Liberatores

The everlasting war between our reason and our instinct
has profoundest consequences for ourselves and those we love;
our decisions may be governed by emotion, the heart's precinct
or the mind's fixed calculations, jurisdiction from above.
The chronicles of history are stained with tragic cases
of the battles that we face in colosseums of dull routine;
on close examination, Julius Caesar's fate embraces
our assumptions, for his inauspicious death was twice foreseen.

To dismiss a dream so vivid that it wakes the soundest sleeper
as hysteria or folly by Calpurnia, your wife,
is the height of spousal hubris, and exerts a toll much steeper
than the grief of those who love you and will weep your wasted life;
and for one who knows your future on the eve of the inception
of a plot too late discovered, to withhold is injudicious;
falsely hoping you would meet, he did not plan for interception;
thus Mark Antony did fail to thwart the schemes of the malicious.

Could you hear in fawning sentiments the stirrings of sedition
as they circled you like vultures biding time before a kill?
When they lured you to death's chamber with a falsely writ petition
did you ponder if their compliments were bearers of goodwill?
Did the proud Liberatores think that sanction by the public
would absolve them of your murder for the greater good of all?
When your blood rinsed the foundations of the old Roman Republic,
did they know it was the catalyst for Rome's decline and fall?