What happened after Julius Caesar died?

A pardon for the killers

The killers expected Rome to cheer. Instead the city shut its doors. Brutus and Cassius, daggers still bloody, climbed the Capitol and waited. Antony, Caesar’s fellow consul, slipped home in disguise, then collected Caesar’s papers and money from his widow, Calpurnia. Lepidus, Caesar’s master of horse, marched soldiers into the Forum.

On March 17 the Senate met in the temple of Tellus, the Earth goddess. Cicero proposed what Athens had once done after its own civil war: let the past be forgotten. The killers would go unpunished, and every act of Caesar’s would stand, because many senators owed their posts to him. Cassius even dined with Antony, and Brutus with Lepidus.

The will and the funeral

Then the will was opened, at Antony’s house. Caesar left his gardens across the Tiber to the people and 300 sesterces to every citizen, and he adopted his eighteen-year-old grandnephew, Gaius Octavius. Such generosity made his killers look like ingrates (how Octavius was related to him).

At the funeral, Suetonius says, Antony gave no real eulogy. He had a herald read the decree that voted Caesar every honor, and the oath by which the senators had sworn to protect him, and added a few words of his own. Appian tells a bigger scene: Antony held up the torn, bloodstained toga, and a wax figure of Caesar showing all twenty-three wounds was raised on a frame and turned for the crowd to see. The crowd cremated him on the spot and went hunting for his murderers. Shakespeare gave Antony the speech everyone quotes: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” Within weeks Brutus and Cassius had left Rome.

Caesar’s heir

Octavius heard the news at Apollonia, across the Adriatic, and came to Italy to claim his name. Antony treated him as a boy. Octavian, as historians call him from here on, answered by paying Caesar’s gift to the people out of his own pocket and raising an army of his adoptive father’s veterans at his own expense. In July 44, at games in Caesar’s honor, a comet blazed for seven days. Romans took it for Caesar’s soul rising to heaven, and his statues were given a star.

War came within the year. Antony besieged Decimus Brutus, one of the assassins, at Mutina, today’s Modena. Spurred by Cicero’s speeches, the Senate sent both consuls and young Octavian against him, and in April 43 Antony was beaten. Both consuls were killed. Octavian kept their armies, marched on Rome and made himself consul at nineteen.

Death lists and Philippi

Then he changed sides. In November 43 Octavian, Antony and Lepidus met on a river island near Bononia, today’s Bologna, and made themselves triumvirs for five years, with a law to back them. They posted death lists like Sulla’s. Appian counts about 300 senators and 2,000 knights condemned, and Cicero was among the first names (how Cicero died). On January 1, 42 BC, Caesar was declared a god, Divus Iulius.

That autumn the triumvirs met Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, in northern Greece, in two battles about three weeks apart. In the first, Brutus overran Octavian’s camp while Antony broke Cassius, who believed all was lost and had a freedman kill him. In the second, Brutus was beaten and took his own life. Antony was the real victor; Octavian had been ill. The other killers fared no better. Trebonius was murdered at Smyrna in 43, Decimus Brutus in Gaul that same year, and the last of them, Cassius of Parma, was executed after Actium.

From three men to one

The victors split the Roman world. Antony took the East, and Cleopatra; Octavian took Italy and the West; Lepidus was pushed aside in 36 BC. The partnership broke into war, and in 31 BC, off Actium in western Greece, Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra (how Antony died). In 27 BC he took the name Augustus (the first emperor). The men who killed Caesar to save the Republic had cleared the way for a monarchy.