Marcus Junius Brutus

• 1. Introduction

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  Marcus Junius Brutus died on the 23rd of October 42 BC, on a hillside near Philippi, by falling on his own sword. He had just lost two battles in quick succession to the armies of Octavian and Mark Antony. Four legions remained with him. He knew they would not be enough.

  His last recorded words, according to Plutarch, were: "By all means must we fly, but with our hands, not our feet." He also reportedly quoted from Euripides' Medea, calling down a curse: "O Zeus, do not forget who has caused all these woes."

  Brutus had spent his entire adult life trying to be two things at once: a loyal friend to Julius Caesar and a loyal son to the Roman Republic. On the Ides of March of 44 BC, he chose the Republic. What followed was not liberation. It was two more years of civil war, more proscriptions, and the deaths of almost everyone he cared about, including his wife Porcia and his closest ally Cicero.

  His name, in most European languages, has since become a synonym for betrayal. And yet, for centuries, others have called him the last true republican. How one man became both the most famous traitor in Western history and one of its most admired patriots is the question this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. A Family Built on Liberty

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  The gens Junia, the clan into which Brutus was born late in 85 BC, traced its semi-legendary origins to Lucius Junius Brutus, the man credited with expelling Tarquinius Superbus, the last king of Rome. That ancestor went on to become one of the first two consuls of the Roman Republic in 509 BC, and he had the people swear an oath never to accept another king.

  This ancestry was not merely decorative. When Brutus served as triumvir monetalis in 54 BC, one of three officials charged with producing Rome's coinage, he chose to put his ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus on the face of a silver denarius alongside Gaius Servilius Ahala, a maternal ancestor celebrated for killing a man named Spurius Maelius, who had apparently harboured kingly ambitions. His colleague that year, Quintus Pompeius Rufus, similarly honoured his own grandfathers, the dictator Sulla among them. But where Rufus celebrated family power, Brutus's coins advertised a philosophy: that the role of the Junii was to destroy tyranny.

  The coins also carried a second design, this one featuring Libertas, the goddess of liberty, alongside Lucius Brutus. Cicero had already noted Brutus's admiration for his tyrannicide ancestors as early as 59 BC. The coins, minted when Brutus was around thirty, show that admiration was already shaping his public identity long before any conspiracies were formed.

  Brutus's actual father, also named Marcus Junius Brutus, had served as tribune of the plebs in 83 BC before being killed by Pompey in 77 during the aftermath of a failed rebellion. That killing left a permanent mark. And yet, when civil war finally came, Brutus would side with Pompey rather than Caesar, apparently because his closest allies made the same choice. His relationship to his father's killer was complicated enough that Caesar was said to have spoken privately about avenging that death, apparently courting Brutus's loyalty in the years before the war.

• 3. The Money-Lender and the Lawyer

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  During his time in Cilicia around 53-51 BC, Brutus found a way to make money that would later embarrass him considerably. He had arranged loans to Ariobarzanes, king of Cappadocia, and to the town of Salamis on Cyprus. The Ariobarzanes debt was bundled with a loan also extended by Pompey. The Salamis loan was the more revealing one.

  Officially, the money had been lent not by Brutus but by two of his friends, allowing him to sidestep the lex Gabinia, which made it illegal for Romans to lend directly to provincial communities in the capital. The interest rate he charged was 48 per cent per annum, four times the cap of 12 per cent that Cicero had previously set as proconsul. When Cicero was appointed to the province and discovered the arrangement, one of Brutus's friends, Marcus Scaptius, was using force in Cilicia to extract repayment. Cicero put a stop to that.

  The letters Cicero and Brutus exchanged over this episode reveal a great deal. Cicero was genuinely fond of Brutus and did not want to damage their friendship. But he was also angry at what he described as Brutus's mischaracterisation of the loan and the brutal interest rate attached. In the end, Cicero chose not to resolve the matter, deferring the decision to his successor.

  Brutus was also, by this period, a practising advocate in the Roman courts. He worked alongside Cicero and Quintus Hortensius in several major trials. In 50 BC, he helped defend his father-in-law Appius Claudius against charges of treason and electoral malpractice. He was also a writer of considerable reputation: his pamphlet De Dictatura Pompei, written in 52 BC, contained the line "it is better to rule no one than to be another man's slave, for one can live honourably without power but to live as a slave is impossible." That pamphlet was considered more radical than Cato's position at the time, and his pro Milone speech was later praised by teachers of rhetoric.

• 4. Caesar's Clemency, Caesar's Drift

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  After the Battle of Pharsalus on the 9th of August 48 BC, in which Pompey's forces were routed, Brutus fled through marshland to Larissa and wrote to Caesar. Caesar welcomed him. According to Plutarch, Caesar had ordered his officers beforehand that if Brutus surrendered, he should be taken prisoner safely, and if he resisted, he should be left unharmed.

  This was not the behaviour of a man treating Brutus as an ordinary enemy. Caesar appointed Brutus governor of Cisalpine Gaul, gave him the prestigious urban praetorship for 44 BC, and reportedly earmarked him for the consulship in 41. After Cato's suicide at the battle of Thapsus on the 6th of April 46, Brutus wrote a pamphlet called Cato reflecting positively on Cato's life while also, notably, praising Caesar's clementia, his clemency toward enemies.

  The shift that ended this relationship was not sudden. By late 45 BC, Caesar had accepted the title dictator perpetuo, which translated either as "dictator for life" or "dictator for an undetermined term." He had deposed two plebeian tribunes in January 44 for removing a crown from one of his statues. In February he rejected a crown from Mark Antony three times to cheering crowds, a piece of theatre that satisfied no one. The reduction of the senate to what was essentially a ratifying body had removed the competitive pathways through which Romans of Brutus's generation expected to earn power and distinction. The senate could no longer shape policy independently.

  Brutus had also divorced his wife Claudia in June 45 to marry his cousin Porcia, the daughter of Cato, within the same month. Cicero noted this caused something of a scandal. Porcia and Brutus's mother Servilia reportedly made their mutual hostility plain. Whether the marriage was romantic or politically symbolic, it aligned Brutus publicly with the republican tradition his coins had long advertised.

• 5. The Ides of March

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  Gaius Cassius Longinus, a former legate of Caesar's and one of the praetors for 44 BC, was also involved in forming the conspiracy. The ancient sources disagree on who approached whom first: Plutarch has Brutus approach Cassius at Porcia's urging, while Appian and Dio have Cassius make the first move. The recruiting phase began in late February 44, when Brutus, Cassius, and Brutus's cousin Decimus Junius Brutus began bringing in others, including Gaius Trebonius, Publius Servilius Casca, and Servius Sulpicius Galba.

  Various locations for the killing were proposed, including an ambush on the via sacra and an attack at a gladiator match. The conspirators eventually settled on a senate meeting on the Ides of March, a date that carried symbolic weight because consuls had historically assumed office on that day until the mid-2nd century BC. The plan gave them a tactical advantage: senators were not armed, and by smuggling weapons in under their robes, only the conspirators would be.

  The implementation called for Trebonius to detain Antony outside the senate house. Caesar was then stabbed almost immediately. The accounts diverge sharply on details: Nicolaus of Damascus counted some eighty conspirators, while Appian listed only fifteen. The number of wounds on Caesar's body varies in the sources from twenty-three to thirty-five.

  The famous line attributed to Caesar, the Greek "kai su teknon" ("You too, child?"), appears in Dio's account. Suetonius cites a friend of Caesar's, Lucius Cornelius Balbus, as saying Caesar actually fell in silence, with the phrase perhaps added after the fact. Classicists James Russell and Jeffrey Tatum have noted that the use of "kai su" in Greek suggests the possibility of a curse rather than a question. Plutarch reports that Caesar yielded to the attack after seeing that Brutus had joined it.

• 6. The Settlement That Failed

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  Immediately after Caesar's death, the senators fled. No one tried to help Caesar or move his body. His corpse remained where it fell, at the foot of the statue of Pompey according to Cicero, until night, when it was carried to Caesar's wife Calpurnia. Brutus spoke before the people in a contio, an open public address, but the text of that speech is lost.

  Cicero brokered the terms of what should have been a lasting peace: a general amnesty for the assassins, ratification of Caesar's acts and appointments for the next two years, guaranteed land grants for Caesar's veterans, and a public funeral for Caesar. Had this settlement held, Decimus would have gone to Gaul and stood for the consulship in 42, with elections to follow for 41.

  It did not hold. Caesar's funeral on the 20th of March saw Antony deliver a speech that energised opposition to the tyrannicides. After the funeral, Brutus retreated to one of his estates in Lanuvium, about twenty miles south-east of Rome, after a person calling himself Marius, claiming descent from the general Gaius Marius, threatened to ambush him and Cassius. This fake Marius was eventually executed by being thrown from the Tarpeian Rock in mid- or late April.

  By mid-May, Antony was manoeuvring against Decimus's governorship in Cisalpine Gaul, using the popular assemblies rather than the senate to reassign the province by law. He also proposed reassigning Brutus and Cassius from their own provinces to grain-purchasing duties in Asia and Sicily. At a meeting at Brutus's house, attended by Cicero, Cassius announced his intention to go to Syria. Brutus initially wanted to return to Rome but ended up sailing for Greece. The initial plan to return to Rome had been partly to put on games in July commemorating Lucius Junius Brutus, but he delegated those games to a friend.

• 7. Philippi and the End

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  By August 42 BC, Brutus and Cassius had marched their combined forces into Thrace. They had spent the previous year building substantial armies and wealth in the east, including a campaign through southern Asia Minor that left Xanthus enslaved and plundered, a chapter that damaged Brutus's reputation among ancient writers like Appian while Plutarch portrayed him as weeping over the violence, a common literary device for excusing morally condemned actions.

  At Philippi, the liberatores positioned themselves west of Neapolis with their supply lines running east. Octavian and Antony commanded some 95,000 infantry and 13,000 cavalry. Brutus and Cassius fielded around 85,000 infantry and 20,000 cavalry. The republicans had a financial advantage and paid their soldiers 1,500 denarii per man in advance, with more for officers.

  Antony moved to force an engagement by building a causeway under cover of darkness into the swamps anchoring the republican left flank. In the first battle of Philippi, Brutus's forces defeated Octavian's troops on the right, sacking Octavian's camp and forcing his withdrawal. Cassius, however, fared badly against Antony. One of Cassius's legates failed to relay news of Brutus's victory to him, and believing Brutus had been defeated, Cassius killed himself. The sources are in agreement on this sequence, except for Appian, who offers a different account.

  After assuming command of Cassius's army, Brutus held out for as long as he could before joining the second battle, described in the sources as a head-to-head engagement with heavy casualties and few tactical manoeuvres. After the defeat, Brutus fled into the hills with about four legions before taking his own life. Some sources report that Antony ordered Brutus's body wrapped in his most expensive purple mantle and cremated, the ashes sent to Brutus's mother Servilia. Suetonius reports a different ending: that Octavian had Brutus's head cut off and planned to display it before Caesar's statue, until a storm in the Adriatic threw it overboard.

• 8. Two Thousand Years of Argument

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  Even Antony, Caesar's closest ally, was later quoted by Plutarch as saying that "Brutus was the only man to have slain Caesar because he was driven by the splendour and nobility of the deed, while the rest conspired against the man because they hated and envied him."

  Dante Alighieri took the opposite view, placing Brutus in the lowest circle of Hell alongside Cassius and Judas Iscariot, personally tortured by Satan. Dante interpreted the assassination as resistance to God's historical design for Rome. In the 12th century, the English writer John of Salisbury had defended tyrannicide as a moral obligation, citing Cicero's De Officiis. Thomas Aquinas initially agreed before qualifying the position, arguing that mild tyrants should be tolerated to avoid unintended consequences.

  Renaissance Europe was considerably warmer toward Brutus as a symbol. In 1537, a man known as the "Florentine Brutus," Lorenzino de' Medici, killed his cousin Duke Alessandro, claiming to free Florence. In 1579, a French pamphlet titled Vindiciae contra tyrannos was published under the pseudonym Stephanus Junius Brutus. In 1683, Algernon Sidney, known as the "British Brutus," was executed for allegedly plotting against Charles II. The Anti-Federalist Papers of 1787 were also written under the pseudonym "Brutus."

  The historian Cremutius Cordus was charged with treason during the reign of Tiberius for writing a history too sympathetic to Brutus and Cassius. Valerius Maximus, writing under imperial patronage around the same time, judged that Brutus's memory suffered from "irreversible curses." Theodor Mommsen's influential History of Rome in the late 19th century delivered a damning verdict by simply ending its account with Caesar's reforms in 46 BC, implying the republic Brutus died for was already over. Ronald Syme later pushed back, writing that "to judge Brutus because he failed is simply to judge from the results." That argument has not been settled. Two thousand years of verdict-rendering have produced no consensus, which is itself a kind of testament to the man who left Philippi by falling on his sword and quoting Euripides.