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And so every kind of person conspired against him—great and small, friend and enemy, soldier and civilian. Each had his own reasons for doing so and gladly heard the complaints of others.
—NICOLAUS OF DAMASCUS
In February of 44 B.C., Cicero’s daughter Tullia died. Although the death of a child was all too common in ancient Rome, Cicero was inconsolable. One of his friends, Servius Sulpicius Rufus, wrote to him from Greece as soon as he heard the news. Servius was a former consul and one of the leading lawyers of the day. He had reluctantly joined Pompey when the civil war began, but Caesar had gladly pardoned him and even appointed him governor of Greece. The letter of Servius begins with heartfelt sympathy for Cicero’s loss, but quickly turns into mourning not for a daughter, but for Rome itself:
Look at what fortune has done to us. Everything that a man should hold no less dear than his children—country, reputation, dignity, honors—all have been lost. Could this misfortune of yours really make matters any worse?
The opposition of implacable enemies like Cato or Labienus had been one thing, but with the victory now won, moderates like Servius and even old friends of Caesar like Gaius Trebonius felt only frustration and despair at the new Rome he had created. How could a man who had gained the whole world lose the support of those who had served him loyally?
Caesar had not begun to understand the depths of the enmity against him until Cicero published a eulogy entitled Cato in praise of the slain optimate soon after the African campaign. In this work Cato was held up as the ideal of Roman virtue, a martyr to the ancient Republic. Caesar was furious with Cicero, but greater than his anger was his bafflement at the warm reception of the book among the public. As always, Caesar was unable to understand how others could not see what was so obvious to him—the Republic was dead. Moreover, it was a death well deserved as it had served only to perpetuate the rule and enrichment of a few powerful families at the expense of everyone else. To make Cato the shining hero of a failed and corrupt system was unforgivable.
Caesar resisted the urge to separate Cicero’s head from his shoulders and instead sent a warm letter to the orator praising his marvelous writing style. But as soon as the war in Spain was finished Caesar wrote a virulent response called the Anti-Cato. This work, now lost except for fragments, was one of Caesar’s greatest mistakes. Instead of ignoring the praise heaped on Cato, Caesar vented his spleen against his deceased enemy in the crudest manner. He accused Cato of being a miser, a drunkard, and a heartless schemer who gave his wife, Marcia, to his wealthy friend Hortensius only so that he could later remarry her:
Why did Cato give up a wife he loved? Or if he didn’t love her, why did he take her back? He must have used her as bait for Hortensius so that he could reclaim her later as a rich widow.
As Plutarch says, calling Cato greedy was like calling Hercules a coward. Even Caesar’s closest friends were embarrassed by this baseless tirade against a dead man. Cicero was so delighted at Caesar’s overreaction that he urged everyone to read the Anti-Catobecause its vindictiveness served to make Cato look even more noble compared to Caesar.
Brutus joined in the fray soon after by publishing his own pamphlet in praise of Cato. Caesar had never believed he would gain Cicero’s sincere support, but had always tried to win Brutus to his cause. Caesar had praised his service as governor of Italian Gaul and announced that as a reward he was nominating Brutus to serve as praetor, followed by a consulship. Caesar kept his faith in the younger man even when Brutus married Cato’s daughter, Portia, the widow of his old enemy Bibulus. The dictator would never have trusted anyone else who made such obvious declarations of optimate values, but Caesar’s affection for Brutus was undiminished.
Caesar seemed to have learned nothing from the mistakes during his triumphal parades the previous year. The Roman people loved a good show, but when Caesar decided to celebrate his victory over the Pompeians in Spain by staging a grand triumph through the streets of the capital, it turned into a public relations disaster. Gaul and Egypt had been foreign wars and even in Africa Caesar could argue that a significant portion of the defeated army were Juba’s Numidians, but Romans saw the war in Spain as a slaughter of their own sons and brothers. They understood that it had been necessary for Caesar to defeat the last of the rebels, but to hold a public celebration as if he had conquered the blue-skinned Picts of Caledonia was in horrible taste.
No one in power had the courage to object to Caesar’s behavior except a young tribune of the people named Pontus Aquila. As Caesar rode past in his triumphal cart all the magistrates rose to honor him—except Aquila. Caesar was so enraged at the man for this public disrespect that he lost his customary control and shouted out: “Tribune Aquila, why don’t you take back the government from me?” For days afterward, whenever he promised anything to anyone, he added with pointed sarcasm: “That is, if Pontus Aquila will permit me!”
However, the rest of the senators vied with each other in flattering the dictator with ever greater honors. He was allowed to wear his triumphal garments at all future games along with a laurel crown. His victory at Munda was to be celebrated annually with races at the Circus. The Senate bestowed upon him the titles liberator and imperator, the latter of which, previously restricted to conquering generals, would pass automatically to his sons and grandsons regardless of military victories. A golden chair was built for his pleasure in the Senate chamber, while the state was to construct a temple to the goddess of liberty in his honor as well as a private palace for his residence on the Quirinal Hill. Caesar’s birthday was declared a public holiday in perpetuity. Moreover, the month of his birth, which had previously been known simply as Quinctilus (the fifth month, from when the Roman year began in March) was renamed Julius in his honor—hence our modern July. He was allowed to wear the purple regalia of the ancient Roman kings and to be buried, contrary to all tradition, within the walls of the city. He was proclaimed Father of his Country and declared consul for ten years. More significantly, he was named dictator for life.
But as unprecedented as these honors were, it was the astonishing transformation of Caesar from conquering hero to divine figure that most troubled the ancient Romans, as it does modern students of history. The Egyptians and much of the eastern Mediterranean had long been accustomed to revering their leaders as demigods, but such veneration of rulers was contrary to the very core of Roman beliefs. How could the Senate permit such apparent blasphemy—and why did Caesar allow it? Perhaps the answer lies in the huge foreign population of Rome that was not troubled by the thought of a divine ruler. Perhaps the Romans so yearned for stability after decades of civil war that they were willing to give up cherished traditions in exchange for anyone who would bring peace to their world. Perhaps the senators granted divine honors to Caesar merely to curry favor or feared that he would yet become a bloodthirsty tyrant unless appeased. Caesar may have accepted such honors to humor the common people or to guarantee the success of his reforms for the good of the empire—or perhaps he fell victim to the very human vice of pride. Caesar surely knew that hubris, the arrogance of the king who thinks himself equal to the gods, was a favorite subject of Greek drama. But as a supposed descendant of the goddess Venus through her son Aeneas, Caesar may have genuinely come to believe he deserved divine honors.
When the Senate decreed his ivory statue would be carried in procession with the gods of Rome, Caesar did not object. When it voted to establish a new cult to Caesar with Mark Antony as chief priest, the dictator graciously concurred. When an image of Caesar with the inscription to the unconquered god was to be erected at the temple of Quirinus—the deified Romulus, first king of Rome—there was scarcely a whisper of discontent, least of all from Caesar. But beneath the public calm a storm was brewing among the surviving aristocracy. As Cicero quietly commented to his friend Atticus: “I’d prefer Caesar share a temple with Quirinus than Salus.” Salus was the goddess who guarded the health of the state, while Romulus had been torn to pieces by Rome’s first senators when they believed he was becoming a tyrant.
Caesar had long planned a war against the Parthians, in part to avenge the death of his former partner Crassus nine years earlier. But Caesar had other reasons for a grand campaign to the east. The Parthian king had already sent his son Pancorus to successfully aid rebel troops in the province of Syria. If the Romans did not respond quickly and forcefully, the Parthians could threaten Asia Minor, Egypt, and the rest of the eastern Mediterranean. Fortunately for Caesar, the Roman people enthusiastically backed the war. Caesar also undoubtedly wanted to get out of Rome to escape scheming senators and the fickle mob. Although he was a master politician, he had spent most of the previous twenty years as a general on the battlefield, where life was so much simpler. It was at war that Caesar felt most in control of his world. But the greatest reason for an eastern campaign was Caesar’s unquenchable ambition—or as Plutarch puts it, the rivalry between what he had done and what he hoped to do. Caesar, now in his mid-fifties, still dreamed of conquering new worlds.
Caesar realized he had to settle affairs in Rome before leaving and so worked furiously to enact laws, appoint magistrates, and deal with a thousand problems that might come up while he was on a campaign that could take him away from the capital for at least three years. He had already sent sixteen legions and ten thousand cavalry across the Adriatic to prepare for war. He himself had decided to leave Rome at the beginning of spring, three days after the Ides of March.
Rumors flew through Rome that Caesar would not be coming back from the East, but would move the capital of the empire to Egypt or his supposed ancestral home at Troy. In fact, he had every intention of returning to Rome once the long campaign was finished. He planned to strike first against the troublesome Dacians on the lower Danube to secure the northern Balkans. Then he would march across Asia Minor to Armenia and invade the Parthian empire from the north. How far east he planned to go is unknown—whether he would be content with the conquest of Mesopotamia or press on to the Indus River like Alexander before him. However far he might go, reports were that he would return by way of the Caucasus Mountains and Caspian Sea, crushing the wild Scythian tribes of the steppes along the way. From there he would follow the Danube west to the Alps and overwhelm the Germans before returning to Italy through Gaul. If such stories were told of any other general they could safely be dismissed as fantasy, but Caesar may very well have planned to conquer the Near East and all of Europe to the North Sea.
But before setting out on this expedition, he had to face his own mortality. Caesar had no legitimate Roman son, so he chose his great-nephew Octavius as his chief heir. This exceptionally bright young man was barely eighteen years old, but he had greatly impressed Caesar. Octavius was to receive three-quarters of Caesar’s immense wealth, while two other great-nephews were to divide the remainder of his estate. But before filing his will, Caesar added one last line, adopting Octavius as his son upon his death. Such an adoption by last will and testament was common enough in ancient Rome, but given Caesar’s position, the choice of Octavius as his next of kin marked the teenager as his intended political heir as well. In case anyone doubted Caesar’s faith in Octavius, the dictator declared his grandnephew would become Master of the Horse, the post previously held by Mark Antony, as soon as he departed for the Parthian War.
On December 18 of 45 B.C., Caesar visited Campania for a few days of relaxation amid the planning for his eastern campaign. Even at leisure, Caesar was always a frenetic worker. While attending races at the Circus Maximus, he had repeatedly annoyed the crowd by answering letters and hearing petitions rather than watching the show. But at Puteoli on the Bay of Naples, Caesar did manage to find a few moments of peace as he gazed across the water at Mount Vesuvius.
Cicero gives us a remarkable glimpse of Caesar during his visit as he owned a home nearby and was the dictator’s dinner guest. As he wrote to his friend Atticus, Caesar arrived with two thousand attendants—scribes, slaves, and soldiers—at the house of his neighbor Philippus, the stepfather of Octavius. The estate was overflowing with Caesar’s retinue so that most camped in a nearby field. The next day Caesar worked undisturbed until early afternoon with his comrade Balbus, then went for a walk on the beach. At midafternoon he bathed and heard a report concerning his follower Mamurra, whom Catullus had years before accused of being Caesar’s lover.
As evening fell, Caesar was anointed with perfume and joined his guests for dinner. As was common at the time, Caesar’s doctor had prescribed a course of emetics to clean out his patient’s digestive system, so the dictator felt free to indulge himself that night rather than follow his customary restraint at meals. Cicero says the dinner was splendid, the entertainment lively, and the conversation warm. Aside from the inner circle of diners, of which Cicero was a part, Caesar had tables laid out for freedmen and even slaves. Talk among Caesar and his guests revolved around literature, not politics. In spite of the good time had by all, Caesar and his entourage, as Cicero says, were so overwhelming that one would scarce invite them back again.
Once Caesar returned to Rome, he began to act more like a king than the leader of a republic. One day when he was sitting in front of the temple of his ancestor Venus transacting business, a large group of senators approached him to announce new honors they had voted for him. Caesar started to rise to greet them, but his confidant Balbus whispered in his ear that if he wanted to be treated like a ruler he should start acting like one. Therefore, contrary to all custom, Caesar remained seated like a king while the most respected body in ancient Rome stood and addressed him. Not only were the senators deeply offended by this haughty behavior, but the crowd that had followed them was stunned that Caesar would show such disrespect to the venerated body. Once they had left and Caesar realized just how insulting his actions had been, he cried out to his friends in a fit of melodrama that he was ready to offer his throat to the knife of anyone who felt slighted. Instead of suicide, however, he spread the story that he had suddenly felt ill and was unable to rise for the senators.
Although Caesar was king of Rome in all but name, he still lacked the actual title of rex. Ever since Tarquin the Proud, the last king of Rome, had been overthrown five centuries earlier, rex had been a cursed word among Romans. As dictator for life, commander of the armies, and chief priest of Rome, he held power over millions that a title of royalty would not augment. Yet there was something about being king of Rome that must have appealed to Caesar. His Julian ancestors, after all, had been kings of nearby Alba Longa when Rome was still just a village of refugee cowherds. Moreover he governed a mighty empire in a world where all other rulers, whether in Egypt, India, Parthia, or even Britain, were kings over their people. It must have been very tempting for Caesar to add this one last title to his name—if only the Senate and people would allow it.
The stories that survive from the first few weeks of 44 B.C. show Caesar toying with the idea of kingship—publicly rejecting the title, but in a half-hearted way as if he were testing the waters. A rumor arose (spread by Caesar?) that the sacred Sibylline books predicted that only a king could conquer the Parthians. Caesar’s cousin Cotta, one of the priests in charge of interpreting these texts, was to propose that Caesar be named rex, but only outside of Italy.
In another incident, one of Caesar’s statues in the Forum was found adorned with a ribbon on its head, an eastern symbol of kingship. Two tribunes named Marullus and Flavius immediately ordered it removed, declaring that Caesar had no need of such offensive devices. In one account, Caesar was perturbed at the pair for removing the ribbon, in another for not allowing him to reject it himself. Still other sources believed that Caesar thought Marullus and Flavius had set up the whole thing to rouse the people against his bid for kingship.
Soon afterward, Caesar was riding home when someone in the crowd hailed him as king. The dictator laughed and shouted: “My name is Caesar, not Rex.” But Marullus and Flavius grabbed the offending spectator and hauled him off to court. This time Caesar believed the presence of the two tribunes was too convenient and decided they were trying to provoke the crowd. He brought them before the Senate and declared they were worthy of death for their insidious manipulation of the mob. They were, he asserted, trying to lay the odious title of king upon him against his wishes. The two cried out that Caesar was preventing them from exercising their sacred rights as tribunes of the people. In the end, both Marullus and Flavius were removed from the Senate rolls, though they kept their lives. It is difficult to know whether they had interrupted a staged attempt by Caesar to have himself declared king by popular acclaim or if they had in fact instigated the entire affair to make him look as if he were grasping for a royal title.
The matter of kingship finally came to a head at the festival of the Lupercalia on February 15. The Lupercalia was so ancient a ceremony that no one had any clear idea of its origins or the meanings of its rituals. It was conducted by a brotherhood of the Luperci, who apparently took their name from the she-wolf (lupa) who had suckled the infants Romulus and Remus. A dog and several goats were first sacrificed at a cave on the Palatine Hill, where the wolf had raised the boys. The blood from the sacrificial knife was daubed on the foreheads of two boys, who for some reason were expected to laugh, then they were wiped clean by wool dipped in milk. After this the members of the brotherhood—naked except for the skin of the sacrificed goats around their waists—ran around the center of Rome striking eager women with goatskin thongs for purification (februare, thus our month February). This was also thought to promote fertility and ease the pains of childbirth.
This year Mark Antony was consul and also one of the Lupercalia brotherhood selected to dash through the streets. When he came to the Forum, he found Caesar sitting on his golden throne and wearing a purple robe. Suddenly he pulled a diadem wreathed in laurel from somewhere under his goatskin and held it out to Caesar proclaiming: “The people ask me to give you this crown.”
There was a notable silence from the crowd at this supposedly popular gesture as Caesar sat staring at the gift in Antony’s hands. Antony offered it to him again, but Caesar pushed it away and declared: “Jupiter alone is king of the Romans!” At which point the crowd erupted in wild applause.
Some ancient commentators say Caesar had staged this spectacle to put to rest once and for all any rumors that he desired the kingship. By refusing the crown in the most public of settings he was making it abundantly clear that he had no desire to be king. But most sources take the opposite view, that Caesar had arranged for Antony to offer him the kingship so that he might gauge the reaction of the Roman populace and accept the monarchy if they approved. Since it turned out they did not, he made a great show of rejecting Antony’s offer. In any case, most of the Roman nobility certainly believed that Caesar would have become king of Rome that day if the crowd had been on his side and so began to lay their plans in earnest. Cicero, who witnessed the entire scene, later wrote that the Lupercalia marked the beginning of the end of Caesar.
There were three kinds of men who wanted Caesar dead. The first were old enemies who had sided with Pompey but had been granted pardon. These men, such as Cassius, had joined Caesar’s cause due to expediency, not conviction. When they realized the optimates would lose the war, they chose to cut their losses and transfer their loyalty. They followed Caesar out of desire for profit and high office, which he had gladly given them. But as one ancient historian said:
They hated him precisely because he had forgiven them and treated them so kindly. They could not stand the thought of receiving as a gift from Caesar that which they might have gained on their own through victory.
The second group to plot Caesar’s downfall was his friends. Many of these men, like Trebonius, had followed Caesar faithfully since the Gallic war and now found themselves in positions of great favor in Caesar’s government. They respected Caesar greatly as a military leader, but deeply resented his policy of reconciliation with his former enemies. They had sided with Caesar because they had seen in him the genius to overthrow the entrenched optimates. However, instead of purging the ruling families as they had hoped, he had brought them into his new government on an equal footing. His disgruntled friends had no interest in Caesar’s vision for a harmonious new Rome; they simply wanted the fruits of victory for themselves.
The final conspirators were idealists who truly believed in the Republic. These few, like Brutus, had other motives as well, but their dedication to the ancient Roman tradition of shared power was genuine. The very thought of their beloved Rome ruled by a single man was unbearable. For generations their ancestors had fought and died to preserve their constitutional freedoms, but now they served the uncrowned king of Rome. What did it matter if he named them as consuls or made them governors of some wealthy province? When they returned home at night they still had to face the wax masks of their forefathers, who looked down on them and silently asked how they could have allowed this to happen.
The four leading figures of the conspiracy came from Caesar’s longtime companions as well as those who had fought against him. Gaius Trebonius had worked with Caesar since the days of the triumvirate, performing especially valuable service during his last years in Gaul. He had organized the siege of Massalia during the early months of the civil war and had fought for Caesar in Spain as well. Through Caesar, he had become praetor and served briefly as consul in 45 B.C. Decimus Brutus, from the same family as the more famous Brutus, had masterminded the naval victory against the Gaulish Veneti twelve years earlier and had also been one of Caesar’s most reliable commanders in Gaul. He had worked with Trebonius to subdue Massalia for Caesar and had been appointed governor of Gaul, where he had distinguished himself by suppressing a rebellion of the fierce Bellovaci. Caesar had honored Decimus repeatedly and had designated him as consul for 42 B.C. Both Trebonius and Decimus owed everything they had to Caesar, but neither felt it was enough.
Cassius was violent and ruthless, but Caesar respected him as a man who could get things done. He had served brilliantly under Caesar’s old triumvirate partner Crassus, then joined Pompey as a naval commander in the civil war. When he heard of the optimate defeat at Pharsalus, however, he quickly appealed to Caesar for pardon. He was made a praetor in 44 B.C. under Caesar’s sponsorship, but the dictator never fully trusted him and in fact suspected that he might be planning treachery. More than once Caesar said to friends that Cassius looked much too pale in his presence.
Brutus had long been Caesar’s favorite among the younger generation of Roman nobles. Caesar knew Brutus could be greedy and arrogant, but perhaps because he was the son of his long-time mistress, Caesar lavished him with honors. His brief service with Pompey was easily forgiven, after which he was made a pontifex and governor of Italian Gaul. He was chosen as praetor for the city of Rome in 44 B.C. and marked for the consulship three years later. Caesar would not hear a word against Brutus, even when a friend warned he was involved in a plot against his life. “Brutus will wait for this shriveled skin,” Caesar replied as he sent the man away. But Brutus was under increasing pressure from Cassius and other disgruntled senators to end Caesar’s tyranny, just as his illustrious ancestor, also named Brutus, had overthrown the last Roman king centuries before. Every night new graffiti would appear on the statues dedicated to this hero of Rome’s past with provocative messages:
Oh that you were still alive!
Your seed has failed you.
We need a Brutus!
In the end the pressure was too much for Brutus to resist. He decided to lead the plot to assassinate Caesar in spite of the forgiveness and favor the older man had gladly granted him.
There was no time to spare if they were to eliminate Caesar since he would leave for the Parthian campaign on March 18. Absent from Rome and surrounded by his faithful soldiers, he would be untouchable. Although it might be possible to waylay him on the streets, the conspirators were determined to slay Caesar in a public place. This was not to be a tawdry back-alley murder as if they were thugs stealing a rich man’s purse. This was a political statement, the restoration of power to the Senate and people of Rome—it had to be done in the open, yet in a setting they could control. They finally decided on the Senate meeting scheduled for the Ides of March. The Ides were on the thirteenth day of most months, but in March they would fall on the fifteenth. There was no opportunity to get to Caesar before that date and there would be no second chance if something went wrong.
Caesar had little use for signs and wonders, but if he had been paying attention in those days before the Ides he might have noticed some ominous warnings of approaching doom. According to ancient authors, who delighted in reporting such events, strange lights lit the sky, crashing sounds echoed through the night, and birds of ill omen flocked to the Forum. As in a story told of Caesar’s ancestor Julus fleeing with his father, Aeneas, from Troy (and the New Testament episode of Pentecost), fire shot from the bodies of men but left them unharmed. Caesar himself, while conducting a sacrifice, found that one of the animals he had just killed had no heart. Beyond Rome, settlers in one of Caesar’s colonies in southern Italy demolishing an ancient tomb found a tablet warning that whenever the bones therein were disturbed a son of Troy would be slain. If this were not clear enough, Caesar was confronted on the streets by an old soothsayer named Spurinna who warned him plainly that grave danger awaited him on the Ides of March.
But Caesar scoffed at such omens and had little fear of death. He had already dismissed his bodyguard, trusting in an oath by the senators to protect his life with their own. On the night of March 14, as he dined with his friend Lepidus, conversation turned to the best kind of death. Caesar mentioned that he had read of the Persian emperor Cyrus, who at death’s door had enough time to carefully plan his own funeral. Caesar shuddered at the thought of a lingering demise and said that by far the best kind of death was one that was sudden and unexpected.
On the morning of March 15, Caesar awoke to find his wife, Calpurnia, in a panic beside him. She had been visited that night with horrible dreams that she was holding Caesar’s lifeless body in her arms. Calpurnia was not a woman given to premonitions, but she begged Caesar to cancel the meeting of the Senate that day. At first he dismissed her fears as groundless, but she was so insistent that he began to have second thoughts. Just then Decimus arrived to escort him to the meeting. Hearing that Caesar was considering not attending the Senate that morning, he took him aside and urged him to reconsider. How would it look, he asked, if word got out that Caesar was afraid to leave his home because of a woman’s dreams? Caesar agreed and bade his wife farewell, urging her not to worry.
On the way Caesar was accompanied by the usual crowd of well-wishers and suppliants seeking a moment of his time. Among these was a Greek philosophy teacher named Artemidorus who was a frequent visitor to the homes of Brutus and his friends. He had overheard that an attempt was to be made on Caesar’s life that very day and was anxious to warn the dictator. Knowing he could scarcely reveal the details to Caesar in public, he quickly prepared a scroll giving Caesar the details of the conspirators’ plans. He fought his way through the crowd and thrust the scroll into Caesar’s hands saying he must read it, privately, and right away. Caesar agreed, but pressed for time he put the message aside to look at after the meeting.
Passing the soothsayer Spurinna along the way, Caesar cheerfully called out that the Ides of March had arrived and he was still alive. Spurinna replied: “Yes, the Ides have come, but not yet passed.”
The Senate meeting that day was to take place in the hall adjoining Pompey’s theater to the west of the Forum. Pompey had completed this building, first stone theater in Rome, in 55 B.C. in celebration of his eastern victories. Not a modest man, Pompey had placed a statue of himself in the hall to look down on all who gathered there.
Antony accompanied Caesar to the entrance of the hall but was called aside by Trebonius on supposedly pressing business. Many of the conspirators had wanted to kill Antony as well, but Brutus had insisted that they strike down Caesar alone. If we slay any of Caesar’s friends, Brutus argued, it will look like factional fighting rather than the justified killing of a tyrant.
When Caesar entered the meeting, all the senators rose to greet him. He was anxious to finish the proceedings as quickly as possible and so took his seat at the front. A senator named Tullius Cimber, whose brother Caesar had exiled, then approached the dictator with a petition to have his sibling pardoned. Caesar dismissed the man, but Cimber grabbed his toga and beseeched him for mercy. This was the signal. Another senator named Casca rushed at Caesar with his dagger drawn and stabbed him in the neck. Casca was so nervous, however, that he barely scratched Caesar, who in response sprang from his chair, plunged his stylus (his writing implement) through Casca’s arm, and threw him off the podium.
The other conspirators now joined in and began stabbing Caesar with their knives as he fought them off furiously. From the front, side, and back they struck him over twenty times until the pain and loss of blood made him falter. It was then that he saw Brutus approaching, with his dagger raised to strike. Until that point Caesar had been ready to fight for his life against the senators, but as the younger man drew near he could only stare at him in shocked disbelief. Contrary to Shakespeare’s immortal question—Et tu, Brute?—the last words of Caesar were in fact whispered to Brutus in Greek:
Kai su, teknon?
(Even you, my child?)
With that, Caesar wrapped his toga about his face and died at the foot of Pompey’s statue.