The assassination, its method of accomplishment, and the men who planned and carried it out, bound as all of them were by some kind of obligation to the conqueror, can hardly win sympathy even from those who hate autocratic rule, and think the man who destroys a democracy beyond the law. The conspirators had not the personal character of the traditional tyrannicides of Greece. There is something of a pose in the whole action. Brutus and his fellows were representing a clique and cannot be called in any sense the executors of the will of the people. It would have been more fitting if the old precedent followed in the legendary expulsion of the former kings of Rome, banishment, had been adopted here. After all, Cæsar was giving the Roman empire a better kind of government than the Senatorial oligarchy. The cause of the conspirators was weak, and the men who carried it out, as events soon showed, were even weaker than their cause. Only verbally were the interests of republicanism represented by the murderers of Cæsar. The Senate and People of Rome existed as they had done of old; but the elements in each were different. In the people of Cæsar’s days there was nothing that resembled the ancient community of the plebeians. Military expansion had long since destroyed the old civil constitution; the assemblies in the Forum were legal only in name, for they disguised the irregularities of mob rule, giving opportunities for violence and corruption on the largest scale. Even the Senate was virtually a new creation filled with Cæsar’s enemies and certainly incapable from its membership of preparing a genuine restoration of republican institutions. It had stood, even before the civil war, at a time when the oligarchy of wealth and descent had recovered its lost ground through the patronage of Sulla, for governmental inefficiency.