n asked from Caesar himself
the property of Attia, Caesar's mother, who had died at the time and had
been honored by a public burial.
[-18-] While these three men were behaving in this wise, they were also
magnifying the former Caesar to the greatest degree. As they were all
aiming at sole supremacy and were all striving for it, they vindictively
pursued the remainder of the assassins, apparently in the idea that they
were preparing from afar immunity for themselves in what they were doing,
and safety; and everything which tended to his honor they readily took
up, in expectation of some day being themselves deemed worthy of similar
distinctions: for this reason they glorified him by the decrees which had
been passed, and by others which they now added to them. On the first day
of the year they themselves took an oath and made others swear that they
would consider binding all his acts; this action is still taken in the
case of all officials who successively hold power, or again of those
who lived in his era, and have not been dishonored. They also laid the
foundation of a hero-shrine in the Forum, on the spot where he had been
burned, and escorted a kind of image of him at the horse-races together
with a second statue of Venus. In case news of a victory came from
anywhere they assigned the honor of a thanksgiving to the victor by
himself and to Caesar, though dead, by himself. They compelled everybody
to celebrate his birthday wearing laurel and in good spirits, passing
a law that all others, neglected it, were accursed before Jupiter and
before him while any senators or their sons should forfeit twenty-five
myriads of denarii. Now it happened that the Ludi Apollinares fell on the
same day, and they therefore voted that his natal feast should be held
on the previous day,[28] because (they said) there was an oracle of the
Sibyl forbidding a festival to be celebrated during that twenty-four
hours to any god except Apollo. [-19-] Besides granting him these
privileges they regarded the day on which he had been murdered (on which
there was always a regular meeting of the senate) as a dies nefas. The
room in which he had been murdered they closed immediately and later
transformed it into a privy. They also built the Curia Julia, called
after him, next to the so-named Comitium, as had been voted. Besides,
they forbade any likeness of him, because he was in very truth a god, to
be carried at the funerals of his relatives, which
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