Marcus Junius Brutus, who emerges as an honourable patriot from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, was probably one of the most self-interested of the lot. He had an appalling record of exploiting people in Rome’s empire. Notoriously, he lent money to a city in Cyprus at a 48 per cent rate of interest, four times the legal maximum, and he had his agents blockade the local council chamber to recover what was owed, starving five councillors to death in the process. And within a couple of years of Caesar’s assassination, despite his opposition to monarchy, he had his own head depicted on the coins that he minted to pay his troops.
Mary Beard in Emperor of Rome