摘要：If ever there was a moment when the writing of history mattered, it was duringthe eighteen months between the murder of Caesar and the announcementof public legal proceedings against the assassins. This was the timewhen Sallust, retired from politics, was ‘reading much and listening to muchon the history of the Roman People’ (Cat. 53.2), and coming to the conclusionthat the disastrous events of the previous ninety years had been due to theavarice and arrogance of the nobilitas.1 Meanwhile Cicero, once a scourge ofaristocratic corruption, was writing polemical contemporary history to justifyhis own shift to a hard-line optimate attitude that approved of political assassination.2 What was at stake was freedom: that of the Roman People from thedomination of an oligarchy,3 or that of the oligarchs themselves from the ‘tyranny’of Caesar.4 ‘We have freedom,’ said Cicero after the Ides of March, ‘butwe don’t have the res publica … It’s just as dangerous to attack that wicked partynow the tyrant’s dead as it was when he was alive’ (Att. 14.4.1, 14.17.6). Whathe meant was that the consul and the Roman People were demanding thatmurder be punished,5 and eventually they got their way.
