This the town was ready to do; but then came in the question of interest.  An edict had been published that this should never exceed twelve per cent., or one per cent, monthly, that being the customary way of payment.  But Scaptius pleaded his bond, which provided for four per cent, monthly, and pleaded also a special edict that regulations restraining interest were not to apply to Salamis.  The town protested that they could not pay if such terms were exacted—­terms which would double the principal.  They could not, they said, have met even the smaller claim, if it had not been for the liberality of the governor, who had declined the customary presents.  Brutus was much vexed.

“Even when he asks me a favor,” writes Cicero to Atticus, “there is always something arrogant and churlish:  still he moves laughter more than anger.”

When the civil war broke out between Caesar and Pompey, it was expected that Brutus would attach himself to the former.  Pompey, who had put his father to death, he had no reason to love.  But if he was unscrupulous in some things, in politics he had principles which he would not abandon, the strongest of these, perhaps, being that the side of which Cato approved was the side of the right.  Pompey received his new adherent with astonishment and delight, rising from his chair to greet him.  He spent most of his time in camp in study, being ingrossed on the very eve of the battle in making an epitome of Polybius, the Greek historian of the Second Punic War.  He passed through the disastrous day of Pharsalia unhurt, Caesar having given special orders that his life was to be spared.  After the battle, the conqueror not only pardoned him but treated him with the greatest kindness, a kindness for which, for a time at least, he seems not to have been ungrateful.  But there were influences at work which he could not resist.  There was his friendship with Cassius, who had a passionate hatred against usurpers, the remembrance of how Cato had died sooner than submit himself to Caesar, and, not least, the association of his name, which he was not permitted to forget.  The statue of the old patriot who had driven out the Tarquins was covered with such inscriptions as, “Brutus, would thou wert alive!” and Brutus’ own chair of office—­he was praetor at the time—­was found covered with papers on which were scribbled, “Brutus, thou sleepest,” or, “A true Brutus art thou,” and the like.  How he slew Caesar I have told already; how he killed himself in despair after the second battle of Philippi may be read elsewhere.

Porcia, the daughter of Cato, was left a widow in 48 B.C., and married three years afterwards her cousin Brutus, who divorced his first wife Claudia in order to marry her.  She inherited both the literary tastes and the opinions of her father, and she thought herself aggrieved when her husband seemed unwilling to confide his plans to her.  Plutarch thus tells her story, his authority seeming to be a little biography