Like many of the Republican elite his descendant had been raised to believe it was his duty to remove tyrants (usually defined as those regarded as having seized power illegally) and restore liberty. Brutus’ romantic notions of regicide were soon exploited by his more pragmatic brother-in-law Cassius, who had also switched to Caesar’s side after Pharsalus. Married to Servilia’s daughter, the dour Cassius had been given several important posts, but despite previous military experience in Parthia with Crassus he had been passed over for Caesar’s forthcoming campaign.
As the rather naive Brutus became the figurehead of Cassius’ plot to assassinate Caesar they were joined by around sixty fellow conspirators, around twenty of whom are known by name. They included nine former allies of Pompeius; the rest bore personal grudges. All were sufficiently misguided to genuinely believe that the removal of Caesar, Antonius and their key supporters would bring about the immediate return of the Republic. Brutus decided to make the most of their grand gesture and at the last moment decided against killing Antonius, despite the advice of Cicero who wanted him dead too.
Having become increasingly offended that he could not always gain an audience with an increasingly busy Caesar, Cicero claimed he ‘no longer refuses to be called a tyrant, in fact he practically demands it, and that is exactly what he is’, remarking that he was glad Caesar chose to compare himself with Rome’s deified founder Romulus because he too had been killed by senators when he became a tyrant. Although he maintained that Caesar must fall, ‘either through the agencies of his enemies, or of himself, Cicero himself was excluded from the plot since he lacked the courage of his convictions and was such an appalling gossip.
As the rest of the conspirators formulated their plot, which soon became public knowledge, Caesar perversely began to act as if he was beyond danger, cultivating an aura of divine invulnerability by dismissing his Spanish bodyguard in February 44 BC. Despite pleas from Antonius and no doubt Cleopatra, the Father of his Country never imagined that any of his children could seriously wish him harm, particularly since past events had repeatedly shown that only he was capable of bringing Rome victory. For, as he used to say himself, ‘It is more important for Rome than for myself that I should survive. I have long been sated with power and glory; but should anything happen to me, Rome will enjoy no peace. A new civil war will break out under far worse conditions than the last.’ He should have been a prophet.
The first day of March, the month named after the war god Mars which marked the beginning of the campaigning season, was also sacred to Juno, the Greek Hera, wife of Zeus. On this date wives were traditionally given presents by their husbands. So perhaps Cleopatra, like Calpurnia, may have received even more gifts from Caesar on one of the last occasions she would ever see him.
Despite a series of bad omens, including a warning from the augur (soothsayer) Spurinna that Caesar would only be safe after 15 March, known to Romans as the Ides, he ignored it all and concentrated on the business at hand. Having ordered a statue of his former son-in-law Pompeius to be restored after it had been toppled by the crowds following Pompeius’ fall from grace, Caesar had had it re-erected in the Assembly Rooms, and it was here that he called a meeting of the Senate for the morning of the 15th. Given the presence of that pithy statement in the Sibylline Book that ‘only a king could conquer Parthia’, which Caesar would be setting out to do in only three days’ time, the conspirators concluded that this would be their last opportunity to strike a blow for liberty and restore their beloved Republic.
On the evening of 14 March Caesar dined at Lepidus’ home with a group of associates who asked him his opinion on ‘the best sort of death’, to which he replied, ‘let it come swiftly and unexpectedly’. That night when he returned to his official residence, the home he shared with Calpurnia, he dreamed he floated above the clouds and shook the hand of Jupiter (Zeus) himself; Calpurnia, clearly fearful of recent gossip and rumour, told him of her dream in which their temple-like roof gable crashed down and he was stabbed to death in her arms.
Perhaps worried about a renewed attack of epilepsy in such stressful circumstances, Caesar decided to cancel his 9a.m. meeting with the Senate, maybe to enable him to consult his doctor, Antistius. But Brutus’ brother Decimus dropped by and managed to persuade him otherwise. So, dressed in his purple toga, Caesar finally left home an hour late and, travelling by sedan chair, arrived at the Assembly Rooms where the Senate were already in session.
As he was about to enter, Brutus’ former tutor, the Greek scholar Artemidorus, gave him a note which he said contained important information about an imminent attack. Adding it to his pile of paperwork and letters to read through later, Caesar passed the augur Spurinna to whom he bullishly claimed, ‘the Ides of March have come’, to which Spurinna replied, ‘Ay, they have come, but they have not yet gone.’ And although Antonius, still jumpy at the lack of bodyguards, was waiting at the entrance to accompany Caesar in, one of the conspirators took him aside and struck up a conversation with him so that Caesar would have to enter the Senate alone.
After the gathering rose to greet him, he took his golden seat in front of Pompeius’ re-erected statue where a group of senators approached to talk to him. Tillius Cimber was the first to speak, coming close to plead for the return of an exiled brother. Caesar told him he would have to wait, whereupon Cimber grabbed Caesar’s shoulders with both hands. As Caesar pulled away shouting, ‘This is violence!’, the pack sprang upon him. One of the Casca brothers stabbed him sideways in the throat and Caesar retaliated by stabbing him in the arm with his sharp metal writing stylus, the only weapon he had to hand. But this time Caesar’s pen proved no match for the blades of his enemies, and as one dagger thrust followed another and another, Cassius wounded him in the face before Brutus finally came at him. ‘Kai su teknori?’, ‘You too my son?’ asked Caesar in Greek rather than the usually quoted ‘Et tu Brute?’ Latin version.
Dignified to the end, Caesar had not cried out, and wanting no one to see him die, had covered his head with his toga while loosening his belt to let the lower part fall over his feet. He had effectively formed his own shroud as the assassins continued their attack, and finally his lifeless body slid, covered, to the ground at the foot of Pompeius’ statue. Of the hundreds of senators present, only two had made any attempt to intervene. Despite the oath that of them all had taken to guard Caesar’s safety, the rest simply froze before scattering in terror.
Although the murderers planned to drag Caesar’s body to the Tiber and confiscate all his property amid scenes of popular rejoicing, they had severely miscalculated public feeling. Their attempts to address the gathering crowds as ‘liberators’ met with such outright hostility once the news got out that they were forced to flee to the Capitoline Hill. After the bloodstained corpse had been left on the floor of the empty Assembly Rooms ‘for some time’, three of Caesar’s household slaves carried it back to his house in a litter, one lifeless arm hanging down at the side. With Calpurnia’s nightmare now a reality, Caesar’s doctor, Antistius, conducted a post mortem and discovered that of all the twenty-three wounds only one, the second to the chest, had been fatal.
As the news spread quickly through Rome, Cicero expressed his complete admiration for the deed, telling a friend that ‘our heroes most splendidly and gloriously achieved everything that was in their power.’ Yet such joyful emotions were certainly not shared by the majority of those in Rome.
It would have been a matter of hours at most before the news reached Cleopatra, who must have been genuinely distraught. Tearing at her clothes and pulling at her hair in traditional gestures of mourning, she had finally become the ultimate Isis as she lived the myth, mourning for her husband the dead ruler who had been so brutally cut down.
As the masses, who had also loved Caesar, began demanding vengeance, Antonius as consul and Caesar’s deputy took charge in the absence of the Senate. Acting firmly in the days after the murder, he followed Caesar’s example to become only the second living
person to appear on Rome’s coinage. That issued shortly after the Ides of March carried the earliest known portraits of Antonius: he was shown in mourning, bearded, with his head covered in priestly fashion to stress piety toward the dead man he intended to succeed. He appointed Lepidus Pontifex Maximus to fill the priestly vacancy left by Caesar, and Lepidus returned the favour by backing him with troops.
After Calpurnia and her father Piso had handed over Caesar’s private papers, his well-briefed secretary and Caesar’s personal fortune to allow the implementation of Caesar’s will, Antonius called a Senate meeting on 17 March. He had them ratify Caesar’s plans to carry out any outstanding matters, then ordered a general amnesty and met with the assassins, knowing full well that if he punished them the civil war would begin again. But leaving them unpunished would be an admission that they had been right to kill Caesar, and so began a period of ‘armed neutrality, whilst Antonius carried on the government along Caesarian lines’, using Caesar’s papers, his secretary and no doubt Cleopatra’s continuing advice to guide him.
When Caesar’s will was read at Antonius’ house on 17 March Cleopatra would have been unsurprised that, as foreigners, neither she nor Caesarion was included, although Antonius later informed the Senate that Caesar himself had acknowledged Caesarion’s paternity. Yet the recent addition of a clause appointing guardians for ‘a son being subsequently born to him’ seems almost certainly to have referred to Cleopatra, who was most likely pregnant again at the time of Caesar’s murder.
After the will had been read out, the magistrates carried Caesar’s shrouded body in public procession to the Forum where it lay in state for several days on a finely carved ivory bier spread with gold and purple cloth. With his torn and bloodied purple toga emotively displayed at the head of the couch, the temporary memorial was topped by a wax effigy bearing the twenty-three stab wounds which could be observed when the image was turned by means of a macabre mechanical device. Such effigies were a Roman practice commonly featured in Triumphal processions.
Yet the body and effigy were also laid out within a golden funerary shrine ‘modelled on the temple of Venus Genetrix’, the counterpart of Isis-Hathor ‘the Golden One’, and since golden funerary shrines were an ancient Egyptian tradition Cleopatra may well have been involved in Caesar’s funeral rites. For although nothing could bring back the living Caesar, his transformation into Osiris according to Egyptian belief would strengthen her role as Isis, while his full deification would enhance her status and that of their son Caesarion. No doubt working closely with Antonius to promote Caesar’s divine powers to their mutual advantage, an announcement was made by his former deputy that Caesar would be awarded all human and divine honours. Then Antonius led the funeral procession of officials, musicians and masked professional mourners to the Forum, where huge crowds had been holding candle-lit vigils.
Dispensing with the formal eulogy, Antonius drew on his Greek-style oratorical training and immediately won over friends, Romans and countrymen alike. After reiterating the oath taken by all senators to guard Caesar’s safety, he gave an emotive reading from a popular drama in which Alexander’s hero Achilles asked, ‘Did I save these men that they might murder me?’ Then, as feelings spilled over, the Roman people took matters into their own hands. Despite the fact that arrangements had been made to take the body to the huge pyre on the Campus Martius, the bier was ignited where it lay in the Forum. The crowds ripped up magistrates’ benches, judges’ chairs, tree branches and whatever came to hand to add to the blaze; his troops threw on the arms they had carried at his Triumphs; while women offered their jewels and even the tunics and amulets of their children to encourage the flames to consume Caesar’s body and release his soul.
Although Cicero would claim that Antonius had first lit ‘the torches which charred the very body of Caesar’, at least one eyewitness account described two ‘divine forms, perhaps the Twin Brethren’ suddenly appearing with ‘javelin at hand and sword at thigh’ to set light to the pyre. And given Cleopatra’s track record for stage-managed state events, including the attempted crowning of Caesar at the recent Lupercalia, it seems highly likely the two ‘divine forms’ could have been actors dressed as Castor and Pollux, the twin deities popular in both Alexandria and Rome. The tale was embellished by court poets describing the gods themselves coming down for Caesar, the goddess Vesta, guardian of Rome’s eternal flame maintained in her temple by the Vestal Virgins, claiming that ‘I myself carried the man away, leaving only his image behind: what fell by the sword was Caesar’s shade’.
As public grief turned into mass hysteria, some of the crowd tried to burn down the homes of Brutus, Cassius and other known conspirators. One man, mistaken for an assassin, was killed and his head paraded around the streets on a spear. It was only Antonius’ control of the city that prevented mass slaughter. Many of the conspirators fled Italy in fear of their lives, Brutus’ brother admitting that ‘we must give place to fortune; I think we must leave Italy and go to Rhodes or somewhere else. If the best happens we shall return to Rome. If ordinary fortune, we shall live in exile, if the worst, we shall employ the last resort . . .’. Their genuine amazement that the people had not supported their actions revealed just how remote the Republican elite were from the feelings of the people whom Caesar himself had so effectively exploited and who continued to mourn his passing and honour his memory.
The burnt bones and ashes were collected up and placed in an urn beside those of his daughter Julia in the family tomb, the Tumulus Iuliae. In the Forum a 20-foot-high column of Numidian marble was set up, simply inscribed ‘For the Father of the Country’. Antonius then ordered the Assembly Hall to be walled up and never used again, and the title of Dictator to be abolished for ever.
Although he would also have protected Cleopatra and Caesarion had they wished to stay in Rome, she seems to have had no desire to remain once Octavian had received his mother’s letter telling him about his great-uncle’s murder and the contents of the will. For as he sped back from student life in Macedonia to claim his inheritance, Cleopatra knew only too well that he would be a threat to the life of Caesar’s true son, Caesarion.
Yet Cleopatra may also have lost their second child around this time, in much the way that Caesar’s daughter Julia had suffered the same fate in 55 BC, losing Pompeius’ child after seeing his cloak covered in blood after a violent public meeting and imagining the worst. Although heavily censored by Octavian in his later rewriting of history, there is some evidence in Cicero’s copious correspondence that Cleopatra suffered a miscarriage in the month following Caesar’s death. Writing with regret about the miscarriage suffered by Cassius’ wife after her husband’s part in Caesar’s murder, Cicero added immediately afterwords, ‘I am hoping it is true about the queen and that Caesar.’ The possibility that this cryptic comment may refer to a second child of Caesar and Cleopatra is backed up by references to Caesar’s non-Roman children in the plural and his own provision for a son ‘who might be born’ to him.
Yet, regardless of such a loss, some Romans had suddenly become brave enough to say what they had only thought when Caesar had been alive, Cicero commenting that ‘I see nothing to object to in the flight of the queen.’ And indeed Cleopatra had left Rome by 15 April with her son, her brother and her entourage. Presumably she would have worn the dark head cover or ricinium that Western widows had adopted as early as Homer’s time. But for the Egyptians black had always been the colour of new life and rebirth. So, dressed in her usual dark robes of Isis, Cleopatra’s appearance would have served a dual purpose.
Yet the black-robed monarch did not sail straight to Alexandria, but travelled east to Cyprus to restore Ptolemaic authority. Although Caesar had returned the island to Egypt in 48 BC after ten years’ harsh Roman rule, it had technically been given to her two younger siblings, Ptolemy XIV and Arsinoe IV. Since Arsinoe was still alive in nearby Ephesus, where Caesar had exiled her, and stirring up dissent, Cleopatra was more than keen to appear before the
Cypriot people as their rightful female monarch alongside their acknowledged ruler Ptolemy XIV — even if he had been airbrushed from the official coinage, which depicted only Cleopatra with young Caesarion.
Having ensured that Cyprus’ wealth was once more directed to Egypt, Cleopatra appointed the official Serapion as governor before setting sail for Alexandria. It was possible to cross the Mediterranean in as little as six days if the Etesian winds were blowing from the north, and, managing to avoid the sudden spring storms, Cleopatra’s ship finally reached the shelter of the Great Harbour.
Backed by the three legions that Caesar had stationed there, she picked up the reins from her caretaker government and was firmly back in power by July 44 BC. Although a document dated 26 July was issued in the joint names of Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIV, by September he had ominously disappeared from the records. Having reached fifteen, notional adulthood, he may well have wanted more power for himself, and Caesar’s death meant there was nothing to prevent Arsinoe resuming co-rule with him. The pair would have posed a real threat to Cleopatra and her three-year-old son, so he was eliminated, reputedly poisoned by Cleopatra in time-honoured royal tradition.
Retaining her title Thea Philopator, ‘the Goddess who loves her Father’, Cleopatra then dropped the now redundant title ‘Philadelphus’, ‘Brother Loving’, while upholding the Ptolemaic tradition of dual rulers by immediately making Caesarion her co-ruler. As Ptolemy XV Caesar, Theos Philopator Philometor, ‘the God who loves his Father and Mother’, he became the Living Horus in every sense, his mother Cleopatra the Living Isis and his father Caesar Osiris. For in the well-known Egyptian saga, Osiris was resurrected at the hands of his all-powerful wife Isis and took his place as Lord of the Underworld, while their son Horus was successfully raised by Isis to take his father’s place on earth.
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