Assassination of Julius Caesar

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 15th of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar walked into the Senate House of Pompey and never walked out. He was stabbed 23 times by a group of senators who numbered around 60. They called themselves liberators, and they believed they were saving the Roman Republic. What followed instead was the Republic's collapse and the rise of the Roman Empire. How did Rome arrive at this moment? What turned senators into assassins? And why did an act meant to restore a republic produce its opposite?

• 2. Three Last Straws

  ›

  In March 45 BC, or possibly early 44 BC, a senatorial delegation marched to the Temple of Venus Genetrix to formally present Caesar with a large number of honors the Senate had voted to bestow on him. Etiquette required Caesar to stand and greet them. He did not rise. He also joked that his honors needed to be cut back, not increased. The historian Suetonius, writing roughly 150 years later, records two competing explanations: either Caesar was physically restrained by Lucius Cornelius Balbus, or he simply refused to stand. Either way, the senators read his seated posture as contempt.

  In January 44 BC, the tribunes Gaius Epidius Marullus and Lucius Caesetius Flavus found a diadem placed on Caesar's statue at the Rostra in the Roman Forum. A diadem was a symbol of both Jupiter and royalty. The tribunes ordered it removed. Then, on the 26th, as Caesar rode along the Appian Way, members of the crowd called out to him as rex, the Latin word for "king". Caesar replied, "I am not Rex, but Caesar," a pun on the name Rex which was also a Latin cognomen. The tribunes had the man who shouted rex arrested. Caesar's response was to have the tribunes removed from office and stripped of their Senate membership. The Roman plebs held their tribunes in deep regard as the voice of ordinary people, and Caesar's move turned popular sentiment against him.

  The third incident came on the 15th of February 44 BC, at the festival of the Lupercalia. Mark Antony, Caesar's co-consul, climbed the Rostra and placed a diadem on Caesar's head, saying, "The People give this to you through me." Most of the crowd responded with silence. Caesar removed the diadem; Antony placed it back. Caesar removed it again and set it aside, dedicating it as a sacrifice to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. He declared, "Jupiter alone of the Romans is king," and the crowd applauded. Many observers at the time believed the entire episode was staged so that Caesar could gauge public appetite for a monarchy.

• 3. Recruiting the Conspiracy

  ›

  On the evening of the 22nd of February 44 BC, Cassius Longinus met with his brother-in-law Marcus Brutus and the two agreed that Caesar had to be stopped. The recruitment process that followed was deliberate and careful. Brutus believed the act needed legitimacy, and legitimacy required numbers: specifically, enough of Rome's leading men to make the assassination look like a civic act rather than a coup. The conspirators preferred friends over acquaintances and avoided both reckless youths and feeble elders, settling on senators near the age of forty.

  Pacuvius Labeo answered affirmatively on the 2nd of March when Brutus asked him whether a man should put himself in danger to overcome evil or foolish men. Decimus Brutus joined on the 7th of March after being approached by Labeo and Cassius. Gaius Trebonius, Tillius Cimber, Minucius Basilus, and the brothers Casca all joined, despite being men from Caesar's own ranks. Pontius Aquila, who had been personally humiliated by Caesar, was also among them. According to Nicolaus of Damascus, many conspirators joined not out of principle but out of jealousy, believing Caesar had not rewarded them adequately.

  Cicero was considered and rejected. Though Cassius and Brutus trusted the famous orator and knew he opposed Caesar openly, they judged him too cautious: he was over sixty and, they feared, would prioritize his own safety over the speed the plan required. Mark Antony was also discussed. Gaius Trebonius disclosed that the previous summer he had personally invited Antony to join an earlier conspiracy against Caesar, and Antony had declined. That refusal settled the question of whether to recruit him.

• 4. The Question of Antony

  ›

  Antony's rejection of Trebonius's earlier approach forced the conspirators to decide what to do with him. He was consul, he commanded respect from soldiers, and he was dangerous. The most radical faction, the optimates who called themselves the "Best Men" of Rome, wanted to kill not just Caesar but all the men around him, Antony included, and to roll back every reform Caesar had made. Caesar's former supporters among the conspirators refused; they wanted the reforms to stand.

  Brutus broke the deadlock with a different argument entirely. Killing only Caesar, he said, was the only course consistent with the principles of law and justice they claimed to be acting on. Killing Antony would look like a political purge, not the removal of a tyrant. By keeping Caesar's reforms, they would retain the loyalty of the Roman people, who objected to Caesar the would-be king, not to his legislation. His reasoning carried the room, and the conspirators narrowed their target to Caesar alone. The conspirators also considered the setting carefully: an ambush on the Via Sacra, a strike during the consular elections (they would push Caesar off the bridge voters crossed), an attack at a gladiatorial game where armed men raised no suspicion. The Senate meeting won out, because it was the one venue where Caesar's formidable personal friends could not follow him inside.

• 5. The Ides of March

  ›

  Around 5 a.m. on the 15th of March 44 BC, Calpurnia, Caesar's wife, woke from a nightmare. She had dreamed she was holding Caesar's murdered body in her arms. She begged him not to go to the Senate. Caesar agreed, and sent Mark Antony to dismiss the meeting. When the conspirators heard this, Decimus Brutus went to Caesar's house and challenged him directly: "What do you say, Caesar? Will someone of your stature pay attention to a woman's dreams and the omens of foolish men?" Caesar changed his mind and went.

  On his way, Caesar spotted the seer Spurinna, who had warned him weeks earlier that his life would be in danger no later than the Ides of March. Caesar called out, "Well, the Ides of March have come!" Spurinna replied, "Aye, the Ides have come, but they are not yet gone." Trebonius or Decimus Brutus intercepted Antony at the entrance and kept him outside. Inside, Lucius Tillius Cimber approached Caesar with a petition asking him to recall Cimber's exiled brother. When Caesar waved him off, Cimber grabbed his shoulders and pulled down his toga. Caesar cried out, "Why, this is violence!" Publius Servilius Casca drove a dagger at Caesar's neck, a glancing blow. Caesar grabbed Casca by the arm. Casca shouted to his brother for help in Greek: "Brother! Help me!" His brother Gaius Servilius Casca then stabbed Caesar in the side.

  What followed was an assault from all directions. Cassius slashed Caesar's face; Bucilianus stabbed his back or the back of his head; Decimus sliced his thigh. Blinded by blood, Caesar tripped and fell. The men continued stabbing him as he lay on the lower steps of the portico. A physician's autopsy, the earliest known post-mortem report in history, concluded that only one wound had been fatal: the second stab to Caesar's ribs, which caused death primarily through blood loss. Caesar fell at the base of a statue of Pompey the Great. His last words remain disputed. Both Cassius Dio and Suetonius say he said nothing. Others recorded the Greek phrase "kai su, teknon," meaning "You too, child?" Plutarch wrote that Caesar said nothing, only pulling his toga over his head when he saw Brutus among the men.

• 6. The Aftermath

  ›

  After the assassination, all the conspirators fled. Three slaves eventually placed Caesar's body on a litter and carried him home, one arm hanging down. Brutus and his companions marched through the city declaring, "People of Rome, we are once again free!" The citizens responded with silence, locked inside their homes. A wax statue of Caesar was later erected in the Forum displaying all 23 stab wounds. The crowd that gathered burned the Curia of Pompey in rage.

  Two days after the assassination, Antony summoned the Senate and negotiated a compromise: the conspirators would not be punished, but all of Caesar's appointments would stand. Then came the reading of Caesar's will. Caesar had named his grandnephew Gaius Octavius as his sole heir and had bequeathed him the name Caesar. Octavius, aged 18, abandoned his studies in Apollonia and sailed across the Adriatic Sea to Brundisium. He became Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, inheriting both the family name and the loyalty it carried.

  With passage of the Lex Titia on the 27th of November 43 BC, Antony, Octavian, and Caesar's Master of the Horse Lepidus formally created the Second Triumvirate. In 42 BC it deified Caesar as Divus Iulius, making Octavian the "Son of the Divine." The Triumvirate defeated Brutus and Cassius at Philippi. It then fractured: Lepidus was forced into exile in Circeii in 36 BC after Octavian accused him of attempting rebellion in Sicily. Antony, who had married Cleopatra, fought Octavian in the War of Actium and lost in 31 BC. Both Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide in Alexandria in 30 BC. In 27 BC, Octavian was restyled "Augustus" and became the first Roman emperor, the very outcome the conspirators of the Ides had killed to prevent.

• 7. Legacy in Art and Culture

  ›

  The assassination left a long cultural afterlife. The most influential retelling is William Shakespeare's 1599 play Julius Caesar, which placed the conspirators, their arguments, and Caesar's final moments on stages across the world. The play drew so completely on Plutarch's account that its invented dialogue, including versions of Caesar's last words, shaped how later generations imagined the event.

  Film and television returned to the subject repeatedly across the twentieth century. An Italian film in 1914 dramatized Caesar's return to Rome, the Ides, and the civil war. In 1950, Charlton Heston starred in a version of Julius Caesar. A full film adaptation of Shakespeare's play followed in 1953, with another in 1970. In 1954, the Canadian comedy duo Wayne and Shuster performed "Rinse the Blood Off My Toga," a sketch that reimagined the assassination as a detective noir story, first on radio and later reprised many times on television. A 2002 miniseries covered Caesar's full life; the HBO series Rome, beginning in 2005, tracked the period from the end of the Gallic Wars through the rise of Octavian. Cicero, who was not a conspirator but was surprised by the assassination, later wrote to Trebonius that he wished he had been "invited to that superb banquet" and believed the group should also have killed Mark Antony.