Julius Caesar

​Nor did he utter words of less insolence openly, as Titus Ampius writes: that the republic was nothing, a mere name without body or form; that Sulla did not know his letters, since he had laid down the dictatorship; and that men ought now to speak with him more considerately, and hold what he said as laws. And he advanced to such a pitch of arrogance that, when a soothsayer once reported unfavorable entrails without a heart, he said that the omens would be more favorable when he wished, and that it should not be considered as a portent if a beast lacked a heart.

​But he aroused the chief and fatal hatred against himself especially from this. He received the entire body of conscript fathers, who were approaching him with numerous and most honorable decrees, while sitting in front of the temple of Venus Genetrix. Some think he was held back by Cornelius Balbus when he attempted to rise; others, that he did not even make an attempt at all, but even looked with a less than friendly countenance at Gaius Trebatius when he suggested that he should rise. And this action of his seemed all the more intolerable because he himself, when celebrating a triumph and riding past the tribunes’ benches, had been so indignant that Pontius Aquila, one of the college, did not rise for him, that he cried out: ‘Take back then, Aquila, the republic, you tribune!’ and for days together he did not cease to promise anything to anyone except with the reservation: ‘If Pontius Aquila permits, however.’

​To so signal an insult to the slighted senate he added a much more arrogant deed. For when, on his return from the Latin Festival, amidst the excessive and novel acclamations of the people, someone from the crowd had placed upon his statue a laurel crown bound with a white fillet, and the tribunes of the plebs Epidius Marullus and Caesetius Flavus had ordered the fillet to be removed from the crown and the man to be taken into bonds, grieved either that the mention of his kingship had been made with so little success, or, as he pretended, that the glory of refusing it had been snatched from him, he severely rebuked the tribunes and deprived them of their power. Nor was he able from that time on to shake off the infamy of having also aspired to the royal title, although he replied to a plebeian who saluted him as king that he was Caesar and not a king, and at the Lupercalia, from the rostra, he repeatedly rejected the diadem offered to his head by the consul Antony, and sent it to the Capitol to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Nay, even various rumors spread abroad that he would move to Alexandria or Ilium, having at the same time transferred the resources of the empire, exhausted Italy by levies, and left the administration of the city to his friends; and that at the next meeting of the senate Lucius Cotta, one of the fifteen commissioners, would propose that since it was written in the books of fate that the Parthians could not be conquered except by a king, Caesar should be styled king.

​This was the cause for the conspirators to hasten their planned designs, so that they would not be forced to assent. Therefore, the plans which had previously been held separately and which two or three had often formed, they all brought together into one, since not even the people were now pleased with the present state, but secretly and openly rejected the tyranny and demanded liberators. When foreigners were admitted into the senate, a placard was posted: ‘A good deed: let no one be willing to show a new senator the way to the senate-house!’ and the following was commonly sung: Caesar leads the Gauls in triumph, and the same into the senate-house; The Gauls have put off their trousers, and put on the broad purple stripe. When Quintus Maximus, a substitute consul for three months, entered the theater, and his lictor according to custom ordered the people to pay attention, a shout was raised by everyone that he was not a consul. After the removal of the tribunes Caesetius and Marullus, at the next elections many ballots were found declaring them consuls. Some wrote on the statue of Lucius Brutus: ‘Would that you were alive!’ and likewise on that of Caesar himself: Brutus, because he drove out the kings, was made the first consul; This man, because he drove out the consuls, has at last been made king. A conspiracy was formed against him by more than sixty persons, Gaius Cassius, and Marcus and Decimus Brutus being the leaders of the conspiracy. Who at first hesitated whether, in the Campus Martius during the elections, they should divide into parties and throw him from the bridge as he was calling the tribes to vote, and slaughter him when caught below, or attack him on the Sacred Way or at the entrance to the theater, after the senate was summoned to meet on the Ides of March in the curia of Pompey, they easily preferred this time and place.