Caesar by Thomas De Quincey

It is very evident that Dr. Arnold could not have understood the position of politic  in Rome, when he allowed himself to make a favorite of Pompey. The doctor hated aristocrats as he hated the gates of Erebus. Now Pompey was not only the leader of a most selfish aristocracy, but also their tool. Secondly, as if this were not bad enough, that section of the aristocracy to which he had dedicated his services was an odious oligarchy; and to this oligarchy, again, though nominally its head, he was in effect its most submissive tool.

Caesar, on the other hand, if a democrat in the sense of working by democratic agencies, was bending all his efforts to the reconstruction of a new, purer, and enlarged aristocracy, no longer reduced to the necessity of buying and selling the people in mere self-defense. The ever-lasting war of bribery, operating upon universal poverty, the internal disease of Roman society, would have been redressed by Caesar’s measures, and was redressed according to the degree in  which those measures were really brought into action. New judicatures were wanted, new judicial laws, a new aristocracy; by slow degrees a new people, and the right of suffrage exercised within new restrictions – all these things were needed for the cleansing of Rome; and that Caesar would have accomplished this labor of Hercules was the true cause of his assassination. The scoundrels of the  oligarchy felt their doom to be approaching.  It was the just remark of Napoleon, that Brutus (but still more, we may say, Cicero), though falsely accredited as a patriot, was, in fact, the most exclusive and the most selfish of aristocrats.

Yet,

The graves of the best men, of the noblest martyrs, are, like the graves of the Herrnhuters (the Moravian Brethren), level and indistinguishable from the universal earth:, and, if the earth could give up her secrets, our whole globe would appear a Westminster Abbey laid flat. Ah! What a multitude of tears, what myriads of bloody drops have been shed in secrecy about the three corner trees of earthy – the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, and the tree of freedom – shed, but never reckoned! It is only great periods of calamity that reveal to us our great men, as comets are revealed by total eclipses of the sun. Not merely on the field of battle, but also upon the consecrated soil of virtue, and on the classic ground of truth, thousands of nameless heroes must fall and struggle to build up the footstool from which history surveys the one hero, whose name is embalmed, bleeding –conquering – and resplendent. The grandest of heroic deeds are those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy. And, because history records only the self-sacrifice of the male sex, and because she dips her hands only in blood, therefore is it that in the eyes of the unseen spirit of the world our annals appear doubtless far more beautiful and noble than in our own.

To die for truth – is not to die for one’s country, but to die for the world. Truth like the Venus de Medici, will pass down in thirty fragments to posterity: but posterity will collect and recompose them into a goddess. Then also thy temple, O eternal Truth! That now stands half below the earth, made hollow by the sepulchers of its witnesses, will raise itself in the total majesty of its proportions; and will stand in monumental granite; and every pillar on which it rests, will fixed in the grave of a martyr. [Analects of Richter]