Who was Brutus?

A name with a past

Brutus was born around 85 BC into a family that claimed a famous ancestor: Lucius Junius Brutus, who drove out Rome’s last king in 509 BC and founded the Republic. The name was a weight to carry. His father was killed on Pompey’s orders in 77 BC. His mother, Servilia, was the half-sister of Cato, the stiffest defender of the old Republic, and for years the woman Caesar loved most (Suetonius, Julius 50). An uncle adopted him, so for a time his official name was Quintus Caepio Brutus. His second wife, Porcia, was Cato’s daughter.

Philosopher and moneylender

Brutus was serious and bookish, a student of Greek philosophy who wrote treatises of his own. Cicero dedicated several works to him and named a whole dialogue on Roman orators Brutus (46 BC). Cicero’s private letters show another side. Brutus had lent money to the city of Salamis, on Cyprus, at 48 percent a year, and his agent Scaptius besieged its council house with cavalry until five councillors starved to death (Cicero, Letters to Atticus 5.21; 6.1). Cicero was appalled, and still called Brutus a friend.

Pardoned, promoted, and the plot

When civil war broke out in 49 BC, Brutus joined Pompey, the man who had killed his father, because Pompey stood for the Senate. At Pharsalus in 48 BC, Caesar had ordered his officers to spare Brutus, and after the victory he welcomed him warmly (Plutarch, Brutus 5–6). He made Brutus governor of Cisalpine Gaul and, in 44 BC, city praetor, one of the top posts in Rome.

But Caesar was now dictator for life, and Rome talked of crowns. Someone wrote on the old liberator’s statue: if only you were alive. Notes appeared on Brutus’s own tribunal: Brutus, are you asleep? (Suetonius, Julius 80; Plutarch, Brutus 9). Gaius Cassius recruited him, and his name made the plot respectable. Porcia, Plutarch says, cut her own thigh to prove she could keep a secret, and only then did he tell her (Brutus 13). On March 15 he struck Caesar with the others; the rumored “You too, my child?” is weighed in what Caesar really said.

From the Ides to Philippi

The killers expected Rome to cheer. Instead Caesar’s funeral turned into a riot, and Brutus left the city. In the East he raised legions and struck silver coins with his own portrait on one side and, on the other, two daggers, a cap of liberty and the words EID MAR, the Ides of March. Before he crossed into Europe, Plutarch says, a monstrous figure appeared in his tent at night and told him: you will see me at Philippi (Brutus 36).

He did. In October 42 BC, at Philippi in northern Greece, Antony and Octavian fought the conspirators twice. Cassius killed himself after the first battle; after the second, Brutus fell on his sword with the help of a friend, Strato (Plutarch, Brutus 52). Antony covered the body with his own purple cloak. He had said, Plutarch writes, that Brutus alone killed Caesar because he believed the deed was noble, while the rest acted from hatred and envy (Brutus 29, 53).

How he is remembered

Dante put him in the lowest pit of hell, chewed in Satan’s mouth beside Cassius and Judas (Inferno 34). Shakespeare’s Antony calls him “the noblest Roman of them all.” Do not confuse him with Decimus Brutus, a distant relative and one of Caesar’s own generals, who escorted him to the Senate that morning (how Caesar died).