ratified, publicly read, and executed. Cæsar had bequeathed to the soldiers, and to every single individual of the Roman people, great sums from his immense treasures; with this one would be sure to rekindle the enthusiasm of the soldiers and of the populace for him who was dead. Some had wisely requested that the burial should be quite private; yet this also was overruled, owing to the boldness of the faction and the cowardice of the senate, and it was ordered that he should have a stately funeral in the _Campus Martius_. The corpse in an open bier, according to the Italian custom, as is still the case at this day, was set down in the Forum before the _rostra_; and there his nearest kinsman Antony, who was allied to him by his mother Julia, delivered the oration, thus working powerfully on the minds of the fickle and capricious people: he not only recounted Cæsar’s great achievements, but he afterwards showed the wounds, and held aloft the bloody toga pierced by the daggers. At this sight, the people became so frantic and enraged, that instead of bearing the dead body to the _Campus Martius_, they at once built up a funeral pile of the benches and whatever wood besides chanced to be at hand, and there they burnt it: they then tore a man to pieces, whom they had groundlessly mistaken for one of the conspirators, and they stormed the houses of Brutus and Cassius. These had already come down from the Capitol on a promise which Antony and Lepidus had made on oath; and now they betook themselves to Antium, whilst others went down to the provinces of which they were governors. Dec. Brutus withdrew to Cisalpine Gaul which had been promised him by Cæsar; there he meant to take the oaths of the legions, and to make sure of them: M. Brutus was to have had Macedon; Cassius, Syria. The events of this year (708) are so complicated and various, that it is quite impossible to relate them in order. Fr. Fabricius gives a detailed account of them in his life of Cicero: the knowledge of them is of importance for the Philippic orations.