[II.58] high: full, perfect. Cf. 'high day,' 'high noon,' etc.
[II.59] all over: one after the other until all have been included.
[II.60] No, not an oath. This is based on Plutarch's statement in Marcus Brutus: "Furthermore, the only name and great calling of Brutus did bring on the most of them to give consent to this conspiracy: who having never taken oaths together, nor taken or given any caution or assurance, nor binding themselves one to another by any religious oaths, they all kept the matter so secret to themselves, and could so cunningly handle it, that notwithstanding the gods did reveal it by manifest signs and tokens from above, and by predictions of sacrifices, yet all this would not be believed."
[II.61] if not the face of men. This means, probably, the shame and self-reproach with which Romans must now look each other in the face under the consciousness of having fallen away from the republican spirit of their forefathers. The change in the construction of the sentence gives it a more colloquial cast, without causing any real obscurity. Modern editors have offered strange substitutes for 'face' here,—'faith,' 'faiths,' 'fate,' 'fears,' 'yoke,' etc.
[II.62] sufferance: suffering. So in Measure for Measure, III, i, 80; Coriolanus, I, i, 22. In [I, iii, 84], 'sufferance' is used in its ordinary modern sense.
[II.63] the time's abuse: the miserable condition of things in the present. Such 'time's abuse' in his own day Shakespeare describes in detail in Sonnets, lxvi.
[II.64] Brutus seems to have in mind the capriciousness of a high-looking and heaven-daring Oriental tyranny, where men's lives hung upon the nod and whim of the tyrant, as on the hazards of a lottery.
[II.65] What need we: why need we. So in Antony and Cleopatra, V, ii, 317; Titus Andronicus, I, i, 189. Cf. Mark, xiv, 63.
[II.66] secret Romans: Romans who had promised secrecy.
[II.67] palter: equivocate, quibble. The idea is of shuffling as in making a promise with what is called a "mental reservation." "Palter with us in a double sense" is the famous expression in Macbeth, V, viii, 20, and it brings out clearly the meaning implicit in the term.