At the end of Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius, the conspirators who had assassinated Caesar, are themselves dead. Brutus has, in fact, fallen upon his sword rather than face capture by the armies of Octavius and Mark Antony. Brutus was bad enough to betray and murder a man who had been his good friend, but he was not bad enough to be a successful rebel. He had parted company with his fellow conspirators, refusing to approve the killing of Mark Antony, and that sense of honor has now cost him dearly.
After his death, Brutus is praised in the famous words Shakespeare places into Antony's mouth: “This was the noblest Roman of them all.” There are other ways we might have thought to describe Brutus—as traitor, rebel, assassin, for example—and no doubt one might have used such terms to characterize some of Brutus's fellow conspirators. But not Brutus, at least according to Antony: “His life was gentle, and the elements / So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up / And say to all the world ‘This was a man!'”
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