Caesar Appointed Dictator in Perpetuity: The Ides of March
Caesar had been dictator in temporary appointments since 49 BCE, and in early 44 he was made dictator perpetuo — dictator in perpetuity, without term limit. The Roman dictatorship had always been a crisis magistracy with a fixed maximum term of six months; its legitimacy derived from its temporariness. Caesar's permanent dictatorship was the end of that fiction. The honours piling onto Caesar in early 44 alarmed the senatorial class: a golden chair in the Senate, his portrait on coins, the month Quintilis renamed in his honour (July). Mark Antony offered him a royal diadem at the Lupercalia festival in February; Caesar refused it publicly. The conspiracy coalesced around Marcus Junius Brutus — a descendant of Lucius Junius Brutus who had expelled the Tarquins — and Gaius Cassius Longinus. The symbolism was deliberate. On March 15, 44 BCE — the Ides of March — Caesar attended a Senate meeting at the Theatre of Pompey. He was surrounded and stabbed twenty-three times. Caesar covered his face with his toga as he fell at the base of Pompey's statue. Caesar's assassins had no plan for the aftermath. They expected rejoicing; instead the city locked its doors. Mark Antony seized Caesar's papers and treasury. Cicero's Philippics against Antony, and the subsequent rise of the nineteen-year-old Octavian, turned the assassination into the opening act of a new civil war that would consume the Republic entirely.
- Year: 44 BCE
- Category: Political
