12

VENGEANCE

IN SUMMER 43 B.C. WHILE Decimus camped west of Gaul’s Alps and trained his men to work with Plancus’s troops, he was suddenly outflanked. Antony and Lepidus had just combined forces. Beyond the Alps, in Rome, an even more dangerous beast was stirring.

LOOK EASTWARD

After Brutus and Cassius left Italy in August 44 B.C., only scattered reports of their activity reached the capital. Like a spymaster, Servilia sat in Rome and dished out news from the East. In October 44 B.C., she received a slave of Caecilius Bassus, the rebel governor of Syria. The slave told her that the legions in Alexandria were rioting, Bassus had been summoned, and meanwhile, Cassius was due to arrive in Syria. She was expecting a secret visit from Marcus Scaptius, who was Brutus’s long-standing agent in the East. When Servilia passed on the information to Cicero, he wrote to Atticus with a mix of excitement about the progress in the East and worry about the “villainy and madness” of Antony and his followers in the West.

Meanwhile, Brutus was building up his power from a base in Athens. He was hailed as a hero there and his statue was put up next to the statues of famous Athenian tyrant slayers. He gathered supporters and potential officers, and made deals and threats. He talked his way into control of the provinces of Macedonia (roughly northern and central Greece as well as parts of Albania and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) and Illyricum (roughly modern Albania and much of the former Yugoslavia). He was a usurper at first with no legal authority until February 43 B.C., when the Senate confirmed him as legitimate governor of these provinces. Brutus captured Mark Antony’s brother, Gaius Antonius, who was supposed to be governor of Macedonia. Brutus was careful to treat Gaius Antonius well. Unlike Cicero, Brutus still hoped that it would be possible to reach agreement with Mark Antony, a follower of Caesar but a moderate. He had no faith in Octavian and he took Cicero to task for trusting him. “I only wish you could see how much I fear him!” Brutus wrote of Octavian to Cicero.

Cassius, for his part, was even busier. By late February 43 B.C., the news reached Rome that he had taken over Syria as well as legions stationed there and nearby. Again, Cassius acted without legal authority.

From her base in Egypt, Cleopatra watched with concern. Caesar had left four legions in Egypt, and both Dolabella and Cassius asked for them. The queen chose Dolabella and sent the legions, but Cassius captured them en route to Syria. He put together a twelve-legion army and defeated Dolabella, who committed suicide.

But Cleopatra was not done. She decided to help the opponents of Brutus and Cassius, opponents who were then in western Greece. She equipped a fleet and took command of it herself, making her a female admiral like Artemisia of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum, Turkey), who had fought at the battle of Salamis in 480 B.C. or the pirate queen Teuta of Illyria (modern Montenegro and Albania), who battled the Romans in the 220s B.C. Cassius sent another supporter of the assassins, Murcus, to ambush Cleopatra off southern Greece, but the Egyptian fleet never got that far. A storm off Libya damaged it so badly that it had to turn back. Cleopatra herself had a bad case of seasickness. Cassius considered invading Egypt until Brutus reminded him that they needed to save their resources.

From their base in the East, Brutus and Cassius put together the components of a Mediterranean-wide strategy. They would win by fighting the war in the empire, not in Rome or Italy. That had been Pompey’s strategy against Caesar and now they returned to it. Either they felt confident that this time things would be different or they accepted Pompey’s strategy as the best among several bad alternatives.

In April 43 B.C., after the victory at Mutina, the Senate entrusted the Republic’s fate to three commanders in addition to Decimus. They confirmed Brutus as governor of Macedonia, Cassius as governor of Syria, and Sextus Pompey as admiral of the fleet.

Cassius was a better strategist than Decimus. He planned to build up an army and navy in the east and to combine it with Sextus’s naval forces in the west. By the summer of 43 B.C., Sextus moved his base to Sicily.

Sextus Pompey brought sea power. That was immensely useful but not decisive. As in the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, so in the new struggle, strategists hoped to strangle the enemy by sea. They meant to cut off the enemy’s supplies of food and to cripple his transport of men. But with roads available along most of the coastline, a determined and supple enemy could travel overland. Sea power alone could not win the war; it would take an army to deliver the decisive blow. Cassius knew that, and he and Brutus worked mightily to build one.

Brutus had no time to stop, even for grief. In the summer of 43 B.C., Porcia died after an illness; the details are unknown. She was in Italy, Brutus was in Greece, and the two had no chance for a last farewell. Cicero wrote a mourning Brutus to be strong. His country needed him, said the orator: “Not only your army but all citizens and nearly all people have their eyes on you.”

Brutus was active in Thrace (modern Bulgaria) and western Anatolia. Deiotarus sent him troops. Brutus extorted money here and there, winning a minor victory over a Thracian tribe, which earned him an acclamation as imperator by his troops. He put the title on his official statements and his coins.

Like a lioness, Servilia defended Brutus’s and Cassius’s interests in Rome while they were away. Or like a senator, since Servilia ran her family conferences like a Senate meeting. On July 25, 43 B.C., she convened a meeting at one of her houses. Cicero was there as well as Casca and Labeo, two of the assassins on the Ides, and Marcus Scaptius, Brutus’s agent in the east, first in 50 B.C. and now again. Servilia asked if they should send for Brutus now or tell him to stay where he was. Send for him now, said Cicero, but Brutus stayed put. Servilia no doubt kept Brutus informed about the meeting, as she did about her grandchildren. That same summer, Cicero spoke up in the Senate for them, the children of Lepidus, who was married to another one of Servilia’s daughters. Now that Lepidus had defected to Antony, Brutus worried about the children as well as their mother and Servilia.

Servilia worried in turn about Brutus and her son-in-law Cassius but they were doing well on their own. Most of the Roman commanders of the East came over to them. Some of those commanders were convinced opponents of Caesar or believers in the Republic, some were repelled by the brutal methods that Antony and Octavian would each soon employ. Some reasoned that anyone who managed to kill Caesar was an effective soldier indeed—and they wanted to be on the winning side. And some liked the jingle of the assassins’ money.

Meanwhile, in Italy the world was about to turn upside down. Soon it was Servilia who was in danger, not Brutus or Cassius.

ELECTED BY THE SWORD

In July 43 B.C., Octavian made his move. He demanded that the Senate give him one of the two vacant consulships. It was a disrespectful demand on the part of a nineteen-year-old, especially since the Senate had already knocked ten years off the minimum age requirement of forty-three for consul and said he could hold the position at age thirty-three. But Octavian did not lack gall. He sent an embassy of soldiers to the Senate but the senators refused his request. As he left the chamber, one of the soldiers retrieved the sword he had left outside and angrily said, “This will make him consul, if you won’t.” And so it did. Octavian crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome, using the same road that Caesar had taken six and a half years earlier. He had eight legions, including new recruits.

Octavian had himself and his cousin Quintus Pedius named co-consuls. The senators acquiesced and the people held elections to rubber-stamp the choices. Then he had Pedius pass a law to rescind the amnesty for Caesar’s killers. The Lex Pedia, as it was called, set up a special court that promptly condemned the assassins and many of their associates. Even Sextus Pompey, who sympathized with the assassination but had had nothing to do with it, was condemned. Only one judge voted to acquit Brutus. Just like that, the compromise hammered out by the Senate in the days following the Ides of March was abolished.

When it came to Antony and his allies, however, peace was the order of the day. Octavian lifted the decree outlawing Antony and began negotiations. In September 43 B.C., Antony reentered Italian Gaul with about eighteen or nineteen legions. The next month, Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian met near Bononia (modern Bologna) and formed a triumvirate, a three-man commission with dictatorial powers for five years. They had over forty legions. They divided up the western part of the empire among them, with Antony taking most of Gaul, Lepidus taking Narbonese Gaul and Nearer Hispania, and Octavian taking Sicily, Sardinia, and Roman Africa. They were the supreme authority in the state.

On November 27, 43 B.C., a law was passed to make the triumvirate legal. If that wasn’t the death notice of the Roman Republic, it was a declaration that only heroic measures could save it.

Blood, money, and real estate were the first orders of business for the triumvirs. They had no interest in the clemency that, in their judgment, had killed Caesar. Instead, like Sulla, they chose proscription, that is, a purge—the public decree of enemies condemned to death and property confiscation. Three hundred senators and two thousand Roman knights were on the list. One of the senators executed was the judge who had voted to acquit Brutus earlier that year. Gangs of executioners now fanned out in search of loot and bounties. Most of the victims escaped by fleeing Italy but they lost their property nonetheless. It was confiscated and sold. Like so much of Rome’s violent politics in these years, much of the action came down to real estate.

The proscriptions served several purposes, from settling scores to instilling obedience to the new regime, but the main one was raising money. War was expensive and a new conflict loomed against Brutus, Cassius, and Sextus Pompey. The proscriptions could not raise enough money, though, so the triumvirs instituted new taxes as well.

The triumvirs also announced their decision to confiscate the land of eighteen of the richest cities of Italy in order to settle their soldiers. For the inhabitants of those towns, it was a virtual declaration of war. For Brutus and Cassius, it was a recruiting tool.

Caesar’s assassin Galba was one of the senators whose name appeared on the proscription list. We don’t know if he was killed, but in any case he did not survive the wars of these years.

Servilia fared better. She found asylum with Atticus. The careful Atticus had friends in every faction, and earlier he had helped Antony’s wife, Fulvia. Servilia made it through the storm. Not so Cicero. He was the most famous victim of the terror.

On December 7, 43 B.C., Cicero was caught trying to escape from his villa on the coast north of Naples to a ship waiting to take him to safety in the East. He could have escaped earlier but he waited too long. Cicero died with dignity and without offering resistance. His head was brought to Rome and nailed to the Speaker’s Platform in the Roman Forum, echoing Marius’s and Sulla’s treatment of their victims. But Cicero’s hands were cut off and displayed as well in vengeance for the bitter denunciations of Antony that he had written in his Philippics. One source claims that Antony’s wife, Fulvia, pulled out Cicero’s tongue and stabbed it with a hairpin.

Cicero’s death is not just an event in Roman politics but a milestone in Western civilization, of which he is one of the founders. Our purview is narrower; we esteem Cicero as the most famous, the most eloquent, and the most entertaining observer of politics in the age of Caesar. Indeed, no one in all of ancient history has left such a quantity of political commentary. He was also a key actor in the events of 44 B.C. and 43 B.C.

Cicero survived the Ides of March by twenty months. During that time he became the heart and soul of what might be called the Italy First policy. Others fought for the Republic but they did so from abroad. Not Cicero. He was vigorous and courageous, but he was wrong. Octavian was unreliable. Octavian agreed to proscribe his ally Cicero as a favor to Antony. Antony was unbeatable—not by the scanty forces available to the anti-Caesar faction in Italy. The Republic would be saved from outside Italy or not at all. If not for Cicero, Decimus might have evacuated Italy and any remaining republicans might have evacuated Rome to join the armies in the East. A good general like Decimus could have made a major contribution to the republican cause there.

After Cicero’s death, a friend of Antony’s was allowed to buy Cicero’s town house on the Palatine Hill on Rome. It was none other than Censorinus, who had tried to save Caesar in the Senate on the Ides of March.

While Cicero was killed, Caesar’s memory was exalted. The triumvirs passed a law to build a temple and institute the public worship of divus Iulius, the Deified Julius Caesar. Within a few years, when Antony accepted consecration as High Priest of the cult, Caesar’s deification was official. This entitled Octavian to call himself divi filius, the Son of a Man Made God. Acclaimed as an Imperator, Octavian became IMPERATOR CAESAR DIVI FILIUS.

THE END OF DECIMUS

Meanwhile, Decimus decided to save his army and join Brutus in Macedonia. The easiest route, through northern Italy, was closed because of the presence of Octavian and his army. Decimus proposed to his men a much more difficult route, a journey through the Alps. His legions immediately deserted—the veterans and auxiliaries went to Antony while the new recruits went home to Italian Gaul and Octavian. After Mutina, we hear nothing more of Decimus’s gladiators but he still had a bodyguard of Gallic horsemen, perhaps dating back to his days as governor of Gaul. He let those who wanted to go home do so with generous pay for their services while he headed for the Rhenus (Rhine) River with three hundred followers. They probably skirted the Iura Mountains to the east and south, reaching the river in the vicinity of today’s Basel, Switzerland. But the sight of the mighty Rhenus frightened most of them away. Decimus was left with only ten men, of whom at least two were Romans.

Undaunted, Decimus decided to travel through Italian Gaul after all, but in disguise as a Gaul. He knew the language. In hooded coats, breeches, and clogs, he and the non-Gauls among them could look the part. Decimus was not the first Roman to go native, but it was rare to see one in such extreme conditions.

The desperate men probably retraced their steps toward Vesontio (Besançon, France), and then they possibly took the narrow Jougne Pass through the Iura Mountains from today’s France to Switzerland. This was the territory of the Sequani Gauls. Armed locals policed the pass and collected tolls. Their suspicious eyes noted Decimus and his party and arrested them. Decimus was relieved to learn that their leader was a local bigwig named Camilus. As governor, Decimus had done many a favor for Camilus, so he demanded to be taken to him. Camilus fawned over Decimus, apologizing for the mistaken imprisonment, but he secretly sent word to Antony. There was a reward for capturing Decimus, and besides, Antony, and not the former governor, was the man who mattered now.

The sources agree that Antony ordered Decimus’s death. They disagree as to how Decimus died. Some say that Camilus carried out the execution while others say that a group of knights sent by Antony did the job. Several sources claim that, at the end, Decimus forgot about his vaunted prowess and started bemoaning his fate. But Decimus was never anything but brave and this sounds like slander put out later by his enemies. In any case, a sword blow to the neck killed Decimus. Camilus sent his head to Antony, who then had it buried. It was about mid-September 43 B.C.

So died one of the three main conspirators against Julius Caesar. In the last fifteen months of his life, Decimus displayed courage, leadership, determination, energy, and suppleness. He raised new troops and held his army together through a siege. He led his men over the Alps but he could not talk them into trusting their lives to a nearly trackless wilderness. To save the Republic and advance his career, he flouted the law and he was rewarded with the glittering, long-sought prize—a triumph. But he never lived to celebrate it. Had he defeated Antony he would have been one of the very top figures in the Roman state. He would have been the military hero of reestablishing the Republic. For that matter, he would have been in a position to undermine it and make himself the next Caesar, if he so chose.

Decimus demonstrated a taste for risk taking that would have put Caesar to shame, except that Caesar usually took only carefully calculated risks. By choosing to defend Italian Gaul instead of retreating to Macedonia while there was still time, Decimus took as big a gamble as Caesar did by going into the Senate House without a bodyguard on the Ides of March. Decimus displayed everything, in short, except strategic caution.

No doubt Decimus would have preferred a hero’s death in battle to his execution, but on one thing he might have been satisfied. He died on the scene of nearly all his military triumphs—in Gaul.

THE SINEWS OF WAR

Money, said Cicero, is “the sinews of war.” He made this remark in his Fifth Philippic, delivered in the Senate on January 1, 43 B.C. It might have served as a mission statement for Brutus and Cassius in the East. They committed themselves to fighting for the freedom of the Roman people, but the people of the empire were another matter. They squeezed the provincials very hard indeed in order to raise money, but they knew as well as anyone that war was expensive.

At the news from the west, Brutus ordered the execution of his prisoner, Antony’s brother Gaius, in revenge for the deaths of Cicero and Decimus—the latter his kinsman, said Brutus, and the former his friend. As often, Brutus mixed his sentiment with steel and ice; he said that he felt more shame at the cause of Cicero’s death, which he blamed on Roman softness, than he felt grief at the event itself.

In the spring of 42 B.C., the two leaders attacked various centers of resistance. Cassius made war on the island of Rhodes, a small naval power that had supported Dolabella. After two naval defeats and a threatened siege, some Rhodians opened the gates of their city to the Romans. Cassius had fifty leading men put to death and plundered the town’s gold and silver.

For his part, Brutus assaulted the cities of Lycia in southwestern Anatolia. He laid siege to the well-fortified city of Xanthus. When the Romans finally broke in, large numbers of citizens preferred suicide to surrender. Plutarch tells a pretty story about how Brutus cried tears over them, but that sounds unlikely. Next, a neighboring city preferred to accept Brutus’s terms and give up all their coin and treasure. Liberty might have been Brutus’s motto, but it meant the free exercise of Rome’s republican government, not freedom for the cities of the empire.

Around June 42 B.C., Brutus and Cassius met at the city of Sardis in western Anatolia. They resolved various differences and decided to head to Macedonia. After leaving Lepidus behind to hold Italy, Antony and Octavian had crossed the Adriatic Sea with nineteen legions. On paper, that meant 95,000 men, but the real number was probably only about half as much. They were also supposed to have had 13,000 cavalrymen. For their part, Brutus and Cassius had seventeen legions—supposedly 85,000 men but, again, the real number was probably only half. In addition, they are said to have had 20,000 horsemen. Even with the figures cut in half, a massive number of legionaries—around 90,000 all told—were preparing to meet. The largest showdown of the era loomed.

Various eastern allies sent troops to help Brutus and Cassius, primarily cavalry. Deiotarus sent both infantry and cavalry. The king of Parthia sent a contingent of archers. This was a tribute to Brutus’s and Cassius’s diplomacy. In late 43 B.C., they had sent the son of Caesar’s old friend-turned-enemy, Labienus, to Parthia. He negotiated the support.

In the summer of 42 B.C., outside the city of Cardia on the Gallipoli Peninsula, Brutus and Cassius gathered their combined forces. These very large armies had to be fed, housed, exercised, inspired, and, above all, paid.

The commanders did not disappoint. For a year or more they had been raising money by diplomacy or force. Now they had a variety of coins issued by their officials, probably using one or more of the mints of Macedonia.

Brutus had learned his lesson. Unlike in the days following the Ides of March, he would not stint the soldiers. As Appian says, he and Cassius had raised plenty of money to pay them. They worried especially that the large portion of their soldiers who had fought for Julius Caesar might now defect to his adopted son, Octavian. According to Appian, Cassius addressed this point in a speech to the assembled troops. He told them that, whoever the general, they were always fighting for the same cause—Rome. But Brutus and Cassius were not so naïve as to rely on words. Every legionary got 1,500 denarii, every centurion 7,500, and every military tribune 15,000. These were generous sums. They didn’t match the amount that Antony and Octavian promised their men in the case of victory—5,000 denarii (20,000 sesterces) each. They were outdone by the sums at Caesar’s Triple Triumph in 46 B.C., where the payout began at 6,000 denarii per legionary. Brutus and Cassius paid their men before the battle. They already had the money while Antony and Octavian Caesar only promised to get it—they didn’t have it yet, a point that, according to Appian, Cassius emphasized to his soldiers. Even Caesar paid his men only after they had fought for him in Gaul and the Civil War. It’s often risky to pay someone in advance but no doubt Brutus and Cassius felt they had to do so to win over Caesar’s former soldiers. Perhaps as well the two assassins were overcompensating for the mistake of not wooing the soldiers after the Ides of March. In any case, now they surely pointed out that victory would bring even more loot.

The gorgeous array of money illustrated a variety of themes, among them, heroes of the Roman past, gods, and eagles. One coin, issued by Brutus and Casca, shows Neptune with a trident on one side as a symbol of republican sea power. The other side shows a winged victory holding a palm and a broken diadem with a broken scepter under her feet—symbols of success over Caesar’s would-be kingship. The inscription says “BRUTUS IMP,” Brutus Imperator.

One coin, however, stands out from the rest. Issued by Brutus, it is a small, silver denarius, and it may well be the most famous coin of ancient Rome. A gold version, an aureus, exists as well. On its obverse the coin shows Brutus in profile. He wears a beard as a sign of mourning for the Republic. Still, it is a strange image considering that Caesar had been criticized for breaking with precedent and becoming the first Roman ever to depict himself on coins. Now, Brutus, identified as an IMPERATOR, strikes a very unrepublican pose. Yet there was a war to be won. That came first—constitutional niceties could wait for later.

The other side of the coin is even more surprising. The coin shows on its reverse a pileus or freed slave’s cap above the inscription EID MAR—that is, an abbreviation of “IDES OF MARCH.” On either side of the cap stands a military dagger, point facing down. It is an arresting image.

With the prospect of a great battle against the armies of Antony and Octavian looming, the military imagery makes sense. But that, of course, was not the primary meaning of the daggers on this coin, at least not for those who issued it.

Writing centuries later, Dio offers an identification of the two military daggers, making this one of the few coins mentioned by an ancient writer:

In addition to these activities, Brutus stamped upon the coins which were being minted in his own likeness with a cap and two daggers, indicating by this and by the inscription that he and Cassius had liberated the fatherland.

In short, the two military daggers are meant to represent the weapons used by the two leaders of the anti-Caesar movement on the Ides of March. Even for a gathering of soldiers, this was blunt.

As noted earlier, each of the two daggers on the coin has a different hilt. The cruciform hilt might have been Brutus’s dagger, and the two-disk hilt might have been Cassius’s. A less speculative point comes from noticing what the daggers have in common. They are both precisely military daggers—pugiones (singular, pugio) in Latin. The Romans distinguished the military dagger from the sica, a curved dagger of Thracian origin, which was not normally carried by Roman soldiers. The sica, in Roman eyes, was a weapon for cutthroats; a word for “murderer” or “asssassin” is sicarius, literally, “a sica-man.”

After the Ides of March, Caesar’s friends claimed that the assassins were mere murderers. But through imagery this coin argues that the Ides of March was an honorable act carried out by the tools of Roman soldiers, as the military daggers show. It was an act not of murder but of liberation, as the freed-slave’s cap shows.

Of course the soldiers who took Brutus’s coin in 42 B.C. knew that their commanders’ daggers had killed Caesar. They understood the symbolism of the military dagger as a tool of tyrannicide. They were already familiar with the gruesome reality of the weapon. They understood that they were getting paid to use the military dagger, along with the sword and the spear, to finish what Brutus and Cassius had started.

PHILIPPI AND AFTERWARD

The great confrontation took place outside of Philippi, a city in eastern Macedonia, on the Via Egnatia and near the Aegean coast. The number of combatants was huge. The site bespoke destiny. A famous warrior, King Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, had founded the city and named it after himself. Even the spirits played their part. One night before he took his army across the Hellespont, Brutus saw a vision of his evil genius—the bad fortune or bad judgment that the Romans believed each person has. The vision warned Brutus, “you will see me at Philippi.” The vision supposedly appeared again on the night before the final battle. In the heat of combat at Philippi the next day, Cassius supposedly saw Caesar’s ghost dressed in his reddish purple commander’s cape.

As the great clash approached, Brutus wrote with courage and acceptance to Atticus. Either they would free the Roman people, Brutus wrote, or they would die and be freed from slavery. Everything was safe and secure, he added, except for the knowledge of whether they would live free or die.

The odds were good for Brutus and Cassius at Philippi. Their numbers were strong and they had an excellent position on the high ground straddling the Roman road. Mountains protected their northern flank and a marsh protected their southern flank. In Cassius they had a very good commander, and in Brutus, a competent one. They controlled the sea and had their fleet nearby on an island from which it could bring supplies to a port not far from their camp. Octavian and Antony, by contrast, were short of food. So the pressure was on them, while Brutus and Cassius could sit back and let the enemy starve.

They had the help of several of their fellow assassins. Cimber—the drunkard and brawler—had helped them seize this position from an advance guard of the enemy. Publius Servilius Casca, the first man to strike Caesar on the Ides of March, served under Brutus as a commander. There was also a veritable roll call of Roman nobles, including the son of Cato.

Antony was a resourceful general. He was by far the most experienced of the four commanders present. He managed to sneak around Brutus and Cassius’s position and threaten their supply route. Then he started building fortifications to cut the enemy off from the sea and their supplies, so Brutus and Cassius had to begin a counterfortification to stop him. On or around October 3, Antony attacked, and with such success that he took not only the counterfortifications but also Cassius’s camp. Cassius’s men fled in a rout. Meanwhile, to the north, Brutus’s men managed to take Octavian’s camp, even though they were poorly disciplined and failed to listen to Brutus’s orders.

Octavian himself was ill and was not there. His main contribution to victory was to survive unharmed. Afterward, reports credited him with paying careful attention to divine signs. They said that in response to one person’s vision, he put on Caesar’s ring as a good luck charm. In response to another vision, he left his tent beforehand and so avoided harm.

Forced to withdraw to a hill for safety, Cassius mistakenly thought he saw Brutus’s army routed as well. He preferred suicide to capture, so Cassius had a freedman decapitate him. Some ancient writers said that the man killed him without orders. It was Cassius’s birthday.

Cassius was a politician of conviction, one of the Best Men through and through, hostile to Caesar and to anything that smacked of one-man rule. If Plutarch is right, Cassius spurred on the plot to kill Caesar. Given his military background, Cassius surely played a major role in working out the details of the assassination. He pushed consistently for a hard line, both for killing Antony and for denying Caesar a public funeral, but Brutus overruled him. But killing Antony might have unleashed Lepidus and his legion on the assassins on the Capitoline Hill and denying Caesar a public funeral might only have furnished a grievance for the riot that was probably inevitable. Cassius demonstrated strategic insight in the two years after the assassination, back in the eastern Mediterranean that he knew well. His methods were brutal at times but he did a superb job of putting together an army to challenge Antony and Octavian.

Brutus had Cassius buried in secret, so as not to depress the army. He mourned Cassius as “the last of the Romans,” a man whose prowess would never be seen again. It would certainly not be seen in Brutus’s camp. Even if Cassius had lived, it is unclear that he could have outfought Antony. With Brutus in command, his army’s chances plummeted because Brutus was no general. Decimus was—and the army’s chances would surely have improved if Decimus had survived and reached them to hold a position of command.

Brutus distrusted the loyalty of Cassius’s men and he suffered at least one notable defection. Deiotarus’s general, noticing which way the wind was blowing, switched to Antony. One wonders if the old king, with his usual ruthlessness, had ordered his commander to pick the winner. Brutus also knew that the enemy was still trying to cut him off. So, three weeks later, on October 23, he attacked. After a long, fierce fight, the enemy broke Brutus’s line.

Antony was the architect of victory at Philippi—a thorough, decisive victory. Brutus and Cassius’s stand for the Republic was over. Now, if not earlier, Brutus might have reconsidered his decision to spare Antony on the Ides of March.

Brutus managed to escape the battlefield. Traveling in the hills with a few friends, he quoted Greek poetry that night under the stars. After some time passed, he decided to end it all. He told his friends that he blamed fortune but he would die happy. Unlike the victors, he said, he left behind a reputation for virtue, while his enemies were unjust and wicked. So Plutarch tells the story, relying on the eyewitness account of Brutus’s friend and fellow student Publius Volumnius. For once, Plutarch is more credible than the other versions.

Philippi devastated the ranks of the assassins and their supporters. Neither Publius Servilius Casca nor Cimber is ever heard from again. They are presumed either to have fallen in battle or committed suicide afterward. Other nobles joined the ranks of the fallen, including the son of Cato.

The poet Horace made his peace with the new regime after fighting against it at Philippi. He criticized Brutus’s poor generalship and described the battle as “when virtue broke.” “Virtue” in Latin is virtus, a word combining manly prowess with moral excellence. In his own lifetime, Brutus was famous for virtus and proud of it, but now it came into question. Why hadn’t he been a better general at Philippi? Why did he kill himself instead of fighting on? So men asked at first.

In the long term, though, an afterglow of glory attached itself to Brutus. He was remembered not as the Loser of Philippi, but instead as the Man of Virtue, as he is in Plutarch. Brutus had a good press, and that owed something to his connections and to Servilia’s, but there was more to the matter than that. Brutus appealed to the Romans. He was both a figure out of their steely, Central Italian past and a suppler, more forward-looking practitioner of Greek wisdom. Make no mistake about it—if Brutus’s action on the Ides of March horrified the people of Rome, it also electrified them. By drawing his dagger and stabbing Caesar, Brutus proved his courage. As Plutarch says, even those who hated him for killing Caesar couldn’t help but find something noble in him.

Brutus was not the woolly-eyed idealist that he is sometimes portrayed as. Although Antony’s generalship destroyed Brutus, Brutus was not wrong to have spared him on the Ides of March. Without Antony’s moderating hand it’s not clear that the assassins could have survived the vengeance of Lepidus and his men. Nor could Brutus have predicted Octavian’s effectiveness and how that would push Antony into destroying Decimus. In any case, Brutus had warned Cicero not to trust Octavian. If Brutus had had his way, Decimus would have allied with Antony against Octavian. The world might have looked very different if that had happened. Brutus might just have saved the Republic.

And yet the ancients couldn’t resist a series of ghastly, comic anecdotes about the fate of Brutus’s corpse. For example, the story goes that when Antony found Brutus’s dead body, he had it wrapped in his most luxurious reddish purple robe—the mark of a Roman commander. Then some thief stole the robe and Antony had him executed.

After having Brutus’s body cremated, Antony sent the ashes home. And so, late in 42 B.C., a messenger arrived at Servilia’s villa, either a town house in Rome or one of her country places in Antium or near Naples. He brought an urn. It carried all that was mortal of her only son—all, that is, except his head, if we can believe the source that says that Octavian had it cut off just as Decimus’s head was cut off. According to the source, Brutus’s head was sent to Rome to place at the foot of a statue of Caesar as revenge. But the head never made it there, because during the sea voyage to Rome, the sailors tossed it overboard as bad luck during a storm, like the biblical Jonah. As Servilia looked at the urn containing the remains of Brutus, what did she think? Did she tote up the corpses? In addition to her son and his wife, Porcia, her son-in-law, Cassius, also lay dead. Or did Servilia take comfort in the thought of her son’s glory? Of Servilia, not another word is heard. The sources do not mention her again.

“This was the noblest Roman of them all,” says Shakespeare’s Antony on finding Brutus’s body. He is echoing the sentiments about Brutus that Plutarch ascribes to him in another earlier context. In the earshot of many, says Plutarch, Antony once declared that Brutus was the only conspirator against Caesar who was motivated by the splendor and nobility of the deed; as for the others, only hate and jealousy moved them.

In truth, Antony was a noble Roman as well, a man of the old school. He belonged to Brutus’s generation. Like Brutus, he took his bearings from a world that was disappearing around him. Not so Antony’s twenty-one-year-old co-commander at Philippi. Octavian treated the Roman past with breezy insincerity.

Brutus said that Antony would pay the penalty for his folly. Instead of standing up to be counted with the likes of Cato, Cassius, and Brutus himself, Antony had made himself Octavian’s accessory. Brutus predicted before the decisive encounter at Philippi that if Antony wasn’t defeated with Octavian, then the two men would soon be fighting each other. He was right.

THE LAST ASSASSIN

Philippi was a massive victory for Antony and Octavian, but there was still work to do to bring the Roman world under their thumb. The republican fleet, led by Sextus Pompey from his base in Sicily, still controlled the sea. In the following years, Sextus Pompey first brought the triumvirs to the bargaining table and then destroyed two of Octavian’s fleets before finally losing decisively at sea in 36 B.C. Afterward he fled to Anatolia, where he was caught and executed.

Lepidus suffered a steady decline. In 40 B.C. he had to trade Nearer Hispania and Narbonese Gaul for the less strategic province of Roman Africa. From there he helped Octavian against Sextus Pompey—and only too well, as Pompey’s troops eventually defected to Lepidus. He wanted to add Sicily to his portfolio, but Octavian was strong enough to push Lepidus aside. In 36 B.C. Lepidus was forced into permanent exile south of Rome at Circeii, a beautiful but lonely seaside spot, famous only for its oysters.

Antony and Octavian divided the Roman Empire between them. Antony took the East and Octavian the West. That left Octavian the unpopular job in Italy of confiscating land for veterans. The result pleased the ex-soldiers but meant ruin for many other Italians.Military gravestones around Italy record the new prosperity, while contemporary poetry echoes the misery of the dispossessed. Fulvia, Antony’s formidable wife, and Lucius, his surviving brother, stirred up so much opposition to the land grab that it came down to war around the Central Italian town of Perusia (modern Perugia). Octavian’s forces won. If the report is not just propaganda, they then massacred a large number of enemy senators and knights on the altar of the Deified Julius on the Ides of March. It was virtually a human sacrifice for Caesar’s ghost. They let Fulvia and Lucius go free.

In the East, Antony picked up Caesar’s mantle of opposition to the Parthians. Astoundingly, the Parthians had the help of Quintus Labienus, the son of Caesar’s old friend-turned-enemy Titus Labienus. The Parthians conquered much of the Roman east after Philippi. Now Antony’s deputy pushed them back and captured and executed Quintus Labienus. Then Antony pushed too far—he tried to invade Parthian territory via Armenia, only to end in utter failure. But history remembers Antony for something entirely different during his time in the East—his relationship with Cleopatra, a political and military alliance as well as a love affair. It wasn’t his first move. After Fulvia died in 40 B.C., Antony married Octavian’s sister, Octavia. They had two daughters together, but it was not enough to keep him from Cleopatra.

If Octavian had Caesar’s name, Antony had Caesar’s mistress. There are many fascinating stories to tell about history’s most famous power couple, but they are not our subject. Cleopatra was once again the lover of a man like Caesar. He was one of the two most powerful men in the Roman world. But the world could not stand two Caesars. Eventually, there was war between Octavian on the one side with Antony and Cleopatra on the other.

Now master of the sea at last, Octavian had the winning fleet at the Battle of Actium in western Greece in 31 B.C. It was a decisive victory. Within the next year, Antony and Cleopatra each committed suicide in Alexandria. At last, Octavian really was the one and only Caesar, the sole master of the Roman Empire. But there were still scores to settle over the Ides of March.

Suetonius writes that within three years of Caesar’s assassination, all the participants in the conspiracy were dead. That’s not correct. At least two of the assassins lived on for another decade. They were both obscure characters, which is probably not an accident. The triumvirs cut off the tallest heads as quickly as they could. The more obscure were able to escape vengeance longer.

Decimus Turullius was one survivor. After Philippi, Turullius escaped with his ships and a large sum of money to Sextus Pompey in Sicily. Several years later, after Sextus’s eventual defeat, Turullius went over to Antony. He supported his former enemy with gusto, building Antony a fleet and even minting coins for him. Turullius fought for Antony at Actium in 31 B.C. The next year, Octavian caught up with Turullius on the Greek island of Cos. He had Turullius executed on the grounds of having cut down wood from a sacred grove in order to build warships. Why not a charge of having assassinated Caesar? Perhaps by now Octavian wanted to change the subject.

The next of Caesar’s assassins to die was Turullius’s colleague Cassius of Parma. He was a poet, and a good one, to judge from the great Roman poet Horace, who praised Cassius of Parma’s “little works,” probably elegies—that is, short, epigrammatic and learned poems. None of Cassius of Parma’s pieces survive. Cassius of Parma was an officer at Philippi, and Horace too fought in the republican army there. Perhaps the two men exchanged lines of poetry while waiting for the battle.

After Philippi, Cassius of Parma gathered the remaining troops and went over to Sextus Pompey. Six years later, in 36 B.C., he switched his loyalties to Antony. While associated with Antony, Cassius of Parma wrote satire insulting Octavian’s ancestry. He fought for Antony at Actium in 31 B.C. Once again, Cassius of Parma escaped defeat, this time fleeing to Athens, but his nemesis was on his heels. At Athens, he had a recurring nightmare of a dark and disheveled man coming for him, telling the poet that he was his evil genius. Not long afterward, in 30 B.C., Cassius of Parma was executed on Octavian’s instructions.

If the sources are right, Cassius of Parma was the last of Caesar’s assassins to die. We cannot document the fate of all of Caesar’s known assassins but none appears in the sources after 30 B.C. It seems likely that fourteen years after the Ides of March, they were all dead. Octavian had his revenge. But Rome, Italy, and indeed places around the Roman world had all paid a price.