But he
prevailed, and Heaven declaring for him, he became a providential
monarch under the title of Perpetual Dictator. He being murdered by
his own son (whom I neither dare commend nor can justly blame,
though Dante in his "Inferno" has put him and Cassius, and Judas
Iscariot betwixt them, into the great devil's mouth), the
commonwealth popped up its head for the third time under Brutus and
Cassius, and then sank for ever.
Thus the Roman people were grossly gulled twice or thrice over, and
as often enslaved, in one century, and under the same pretence of
reformation. At last the two battles of Philippi gave the decisive
stroke against liberty, and not long after the commonwealth was
turned into a monarchy by the conduct and good fortune of Augustus.
It is true that the despotic power could not have fallen into better
hands than those of the first and second Caesar. Your lordship well
knows what obligations Virgil had to the latter of them. He saw,
beside, that the commonwealth was lost without resource; the heads
of it destroyed; the senate, new moulded, grown degenerate, and
either bought off or thrusting their own necks into the yoke out of
fear of being forced.
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