nwealth was more
interested in the safety of his person than himself: for that he had for
some time been satiated with power and glory; but that the commonwealth,
if any thing should befall him, would have no rest, and, involved in
another civil war, would be in a worse state than before.

(55) LXXXVII. This, however, was generally admitted, that his death was
in many respects such as he would have chosen. For, upon reading the
account delivered by Xenophon, how Cyrus in his last illness gave
instructions respecting his funeral, Caesar deprecated a lingering death,
and wished that his own might be sudden and speedy. And the day before
he died, the conversation at supper, in the house of Marcus Lepidus,
turning upon what was the most eligible way of dying, he gave his opinion
in favour of a death that is sudden and unexpected.

LXXXVIII. He died in the fifty-sixth year of his age, and was ranked
amongst the Gods, not only by a formal decree, but in the belief of the
vulgar. For during the first games which Augustus, his heir, consecrated
to his memory, a comet blazed for seven days together, rising always
about eleven o'clock; and it was supposed to be the soul of Caesar, now
received into heaven: for which reason, likewise, he is represented on
his statue with a star on his brow. The senate-house in which he was
slain, was ordered to be shut up [101], and a decree made that the ides
of March should be called parricidal, and the senate should never more
assemble on that day.

LXXXIX. Scarcely any of those who were accessary to his murder, survived
him more than three years, or died a natural death [102]. They were all
condemned by the senate: some were taken off by one accident, some by
another. Part of them perished at sea, others fell in battle; and some
slew themselves with the same poniard with which they had stabbed Caesar
[103].

(56) [104] The termination of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey
forms a new epoch in the Roman History, at which a Republic, which had
subsisted with unrivalled glory during a period of about four hundred and
sixty years, relapsed into a state of despotism, whence it never more
could emerge. So sudden a transition from prosperity to the ruin of
public freedom, without the intervention of any foreign enemy, excites a
reasonable conjecture, that the constitution in which it could take
place, however vigorous in appearance, must have lost that soundness of
political health