On this day, 23 October 42 BC, Brutus lost his last battle, at Philippi. Two years and seven months after the Ides of March. Cassius was already dead, twenty days before. That night Brutus sat in a rocky hollow with a few friends. He begged Volumnius, his old fellow student, to help him drive the blade home. Volumnius refused. So did the rest. Only his friend Strato stayed beside him. Brutus gripped the hilt with both hands and fell on the sword. Or, as Appian tells it, Strato drove it in for him. Antony wrapped the body in his own finest robe, and sent the ashes home to Brutus's mother. Octavian sent the head to Rome, to be thrown at the feet of Caesar's statue. It never got there. Cassius Dio says a storm took it at sea. And Strato? Plutarch says that eleven years later, he was fighting for Octavian at Actium. 🏛️

“Venus and Adonis” François Lemoyne c. 1729

The French Revolution was violent. Extraordinarily, horrifyingly violent. And from it came the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the legal abolition of feudalism, the first significant codification of liberty, equality, and fraternity as political principles rather than philosophical abstractions. Ideas that spread across Europe and eventually the world. Ideas that are now the foundational vocabulary of the very people who condemn revolutionary violence. The discomfort is not with the violence. The discomfort is with the reminder that the values they consider self-evident were not given. They were seized. From people who were not planning to hand them over.