nce,
because it is not regarded as a benefit at all, if you do good when you
intended to do evil; in such a case the benefit is done by chance, the
man did harm. I have seen a lion in the amphitheatre, who recognized one
of the men who fought with wild beasts, who once had been his keeper,
and protected him against the attacks of the other animals. Are we,
then, to say that this assistance of the brute was a benefit? By no
means, because it did not intend to do it, and did not do it with kindly
intentions. You may class the lion and your tyrant together: each of
them saved a man's life, yet neither conferred a benefit. Because it is
not a benefit to be forced to receive one, neither is it a benefit to be
under an obligation to a man to whom we do not wish to be indebted. You
must first give me personal freedom of decision, and then your benefit.

XX. The question has been raised, whether Marcus Brutus ought to have
received his life from the hands of Julius Caesar, who, he had decided,
ought to be put to death.

As to the grounds upon which he put him to death, I shall discuss them
elsewhere; for to my mind, though he was in other respects a great man,
in this he seems to have been entirely wrong, and not to have followed
the maxims of the Stoic philosophy. He must either have feared the name
of "King," although a state thrives best under a good king, or he must
have hoped that liberty could exist in a state where some had so much to
gain by reigning, and others had so much to gain by becoming slaves. Or,
again, he must have supposed that it would be possible to restore the
ancient constitution after all the ancient manners had been lost, and
that citizens could continue to possess equal rights, or laws remain
inviolate, in a state in which he had seen so many thousands of men
fighting to decide, not whether they should be slaves or free, but which
master they should serve. How forgetful he seems to have been, both of
human nature and of the history of his own country, in supposing that
when one despot was destroyed another of the same temper would not take
his place, though, after so many kings had perished by lightning and the
sword, a Tarquin was found to reign! Yet Brutus did right in receiving
his life from Caesar, though he was not bound thereby to regard Caesar
as his father, since it was by a wrong that Caesar had come to be in a
position to bestow this benefit. A man does not save your life who does
not kill y