Within months of his suicide, one of Caesar’s bitterest opponents was being held up as the ideal of aristocratic virtue in books which were openly circulated and widely praised. One was written by an ex-consul who was acknowledged as Rome’s foremost living orator, and the other by Brutus, widely believed to be the foremost of the up and coming men of his generation. When Sulla was dictator no-one would have dared to praise one of his enemies in this way.
