The Roman aristocracy were torn apart by their reactions to the murder. Cicero, for example, was vocally on the side of the killers. He wrote, in a much later piece called On Duties, that killing a tyrant was no more than the amputation of a rotten limb. It was not murder to kill Caesar, in Cicero’s opinion, because the tyrant had given up his humanity. It was an unfortunate and unpleasant act but not murder. Of course, Cicero himself had murdered Catiline as an enemy of the state in 63 BCE, against Julius Caesar’s arguments and without a trial, so he is defending himself as much as the
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