derive from them the power to play the rogue.  That this was not only what he said, but what he did, his acts show clearly.  No one as a result of those letters was even frightened, let alone suffering any great calamity.  And no one knows those who escaped this danger except the men themselves.  This is most astonishing and has nothing to surpass it, that they were spared before being accused, and saved before encountering danger, and that not even he who saved their lives learned who it was he pitied.

[-48-] “For these and all his other acts of lawmaking and reconstruction, great in themselves, but likely to be deemed small in comparison with those others into which one cannot enter minutely, you loved him as a father and cherished him as a benefactor, you glorified him with such honors as you bestowed on no one else and desired him to be continual head of the city and of the whole domain.  You did not dispute at all about titles, but applied them all to him as being still less than his merits, with the purpose that whatever was lacking in each one of them of what was considered a proper expression of the most complete honor and authority might be made up by what the rest contributed.  Therefore, as regards the gods he was appointed high priest, as regards us consul, as regards the soldiers imperator, and as regards the enemy dictator.  But why do I enumerate these details, when in one phrase you called him father of his country,—­not to mention the rest of his titles?

[-49-] “Yet this father, this high priest, this inviolable being, hero, god, is dead, alas, dead not by the violence of some disease, nor exhausted by old age, nor wounded abroad somewhere in some war, nor snatched away irresistibly by some supernatural force:  but plotted against here within the walls—­the man that safely led an army into Britain; ambushed in this city—­the man who had increased its circuit; struck down in the senate-house—­the man that had reared another such edifice at his own charge; unarmed the brave warrior; defenceless the promoter of peace; the judge beside the court of justice; the governor beside the seat of government; at the hands of the citizens—­he whom none of the enemy had been able to kill even when he fell into the sea; at the hands of his comrades—­he who had often taken pity on them.  Where, Caesar, was your humaneness, where your inviolability, where the laws?  You enacted many laws to prevent any one’s being killed by personal foes, yet see how mercilessly your friends killed you, and now slain you lie before us in that Forum through which you often crowned led triumphal marches, wounded unto death you have been cast down upon that rostra from which you often addressed the people.  Woe for the blood-bespattered locks of gray, alas for the rent robe, which you assumed, it seems, only to the end that you might be slain in it!”