The Assassination of Julius Caesar

Brutus minted coins after the killing. His own portrait on one side. On the other, a cap of freedom between two daggers, and beneath it, the words EID MAR: the Ides of March.

Rome had expelled its last king five hundred nine years earlier and built a Republic on one principle: no one person holds permanent, unchecked power, not even for six months at a time.

Caesar broke that. He held the consulship continuously from forty eight BCE, and in February of forty four accepted the title dictator perpetuo, dictator for life, then put his own face on coins while he was still alive.

Cicero called killing a tyrant civic duty, not murder. Brutus, in a letter to Cicero the following year, put the case in his own words.

The plan failed. Caesar had already made the Republic's old constraints impossible to restore.

A century before Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the Republic was already killing itself. Sulla marched on Rome twice and proscribed thousands. Catiline attempted a coup in sixty three BCE.

Caesar redistributed land to eighty thousand veterans and urban poor who had gone landless for decades while a few hundred senatorial families held vast estates. He fixed a calendar that had drifted ninety days out of alignment with the sun, and the fix stayed in use for sixteen hundred years.

The Liberatores were defending a Senate of six hundred men from a handful of families, not the Roman people. Brutus himself lent money to Salamis in Cyprus at forty eight percent interest and sent Roman soldiers to collect it.

Caesar pardoned Brutus, Cassius, and Decimus Brutus after the civil war; Sulla, before him, had simply killed nine thousand men rather than take that risk.

Twenty three of the men who stabbed him had been pardoned by that policy. The lesson every Roman leader after him drew was the opposite one.

The crowd at the funeral did not need a speech to convince them. They had already heard the will: gardens across the Tiber turned into a public park, and cash for every citizen.

Rome's urban poor, something like seven hundred fifty thousand people, had a transactional relationship with Caesar that was entirely real. His grain dole fed as many as three hundred twenty thousand citizens.

When the Senate talked about liberty, the plebs heard a different word. Senatorial liberty meant six hundred families keeping the wealth of an empire to themselves.

The record does not give this crowd a name. Appian preserves one line from the plebeian reaction at the funeral, from a Roman citizen he never identifies.

Two years later the Senate declared Caesar a god. The temple built where the plebs had burned his body stood for centuries after they lit that fire.

Caesar kept his own count. At Avaricum in fifty two BCE, his legions killed the entire population of the town, forty thousand men, women, and children, by his own tally. Eight hundred survived.

Plutarch put Caesar's nine year campaign in Gaul at one million dead and another million enslaved. Even conservative modern estimates place the dead at several hundred thousand, in a population of five to seven million.

This was not defense. Caesar's opening pretext, a tribe moving within Gaul in fifty eight BCE, was never authorized by the Senate.

The gold looted from Gaul was so abundant that its price in Rome dropped twenty five percent. That wealth paid for the civil war and the seventy five denarii in Caesar's will. It had been extracted from Gallic skulls.

Caesar's death changed nothing for the provinces. Rome had extracted tribute under the Republic too, and it kept doing that after him.

William Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar in fifteen ninety nine, drawing on Thomas North's translation of Plutarch, and staged it at the Globe while an aging, unmarried Elizabeth the First presided over an anxious succession crisis.

In Plutarch, Brutus is one figure among many conspirators. Shakespeare makes him the tragic hero, tortured by conscience, killing from principle rather than ambition. This is a line the playwright gives his own invented Brutus, addressing the plebeians right after the killing, and no Roman source records the historical Brutus saying anything like it.

Antony's whole funeral speech in the play, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears," is Shakespeare's invention too.

"Et tu, Brute" is not historical either. It compresses what Suetonius says may have been two words in Greek into three words of Latin, and the compression won. The play shaped the French Revolution's own imagery and the American founders' idea of themselves.