That placed a premium on his death and made his opponents eager for an assassination. If he were king, however, Ms power would merely descend to his nearest heir upon his death, and there would be far less point to killing him.
It was this desire of Caesar to make himself king-a desire imputed to him by the senatorial conservatives, and probably justly so-that was the chief weapon against him. The conservatives, who hated him and his reforms, emphasized his ambition for the kingship, hoping that the hated word would turn the populace against Caesar.
On the other hand, the conservatives also feared that the popularity of his reforms might more than make up for the fearsomeness of the word, and that the infatuated populace, caught up on the occasion of some holiday such as the present Lupercalian festival, would be stampeded into declaring him king and that the Senate would then be forced, much against its will, to go along. Once that was done, it would be too late to expect to turn back the tide of reform.
It was exactly this that Brutus feared when he heard the shouting.
... the waves of Tiber
Brutus' outspoken fear of Caesar as king heartens Cassius. He plays on that fear by describing the indignity of having to bow down to one who after all is but a man and perhaps not even as good a man as oneself. To make his point, he tells a tale of a contest between himself and Caesar.
One cold day Caesar challenged Cassius to swim across the river. Caesar wearied first and cried out for help. Cassius says:
I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor,
Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder
The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber
Did I the tired Caesar.
- Act I, scene ii, lines 112-15
The Tiber River is 252 miles long and is the second longest river in Italy. It would bear little distinction as a river were it not that, like some other short rivers, such as the Thames, the Seine, and the Spree, a great capital was located on its banks. The city of Rome was founded twenty miles upstream from its mouth.
Here again there is a reference to Aeneas as the ancestor of the Romans (see page I-20).
Like a Colossus.. . In all Cassius' clever speaking, he doesn't once accuse Caesar of tyrannical behavior or of cruelty; he doesn't say his reforms are wicked or evil.
He concentrates entirely on Caesar's physical weakness and poor health, for he is endeavoring to show Brutus that Caesar is inferior, hoping that Brutus' inordinate vanity would then rebel at bowing down to such a ruler.
He labors to find a way to describe the greatness of Caesar and the comparative littleness of Brutus in such a way as to force Brutus to rebel. Cassius says:
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
- Act I, scene ii, lines 135-38
The Colossus is a statue of the sun god built in the island of Rhodes in 280 b.c. to commemorate the successful defense against a siege by a Macedonian general, Demetrius. Why the name "colossus" was applied to a huge statue is unknown, but this Rhodian statue, the largest in the Greco-Roman world, 105 feet tall, was the Colossus of Rhodes. It was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
It did not, however, remain long to gladden the eyes of those who value size in art. In 224 b.c., little more than half a century after it had been built, it was toppled by an earthquake.
Once it was gone, the description of what it had looked like while it was standing gradually grew more grandiose, until finally the tale arose that it had straddled Rhodes' harbor and that ships had sailed between its legs in and out of that harbor. This is, of course, quite impossible, for the ancient Greeks had lacked the materials and technique to build a statue so large in a position that would place so much strain on the legs.
The picture is nevertheless a dramatic one, and Cassius, by whose time the statue had been out of existence for nearly two centuries, uses it to fire up Brutus' vanity and envy.
... a Brutus once...
Cassius plays on Brutus' pride of ancestry too, saying: