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 Caesar's memoranda, materials to serve his purpose, he did not
hesitate to forge them. Cicero had no power, and might be in personal
danger, for Antony knew his sentiments as to state matters generally, and
more particularly towards himself. Rome was no longer any p