The Assassination of Julius Caesar

The event

After defeating his rivals, Julius Caesar returned to Rome not as a mere consul but as dictator — eventually dictator for life — concentrating an unprecedented degree of personal power in his own hands while keeping many of the Republic's traditional offices and forms intact. To a significant faction of senators, steeped in Rome's ancient horror of kingship, this looked disturbingly like the return of monarchy under a different name.

On March 15 (the 'Ides of March'), 44 BC, some sixty senators — including Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius, men Caesar had personally pardoned and promoted after the civil war — surrounded him in the Senate chamber and stabbed him to death, reportedly inflicting twenty-three wounds. They believed they were liberating the Republic and restoring Rome's ancient freedoms.

The conspirators badly misjudged the public mood. Caesar's ally Mark Antony turned Caesar's funeral into a piece of political theater that whipped the Roman crowd into fury against the assassins, and within months a new alliance — the Second Triumvirate of Antony, Caesar's young adopted heir Octavian, and a general named Lepidus — hunted down and eliminated the conspirators. Far from restoring the Republic, Caesar's assassination set in motion the final chain of civil wars that would end it for good, clearing the path for Octavian, the future Augustus, to become Rome's first emperor.

Other witnesses

• Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar 82
• Plutarch, Life of Caesar 66