Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/342

So-i MARCUS BKUTUS. Caissius, being a man governed by anger and passion and carried often, for his interest's sake, beyond the bounds of justice, endured all these hardships of war and travel and danger most assuredly to obtain dominion to himself, and not liberty to the people. And as for the former disturbers of the peace of Rome, whether a Cinna, a Marius, or a Carbo, it is manifest that they, having set their country as a stake for him that should win, did almost own in express terms that they fought for empire. But even the enemies of Brutus did not, they tell us, lay this accusation to his charge ; nay, many heard Antony hunself say that Brutus was the only man that conspired against Caesar out of a sense of the glory and the a^jpar- ent justice of the action, but that all the rest* rose up against the man himself, from private envy and malice of their own. And it is plain by what he writes him- self, that Brutus did not so much rely upon his forces, as upon his own virtue. For thus he speaks in a letter to Atticus, shortly before he was to engage with the enemy: that his afiairs were in the best state of fortune that he could wish; for that either he should overcome, and restore liberty to the people of Rome, or die, and be him- self out of the reach of slaveiy ; that other things being certain and beyond all hazard, one thing was yet in doubt, whether they should live or die free men. He adds further, that Mark Antony had received a just pun- ishment for his folly, who, when he might have been numbered with Brutus and Cassius and Cato, would join himself to Octavius ; * that though they should not now be both overcome, they soon would fight between them- selves. And in this he seems to have been no ill prophet. • Octavius 13 the name which and blood properly so named, and Brutus studiously gives to .the only as an adopted son had ceased young Caisar, afterwards called to be Octavius, and had become Augustus, who was indeed by birth Caesar Octavianus.