But to return to the battle.  Brutus fought against Octavius; while Cassius, two or three miles distant, encountered Antony, that having been, as will be recollected, the disposition of the respective armies and their encampments upon the plain.  Brutus was triumphantly successful in his part of the field.  His troops defeated the army of Octavius, and got possession of his camp.  The men forced their way into Octavius’s tent, and pierced the litter in which they supposed that the sick general was lying through and through with their spears.  But the object of their desperate hostility was not there.  He had been borne away by his guards a few minutes before, and no one knew what had become of him.

The result of the battle was, however, unfortunately for those whose adventures we are now more particularly following, very different in Cassius’s part of the field.  When Brutus, after completing the conquest of his own immediate foes, returned to his elevated camp, he looked toward the camp of Cassius, and was surprised to find that the tents had disappeared.  Some of the officers around perceived weapons glancing and glittering in the sun in the place where Cassius’s tents ought to appear.  Brutus now suspected the truth, which was, that Cassius had been defeated, and his camp had fallen into the hands of the enemy.  He immediately collected together as large a force as he could command, and marched to the relief of his colleague.  He found him, at last, posted with a small body of guards and attendants upon the top of a small elevation to which he had fled for safety.  Cassius saw the troop of horsemen which Brutus sent forward coming toward him, and supposed that it was a detachment from Antony’s army advancing to capture him.  He, however, sent a messenger forward to meet them, and ascertain whether they were friends or foes.  The messenger, whose name was Titinius, rode down.  The horsemen recognized Titinius, and, riding up eagerly around him, they dismounted from their horses to congratulate him on his safety, and to press him with inquiries in respect to the result of the battle and the fate of his master.

Cassius, seeing all this, but not seeing it very distinctly, supposed that the troop of horsemen were enemies, and that they had surrounded Titinius, and had cut him down or made him prisoner.  He considered it certain, therefore, that all was now finally lost.  Accordingly, in execution of a plan which he had previously formed, he called a servant, named Pindarus, whom he directed to follow him, and went into a tent which was near.  When Brutus and his horsemen came up, they entered the tent.  They found no living person within; but the dead body of Cassius was there, the head being totally dissevered from it.  Pindarus was never afterward to be found.