Beware the Ides of March — Yet Again
On March 22, 2016, the paperback edition of The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination by Barry Strauss will be released. In this article, Strauss explains how he came to the death of Caesar — and how it surprised him.
The murder of Julius Caesar is not exactly a new topic for historians. The ancient sources are plentiful and the modern scholarship rich. The event itself is dramatic, symbolic, and momentous. Even without Shakespeare it would probably be one of the best-known occasions in antiquity, but thanks to The Tragedy of Julius Caesar it punches above its already substantial weight. Most everyone in the English-speaking world knows the phrase “Et tu, Brute?” and the scene it sets, either through the Bard or one of his various cinematic or televised interpretations.
A historian, therefore, has reason to hesitate before reopening the subject. Yet it seemed to me that there was work to do. As the author of a book on Spartacus, one detail of the assassination had caught my eye: the gladiators the conspirators brought with them to the senate on the Ides of March. They certainly never made it into Shakespeare. Neither did another plot twist: Cleopatra was present in the outskirts of Rome that day. Following these two threads led me in other unexpected directions, such as to Decimus, the often-forgotten “third man” in the conspiracy (after Brutus and Cassius) who owned those gladiators, and to Fulvia, Cleopatra’s later rival for Mark Antony and in 44 BCE a key figure in post-assassination politics.
To be sure, I stand on the shoulders of generations of scholarly giants. Caesar scholarship is undergoing a Renaissance these days, and it was already rich before the epochal biography by Matthias Gelzer, the gripping interpretation by Christian Meier, or the dynamic recent volume by Adrian Goldsworthy. On the Ides of March alone, I can name (relatively) recent works by J. V. P. D. Balsdon, Stephen Dando-Collins, Robert Etienne, N. Horsfall, A. Lintott, Michael Parenti, and Greg Woolf. That only skims the surface, and I refer the reader to my book’s bibliographical essay for more. But I had a hunch that my perspective as a military historian would lead me to see things other scholars might have overlooked. And I believe that it did.
The gladiators appear first in the fragments of Nicolaus of Damascus’s Life of Caesar Augustus. Written within a generation or two of Caesar’s assassination, the work offers a negative picture of the killers — not surprising, since Nicolaus was in the employ of the emperor Augustus and used Augustus’s Memoirs (which no longer survive) as one of several primary sources. The later writers Appian and Cassius Dio also took up the story of the gladiators, but we don’t know if either had an independent source. Nicolaus writes:
the assassins had secured a number of gladiators some time previous to the deed when they were about to attack him and had placed them under arms, between the senate house and the theater in Pompeius’ arcade. Decimus Brutus had got them ready under the pretext that he wished to seize one of the gladiators who were assembling in that theater, a man whom he had previously hired. (The contests were taking place at that time, and as he was going to conduct some himself, he pretended that he was jealous of the present exhibitor.) As a matter of fact, this preparation was more with reference to the assassination, so that, in case any resistance should be offered by Caesar’s guards, the conspirators should have assistance at hand (XXVIa.98 [or in some editions 26b], translated Clayton M. Hall)
The sources go on to explain that the gladiators protected the conspirators as they marched to the Capitoline Hill. There the gladiators served as a deterrent against attack from Caesar’s ally Lepidus and the legion that he had stationed on the Tiber Island nearby. The gladiators offered protection and kept the peace until the assassins and Caesarians could negotiate an amnesty agreement a few days later.
The gladiators (about whom I have much more to say in the book) were hired thugs. Their presence hardly elevates the motives of Brutus and the conspirators. It tells us something crucial, however, and that is that the assassination was no slapdash affair. However far ahead it was planned — and we don’t know how far that was — it was carefully thought out. The conspirators knew how to stage an ambush — which makes sense, considering that all or nearly all had military experience and several of them were generals. They had taken the trouble to invent a pretext to explain the presence of the gladiators in case anyone was suspicious.
With that in mind, the execution of the murder becomes much more impressive than one might have thought. In fact, it was a virtually flawless paramilitary operation. I worked with several veterans and weapons experts to try to reconstruct its details in my book, and I concluded that the conspirators were great tacticians.
Their failure was strategic. They knew how to kill Caesar but not how to take advantage of the deed. Even on that score, however, my research shows that their mistake is not quite what it is usually thought to be.
One of the delights of researching the book was how often it surprised me. For example, I had not expected Decimus Brutus’s voice to speak so loudly from his dozen surviving letters in Cicero’s correspondence, or for it to echo in Cicero’s replies, but it did. Decimus comes out as astute, brisk, violent, terse, status-conscious, thin-skinned, and not particularly interested in the defense of liberty or the niceties of the Roman constitution. In other words, he became a person and not just a name. Decimus has reemerged of late as an important figure, the third man in the leadership of the conspiracy after Brutus and Cassius. But Decimus was also a human being with a family, and it was a pleasure to learn their stories — and that of Decimus’ unexpected journey after the assassination.
Nor had I expected Brutus’s speech to the Roman people after the assassination to emerge as a turning point. Conditioned by Shakespeare I expected to find that occurring only a few days later, at Caesar’s funeral and the riot that followed it and that eventually drove the assassins from Rome. Yet as I compared Brutus’s words with those of earlier and later Roman politicians I realized something was missing: a bribe to the soldiers.
Caesar and Octavian both offered hefty pay raises to their troops. So, for that matter, did Brutus and Cassius in the campaign that ended with the Battle of Philippi in autumn 42 BCE. In the days following the Ides of March, however, Brutus kept the purse strings tightly shut. He promised the soldiers merely not to deprive them of any of the benefits that Caesar had already given them.
I find Brutus’ behavior understandable but deplorable. Had I been one of Caesar’s veterans I would have turned angry at Brutus’s silence. I would have reasoned that the assassins had just killed my patron. Caesar was the guarantee of land in Italy, which most of the veterans had yet to receive. He was the promise of future respect and security. If his assassins wanted my support, they’d need to offer more in return than honeyed words and a handshake. With nothing more I would have looked around for a safer harbor — say, Mark Antony or, soon enough, the new man on the scene, young Gaius Octavius, who was the dictator’s heir and claimed to be a new Caesar. By stiffing the soldiers on that March day, Brutus unwittingly decreed his own exit from Italy. He just didn’t know it yet.
To be sure, Caesar’s funeral was a spectacular event. In the process of researching the funeral I noticed that Mark Antony’s wife at the time, Fulvia, was a veteran of obsequies. She had already buried two husbands, the first of whom, the notorious demagogue Clodius, was murdered on the Appian Way in 52 BCE. Like Caesar, he had a funeral in the Roman Forum that ended in riot and destruction — in Clodius’s case, the crowd destroyed the Senate House.
You had to wonder whether, after Caesar’s death, it was Fulvia who gave Antony the idea of inciting a riot at the dictator’s funeral. If so, she would have been only one of several shrewd and energetic elite women in Rome who moved the political needle in this era. The sources made their importance abundantly clear, from Caesar’s wife Calpurnia to Decimus’s wife Paula to Brutus’s wife Porcia and to Brutus’s mother Servilia — who was also Caesar’s ex-mistress. All figure prominently in my book.
But the most delicious surprises of my research came when I was lucky enough to spend several months at the American Academy in Rome. For the student of history Rome is a never-ending feast and the next course is often a source of wonder.
I hadn’t guessed, for example, that my work would take me into the sub-basement of the city’s historic Teatro Argentina. Opened in 1732, the theater has witnessed premieres of operas by Rossini and Verdi and of plays by Pirandello, Ibsen, and Gorky. Violin virtuoso Paganini performed there in 1818. I wish I could say that Ella Fitzgerald did too when she gave her famous concert in Rome in 1958 but she sang, in fact, at Rome’s Teatro Sistina across town. Nor did she sing her scat trademark, “Mr. Paganini” on that occasion, at least not judging by the recorded version. But she did sing “These Foolish Things,” with its marvelously Caesarian line: “You came, you saw, you conquered me.” (The lyricist, Eric Maschwitz, a 1919 graduate of England’s Repton School and a 1922 graduate of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, had surely read some Caesar.)
But back to the sub-basement. It houses an excellent set of foundations and the odd cornice from the Portico of Pompey (perhaps the grandest structure of ancient Rome that no longer exists) and the edifice that housed the site of Caesar’s assassination, the Curia Pompei or Senate House of Pompey. I explored it one memorable afternoon with archaeologist Stephen Ellis of the University of Cincinnati. That building sat under what is now the theater, the street (via di Torre Argentina) and the archaeological park of the Area sacra dell’Argentina. The eastern end of the Senate House is visible in the archaeological park. It’s a hopeless jumble, though, in spite of a very helpful explanatory panel at the site, and seems much more vivid from the sub-basement.
I was fortunate to have the chance to meet the Spanish archaeologist, Antonio Monterroso of the University of Córdoba. Professor Monterroso has studied the remains of the Curia and argues that he has found a monument on the very spot where Caesar was murdered. He was visiting Rome during my stay there and so we met for coffee in the Feltrinelli bookstore beside the Largo Argentina late one afternoon, just before his flight back to Spain, and he was kind enough to explain his theory to me.
And then there was the day when I visited the Vatican’s Numismatic Cabinet and saw examples of the famous “Ides of March” coin, issued by Brutus to his troops in 42 BCE and commemorating the famous murder as an act of liberation. The small size of the coin surprised me as I held it in my hand. And it strengthened my hypothesis about one of the coin’s details.
I hadn’t anticipated the pleasure of the chase as I looked for the two surviving statues in Rome that might have come from the horti Caesaris, Caesar’s Gardens across the Tiber River. It was wonderful to see the son of Niobe in the Centrale Montemartini (the former power plant that houses spillover works from the Capitoline Museum) and the torso of Apollo in the Barrocco Museum of Ancient Sculpture and to think that Caesar and Cleopatra might once have looked at them as well. Cleopatra was living in Caesar’s Gardens in 44 BCE, possibly with Caesarion, “Little Caesar,” the son she said was Caesar’s love child, when Caesar was assassinated.
Perhaps the biggest surprise came while wandering the hills of Rome’s Monteverde neighborhood with my wife, looking at the streets where the two statues had been found in the nineteenth century, and trying to imagine the scene long ago in Caesar’s Gardens. We have only a general idea of its site and so one must estimate. The Villa Sciarra, a public park, turned out to be the best place to let the mind wander. On a sunny October day in the park you could see the shining marble of the monuments of Rome across the Tiber. It was possible to conjure up Caesar and Cleopatra walking the same paths and dreaming of their future plans for the city that ruled the world.
They didn’t seem far away at all. In fact, they seemed to be right there before me. And that wasn’t a surprise.
Barry Strauss teaches history and Classics at Cornell. He is the author of The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination, available in paperback March 22.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.
