[-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 ancient custom was still being observed.  And they enacted that no one who took refuge in his shrine to secure immunity should be banished or stripped of his goods,—­a right given to no one of the gods even, save to such as had a place in the days of Romulus.  Yet after men began to gather there the place had inviolability in name without its effects; for it was so fenced about that no one at all could any longer enter it.

In addition to those gifts to Caesar they allowed the vestal virgins to employ one lictor each, because one of them had been insulted, owing to not being recognized, while returning home from dinner toward evening.  The offices in the City they assigned for a greater number of years in advance, thus at the same time giving honor through the expected offices to those fitted for them and retaining a grasp on affairs for a longer time by means of those who were to hold sway.