{"id":91657,"date":"2021-04-17T08:17:51","date_gmt":"2021-04-17T06:17:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/?post_type=ciekawostki&p=91657"},"modified":"2022-07-16T23:09:49","modified_gmt":"2022-07-16T21:09:49","slug":"was-marcus-junius-brutus-a-man-of-honor","status":"publish","type":"ciekawostki","link":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/curiosities\/was-marcus-junius-brutus-a-man-of-honor\/","title":{"rendered":"Was Marcus Junius Brutus “a man of honor”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marcus Junius Brutus<\/a> is best known for being one of the killers of Julius Caesar<\/a>. In the historical tradition, he is considered a defender of the Roman republic and republican values. It turns out, however, that he treated these values \u200b\u200bfreely and selectively, depending on whether they actually served his interests. <\/p>\n

Before 50 BCE he lent money to the people of the Cypriot city of Salamis at a very high, as we would say today, interest, charging borrowers with 48% interest! At that time, the permissible interest under Roman law<\/a> was only 12% of the amount borrowed. It is also worth adding that senators were forbidden to engage in business, and for patricians<\/a> it was a disgrace on honor<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Brutus, acting through his equites agents, has broken the law twice. In 50 BCE the proconsul<\/a> of Cilicia<\/a> was Marcus Tullius Cicero<\/a>, and he was also responsible for the affairs of Cyprus<\/a>. He refused to collect such high percentages against the agreed 12%. Marcus Junius then persuaded the senators to vote in his favor, forcing Cicero<\/a> to collect interest. It was then that Cicero learned that one of his friends, i.e. Brutus, was behind the high-interest rates. So Shakespeare was right to describe Brutus with undisguised irony in Antony’s speech on Caesar’s corpse as “a man of honor”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":40652,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"kategorie_ciekawostek":[77],"class_list":["post-91657","ciekawostki","type-ciekawostki","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","kategorie_ciekawostek-unknown-facts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ciekawostki\/91657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ciekawostki"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/ciekawostki"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ciekawostki\/91657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"kategorie_ciekawostek","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kategorie_ciekawostek?post=91657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}