The Historians' History of the World 05

The queen of Egypt had followed her august admirer to Italy, and scrupling perhaps to exhibit her publicly in the city, he had installed her in his house and gardens on the other side of the river.[127] There she had her levees for the reception of the noblest Romans, and her blandishments were not perhaps ineffectual in soothing the asperity of their resentments. Cicero himself condescended to solicit an interview with her. She rewarded him with the promise of some Greek volumes from Alexandria, rendered perhaps doubly precious by the recent conflagration. But the populace were shocked at the report that Cæsar meditated raising this barbarian mistress to the dignity of a Roman wife. He was married indeed already to the noble daughter of Calpurnius Piso; but divorce was easy, and might be resorted to without public scandal; Cicero himself had lately dismissed Terentia for alleged incompatibility of temper, and allied himself in her place with a youthful heiress. Besides, one of his creatures was prepared, it was said, with a measure to remove all restrictions upon the dictator’s passions, and allow him to marry as many wives as he pleased, of whatever race or station.

Roman Brazier

Though arrived, as we have seen, at the summit of real power, it was manifest that Cæsar still chafed under the restraints imposed upon him by opinion and prejudice. His firm and well-poised mind seems at last to have lost its equilibrium, and given way to fretful impatience, and a capricious longing for some unattainable object. The Roman nobles, accustomed to the most perfect equality in their intercourse with one another, were mortified at the haughtiness assumed by the chief of the republic, surrounded by a crowd of flatterers through whom the independent patrician could with difficulty force his way.

Once when the senators came in a body to communicate to him their decrees in his honour, he omitted to rise from his seat to receive them. Balbus, it was said, the upstart foreigner, had plucked him by the sleeve and bade him remember that he was their master. It was reported that he had called Sulla a fool for resigning the dictatorship. But while the lines of his domestic policy were yet hardly laid, and every institution in Rome still demanded the pressure of his moulding hand, Cæsar himself was dreaming of foreign conquests, and sighing for his accustomed place at the head of his legions. The disaster of Carrhæ, yet unavenged, might furnish a pretext for war, and the influence of Mithridates, it might be remembered, had extended from the Caspian and the Euxine to the head of the Adriatic. He conceived, we are assured, the gigantic project of first crushing the Parthians, and then returning across the Tanaïs and Borysthenes, subduing the barbarians between the Caucasus and the Carpathian Mountains, and assailing the Germans in the rear. Cleopatra, who felt herself more secure of her admirer in the provinces than in Rome, would doubtless lend her influence to urge him on. The republicans in the city were not perhaps less anxious to remove him to a distance, and launch him on a long and dangerous enterprise. At the close of the year 45 he directed his legions to cross the Adriatic, and assemble in Illyricum, there to await his own speedy arrival. He contemplated an absence of considerable duration. He provided beforehand for the succession of consuls and prætors for the two following years. On the 1st of January, 44, he entered upon his fifth consulship, in which he associated himself with Antony. At the same time he obtained the designation of Hirtius and Pansa for 43, of Decimus Brutus and Munatius Plancus for 42. The prætors appointed for the year 44 were sixteen in number, and among them were M. Brutus and Cassius.

EVENTS LEADING TO THE CONSPIRACY

[45-44 B.C.]