What do we make of Brutus?
At the end of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Mark Antony declares him “the noblest Roman of them all,” but Dante locates him at the lowest point in the Inferno, spending his eternity being chewed in the mouth of Satan himself, or at least one of them: Dante’s Satan is three-headed, and the other mouths are occupied with Brutus’s co-conspirator, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot. The State of Virginia takes his famous declaration “Sic semper tyrannis!” as its motto, but then so did John Wilkes Booth. (A scholar at the Mises Institute once described Abraham Lincoln as an “American Caesar.”) The Liberty goddess in the Virginia state seal, who stands over the bloodied corpse and dishonored crown of an empurpled monarch, is in essence Divus Brutus, Brutus apotheosized, but who aspires to be a brute?
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