exacted--terms which would double the principal.
They could not, they said, have met even the smaller claim, if it had
not been for the liberality of the governor, who had declined the
customary presents. Brutus was much vexed.

"Even when he asks me a favor," writes Cicero to Atticus, "there is
always something arrogant and churlish: still he moves laughter more
than anger."

When the civil war broke out between Caesar and Pompey, it was expected
that Brutus would attach himself to the former. Pompey, who had put his
father to death, he had no reason to love. But if he was unscrupulous in
some things, in politics he had principles which he would not abandon,
the strongest of these, perhaps, being that the side of which Cato
approved was the side of the right. Pompey received his new adherent
with astonishment and delight, rising from his chair to greet him. He
spent most of his time in camp in study, being ingrossed on the very eve
of the battle in making an epitome of Polybius, the Greek historian of
the Second Punic War. He passed through the disastrous day of Pharsalia
unhurt, Caesar having given special orders that his life was to be
spared. After the battle, the conqueror not only pardoned him but
treated him with the greatest kindness, a kindness for which, for a time
at least, he seems not to have been ungrateful. But there were
influences at work which he could not resist. There was his friendship
with Cassius, who had a passionate hatred against usurpers, the
remembrance of how Cato had died sooner than submit himself to Caesar,
and, not least, the association of his name, which he was not permitted
to forget. The statue of the old patriot who had driven out the Tarquins
was covered with such inscriptions as, "Brutus, would thou wert alive!"
and Brutus' own chair of office--he was praetor at the time--was found
covered with papers on which were scribbled, "Brutus, thou sleepest,"
or, "A true Brutus art thou," and the like. How he slew Caesar I have
told already; how he killed himself in despair after the second battle
of Philippi may be read elsewhere.

Porcia, the daughter of Cato, was left a widow in 48 B.C., and married
three years afterwards her cousin Brutus, who divorced his first wife
Claudia in order to marry her. She inherited both the literary tastes
and the opinions of her father, and she thought herself aggrieved when
her husband seemed unwilling to confide his plans to her. Plutarch thus
tells