Twenty-Three — Caesar III: The Ides of March
He went. At the door waits Decimus Brutus, the same man who is to be the second heir in the will. Plutarch writes that he mocks the soothsayers and persuades Caesar: the senators have assembled at your summons and are ready to proclaim you king of the provinces by unanimous vote. What will your enemies say when they hear that the Senate is to reconvene once Calpurnia has better dreams? Then he takes him by the hand and leads him out.
On the way, someone else tries to save him. Another man’s slave bursts into the house and asks Calpurnia to let him wait until Caesar returns, because he has important news. Artemidorus, a teacher of Greek philosophy from Cnidus, hands Caesar a scroll describing the whole conspiracy and begs: read this yourself, and quickly. Caesar takes the scroll and tries to read it, but people keep pressing in to speak to him. With the scroll still in his hand he enters the Senate. It was found there after his death.
Someone keeps Antony, the strongest of Caesar’s friends, talking outside the hall. According to Dio and Appian it is Trebonius, according to Plutarch Decimus Brutus. The conspirators do not want him inside.
Caesar sits down. The conspirators approach like men who wish to support a petition. Tillius Cimber asks for a pardon for his exiled brother. Caesar waves the matter aside for later. Then Cimber seizes his toga with both hands and pulls it down from his neck. Caesar cries: “Why, this is violence!” It is the signal.
Casca strikes first, just below the throat. The blow is shallow: Plutarch explains that Casca was too agitated. Caesar turns, seizes his arm and, according to Suetonius, stabs it with his writing stylus. He cries in Latin: “Accursed Casca, what are you doing?” and Casca calls out in Greek to his brother: “Brother, help!” When daggers are thrust at him from all sides, Caesar covers his head with his toga and draws a fold of it down over his legs, so as to fall with dignity. He falls at the foot of Pompey’s statue.
There are twenty-three blows in all. Suetonius, Plutarch and Appian give this number independently. Plutarch adds that the conspirators wounded one another in the process, because each wanted to deliver his own blow. The physician Antistius determined, according to Suetonius, that only one was fatal: the second, in the chest.
The last words? Suetonius writes that Caesar said nothing, only groaned at the first blow. He adds that some have recorded that he said to Brutus in Greek: “You too, child?” The Latin “Et tu, Brute?” appears in none of these sources: that comes only from Shakespeare.
Then silence. Senators flee, and people in the city shut their doors. The conspirators, with bared daggers, walk to the Capitol and cry out for liberty. Antony and Lepidus hide in strangers’ houses. The body lies in the hall. At last three slaves lay it on a litter and carry it home, one arm hanging limp.
From here everything starts to go wrong. The Senate tries to reconcile the parties: it confirms all of Caesar’s decisions, grants him divine honors and gives the conspirators provinces. Then the will is opened. Caesar left every citizen of Rome three hundred sesterces and his gardens by the Tiber. He names Gaius Octavius as his adopted son and heir to three quarters of his estate.
At the funeral, instead of a speech, Antony has the Senate’s decrees granting Caesar every honor read aloud, along with the oath by which the senators swore to guard his life. He adds a few words of his own. The body was to be burned on the Campus Martius, but the crowd builds a pyre on the spot in the Forum, from benches and judges’ chairs. Then people run with firebrands to the houses of the assassins, and on the way they kill Helvius Cinna by mistake, taking him for another Cinna.
During the games held by his heir a comet shines for seven days. The people decide it is Caesar’s soul taken up to heaven. The Senate names the Ides of March the Day of Parricide and decrees that the Senate shall never meet on that day. The conspirators do not rejoice for long. Suetonius writes that almost none outlived Caesar by more than three years or died a natural death. Some fell in battle, others in a shipwreck, others by their own hand.
Caesar left behind neither a king nor a rightful successor of his own blood. He left a will and a city that had rid itself of a tyrant and did not know what came next. He also left three people, each of whom believes it is theirs by right. An eighteen-year-old whom almost no one knows, who has just inherited the name of Caesar. Antony, the consul, who has the army and the will in his hand. And a queen with a son whom the Alexandrians named Caesarion. Three people, one world. Next time: Octavian, Antony and Cleopatra.