Then in my tent, Cassius, enlarge your griefs,
And I will give you audience.
(IV. ii. 41.)
In the onset of misfortune Brutus does not forget his weightier responsibilities, though the strain of resisting it may impair his suavity. The fine balance of his nature that was overthrown by suspense, may well be shaken by his afflictions. For they are more numerous than Cassius knew and more poignant than he could understand.
Portia’s suicide with all its terrible accessories Brutus brings into relation with himself. It is absence from him, and, as his love tells him, distress at the growing power of his enemies that caused her madness. The ruin of that home life which was his native element, the agony and death of the wife he worshipped, are the direct consequences of his own act.
And with this private there has come also the public news. The proscription has already swept away seventy senators; Cicero, despite his “silver hairs,” his “judgment,” and his “gravity” being one; and the number given, according to Messala, is an understatement. Brutus had talked of each man’s dropping by lottery under Caesar’s rule, but however much Caesar had degenerated, would he have decreed a more wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter than this? Was there anything in his career as described by Brutus himself, that foreshadowed a callousness like that of the Triumvirs in pricking down and damning their victims, among them the most illustrious members of Brutus’ own class? And the perpetrators, far from injuring their cause by these atrocities, are in a position to take the field with a “mighty power.” So the civil war with all its horrors and miseries will run its full course.
But even that is not the worst. Brutus has to realise that his associates were not the men he supposed them. Their hands are not clean, their hearts are not pure, even his brother Cassius connives at corruption and has “an itching palm” himself. Even when the soi disant deliverers wield the power, what are things better than they would have been under Caesar who was at least personally free from such reproach and whose greatness entitled him to his place in front? Surely there are few more pathetic passages even in Shakespeare than the confession of disillusionment wrung from Brutus by the force of events, a confession none the less significant that he admits disillusion only as to the results and still clings to his estimate of the deed itself.
Remember March, the ides of March remember:
Did not great Julius bleed for justice’ sake?
What villain touch’d his body, that did stab,