In the cool of the late afternoon the two young men had found the lovely grove of the Academy almost deserted, and even Marcus had grown silent under the spell of its memories.  As they turned homeward the violet mantle had once more been let fall by the setting sun over Athens and the western hills.  Only the sound of their own footsteps could be heard along the quiet road.  But at the Dipylon Gate an end was put to their converse with the past.  The whole Roman colony of students was there to meet them, and it was evident that the crowd was mastered by some unprecedented emotion.  Marcus darted forward, and it was he who turned to Horace with whitened face, and said in a curiously dull voice, “Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides.”  The news had come directly from the governor, Sulpicius, one of whose staff had happened to meet a student an hour after the arrival of the official packet from Rome.  Marcus hurried off to the governor’s house, thinking that so good a friend of his father would be willing to see him and tell him details.  Horace could see that the boy was sick with fear for his father’s safety.

For several weeks the students could think or talk of nothing else, their discussions taking a fresh impetus from any letters that arrived from Rome.  Gradually, however, they settled back again into their studies and pleasures, feeling remote and irresponsible.  But with the advent of the autumn a new force entered into their lives.  Brutus came to Athens, and, while he was awaiting the development of political events at home, began to attend the lectures of the philosophers.

Horace was among the first of the young Romans to yield to the extraordinary spell exercised by this grave, thin-faced, scholarly man, whose profound integrity of character was as obvious to his enemies as to his friends, and as commanding among the populace as among his peers.  Before he came Horace had been moderately glad that the Republic had struck at tyranny and meted out to the dictator his deserts.  Now he was conscious of an intense partisanship, of a personal loyalty, of a passionate wish to spend his life, too, in fighting for Roman freedom.  And so, when this wonderful man asked him, who was merely a boy with a taste for moral philosophy, and a knack at translating Alcaeus and Sappho, to become one of his tribunes, and to go with him to meet the forces of Caesar’s arrogant young nephew in one final conflict, it was no wonder he turned his back upon the schools and the Muses, and with fierce pride followed his commander.  He could remember how stirred he had been that last morning when, on riding out of the city, he had passed the famous old statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton.  In immortal youth they stood there to prove that in Athens a tyrant had been slain by her sons.  The ancient popular song that he had so often heard sung by modern Greek students over their cups seemed to be beaten out by his horse’s hoofs as, in the pale dawn, they clattered out of the city gate:—­