passed another which
well indicated their disposition. It gave him the right to place his
tomb within the pomerium; and the decrees regarding this matter they
inscribed with gold letters on silver tablets and deposited beneath the
feet of the Capitoline Jupiter, thus pointing out to him very clearly
that he was a man. When they began to honor him it was with the idea
that he would be reasonably modest; but as they went on and saw that he
was delighted at what they voted,--he accepted all but a very few of
their gifts,--various men kept at different times proposing various
greater marks of esteem, all in excess, some as an act of extreme
flattery toward him, and others as one of sarcastic ridicule. Actually
some dared to suggest permitting him to have intercourse with, as many
women[111] as he liked, because even at this time, though fifty years
old, he still had numerous mistresses. Others, and the majority,
followed the course mentioned because they wished to make him envied and
disliked as quickly as possible, that he might the sooner perish. Of
course precisely that happened, though Caesar took courage on account of
these very measures to believe that he would never be plotted against by
the men who had voted him such honors, nor by any one else, because they
would prevent it; and in consequence from this time he dispensed with a
bodyguard. Nominally he accepted the privilege of being watched over by
the senators and knights and thus did away with his previous guardians.
[-8-] Once on a single day they had passed in his honor an unusually
large number of decrees of especially important character, that had been
voted unanimously by all the rest except Cassius and a few others, who
became notorious for this action: yet they suffered no harm, a fact
which conspicuously displayed their ruler's clemency. So, then, they
approached him as he was sitting in the fore-part of the temple of Venus
with the intention of announcing to him in a body their decisions;--such
business they transacted in his absence, in order to have the appearance
of doing it not under compulsion but voluntarily. And either by some
Heaven-sent fatuity or through excess of joy he received them sitting,
an act which aroused so great indignation among them all, not only
senators but all the rest, that it afforded his slayers one of their
chief excuses for their plot against him. Some who subsequently tried to
defend him said that owing to diarrhoea he coul