”Yet this father, this high priest, this inviolable being, this hero and god, is dead, alas, dead not by the violence of some disease, nor wasted by old age, nor wounded abroad...but right here within the walls as a result of a plot... Of what avail, O Caesar of what avail was your humanity, of what avail your inviolability, of what avail the laws?” Marc Antony's funeral oration for Caesar, Cassius Dio, XLIV.

 ”…according to him, our problems are insoluble: ‘for if a man of Caesar’s genius could find no way out, who will find one now?’” Cicero to Atticus, quoting Caesar's friend Matius, April 7, 44 BC  

PRELUDE TO ASSASSINATION

The rest of the tale is well known, thanks to Shakespeare. At the feast of the Lupercal in February, 44, Mark Antony offered Caesar a “crown” (the diadem of the Hellenistic kings). Caesar refused it, but doubts remained that he had personally arranged for the public offer. Some historians think he staged the incident simply to destroy the rumors he desired kingship. As Napoleon noted succinctly, "If Caesar wanted to be king, he would have got his army to acclaim him as such." Doubts lingered.

Two tribunes, pulling down diadems placed on his statues around the city, were dismissed from office. By dismissing them, Caesar attacked the inviolable position of Tribune of the plebs, the very point for which he claimed he fought in beginning the Civil War. Brutus was sounded out to remove the tyrant; Cassius enjoined; the conspirators grew, including Caesar’s most faithful subordinate, Decimus Brutus. Omens and supernatural portents, remembered later, spoke of danger to come; the dead “did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.” 

Plutarch gives the responsibility for persuading Brutus to turn against Caesar to Cassius, who had a personal animosity against the Dictator and a "peculiar bitterness" against anyone more powerful than he. In addition, Brutus allegedly was pestered, in the last months of Caesar's life, by anonymous appeals calling upon him to rid the state of the tyrant, as his ancestor had done. Cassius had gathered a conglomerate of senators willing to assassinate Caesar but all agreed that the conspiracy could not succeed without the idealistic glamour that Brutus' participation would bring to it; he was the essential man to give the enterprise political legitimacy.

Fuller notes that "The avowed object of the plot was tyrranicide, which in the eyes of both Greeks and Romans was righteous and just...the plotters were well aware that under Caesar's autocracy their opportunities for financial gain and political power would vanish, and the prestige of the Senate would be obliterated... In short, the way of life the senators had been following since the Second Punic War would end. Their struggle against reforms had opened with the murder of the Gracchi, and they fondly imagined it could be closed by the murder of Caesar." Fuller, 302.

Cassius worked hard to convince Brutus to participate, befriending him in spite of their past contention. In one critical meeting, Cassius claimed that a meeting of the Senate on the Kalends (first day) of March, would declare Caesar a king on those parts of the Empire outside Italy. As Senators, each would either have to vote for kingship or reveal themselves in enmity to Caesar. Brutus then claimed he would be forced to "defend my country and to die for its liberty." With Brutus involved, the conspiracy planning began in earnest. Men were actively sounded to join (Cicero, to his everlasting shame, was left out because he was considered too timid by nature to keep the secret). It is astonishing how many of the perhaps 60 conspirators were Caesar's closest associates and friends or those who, fighting for Pompey, had been pardoned by him and raised to the highest officers in the state. Brutus, who was so beloved of Caesar that rumor incorrectly suggested he was his natural son, who had to keep up the front of being calmly in league with Caesar while planning his murder. He began to suffer in private. His wife Porcia, Cato's daughter, knew something was wrong. Eventually, by showing her own courage and ability to keep a secret, she persuaded him to tell her his plans to kill Caesar.

A meeting of the Senate was announced for the Ides (15th day) of March in which dispositions for the Parthian campaign and the issue of Caesar's kingship would be discussed. Caesar would leave on March 18 for Parthia to join his legions in the east, picking up his young relative, Octavius, on the way. Brutus rose early in the morning, hid a dagger under his toga, and met the other conspirators at Cassius' house; then hurried to Pompey's great civic megaplex. The Senate was temporarily meeting in a hall near Pompey's theater in which stood a large statue of Pompey. Caesar was late. Unknown to the nervous conspirators, he was contending with the fears of his wife, Calpurnia, whose dreams suggested Caesar's murder. He was finally persuaded to attend by his old comrade-in-arms, Decimus Brutus, who gently mocked Calpurnia's concerns while carrying his own hidden dagger.

As praetor, Brutus was forced to meet clients throughout that long morning and judge petitions while he waited to assassinate his friend. He knew that, for possible crowd control after the murder, a party of gladiators had been posted in the adjacent Pompey's Theatre. By all accounts he was outwardly calm, although the conspirators as a whole were so jittery that they nearly fled over small hints that their course of action might have been discovered. Word was brought to Brutus that Porcia, in an agony of suspense, had collapsed and appeared to be dead; even this did not shake him from his purpose, and he remained where he was, awaiting Caesar.

Finally, in early afternoon, Caesar arrived to open the Senate. As planned, Gaius Trebonius engaged Antony in a long discussion outside the Senate to keep him out of the way. The conspirators were well-coordinated; gathering immediately about Caesar as he sat in his curule chair, Tullius Cimber pretended to submit a petition. Suddenly Cimber grabbed Caesar's purple robe and wrenched it away from his neck; the signal for attack. Immediately Casca struck the first blow of the most famous assassination in history:

"So it began, and those who were not in the conspiracy were so horrorstruck and amazed at what was being done that they were afraid to run away and afraid to come to Caesar's help; they were too afraid even to utter a word. But those who had come prepared for the murder all bared their daggers and hemmed Caesar in on every side. Whichever way he turned he met the blows of daggers and saw the cold steel aimed at his face and at his eyes. So he was driven this way and that, and like a wild beast in the toils, had to suffer from the hands of each of them; for it had been agreed that they must all take part in this sacrifice and all flesh themselves with his blood...Some say that Caesar fought back against all the rest, darting this way and that to avoid the blows and crying out for help, but when he saw that Brutus had drawn his dagger, he covered his head with his toga and sank down to the ground." Plutarch, Life, 66.

Caesar's bloodied body lay at the foot of Pompey's giant statue and bathed its base. The conspirators, shouting that they had freed Rome, raced towards the Forum, showing their bloody hands to the stunned populace. Antony, Lepidus, and the rest of the Senate, panic-stricken, were in hiding. The triumphant “liberators,” as even Cicero admitted, had no plans whatever about what to do with Rome, once Caesar was gone. Faltering at the lack of public response to their act, they withdrew in turmoil to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus to await events.

"I Have Lived Long Enough"

Caesar is alleged to have said, in the year before his murder, "It is more important for Rome than for myself that I should survive. I have long been sated with power and glory; but, should anything happen to me, Rome will enjoy no peace. A new Civil War will break out under far worse conditions than the last" (Suetonius). His words were prophetic. Cicero quoted Caesar, in the Pro Marcello, as saying “Satis diu vel naturae vixi, vel gloriae” (I have lived long enough both in years and in accomplishment).

Although many scholars, including Gelzer, think Caesar would have been capable following his Parthian Wars to restore postwar order to Roman institutions and create the sort of workable principate his grandnephew Augustus achieved in his 45-year rule. It is just as likely that Caesar was improvising and waiting upon events. He certainly seems to have been content in the end to leave the field of politics and return to his planned invasion of Parthia, to conquer once more and to return to Rome the vanquished Eagles of his dead colleague, Crassus. What he would have accomplished if he had lived was murky even to his contemporaries due to the adamant lack of cooperation his fellow Romans were willing to give. No historian credibly suggests, however, that Caesar fully intended to restore what he viewed as a bankrupt Roman Republic.

There is an inexplicable melancholy in reading about the last year of Caesar's life, perhaps summed up best by Sir Ronald Syme:

After a lifetime of seeking glory within the terms of the aging Republic, all Caesar's best adversaries were dead or silenced; he had the love of the mob, but the hatred of much of the nobility; he had chosen to fight his enemies using the tools that had, by now, become familiar, but were still guaranteed to earn him, forever, the infamy of the man who destroyed the Roman Republic. One wonders if such an intelligent man did not sense this.

Whatever doubts exist about his political actions, Caesar's military reputation has kept its pristine glory; with Alexander, he is generally accounted one of the greatest commanders of all history. His record of almost unbroken victories was envied by, among others, both Napoleon and Hitler. His lessons of swift, unexpected attack reverberate even now.

When a young man in Spain, Caesar allegedly wept when he saw the statue of Alexander, having accomplished, himself, so little by the same age. His death on the Ides of March, 44, occurred when he had conquered the Roman world and finally saw his chance to take that hunger for world conquest to the East, like Alexander. His legions were marshaled, his preparations made, his personal affairs settled. The night before Caesar died, at a dinner at Lepidus’ house, he was heard to answer the question “what death is the best?” with the instant answer, “an sudden one." So would a soldier expect to die; so he did.

Jerome, The Death of Caesar, 1867

Sources:

Quotation from Napoleon - whose comments on Caesar are invariably fascinating and pragmatic - from Fuller's "Julius Caesar: Man, Soldier and Tyrant," p. 302. Quotation from Napoleon - whose comments on Caesar are invariably fascinating and pragmatic - from Fuller's "Julius Caesar: Man, Soldier and Tyrant," p. 302. Without exception, classical historians are thrilling on Caesar's murder. Primary sources include Plutarch, Caesar, LXIVl Suetonius, Div. Iul., LXXXII; Dio, XLIV. See Appian, Civil Wars, II, 118-48 for the fullest account of post-assassination events.