The Historians' History of the World 05

[124] [According to Nicolaus, it was the conspirators who moved the senate to declare Cæsar inviolable. They prompted this decree with the cunning aim of hereby making Cæsar secure (as he would think) and so inducing him to dismiss his bodyguard. After his return from Spain whenever he came forth in public, not only in the country but also in town, he had himself accompanied by a bodyguard. He did not dismiss this bodyguard until shortly before his appointment as perpetual dictator, which took place between the 26th of January and the 15th of February, in the year 44 B.C.

“That this statement of Nicolaus rests on a pure invention can hardly be assumed,” says Wiegandt, who gives it full credit, and adds:

“This is all the more probably true of the above-mentioned decree, because it served the most vital interests of the conspirators. For, so long as Cæsar was protected by his bodyguard any attack upon him exposed their own lives to the hazard. Consideration of their own personal safety, again, influenced the conspirators at every step. Even after Cæsar had dismissed his bodyguard, the attempt was constantly being postponed in view of the danger resulting from his numerous attendance. In this way were rejected the various designs to murder him on the Via Sacra, on the occasion of the meeting of electoral committees in the Campus Martius, or during the gladiatorial games at the theatre. What recommended the senate house to the combined choice of the conspirators as a fit place in which to execute the blow was this, that here, secretly armed themselves, they had nothing to fear from the unarmed friends of Cæsar, and, moreover, might rely on the protection of the gladiators of Decimus Brutus.

“A second argument in favour of the statement of Nicolaus is that a still broader decree of the senate appears to have been based on the same cunning motive. The conspirators had reckoned too little with Cæsar’s sober practical nature when they hoped that as a man sacrosanct he would renounce all armed attendance. As a matter of fact he attached so little significance to the decree, that it never occurred to him to dismiss his escort.”h]

[125] [“But,” says Florus,f “all these honours were but as decorations laid on a victim doomed to die.”]

[126] [Sulla had raised the number of senators to six hundred; cf. page 444.]

[127] [On this much discussed question of Cæsar and Cleopatra it is interesting to quote Froude’s opinion from his Cæsar

: “Cleopatra is said to have joined Cæsar at Rome after his return from Spain, and to have resided openly with him as his mistress. Supposing that she did come to Rome, it is still certain that Calpurnia was in Cæsar’s house when he was killed. Cleopatra must have been Calpurnia’s guest as well as her husband’s; and her presence, however commented upon in society, could not possibly have borne the avowed complexion which tradition assigned to it. On the other hand, it is quite intelligible that the young queen of Egypt, who owed her position to Cæsar, might have come, as other princes came, on a visit of courtesy, and that Cæsar, after their acquaintance at Alexandria, should have invited her to stay with him. But was Cleopatra at Rome at all? The only real evidence for her presence there is to be found in a few words of Cicero: ‘Reginæ fuga mihi non molesta.’ (‘I am not sorry to hear of the flight of the queen.’) There is nothing to show that the ‘queen’ was the Egyptian queen. Granting that the word Egyptian is to be understood, Cicero may have referred to Arsinoe, who was called queen as well as her sister, and had been sent to Rome to be shown at Cæsar’s triumph.”]

[128] [“Thus,” says Florus,f “he who had deluged the world with the blood of his countrymen, deluged the senate house at last with his own.”]

CHAPTER XXVI. THE PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER OF CÆSAR

But yesterday the word of Cæsar might

Have stood against the world; now lies he there,

And none so poor to do him reverence.

—Shakespeare.

Cæsar was assassinated in his fifty-sixth year. He fell pierced with twenty-three wounds, only one of which, as the physician who examined his body affirmed, was in itself mortal. In early life his health had been delicate, and at a later period he was subject to fits of epilepsy, which attacked him in the campaign of Africa, and again before the battle of Munda. Yet the energy and habitual rapidity of all his movements seem to prove the robustness of his constitution, at least in middle life. It may be presumed that if he had escaped the dagger of the assassin, he might, in the course of nature, have attained old age; and against any open attack his position was impregnable. He might have lived to carry out himself the liberal schemes which he was enabled only to project. But it was ordained, for inscrutable reasons, that their first originator should perish, and leave them to be eventually effected by a successor, within a quarter of a century.