Gaius Cassius Longinus, and Murder

I don't really like the historical figure of Cassius, who helped plot the assassination of Julius Caeser and then fought, unsuccessfully, against Octavian and Mark Antony. Part of that has to do with not being very good at taking over the state of Rome, and part of it has to do with my general, ethical disapproval of having a dozen friends stab a rival in the chest.

Still, Shakespeare's version of Cassius gets at something that I think is very important to a possible character. In the excerpt from his famous monologue, he says:

Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Jealousy can be a tool, it can be a way of improving ourselves when we might otherwise lack the motivation to aspire to greatness.

Unfortunately, murder is not a good way to promote one's station in life.

One of my professors, who teaches Latin and classics, likes to hammer home the point that a leader who attains power by force must live in fear, because he's set a precedent. This is generally a fair point, and one of the reasons that I don't really like Machiavelli's The Prince as a methodology for living and attaining power.

We play by rules in order to establish that others will do the same, this is the fundamental principle of the social contract. When Cassius and Brutus broke the social framework, when they took a form of government with a social structure that was not built on headhunting, and changed it to one controlled by whoever was most successful in violence, they put their heads at risk, and they lost.

Cassius was a philosopher, widely believed to be Epicurean, but the ambitious nature, the jealousy that led him to violate the social contract, led him to forget one of the central tenants of Epicurus' personal philosophy:

He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.

I do not think ambition is something to be ashamed of, but there is a reason why we curb it, why we don't overstep certain boundaries. We do it to be assured that the society in which we live maintains a certain level of order. That is the balance between order and advancement.