Augustus

The dictator’s position was simultaneously impermeably strong and invisibly very weak. Romans were enormously proud of the Republic formed after the expulsion of the kings in the sixth century B.C. The bien-pensant ruling class expected Caesar, having won his civil war and being in complete control of Rome and its empire, to reinstall Rome’s traditional constitution.

But many were beginning to suspect that Caesar had no intention of doing this. His critics believed that, with an insatiable desire for total power, he was set on establishing a monarchy; they decided that the time for talking had passed. A conspiracy was formed, led by former enemies in the civil war, leading members of the regime, and even close friends.

Caesar himself almost certainly did not aim at kingship. However, he realized that his reconciliation policy had failed. The gap between him and Romans of the old school was unbridgeable and, seeing no point in disguising his power, in February of 44 B.C. he had himself declared dictator for life. For the plotters, this was the clinching proof of their worst fears. The tyrant had to be struck down before he left for the east.

The dictator was due to quit Rome on March 18 to join his legions in Greece. He was to meet the Senate for a final time before his departure three days earlier, on the Ides of March. (The Roman month lasted either twenty-nine or thirty-one days; “Ides” was the name for the thirteenth or the fifteenth, depending on the month’s length.) The meeting with the Senate took place in Pompey’s theater on the Campus Martius. Caesar did not arrive until about eleven o’clock in the morning. He was not in the best of form; there had been a storm the night before, and both he and his wife, Calpurnia, had slept badly. She said she had had a dream portending disaster.

Caesar entered the meeting hall and took his seat at one end, on his special chair between the seats of the two consuls. One of these was Antony, but he was delayed in the anteroom by a conspirator. In spite of his closeness to Caesar, he knew that the assassination was being planned; he had treacherously kept the information to himself. Before the session opened, a large number of senators pressed around the dictator presenting various pleas. They were all members of the plot.

One of them grabbed the dictator’s purple toga to stop him from getting up or using his hands. “Why, this is violence!” he shouted. Someone stabbed him from behind, but he managed to struggle to his feet and turn round to grab his assailant’s hand. Men pressed around Caesar in a tight scrum as each tried to stab him; in the process, a number of the assassins accidentally cut one another.

The wounded victim twisted from side to side, bellowing like a wild animal. He was amazed to see in the throng Marcus Junius Brutus, the son of his favorite mistress, Servilia, and a man of whom he had grown very fond. After Brutus had delivered his blow, Caesar saw that further struggle was pointless. He wound himself in his toga so that he would be decently covered, and fell neatly at the base of the statue of Pompey the Great. He was later found to have received twenty-three wounds, of which only one had been fatal.

Within a day or so, Octavius decided to follow his parents’ advice that he should set sail for Italy. He had become a well-lived figure in Apollonia and many of its citizens came to his house begging him to stay. He would be safe with them in a dangerous world. When he insisted on leaving, a large crowd escorted him to the quay.

Octavius had discovered that the legions he had met in Greece were on his side; on his way to Rome he intended to test opinion among the troops who had been waiting at Brundisium to accompany Caesar across the Adriatic. Having no idea what their reception would be, the small band of friends made landfall a little way from Brundisium, near a small town off the main road called Lupiae (today’s Lecce, in Puglia), to which they walked. There they met people who had been in Rome when Caesar had been buried. This had been a sensational occasion.

The dead dictator had lain in state in the Forum, where Mark Antony, who had briefly gone into hiding, gave a eulogy. The mob, infuriated by the assassination, went berserk. They burned down the Senate House and looted the shopping arcades on either side of the Forum, dragging out anything combustible and building an enormous makeshift pyre. Caesar was cremated on the spot.