Well; Mark Anthony managed wisely enough at that crisis; you would almost have said, hearing him speak at Caesar’s funeral, that there was at least a ha’porth of brains hidden somewhere within that particularly thick skull of his.  Half an hour changes him from a mere thing alive on sufferance—­too foolish to be worth bothering to kill—­into the master of Rome.  And yet probably it was not brains that did it, but the force of genuine feeling:  he loved dead Caesar; he was trying now to be cautious, for his own skin’s sake:  was repressing himself;—­but his feelings got the better of him,—­and were catching,—­ and set the mob on fire.  Your lean and hungry ones; your envious detractors; your thin maiden-auntish prig republican philosophers:—­all very wisely sheer off.  Your grand resounding Cicero,—­vox et praeterea almost nihil (he had yet to die and show that it was almost, not quite,) sheers off too, into the country, there to busy himself with an essay on the Nature of the Gods (to contain, be sure, some fine eloquence), and with making up his mind to attack Anthony on behalf of Republican Freedom.—­Anthony’s next step is wise too:  he appoints himself Caesar’s executor, gets hold of the estate, and proceeds to squander it right and left buying up for himself doubtful support.—­All you can depend on is the quick coming-on of final ruin and dismay:  of all impossibilities, the most impossible is to imagine Mark Anthony capable of averting it.  As to Caesar’s heir, so nominated in the will—­the persona from whom busy Anthony has virtually stolen the estate,—­no one gives him a thought.  Seeing who he was, it would be absurd to do so.

And then he turned up in Rome, a sickly youth of eighteen; demanded his moneys from Anthony; dunned him till he got some fragment of them;—­then borrowed largely on his own securities, and proceeded to pay—­what prodigal Anthony had been much too thrifty to think of doing—­Ceasar’s debts.  Rome was surprised.

This was Caesar’s grand-nephew, Octavius; who had been in camp at Apollonia in Illyricum since he had coolly proposed to his great-uncle that the latter, being Dictator, and about to start on his Parthian campaign, should make him his Master of the Horse.  He had been exempted from military service on account of ill-health; and Julius had a sense of humor; so he packed him off to Apollonia to ‘finish’ a military training that had never begun.  There he had made a close friend of a rising young officer by the name of Vipsanius Agrippa; a man of high capacities who, when the news came of Caesar’s death, urged him to lose no time, but rouse the legions in their master’s name, and march on Rome to avenge his murder.—­“No,” says Octavius, “I shall go there alone.”

Landing in Italy, he heard of the publication of the will, in which he himself had been named heir.  That meant, to a very vast fortune, and to the duty of revenge.  Of the fortune, since it was now in Mark Anthony’s hands, you could predict nothing too surely but its vanishment; as to the duty, it might also imply a labor for which the Mariuses and Sullas, the Caesars and Pompeys, albeit with strong parties at their backs, had been too small men.  And Octavius had no party, and he was no soldier, and he had no friends except that Vipsanius back in Apollonia.