This was quite against all Roman law; for whoever of his own free will renounced the republic, might always save his life. Dec. Brutus, whose army had been made disaffected by Octavian, fled to the borders of Gaul, and there he was murdered by a guest-friend. Octavian also reproached the senate with having ill-treated him, and with having slighted him after the war of Mutina; yet as he had the _potestas prætoria_, the senate could not indeed have done more for him than it did. It was now November. Antony returned with Lepidus and Plancus and their army, and Octavian marched to the neighbourhood of Bologna to meet them. Lepidus, however, acted as a mediator, and the three came together on an islet in the river Reno, where they agreed to share among themselves for five years the government of the Roman world as _triumviri reipublicæ constituendæ_. The idea of such a magistracy was not a new one, as it had already been legally instituted once before, after the time of the Licinian law,[20] under quite different circumstances: it is also possible that on some other occasion there may also have been something of the kind. Italy was to be administered by them in common with consular power: of the provinces, Lepidus was to have Spain and Narbonnese Gaul; Antony, Cisalpine, Lugdunensian, and Belgic Gaul; Octavian, Africa, Sicily, and Sardinia. With regard to the eastern provinces nothing was settled. And likewise they first began with publishing a proscription of seventeen persons. Antony gave up his uncle as a victim; Lepidus, his brother,—or rather he demanded his death; as for Octavian, the historians say that it was only after a struggle that he made up his mind to sacrifice Cicero. Yet this cannot by any means have been hard for him to do: on the contrary, it must have been a relief to him to get rid of a benefactor, whom he had so beguiled and deceived, and to whom he had so often made vows of gratitude and of devotion to the republic. And moreover, this is only stated by Velleius and those writers who follow the historians of the Augustan age. How Livy treated this part of history, we unfortunately do not know for certain; but it is very likely that he was more free-spoken than others: we are told that Augustus called him a Pompeian, and a fragment also of his with regard to Cicero displays much boldness. It is, on the whole, astonishing how openly the writers of Augustus’ times—Asinius Pollio for instance—spoke out what they thought of the state of things in their day: this was partly because it was looked upon as the opinion of private persons, and perhaps also because these writings were not immediately circulated. A second proscription followed of a hundred and thirty senators, which was afterwards still further enlarged. These lists were much worse than those of Sylla. These last were the offspring of party spirit alone,—plunder was only a secondary object, or at most it followed as a thing of course; nor was it even for Sylla’s own