The Makers of Rome (Penguin Classics) by Plutarch

Author:Plutarch [Plutarch]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2004-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

8

BRUTUS

[85–42 B.C.]

1. Marcus Brutus was a descendant of that Junius Brutus in whose honour the ancient Romans erected a statue of bronze and placed it in the midst of their kings. They represented him with a drawn sword in his hand in memory of the courage and resolution he had shown in dethroning the Tarquins. But the first Brutus possessed a character as unyielding as a sword of tempered steel. A hard man by nature, his disposition had never been humanized by education, and so his anger against the tyrants could even drive him to the terrible extremity of killing his own sons for conspiring with them. By contrast, the Brutus who is the subject of this Life took pains to moderate his natural instincts by means of the culture and mental discipline which philosophy gives, while he also exerted himself to stir up the more placid and passive side of his character and force it into action, with the result that his temperament was almost ideally balanced to pursue a life of virtue. So we find that even those men who hated him most for his conspiracy against Julius Caesar were prepared to give the credit for any redeeming element in the murder to Brutus, while they blamed all that was unscrupulous about it upon Cassius, who, although a relative and a close friend of Brutus, was neither so simple in character nor so disinterested in his motives.

Brutus’s mother Servilia traced her descent from the celebrated Servilius Ahala, who, when Spurius Maelius* was plotting to secure the support of the people so as to make himself tyrant, took a dagger under his arm, went into the Forum, and walking up to Maelius as if he were about to start a conversation, chose his moment when the man inclined his head to listen, and then stabbed him to death.

So much is generally admitted as regards his ancestry on his mother’s side; but as for his father’s, the people who bear him most hatred and ill will on account of Caesar’s murder argue that it cannot possibly be traced back to the Brutus who drove out the Tarquins, because after he had killed his sons he was left without issue. According to them, Marcus Brutus was descended from a plebeian, who was the son of a steward of that name, and he had only recently risen to office. On the other hand, Poseidonius the philosopher maintains that the two grown-up sons of Junius Brutus were put to death, as the tradition has come down to us, but that there was yet a third son, an infant, who survived, and from whom the family thereafter traced its lineage. What is more, he mentions that there were a number of distinguished men of this house who were alive in his own day, and that some of them remarked on their physical resemblance to the statue of Brutus. So much for this subject.

2. Brutus’s mother Servilia was a sister of Cato the philosopher. This

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