, and he entered into it with
ardor.

     The plan was divulged to one after another of such men as the
conspirators supposed most worthy of confidence in such a desperate
undertaking, and meetings for consultation were held to determine what plan to
adopt for finally accomplishing their end.  It was agreed that Caesar must be
slain; but the time, the place, and the manner in which the deed should be
performed were all yet undecided.  Various plans were proposed in the
consultations which the conspirators held; but there was one thing peculiar to
them all, which was, that they did not any of them contemplate or provide for
any thing like secrecy in the commission of the deed.  It was to be performed
in the most open and public manner.  With a stern and undaunted boldness,
which has always been considered by mankind as truly sublime, they determined
that, in respect to the actual execution itself of the solemn judgment which
they had pronounced, there should be nothing private or concealed.  They
thought over the various public situations in which they might find Caesar,
and where they might strike him down, only to select the one which would be
most public of all.  They kept, of course, their preliminary counsels private,
to prevent the adoption of measures for counteracting them; but they were to
perform the deed in such a manner as that, so soon as it was performed, they
should stand out to view, exposed fully to the gaze of all mankind as the
authors of it.  They planned no retreat, no concealment, no protection
whatever for themselves, seeming to feel that the deed which they were about
to perform, of destroying the master and monarch of the world, was a deed in
its own nature so grand and sublime as to raise the perpetrators of it
entirely above all considerations relating to their own personal safety.
Their plan, therefore, was to keep their consultations and arrangements secret
until they were prepared to strike the blow, then to strike it in the most
public and imposing manner possible, and calmly afterward to await the
consequences.

     In this view of the subject, they decided that the chamber of the Roman
Senate was the proper place, and the Ides of March, the day on which he was
appointed to be crowned, was the proper time for Caesar to be slain.