How did Julius Caesar die?

Why they wanted him dead

By early 44 BC Caesar was dictator for life, his statue stood among those of Rome’s ancient kings, and a month bore his name. Suetonius singles out one moment that roused deadly hatred: when the Senate came to him in a body with new honors, he received them sitting down. In February, at the Lupercalia, he refused a royal diadem from Antony, but the suspicion that he wanted a crown stuck. Then a rumor spread that the Senate would be asked to make him king, because the books of fate said only a king could conquer Parthia, the war he was about to lead. That, says Suetonius, is what made the plotters hurry.

The plot

Many of the conspirators owed Caesar their lives or careers. Cassius and Marcus Brutus had fought against him and been pardoned; Brutus held a praetorship by Caesar’s favor, and his family claimed descent from the Brutus who had expelled Rome’s last king. Decimus Brutus, a different man, was one of Caesar’s trusted generals and was named in his will as a reserve heir. They chose the Senate meeting called for the Ides, in the Hall of Pompey. Caesar had dismissed his Spanish bodyguard.

That morning almost saved him. Calpurnia had dreamed she held his murdered body, the omens were bad, and Caesar, unwell, meant to send Antony to dismiss the Senate. Decimus Brutus talked him round. On the way, Plutarch says, a Greek teacher named Artemidorus pressed into his hand a scroll exposing the plot. Caesar kept it, unread. At the door, Trebonius, in most accounts, kept Antony talking outside.

The attack

The plotters crowded round his chair as if to back Tillius Cimber’s plea for an exiled brother. When Caesar brushed them off, Cimber pulled the toga from his neck: the signal. Casca’s first blow, at the neck, was shallow. Caesar seized his arm and drove his writing stylus into it. Then the daggers came from every side, aimed at his face and eyes. All had agreed to share in the blood, so Brutus too struck, in the groin, and in the crush the killers wounded one another. Caesar drew his toga over his head, and pulled its folds down over his legs so he would fall decently.

And in this wise he was stabbed with three and twenty wounds, uttering not a word, but merely a groan at the first stroke

The physician Antistius judged that only the second wound, in the chest, was mortal. The senators fled. Caesar lay alone at the base of Pompey’s statue until three slaves carried him home on a litter, one arm hanging down.

Last words

Suetonius prefers silence, with a rumor of a Greek “You too, my child?” to Brutus. The Latin Et tu, Brute? is Shakespeare’s, from 1599: see what Caesar really said.

The funeral and what followed

The Senate struck a compromise: no punishment for the assassins, and all of Caesar’s acts confirmed. Then the will was read. He left his gardens across the Tiber to the people, 300 sesterces to every citizen, and his name to his great-nephew, the future Augustus. At the funeral the crowd heaped benches into a pyre, burned the body in the Forum and ran with torches to the killers’ houses. They tore apart a poet, Helvius Cinna, mistaking him for a conspirator of the same name.

The Senate walled up the hall and named the Ides the Day of Parricide. Brutus struck coins marked EID MAR, with two daggers and a cap of liberty. But within three years, Suetonius writes, hardly any of the assassins was alive; Cassius, beaten at Philippi in 42 BC, killed himself with the dagger he had used on Caesar. The hall’s ruins lie in Largo di Torre Argentina, and the remains of the Temple of the Deified Julius, dedicated in 29 BC, mark the place in the Forum where his body burned.