Death of Caesar : The Story of History's Most Famous Assassination (9781451668827)

by Strauss, Barry

  POMPEY’S REVENGE

  The names of twenty conspirators survive. They are not found on some comprehensive ancient list—none exists. Rather, the twenty names can be pieced together from various sources. We would not expect them to include all the conspirators. Indeed, the sources report a total of more than sixty or even more than eighty conspirators, although the latter number may be a scribal error. As we shall see, far fewer than sixty men actually attacked Caesar on the Ides of March. Nonetheless, as events showed, sixty is a plausible number for the total number of conspirators.

  Sixty was not a small number and it raised the danger of a security risk. Still, an entourage usually accompanied Caesar, and so a considerable attack force might have been needed. No less important, the more men who joined the plot, the more backers there would be afterward to rally public opinion to their side.

  Pompey supporters shared with the supporters of Caesar a common opposition to the drift toward monarchy. But they had additional motives. On the one hand, Caesar had pardoned them but, on the other hand, it was humiliating to be pardoned. The result, said Nicolaus of Damascus, was that “many people were angry at him because they had been saved by him.”

  Although some of Pompey’s supporters, like Brutus and Cassius, did splendidly under Caesar, others suffered. They were men like Quintus Ligarius, forced to live in exile in North Africa until Cicero successfully pleaded his case before Caesar in 46 B.C. His brothers endured the indignity of going before the dictator on bended knees. Although Caesar personally disliked Ligarius and despite warnings to be careful who he pardoned, he decided to let Ligarius come home. Now Ligarius was so eager for revenge that he joined the conspiracy from a sickbed.

  Another supporter of Pompey to join the plot was Pontius Aquila, the People’s Tribune who refused to stand during Caesar’s Spanish triumph in 45 B.C. He suffered humiliation at the dictator’s hands and possibly property confiscation. It’s likely that some of the Pompey allies in the conspiracy lost property under Caesar or knew friends or family who had, which provided another reason to want to kill him.

  It’s hard to say just how much property Caesar confiscated. In principle he pardoned his enemies and spared their property but in practice he engaged in some confiscation. Since Caesar’s enemies were often rich or superrich, this potentially represented a huge transfer of wealth. But it wasn’t only Caesar’s enemies who lost their holdings, as Brutus later complained bitterly—neutrals were targeted as well. Caesar promised to pay compensation but it’s doubtful that it was adequate, if it was paid at all. Besides, for many farmers, nothing could ever make up for the loss of their land.

  The other Pompey supporters among the conspirators are little more than names to us. The other names of conspirators that have survived cannot be assigned to either group in the Civil War. Perhaps they remained neutral, as some Romans did, or perhaps we just don’t know which side they had been on. They included Gaius Cassius of Parma and Decimus Turullius, both later admirals; and Pacuvius Antistius Labeo. Cassius of Parma was also a poet who did not hesitate to put his pen to political use.

  Labeo was a friend of Brutus. He was present when Brutus cautiously sounded out two other prospective conspirators, both politicians with an interest in philosophy. Without revealing his intentions, Brutus probed them about political theory. One of them, Marcus Favonius, was an admirer of Brutus’s late uncle Cato. A virulent enemy of Caesar, Favonius fought for Pompey but had few good words to say about him. Favonius received a pardon from Caesar after Pompey’s death. Now he told Brutus that he thought civil war was even worse than a law-flouting monarchy.

  In the same conversation, Brutus engaged one Statilius, another supporter of Cato, but, unlike him, an Epicurean and hence averse to politics. Statilius said that it was not proper for a wise and intelligent person to take on risks and worries because of bad and foolish people. Labeo disagreed. Brutus diplomatically said it was hard to decide. Afterward, he brought Labeo into the conspiracy but left Favonius and Statilius out.

  CICERO AND ANTONY

  The conspirators turned down two of the leading men of the day, Cicero and Antony.

  It’s been suggested that Cicero was really the guiding spirit of the conspiracy. He denied the charge. Cicero flattered Caesar, served as his host, and did business with him. His written record is mixed but one wonders what he said in private. Inasmuch as Cicero mourned the death of the Republic, idealized its lost liberty, and privately called Caesar a king, he certainly stirred men’s souls. Cicero once said that Caesar had no fear of him, although Caesar knew that Cicero called him a rex, because Caesar knew that Cicero had no courage. By implication, a man with courage who believed as Cicero did would be a threat.

  It’s also true that Cicero was highly regarded for trust and goodwill by both Brutus and Cassius, yet they left him out. In their judgment, Cicero lacked daring. He was too old and too likely to put safety before the speed that was needed. Compared to the leading conspirators, Cicero was indeed old. He was over sixty, while Brutus, Cassius, Decimus, and Trebonius were all around forty. As things turned out, Cicero applauded the Ides assassination, but he considered it a botched job. The old man insisted that he would have done better.

  Antony, another man aged about forty, is a more interesting case. Ultimately, Antony proved to be the mortal enemy of the conspirators. And yet, his name came up among them, and for good reason. For all his support of Caesar, Antony had no intention of burying the Republic. He was not willing to turn over to the dictator the choice of Rome’s top public officials. Antony’s behavior in regard to Dolabella proves that. Dolabella was an ambitious demagogue who had caught Caesar’s eye. Caesar was determined to promote him to consul, even though, at thirty-six, Dolabella was under the required age and had not held the praetorship. Antony was determined to stop it. He hated Dolabella for having committed adultery with his wife, whom Antony promptly divorced. He violently opposed Dolabella’s radical politics and sent troops into the Roman Forum when he was Caesar’s deputy in 47 B.C. to have eight hundred of Dolabella’s supporters killed. Caesar had since reconciled with Dolabella and wanted him appointed Antony’s co-consul when Caesar left for the Parthian War on March 18. Antony was adamant. He was a member of the priesthood of the augurs, men who interpreted the gods’ will by observing the flights of birds. As an augur, Antony had the right to block the appointment of Dolabella.

  Promising material for a conspirator, and Plutarch says that everyone wanted to approach Antony until Trebonius spoke up. He reported his failed attempt to recruit Antony to a plot against Caesar in Narbo the summer before. At this point, according to Plutarch, the conspirators did a 180-degree turn—now they wanted to kill Antony along with Caesar. Antony, they said, was a supporter of monarchy, an arrogant man, strong because of his easy familiarity with the soldiers, and powerful because he held the office of consul.

  Like Decimus, Antony perhaps feared being eclipsed by Octavian, but there the similarities end. Antony might have reasoned that if Caesar were killed, the door would be open for the return to Rome of Pompey’s surviving son, Sextus. As the man who auctioned off Pompey’s property, Antony could not look forward to that. There was kinship, too, as Antony and Caesar were distant cousins. In addition, Antony’s wife, the powerful Fulvia, whom he married in 47 B.C., was a staunch Populist. Perhaps she encouraged her husband’s continued support of Caesar. Finally, there was Antony’s sheer talent. Of all the Roman nobles, only he had a degree of Caesar’s versatility—the combination of political cunning, oratorical fire, and battle command. Antony might simply have felt less threatened by Caesar than his peers, and more confident that he would replace him one day. So, Antony stayed loyal.

  But what should the conspirators do about him?

  THE PLAN

  The conspirators had to work under the constraints of time, numbers, and politics. They needed to attack Caesar before he left Rome for the army on March 18, after which military security would protect him. The plo
tters were a loose coalition, not a tight revolutionary cell. As a mix of Best Men and Populists, they had to limit themselves to goals that everyone could agree on. They couldn’t afford to drive anyone out of the group and risk betrayal.

  Security was a concern. The plotters never gathered in the open but met secretly in small groups and in each other’s houses. They never swore an oath or took pledges over sacrificial animals, as in some conspiracies, but they kept the secret. Perhaps it was the military experience of men like Cassius, Decimus, and Trebonius that allowed them to proceed so sure-footedly. Perhaps it was a kind of reverse “honor among thieves.” According to Nicolaus, every conspirator revealed his own grudge against Caesar when he joined the plot, and the fear of being exposed in turn kept each one from talking. And perhaps it was a proud hostility to oaths that kept their lips sealed. Only tyrants make men swear oaths—the old Romans never did. So Brutus is reported to have said later. By ostentatiously not swearing an oath, the conspirators were almost swearing an oath, as if to say, “I declare that I support this conspiracy against a tyrant but I won’t swear to it, not the way tyrants make men do!”

  The Best Men wanted to go back to the way things were before Caesar. Doing that required killing not just Caesar but all the men around him, starting with Antony. Caesar’s supporters among the conspirators would probably not agree to a purge. They supported Caesar’s reforms and they had no intention of returning property confiscated from Pompey’s supporters. Even they, however, agreed to kill Antony, who they considered too strong and too dangerous. Perhaps Decimus remembered how, on the return to Italy that summer, Antony shared Caesar’s chariot while he was relegated to the second chariot.

  Brutus disagreed. He objected that the conspirators were acting on behalf of law and justice and it would be clearly unjust to kill Antony. Killing Caesar would win them glory as tyrannicides—tyrant slayers. If they killed Antony or other friends of Caesar, people would consider the deed a private grudge and the work of the old faction of Pompey. Besides, Brutus hoped for a change of heart on Antony’s part. He had a high opinion of Antony, who, like him, came from an old and noble family. Brutus saw Antony as clever, an ambitious man and passionate for glory. He believed that once Caesar was out of the way, Antony would follow their example and fight for the liberation of the fatherland.

  Brutus believed that people opposed Caesar the rex, not Caesar the reformer. For him, therefore, the best strategy was to remove Caesar but leave his program intact. Brutus believed that once Caesar’s faction was decapitated, it would fall apart. Ambitious men like Antony would accept the new reality and move on. Besides, it was absurd to think of restoring the Republic by killing a consul like Antony. A Dictator in Perpetuity was a monstrosity and had to go, but a consul was a sacred Roman office.

  But what about the urban plebs? What about Caesar’s soldiers? Brutus considered it possible to keep their support by maintaining all of Caesar’s actions intact. Brutus refused to give the Best Men what they wanted. There would be no restoration of Pompey’s supporters’ property, no overturning of Caesar’s acts, and no purge. Those whose property had been confiscated would receive public funds in compensation but the new owners would keep their land. Brutus was an assassin whose goal was not revolution but peace. So he alone of the conspirators opposed killing Antony, and he got his way. Brutus was indispensable to the plan.

  Roman history, alas, did not provide support for this plan. It showed, rather, that in order to stop a domestic political movement by violence, you had to kill or at least drive out a man’s followers as well as the leader. Even the founder of the Roman Republic, Marcus Brutus’s supposed ancestor, Lucius Junius Brutus, did more than drive out the king. He also got rid of the king’s wife and children, including his adult sons. Lucius Brutus also made sure that he had armed followers and that they secured the support of the Roman army.

  What then, was Brutus thinking in 44 B.C.? Why did he imagine that the murder of one man would be enough to save the Roman Republic? As a Roman, he knew perfectly well that Caesar’s followers would want to avenge his death. Most Romans admired what Sulla said: “No friend ever served me and no enemy ever wronged me whom I have not repaid in full.”

  Brutus knew that but he expected to win even so. He believed that both Senate and people would thank the conspirators for killing a tyrant. Anticipating that armed men would threaten vengeance, the conspirators prepared a stronghold in the heart of Rome with their own force of armed men to defend it. They did not think they would need it for long, though. They did not believe that any of Caesar’s lieutenants could rally the men as Caesar had. Without a strong leader, the army would dissolve, especially because Brutus would meet the soldiers’ demands.

  The conspirators also thought that the matter of how and where they struck Caesar would make a difference. It was one thing to ambush him with hired thugs on the Appian Way, as the demagogue Clodius was killed in 52 B.C. It was another thing to kill Caesar by themselves in a public place in the heart of Rome. The very act could inform and change public opinion.

  They considered other venues for the assassination. One possibility was an attack while Caesar was walking near his home on the Via Sacra, or Sacred Way, which was the oldest and most important street in the vicinity of the Forum. Another plan was to attack him during the elections for new consuls while he was crossing the bridge that voters crossed in Rome’s formal (and primitive) voting procedure. Others wanted to attack at the time of a gladiatorial game, when no one would be suspicious of armed men. Instead, they decided on a different course. In its own way the plan was very like Caesar. It depended on speed and shock. It was risky. It was spectacular. With luck, it would swing public opinion in their direction, with Brutus’s prestige and moderation taking care of the rest. If, however, that wasn’t enough, they had an ace up their sleeve. Or so we might imagine.

  The conspirators might have thought that this time would be different, and for the same reason that Caesar had cited: that no one wanted a return to civil war. They might have believed that public opinion, stoked by Brutus’s oratory, would insist on a compromise between Caesar’s supporters and the men who killed him. They knew Caesar’s supporters and they were confident that they could do business with most of them.

  It was a risk, but Brutus gambled that the Republic could still be saved. Like Caesar, he was willing to let the dice fly high.

  DISMISSING THE BODYGUARD

  Of course, security considerations came into play as well. It was best to strike when the dictator was vulnerable. It might have seemed as if he was always vulnerable because Caesar had no bodyguard, but Caesar was not without protection.

  Sometime after returning to Rome in October 45 B.C., Caesar formally dismissed his Spanish bodyguard who protected him in the field. In principle, he relied solely on the informal protection of the senators and the knights. On the face of it, this was remarkable. If Roman history taught anything, it was that you could kill anyone. Assassination was not the rule in Rome but it wasn’t rare, either.

  True, other plots against Caesar had not amounted to much. Cassius supposedly conspired against him in 47 B.C. In 46 B.C., Cicero worried publicly about assassination plots against Caesar. In 45 B.C., Trebonius had tried to enlist Antony in a conspiracy. The fate of Caesar’s former foe Marcus Claudius Marcellus that year—stabbed to death by a disgruntled friend—served as a warning. Meanwhile, Caesar’s slave Philemon, his secretary, promised Caesar’s enemies that he would poison his master. When the plot was discovered, Caesar showed mercy by sparing Philemon from torture; he was merely executed. Only the last plot was certainly real. The rest might have been just talk. But then, consider the case of Deiotarus.

  In November 45, Deiotarus, king of the central Anatolian kingdom of Galatia, was the subject of a hearing in Rome. A former supporter of Pompey, for whom he fought in person at Pharsalus, Deiotarus was accused of plotting to murder Caesar when the dictator visited him during Caesar’s Anatolian campaign in 4
7 B.C. Cicero, who defended Deiotarus, gave the whole thing a comic opera air, which was not hard to do, since the accuser was none other than Deiotarus’s grandson, Castor, and the main witness for the prosecution was Deiotarus’s doctor. Less funny was the venue of the hearing—Caesar’s house, the Public Mansion, the official residence of the Chief Priest. Long ago the kings of Rome enjoyed the right of hearing cases in their palace and Caesar now insisted on no less.

  The other thing that was not funny was the possibility that the charge was true. Brutus was one of Deiotarus’s friends in Rome and we can only wonder if the two communicated about the subject of killing Caesar. In any case, Caesar did not render a verdict on the matter. He certainly did not take it as a reason to increase security.

  More than assassination plots, it was bad press that got to Caesar, like the scathing verses of one Pitholaus. Caesar did not suppress them but he showed his displeasure. Another case: during the Civil War, Aulus Caecina published a pamphlet that so laid into Caesar that now he refused to grant the writer a pardon, in spite of Cicero’s pleas.

  Caesar’s sources in Rome denounced conspiracies and nighttime meetings. Caesar did nothing but announce that he knew what was going on. Cassius Dio makes the striking statement that Caesar refused to hear information about the conspiracy and that he severely punished those who brought any such news. All the talk of plots had not amounted to much, and that could breed complacency on Caesar’s part. “Let them talk about assassination,” he might say, thinking that talk would blow off steam. Besides, he trusted his own judgment above all. In the field he sometimes acted in the absence of reliable intelligence. He made snap judgments and dealt with stereotypes and probabilities. He took risks that most commanders would shrink from.