7
NOT LONG AFTER FIVE IN the morning of March 15, 44 B.C., the first light was visible in the eastern sky above Rome. Romans were early risers, so Calpurnia, wife of Julius Caesar, was probably already awake after a night of uneasy sleep. She was in bed by Caesar’s side that night when, suddenly, all the doors and windows of the bedroom opened and woke them both.
The noise roused Calpurnia from a bad dream. According to one version, she dreamt she was holding a murdered Caesar in her arms and mourning him. Other versions have Calpurnia dream that the front pediment of their house collapsed, with Caesar’s corpse either present or just suggested. In one version, his body was streaming with blood. The Senate had given Caesar the right to put up this pediment to make the house look like a temple—he was a god, after all.
Calpurnia had plenty of reason to toss and turn. Daughter of a prominent noble family, she was Caesar’s third wife (the first had died, while the second was divorced after adultery). Her father, Piso, was a former consul and a leading patron of philosophy. He and Caesar negotiated the marriage in 59 B.C. when Calpurnia was in her late teens. Now, fifteen years later, she was a mature woman. The marriage was childless. Although Caesar was absent from Rome for almost their entire marriage, she had plenty of time, living in the center of the city, to deepen her knowledge of Roman politics and its treacherous ways.
Rumors of plots to kill Caesar were widespread. Unfavorable omens were piling up, from menacing behavior by birds and weird lights in the sky to the discovery of a buried inscription with a threatening-sounding message, strangely crashing weapons, and men who seemed to catch on fire. Even the horses that Caesar had used to cross the Rubicon, now dedicated to the gods, supposedly stopped eating and started shedding tears. But if Calpurnia went in for prophecy, the most troubling item was Spurinna’s prediction. A month before, Spurinna said that Caesar faced great danger for the next thirty days. The morning would bring the last day. It was the Ides of March, roughly, the midpoint of the month.
SPURINNA
Spurinna came from Etruria (roughly, modern Tuscany), possibly from the city of Tarquinia, where the name was prominent. In Roman eyes, it was a city of dead kings and live soothsayers. Rome’s last kings had come from Tarquinia. Spurinna was a soothsayer—that is, he predicted the future by examining the internal organs of sacrificial animals or by interpreting lightning bolts or other omens. As an Etruscan, Spurinna was a Roman citizen, but he was also descended from a proud and separate culture. The Romans held Etruscan soothsayers in high regard and some leading politicians had personal soothsayers.
Spurinna served as Caesar’s soothsayer at the infamous Lupercalia on February 15. Caesar sacrificed a bull that day. Spurinna made the chilling announcement that the beast had no heart—perhaps it had withered or been displaced in the chest cavity or perhaps its absence was a sorcerer’s trick. Caesar was unmoved—he was famously unimpressed by omens. Spurinna, though, said he was afraid. The ancients believed that the heart was the seat of thought as well as of life, and so, Spurinna said, he feared that not only Caesar’s plans but also his life might come to a bad end. Then came another ominous sign when, at another sacrifice the next day, the victim’s liver was lacking the lobe.
The evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive, but a reasonable modern interpretation of these events is as follows: Spurinna was trying to warn Caesar not to go too far and not to become a king. Spurinna was a friend of Caesar. Caesar put at least one soothsayer in the Senate. We don’t know who but Spurinna is the leading candidate. Yet, like others rewarded by Caesar, Spurinna had principles. It seems that Spurinna came from an Etruscan aristocratic family that was as opposed to kings as Brutus, Cassius, and Decimus were.
February 15 was probably also the occasion when Spurinna warned Caesar that his life would be in danger for the next thirty days, a period ending with the Ides of March. This is subtly different from the famous warning in Shakespeare to “beware the Ides of March.” Spurinna’s notice referred to a month rather than a specific day. He could not have known that the conspirators would strike on March 15. He was not a conspirator and besides, they hadn’t settled on that date yet. What Spurinna did know was that Caesar was planning to leave Rome in mid-March for the Parthian War. He also knew the rumors of plots to kill Caesar—any well-informed Roman did. “Thirty days” was a conventional time period for a prophetic warning. The result was a warning period that expired on the Ides of March.
Calpurnia no doubt knew about Spurinna’s warning, which makes it easier to understand her troubled sleep on the night of March 14. The next morning at daybreak, around 5 A.M. or not much later, she begged Caesar not to go to the Senate meeting, or at least to carry out new sacrifices and check the omens first.
As for Caesar, one source says that he too had a bad dream—that he was flying above the clouds and shook the hand of Jupiter, king of the gods. But a bad dream might have been the least of Caesar’s problems. When Caesar returned home from dinner at Lepidus’s on the night of March 14, the meal did not sit well with him and his body felt sluggish. The next morning, he felt poorly. In particular, he is said to have suffered from vertigo. Could these have been the symptoms of an undetected epileptic seizure?
Even today, dizziness is often the mistaken description of the aftereffects of an undetected seizure (or even possibly a small seizure itself, although that seems less likely). One source says that Caesar experienced fainting and night terrors toward the close of his life, which might be seen in retrospect as signs of a seizure. If Caesar did suffer a seizure during the night of March 14–15, it might have left him with impaired judgment the next morning, even though he appeared normal. He might not even have been aware of the seizure.
Caution is needed, though, and not only because diagnosis is difficult on the basis of fragmentary details analyzed two thousand years after the fact. We can’t even be certain that Caesar really had the symptoms in question. Some in the ancient world said that Caesar was merely pretending to be ill on the Ides as a cover for the real reason he wanted to postpone the Senate meeting—the omens disturbed him. We might also imagine that after the assassination Caesar’s people invented the detail of his illness on the Ides as a way of explaining the great man’s blindness to danger on the fateful day.
So, whether he was suffering from poor judgment after a seizure or he was too proud to admit weakness or he was, in fact, perfectly healthy, Caesar went on an early errand that morning. It was a protocol visit, a routine sacrifice to the god Jupiter, and only about three hundred yards away from the Public Mansion. The location was the residence of Cnaeus Domitius Calvinus. One of Caesar’s generals, Calvinus was the dictator’s choice for Master of the Horse in 43 B.C.
As it happened, Spurinna was also at Calvinus’s house. There now took place the famous exchange between the dictator and the soothsayer. “The Ides of March have come,” said Caesar. “Aye, they have come but not gone,” replied the soothsayer in one of history’s memorable comebacks.
Despite his bravado, Caesar took Spurinna’s words to heart once back at the Public Mansion. According to some sources he ordered new sacrifices just as Calpurnia asked, and the omens were bad. Caesar hesitated for a long time and finally decided to stay home. He was not a superstitious man, but he knew that Spurrina and Calpurnia each had a finger to the political winds. Perhaps, he decided, it was better to be cautious in the face of all the conspiracy talk after all. Maybe Caesar respected Calpurnia’s nose for trouble or maybe he just wanted peace in the household. Perhaps he felt dizzier than ever after the exertion of his visit to Calvinus’s house.
Caesar decided to send the consul, Antony, to dismiss the Senate because Caesar would not be attending. It’s not clear whether Antony was with Caesar in the Public Mansion at the time or whether Antony was elsewhere and reached by messenger.
Caesar would have missed the scheduled Senate meeting if not for the intervention of Decimus, who arrived at the Public Mansion later that morning. By that time, a lot was already going on in the city.
A GATHERING OF TOGAS
Rome was full of anticipation. It always was in March. It was less than a week until the first day of spring, the famous Roman spring. It was the season of Venus—Caesar’s patron goddess was also the Roman goddess of spring. Caesar’s contemporary the poet Lucretius (ca. 99 B.C. to ca. 55 B.C.), beautifully expresses the Roman attitude toward spring in a hymn to Venus in his great poem, On the Nature of Things:
Mother of Aeneas and his descendants, the Romans,
The joy of men and gods, bountiful Venus,
. . . .
For as soon as you bring the sight of a spring day
And the fruitful breeze blows freely from the west,
The birds of the air, their hearts stirred,
Give the first sign, goddess, of your arrival,
And wild cattle range about their happy fields
And cross rapid rivers: thus seized with delight
Everyone eagerly follows you wherever you lead.
The Ides of every month was sacred to Jupiter but the Ides of March was special because it was also the annual festival of Anna Perenna. She was a minor, obscure, but cherished goddess. On the day of her festival, people sacrificed for a good year. It was not a somber day, but, on the contrary, a time for drinking and carousing by both sexes in tents and grass huts. The festivities focused on a sacred spring in a grove north of the city at the first milestone of the Via Flaminia, about three miles north of the Roman Forum. With many people heading to the festival, some of Caesar’s natural supporters, the working people of Rome, would be far from the center of town when the assassins struck.
They conspirators too began the day in a festive mood. While it was still dark out some them gathered at Cassius’s house. Others, as we shall see, met elsewhere. They then accompanied Cassius and his son on a daybreak procession to the Roman Forum. It was the boy’s coming-of-age ceremony, when he put on the Toga of Manhood, or toga virilis, a key moment for a Roman family. The men were all wearing togas as well. Brutus, who was the boy’s uncle, was surely present.
The toga was the ceremonial public garment of a male Roman citizen. It was a large woolen cloth, off-white in color, dignified but heavy and unwieldy. The toga was worn over the left shoulder, draped under the right arm and back over the left arm and shoulder. It had to be folded, rolled, and draped over the body in an elaborate manner and without pins. This was difficult, if not impossible, to do alone, and those who could turned to a slave for help. Highest-ranking public officials had a reddish purple border on their toga.
Underneath his toga, a man wore a tunic, a simple garment held in place by a belt and covering the knees. In Rome today, average mid-March temperatures range from 43° to 61° Fahrenheit (6° to 16° Celsius), so men probably wore a heavy, woolen, winter tunic rather than a light, linen, summer tunic. Knights and senators were entitled to two reddish purple vertical stripes on their tunics, with narrow stripes for knights and broad stripes for senators.
Before leaving home, Brutus hitched a dagger on to his belt beneath his toga. Most if not all of the other conspirators probably did so as well, but Brutus was the only one who shared the secret with his wife. Calpurnia only feared what the day would bring, but Porcia knew.
As part of the Toga of Manhood ritual, a Roman boy could hardly escape at least one moral lecture about using his new freedom wisely. Now, many years after their own ceremonies, the conspirators stood poised on the most dramatic use of their freedom in their lives. Wisdom was another matter.
IN POMPEY’S SHADOW
After the ceremony in the Forum, the conspirators who were present, all dressed in togas, made their way to a meeting of the Senate. It was here that they planned to kill Caesar. After rejecting the possibility of doing the deed elsewhere, they decided to strike during a Senate meeting when Caesar would be unguarded, unsuspecting, and when many of the conspirators—who were senators—would be present, and they could carry weapons under their togas. It was here, at the site of the Senate meeting, that the rest of the conspirators, those who weren’t at Cassius’s house, gathered at dawn on the Ides.
A rumor may have given the conspirators an added reason to strike at this session. Caesar had called the Senate meeting. It was said that his cousin, Lucius Cotta, was going to make an important announcement as one of the priests in charge of the sacredSybilline Books. Since, those books stated, only a king could defeat the Parthians, the priests were supposedly going to propose that Caesar be declared king. To soften the blow, it’s possible that the title was meant to apply only outside of Rome—in Rome he would remain as dictator. But no less an authority than Cicero, who knew Cotta, stated that the rumor was false. In fact, the purpose of the Senate meeting was for Caesar to get Antony to give up his opposition to naming Dolabella as consul in Caesar’s absence. The question is: did the conspirators believe the rumor, and if so, did it give them a nudge?
In any case, they decided to strike in the Senate. Shakespeare writes that Caesar was murdered in the Senate House on the Capitol—that is, on the Capitoline Hill. The dramatic setting on high mirrors Caesar’s pride and its undoing. But it is not true. The Roman Senate met from time to time on the Capitoline Hill, although in the Temple of Jupiter and not the Senate House, which was located elsewhere. But the Senate did not meet on the Capitoline on the Ides of March.
Unlike most modern senates, the Roman Senate had several different venues for meetings. They were all formally temples, including the Senate House itself, because legally the Senate could render a formal opinion only in consecrated space. Usually, though, the Senate met in the Roman Forum, where the Curia or Senate House was located. Originally called Curia Hostilia, after Rome’s legendary third king, Tullus Hostilius, the Senate House was destroyed and rebuilt more than once. In 44 B.C., it was in the process of being rebuilt again by Caesar himself to be given his family name—it would be called the Julian Senate House (Curia Julia). And so, with construction still in progress, the Senate met in various other locations. The typical meeting place in this period was the Temple of Concord in the far west of the Forum.
But on March 15, the Senate met in the Portico of Pompey. To be precise, it met in the Senate House of Pompey (Curia Pompei or Curia Pompeia), a structure at the eastern end of that large complex opening onto the Portico and built to house Senate meetings.There were gladiatorial games in the Theater of Pompey that day, and Senate meetings were held in the Senate House of Pompey on days when there were games or shows in the theater.
The irony of attacking Caesar in a building dedicated to his enemy Pompey was clear. “It seemed as if some god was leading the man to the justice of Pompey,” writes Plutarch. But the Portico of Pompey was a monument to Pompey’s vain ambition, not to his loyalty to the Republic. “Murder for Pompey” was the slogan of a faction, not of men who put country above party. Worse still, the Senate House of Pompey was consecrated space, which made the conspirators not only murderers but also temple violators. Still, the conspirators planned to seize the public relations high ground.
They planned not just an assassination but an event. The conspirators believed that a murder in full view of the Senate would seize the public’s imagination. “They thought that the act,” wrote Appian, “precisely because it took place in the Senate, would appear to have been done not as a plot but on behalf of the country. . . . And the honor would remain their own because people would be well aware that they had begun it.”
Then too, there was great symbolism in the Senate murder. It was believed that the senators assassinated the legendary Romulus after he changed from king to a tyrant. Plutarch cites a story that Romulus was killed in a Senate meeting in a temple, of all places, but the killers hid the body and kept the deed quiet. According to Appian, the conspirators of 44 B.C. believed that the Romulus story would resonate if they killed Caesar in a Senate meeting. Perhaps they also took note of an alternate version of Romulus’s death in which the Roman nobility murdered Romulus at a meeting not of the Senate but of the assembly, when people were distracted by a violent rainstorm. The assembly supposedly took place, like the Senate meeting of the Ides of March, in the Field of Mars, where the Portico of Pompey was located.
To turn from politics to security, the Portico of Pompey was a godsend. The plotters faced threats both inside the Senate House and out, but the layout of the Portico favored them. The entrance to the Senate House of Pompey was in the Portico. If necessary, the conspirators could close off access to the complex. They had the manpower to do so on that day.
GLADIATORS AND SOLDIERS
A large group of gladiators gathered in the Portico of Pompey on the morning of the Ides. They were a team—a “family,” as the Romans called groups of gladiators, no doubt named, as was usual, after their owner. They were probably known as the FAMILIA GLADIATORIA D BRUTI ALBINI, the gladiatorial “family” of Decimus Brutus Albinus.
The huge complex of the Portico, one of Rome’s architectural wonders, held a theater at one end and a Senate House at the other, with a four-sided colonnade and park in between. Laid out as a rectangle, the Portico stretched eastward from the theater nearly 600 feet and was nearly 450 feet wide. The gladiators were positioned somewhere in the colonnade or the park. (At this hour of the day, there were probably none of the park’s famous whores there to distract them.) The men were armed and preparing for a fight, but not an ordinary one.
Gladiatorial games were, in fact, underway in the theater—a venue for such events—but Decimus’s men weren’t part of them. Instead their job was to kidnap one of the gladiators who had violated his contract with Decimus by selling his services to the organizer of those games. Perhaps the organizer was an ambitious young official eager to catch Caesar’s eye by his expenditure on public entertainment. The gladiator was clearly a good fighter—not one of those posers who fell over if you blew on him—and Decimus, his owner, said that he wanted him for his own upcoming games. This, at least, is the story told only by Nicolaus of Damascus. Others say that the gladiators were there to take part in the games, but Nicolaus’s version is more plausible because it leaves the gladiators free to move at a moment’s notice, which they couldn’t do if they were competing. In any case, it speaks volumes about the level of violence in ancient Rome that Nicolaus’s tale seemed perfectly normal.
The Romans took gladiatorial contests as seriously as we take football games today. By investing in a gladiatorial “family,” a politician like Decimus hoped to win popular acclaim and political capital. The Romans called the games “gifts”—gifts to the people, that is. But Decimus was also investing in protection because gladiators doubled as private security forces. Many elite Romans, their names a roll call of republican glory—Cato, Sulla, Scipio—and their professions ranging from jurors and generals to art collectors, all employed gladiators as armed guards.
Take Birria and Eudamus, surely the most notorious gladiatorial guards of the era. In 52 B.C., they provoked a brawl on the Appian Way near Rome that led to the murder of the politician Clodius. Clodius was a Populist and demagogue, while Birria and Eudamus worked for his conservative archenemy, Milo. It was the evening of January 18 and they were bringing up the rear of the guard protecting Milo and his wife, Fausta, who were traveling in a litter. Then they came upon Clodius and his men. Eudamus and Birria started an argument and they noticed Clodius looking at them menacingly. So Birria ran Clodius through in the shoulder with his weapon, a rhomphaia.
This was no mean feat. The rhomphaia was a big, double-edged iron sword featuring a long wooden handle. It has been compared to a polearm or to the halberd used by Swiss armies in the Renaissance. The rhomphaia was a Thracian weapon, which suggests that Birria was Thracian. It required strength and skill to wield the rhomphaia properly. Considering that Clodius had the advantage of being on horseback while Birria was on foot, his achievement in wounding Clodius was all the greater. As an example of just what a gladiator could do in a fight, it helps explain why even veteran Roman soldiers were reluctant to attack gladiators.
Clodius’s men carried him to the nearest tavern to recover, but Milo was hot on their heels. Milo ordered his men to drag him out and kill him, which they did. But the people loved Clodius and they mourned him mightily. There was a riot at his funeral in Rome that burned down the Senate House and upended the Republic. When Milo was put on trial, he got the best defense attorney money could buy: Cicero. The authorities surrounded the courthouse with soldiers in order to intimidate the jurors. The authorities wanted a guilty verdict to calm the people, and they got it. Milo was condemned to exile.
We don’t know how many gladiators Decimus had, but the sources say there were a lot of them. Given their later role protecting the conspirators, it’s hard to imagine fewer than 50 gladiators, but 100 or more is not out of the question. Too large a number of gladiators might have aroused suspicion, but Decimus was very close to Caesar, so few men would have dared challenge him. And Decimus was a very good liar indeed. No doubt he told Caesar about his plan to recover his wayward gladiator, and maybe the dictator smiled wryly at the thought of the fights he had once instigated in the streets of Rome. Maybe Decimus even reassured Caesar that the gladiators would double as security for him.
Caesar himself might have given these gladiators to Decimus as a token of friendship. Caesar had a fondness for gladiators. “He squandered all the power of his supreme talent,” complained Cicero, “on levitas popularis,” meaning “popular shallowness.” He was Rome’s greatest gladiatorial entrepreneur. Not only did he give Rome’s most lavish gladiatorial games ever, but he also took a personal interest in the sport. The day before he crossed the Rubicon in January 49 B.C., he devoted several hours to watching gladiators training. In that same year he is recorded owning a very large number of gladiators in Capua, Italy’s great training center for gladiators.
Decimus’s gladiators could be useful in several ways. If a fight broke out to protect Caesar, the gladiators could intervene. If the assassins killed Caesar but then came under attack, the gladiators could protect them. If necessary, the gladiators could block the entrances to the Portico, and the Senate House had no direct access to the street—one had to go through the Portico. But the biggest threat that the gladiators faced lay not in the Portico but about half a mile away.
There, on the Tiber Island, a Roman legion had pitched its leather tents. If Cassius Dio is right, they were out on maneuvers in the suburbs of Rome that morning. In any case, by the afternoon they were back in camp and ready to be sent out on assignment.
Readers of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar will have the impression that Rome on the Ides of March was a civilian city. Nothing could be further from the truth. Outside the Sacred Boundary or pomerium, the ancient heart of Rome, the city was bristling with soldiers, both active-duty and demobilized. Armed soldiers were not allowed within the Sacred Boundary, a rule that was not always honored, but Caesar seems to have followed it.
The Tiber Island troops were under the command of Lepidus, a loyalist of Caesar who was about to finish his term as Master of the Horse, and so, the dictator’s deputy. In four days, Lepidus was scheduled to leave Rome to take up a new job as governor of two important provinces, Narbonese Gaul (southern France) and Nearer Hispania (northeastern Spain), no doubt escorted by his legion. He was with the legion on the morning of the Ides.
Their camp on the Tiber Island made them an intimidating presence in Rome, even if they were less than full strength. In principle, a legion was made up of five thousand men, but legions were often understrength and Lepidus’s force almost certainly was because you could not fit five thousand men on the island. It is no bigger than an average city block today. In antiquity, temples, shrines, and their grounds covered the island, leaving little open space.
We don’t know much about the men but we can be sure that they were not new recruits. Perhaps some of them had served with Lepidus in Hispania during his earlier mission there. The cool professionalism that they would soon display shows that they were experienced troops. Perhaps Caesar thought of Lepidus’s men as a deterrent to any would-be assassins, an insurance policy of sorts. If so, the policy had an additional protection clause—a second group of soldiers in Rome.
They were Caesar’s discharged veterans. Between 47 B.C. and 44 B.C., up to fifteen thousand were settled on land in Italy but Caesar was still in the process of settling many more there. Some of those who already had land came to Rome to escort their old chief on his way to the Parthian front on March 18.
The veterans were stationed in temples and sacred precincts in various places outside the city walls of Rome. Like the men on the Tiber Island, they were armed. They were planning to march out to their new lands in the old-fashioned Roman style, following a banner, in military formation, led by a colonial commission. Presumably, they too would leave on March 18 for their new homes in Italy. Cicero called these veterans “country folk but very brave men and excellent citizens.” They were certainly loyal to Caesar, but their commitment to the Senate was another matter.
No group of gladiators could protect the conspirators from thousands of Caesar’s angry veterans for long, but they might give the conspirators enough time to persuade Caesar’s angry soldiers that Rome’s new leaders were offering even better terms for resettlement. And so there would be handshakes instead of civil war.
CRIES AND WHISPERS
Senate meetings began in the early morning. In times of emergency, meetings began at daybreak or even earlier, although legally a vote could not be taken before sunrise. On this day, though, the Senate probably met at what the Romans called the third hour, that is, around 8 or 9 A.M., when courts usually began the day. Yet the scheduled hour came and went, and Caesar was nowhere to be seen.
While they were waiting for the dictator to arrive, the praetors went about their business, which they carried out in the Portico of Pompey. Plutarch marvels at the calm and composure with which Brutus and Cassius listened to petitions, resolved disputes, or judged cases. He even mentions a litigant who promised to appeal to Caesar against Brutus’s unfavorable verdict. Brutus replied, with a philosopher’s precision, that Caesar neither did nor would prevent Brutus from behaving according to the laws.
But as the time passed and Caesar failed to appear, tension rose. Like Caesar, Brutus too endured sleepless nights leading up to the Ides of March. Various anecdotes claim to describe the nervous scene at the Portico of Pompey. A man approached the older Casca brother and scolded him for keeping a secret that, he announced, Brutus had revealed to him. Casca was unnecessarily frightened, as the man was just gossiping about Casca’s run for office.
Then an augur and senator named Popilius Laenas took Brutus and Cassius aside to say that he joined in their prayers for success and urged them to hurry. The obvious question was, “prayers for success in what?” but Brutus and Cassius were too terrified to say anything. Finally, Brutus got awful news from home that Porcia was dead. It turned out to be a false rumor—she had just fainted from anxiety. But Brutus didn’t know that yet, claim the sources, and he soldiered on.
The report came of the bad omens at Caesar’s house, along with a rumor: the Senate might be dismissed. Thinking that Caesar wasn’t coming, an attendant carried his golden chair—the special one, voted to him by the Senate—out of the hall. Later, in retrospect,that seemed like a bad omen. But the conspirators had to worry about action and not omens. Dio claims that they decided to send Decimus to Caesar’s house to try to talk him into coming because he was such a close friend of Caesar.
Decimus was about to enter a man’s home to lure him to his death. That man was someone Decimus had served for more than a decade and who had honored and promoted Decimus in turn. True, he probably had left Decimus feeling unappreciated and overlooked, and true, he threatened to destroy the Republic and the values in which Decimus believed. Yet many people would label Decimus’s behavior disgraceful, even while acknowledging that it took guts.
How could Decimus do it? Those in the know might have said afterward, “Like mother, like son.” Sempronia had a reputation for brains, beauty, adultery, and revolutionary politics. She was accused of “masculine audacity.” In 63 B.C. she broke with the conservative politics of her husband and her father and supported Catiline. He was a failed politician who advocated armed rebellion to obtain debt relief for both poor people and overextended aristocrats like Sempronia. While her husband was out of town, she opened their home to Catiline’s Gallic allies—Allobroges, a tribe famous for its spear-wielding horsemen. Catiline’s rebellion failed but Sempronia might have taught Decimus a thing or two about betrayal.
Whether he went to Caesar’s on his own or at the call of others, Decimus was the linchpin of the plot. Unless he talked Caesar into coming to the Senate meeting, there would have been no attack that morning and probably no attack at all. Yes, Caesar would likely reschedule the Senate meeting for the next day or the day after, before he left for war. But with each day the risk increased that the plot would be discovered. It all came down to Decimus.
And so, he came to Caesar’s home. The two men conversed among the mosaics and the marbles of the Public Mansion. We will never know the details of that conversation. One of the participants told the story to his advantage and the other was silent. Historians in ancient times did not hesitate to invent dialogue, reporting what the speakers “should” have said. Yet, most of what they state about Decimus and Caesar has the ring of truth.
Decimus, they say, argued that Caesar should not risk disappointing the Senate or, worse, seeming to insult or mock it. Caesar himself had called the meeting, and for business that required a quorum, so the house was full and it was already waiting for some time. If Caesar simply sent someone to dismiss the meeting because of Calpurnia’s dreams, the senators would consider him a tyrant or a weakling. Some sources add that Decimus ridiculed the soothsayers. One writer even says that Decimus promised a vote in the Senate to declare Caesar king outside of Italy.
As the son of a noble family, Decimus had his finger on the pulse of the Senate, and Caesar knew it. But the key thing, one suspects, is that Decimus spoke as one soldier to another. They were comrades of the battlefield and Caesar was about to leave for another war, perhaps the greatest campaign of his career—this time without Decimus.
“What do you say, Caesar?” Decimus is supposed to have said. “Will someone of your stature pay attention to the dreams of a woman and the omens of foolish men?” Decimus told Caesar, in effect, to man up. Between two soldiers like Decimus and Caesar, an argument from masculinity is a trump card.
Caesar decided to go. He would postpone the meeting to another day but he would do it in person in the Senate House, thus showing the senators respect. Perhaps he was thinking that he would show something else, too—contempt for fear. What warrior could resist that?
In a seeming gesture of friendship, Decimus led Caesar out by the hand. To trick Julius Caesar was no mean feat, even if Caesar was in fact suffering from impaired judgment after a seizure. Decimus was a liar, a flimflam man, a brazen and audacious snake. In short he was much like Caesar.
Julius Caesar, the ultimate captain of his own fate, put his life in the hands of another. No writer could resist the drama of Caesar’s decision. The sources give us a Caesar who is gullible, taken in by a schemer like Decimus—so says Nicolaus of Damascus. They give us a Caesar who is passive because he is led rather than a leader—so says Plutarch. They give us a Caesar who cares about appearances—so says Appian. They give us a Caesar who is arrogant because he ignores the warnings of the gods—so says Suetonius or Dio. Yet, there was another Caesar, a man who was a risk taker—indeed, a risk addict—and a gambler who couldn’t resist one last roll of the dice. Appian, who sketches a Caesar who wanted a sudden death, comes closest to this side of the great commander’s personality. The man who scaled walls as a young soldier in the East, fought his way through an ambush on the Sabis River in Gaul, and stole a march on more than one fierce enemy, could not resist the call of a fellow soldier to undertake a final mission.
Caesar decided to go to the Senate meeting not because he thought it was safe, one suspects, but because he thought it was dangerous. It was almost at the end of the fifth hour—that is, shortly before eleven o’clock—when Caesar went forth.
CAESAR ARRIVES
A litter carried by slaves brought Caesar through the streets of Rome. Festival of Anna Perenna or not, Caesar was thronged along the way by his twenty-four lictors, by most of Rome’s public officials, and by a large and diverse crowd of citizens, foreigners, freedmen, and slaves. No doubt the multitude included favor seekers, well-wishers, rubberneckers, and maybe even a few bold catcallers. Many handed him small rolls of papyrus containing petitions or letters. Caesar immediately turned the rolls over to his attendants. It might have taken as long as forty-five minutes to reach the Portico of Pompey, so perhaps it was around 11:30 A.M. when he arrived. Meanwhile, word was sent to the senators that the dictator was on his way.
There was still time for Caesar to discover the plot, according to the sources. Barely had he left his door when another person’s slave tried to reach him, but the press of people around the dictator was too great. The slave asked Calpurnia to let him stay until Caesar returned, presumably because he knew that something was afoot but not that it was set for that very day.
Then, a man named Artemidorus of Cnidus made his way through the crowd to hand Caesar a small roll and told him to read it himself and to do so quickly. Artemidorus knew the truth about the conspiracy. Caesar tried to read the roll more than once but the mob of people kept preventing him. He was still holding it in his hand, unopened, when he entered the Senate. Or so one version goes. On another account, Artemidorus couldn’t break through the crowd to Caesar and someone else gave Caesar the roll he held as he went into the meeting. Suetonius merely says that Caesar got the roll from someone, but he claims that Caesar held it with other rolls in his left hand—the ill-omened hand for the Romans, as we can tell from the Latin word for left: sinister.
Who was Artemidorus to capture Caesar’s attention? His hometown, Cnidus, was an important port city in southwestern Anatolia (Turkey). His father, Theopompus, was called “a friend of the deified Caesar, a man of great influence with him.” Since 54 B.C. if not earlier, Theopompus had served Caesar as a diplomat. The dictator returned the favor by granting Cnidus “freedom”—that is, a certain amount of autonomy within Rome’s empire—and immunity from direct taxation. Like his father, Artemidorus was a local bigwig. Plutarch calls him a teacher of Greek philosophy, which underestimates his importance but might explain how Artemidorus knew Brutus—through a common interest in philosophy. That is the only clue we have as to how Artemidorus was aware of the conspiracy.
Caesar finally arrived at the Portico of Pompey. No sooner did he get out of his litter than Popilius Laenas hurried up to speak to him. The same man had scared Brutus and Cassius before. Now, as he spoke at length to Caesar, the conspirators exchanged mutual looks of concern. Cassius and others supposedly reached for their weapons under their togas when Brutus smiled at them. He couldn’t hear Popilius’s words but he could see his face. He observed with relief that he was asking Caesar for some favor and not denouncing the plot. So Brutus signaled that all was well. Popilius is said to have kissed Caesar’s hand as he said goodbye. Once again, we have only questionable sources for this melodramatic story.
Before Caesar went into the room, he had to wait for the magistrates to conduct the customary sacrifices and the soothsayers to take the auspices. Once again, they were unfavorable. The sources agree that the priests sacrificed several victims. The soothsayers examined the entrails but they did not like what they saw. The sources now offer two very different versions of what happened next. Nicolaus paints a dark picture. The soothsayers saw an avenging spirit in the omens; Caesar got angry and turned to face west, which was an even worse omen since the west symbolized sunset and death. Then Caesar’s friends talked him into putting off the meeting—at a guess, without entering the Senate House at all.
What changed Caesar’s mind? Nicolaus lays the blame squarely on the shoulders of Decimus, in whose mouth is put the memorable phrase, “make your own manly excellence an auspicious omen.” He says Decimus scorned the soothsayers and so changed Caesar’s mind. In the end, Decimus took Caesar by the hand and led him into the Senate House with Caesar following in silence. If this story is true, then Decimus becomes an even more pivotal player: even more cold-blooded and two-faced. Caesar is almost passive.
But no other source tells the tale, so perhaps it was a piece of venom invented after the fact. Nicolaus’s patron, Augustus, loathed Decimus. The other sources leave out Decimus and emphasize Caesar’s hubris instead. They have him insistent in the face of the bad omens. This sounds like the Caesar of old and, in fact, Appian says that Caesar reminded the soothsayers of a similar bad omen back on the campaign when he crushed Pompey’s armies in Hispania.
The capsarii had long since entered the Senate House. They were slaves and it was their job to carry the capsae, containers holding scrolls that served as books in Rome. Each capsa was made of beechwood and stood about a foot high. Each could carry six scrolls. But today, some of the capsae held something additional and unexpected. If the slaves noticed that they were carrying extra weight, they said nothing. Slaves knew better than to challenge their masters.
The other senators had already entered the chamber. There was nothing left except for Caesar to go in. It was around noon.