ides of March are come"; to which he answered softly, "Yes; but they are
not gone."

The evening before, he supped with Marcus Lepidus, and signed, according
to custom, a number of letters, as he sat at table. While he was so
employed, there arose a question, "What kind of death was the best?" and
Caesar, answering before them all, cried out, "A sudden one." The same
night, as he was in bed with his wife, the doors and windows of the room
flew open at once. Disturbed both with the noise and the light, he
observed, by moonshine, Calpurnia in a deep sleep, uttering broken words
and inarticulate groans. She dreamed that she was weeping over him, as
she held him, murdered, in her arms. Others say she dreamed that the
pinnacle was fallen, which, as Livy tells us, the senate had ordered to
be erected upon Caesar's house by way of ornament and distinction; and
that it was the fall of it which she lamented and wept for. Be that as
it may, the next morning she conjured Caesar not to go out that day if he
could possibly avoid it, but to adjourn the senate; and, if he had no
regard to her dreams, to have recourse to some other species of
divination, or to sacrifices, for information as to his fate. This gave
him some suspicion and alarm; for he had never known before, in
Calpurnia, anything of the weakness or superstition of her sex, though
she was now so much affected.

He therefore offered a number of sacrifices, and, as the diviners found
no auspicious tokens in any of them, he sent Antony to dismiss the
senate. In the mean time Decius Brutus, surnamed Albinus, came in. He
was a person in whom Caesar placed such confidence that he had appointed
him his second heir, yet he was engaged in the conspiracy with the other
Brutus and Cassius. This man, fearing that if Caesar adjourned the senate
to another day the affair might be discovered, laughed at the diviners,
and told Caesar he would be highly to blame if by such a slight he gave
the senate an occasion of complaint against him. "For they were met," he
said, "at his summons, and came prepared with one voice to honor him
with the title of king in the provinces, and to grant that he should
wear the diadem both by sea and land everywhere out of Italy. But if
anyone go and tell them, now they have taken their places, they must go
home again, and return when Calpurnia happens to have better dreams,
what room will your enemies have to launch out against you? Or who will
hear your fri