suscepti of men, who dwelt proudly on the recollection of the long centuries of glory, in which freedom and self-government had made them masters of the world. He attempted to force on them the show of despotism for which the Roman world was not ripe for yet three hundred years. The setting up of Cæsar's statue beside that of Quirinus, the deified Romulus, brings to Cicero's lips the sharp retort: "I am better pleased to see him the neighbour of Quirinus, than as sharing the temple of Safety."[1] The legend ran that Romulus had governed tyrannically, and had been torn in pieces by the Senators. In indicating such an omen for the new monarch of Rome, Cicero shows that the idea was already (May 45 B.C.) floating before his mind that the effort to reconstruct the Republic might have to be made over the dead body of Cæsar.
While on the one hand Cæsar accepted the odious memory of the office which the free State had renounced for ever, on the other hand we see in him a hankering after the barbaric expressions by which Eastern potentates were wont to attempt to realise to themselves the plenitude of their power. He aspired to a "Divine Right," not in that comparatively innocent form in which the ruler is regarded as the special servant and delegate of Heaven, but in the slavish sense in which the prostrate Asiatic deifies the person of his master. Cæsar must have his statue borne in procession among the images of the gods, he must have temples and a flamen to offer incense to his divinity and a statue inscribed, "the
- ↑ Ad Att., xii., 45, 3.
