Assassination of Julius Caesar
Some sixty senators stabbed Julius Caesar to death in a hall attached to the Theatre of Pompey on 15 March 44 BC. He had been appointed dictator for life the previous month, which is the immediate cause. The office was not in itself unprecedented — Sulla had held a dictatorship — but its permanence was, and it removed the assumption on which the Republic worked, that power was borrowed and given back. He had also accumulated the censorship, the right to nominate magistrates, a gilded chair in the senate house, his image on the coinage while living, and a priest of his own cult. He had refused a diadem offered by Mark Antony at the Lupercalia in February, publicly and possibly by arrangement, and the crowd's reaction to the offer was as informative as his refusal. The conspirators called themselves the Liberators. Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus led them, and Brutus mattered because he was descended from the man who expelled the last king and because Caesar had pardoned him after Pharsalus. That was the pattern: most of the assassins were men Caesar had spared and promoted. He was stabbed twenty-three times. The physician Antistius reportedly judged only one wound fatal. The last words are disputed and the Greek phrase reported by Suetonius means roughly you too, child. They had no plan for what came next, offered no programme, and were driven from Rome within weeks. Thirteen more years of civil war produced Caesar's heir as emperor. The hall where he died was walled up as an accursed place, and the Roman calendar still carries his name in July.
- Category: Political
