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

by Strauss, Barry

  A GATHERING OF TOGAS

  Rome was full of anticipation. It always was in March. It was less than a week until the first day of spring, the famous Roman spring. It was the season of Venus—Caesar’s patron goddess was also the Roman goddess of spring. Caesar’s contemporary the poet Lucretius (ca. 99 B.C. to ca. 55 B.C.), beautifully expresses the Roman attitude toward spring in a hymn to Venus in his great poem, On the Nature of Things:

  Mother of Aeneas and his descendants, the Romans,

  The joy of men and gods, bountiful Venus,

  . . . .

  For as soon as you bring the sight of a spring day

  And the fruitful breeze blows freely from the west,

  The birds of the air, their hearts stirred,

  Give the first sign, goddess, of your arrival,

  And wild cattle range about their happy fields

  And cross rapid rivers: thus seized with delight

  Everyone eagerly follows you wherever you lead.

  The Ides of every month was sacred to Jupiter but the Ides of March was special because it was also the annual festival of Anna Perenna. She was a minor, obscure, but cherished goddess. On the day of her festival, people sacrificed for a good year. It was not a somber day, but, on the contrary, a time for drinking and carousing by both sexes in tents and grass huts. The festivities focused on a sacred spring in a grove north of the city at the first milestone of the Via Flaminia, about three miles north of the Roman Forum. With many people heading to the festival, some of Caesar’s natural supporters, the working people of Rome, would be far from the center of town when the assassins struck.

  They conspirators too began the day in a festive mood. While it was still dark out some them gathered at Cassius’s house. Others, as we shall see, met elsewhere. They then accompanied Cassius and his son on a daybreak procession to the Roman Forum. It was the boy’s coming-of-age ceremony, when he put on the Toga of Manhood, or toga virilis, a key moment for a Roman family. The men were all wearing togas as well. Brutus, who was the boy’s uncle, was surely present.

  The toga was the ceremonial public garment of a male Roman citizen. It was a large woolen cloth, off-white in color, dignified but heavy and unwieldy. The toga was worn over the left shoulder, draped under the right arm and back over the left arm and shoulder. It had to be folded, rolled, and draped over the body in an elaborate manner and without pins. This was difficult, if not impossible, to do alone, and those who could turned to a slave for help. Highest-ranking public officials had a reddish purple border on their toga.

  Underneath his toga, a man wore a tunic, a simple garment held in place by a belt and covering the knees. In Rome today, average mid-March temperatures range from 43° to 61° Fahrenheit (6° to 16° Celsius), so men probably wore a heavy, woolen, winter tunic rather than a light, linen, summer tunic. Knights and senators were entitled to two reddish purple vertical stripes on their tunics, with narrow stripes for knights and broad stripes for senators.

  Before leaving home, Brutus hitched a dagger on to his belt beneath his toga. Most if not all of the other conspirators probably did so as well, but Brutus was the only one who shared the secret with his wife. Calpurnia only feared what the day would bring, but Porcia knew.

  As part of the Toga of Manhood ritual, a Roman boy could hardly escape at least one moral lecture about using his new freedom wisely. Now, many years after their own ceremonies, the conspirators stood poised on the most dramatic use of their freedom in their lives. Wisdom was another matter.

  IN POMPEY’S SHADOW

  After the ceremony in the Forum, the conspirators who were present, all dressed in togas, made their way to a meeting of the Senate. It was here that they planned to kill Caesar. After rejecting the possibility of doing the deed elsewhere, they decided to strike during a Senate meeting when Caesar would be unguarded, unsuspecting, and when many of the conspirators—who were senators—would be present, and they could carry weapons under their togas. It was here, at the site of the Senate meeting, that the rest of the conspirators, those who weren’t at Cassius’s house, gathered at dawn on the Ides.

  A rumor may have given the conspirators an added reason to strike at this session. Caesar had called the Senate meeting. It was said that his cousin, Lucius Cotta, was going to make an important announcement as one of the priests in charge of the sacred Sybilline Books. Since, those books stated, only a king could defeat the Parthians, the priests were supposedly going to propose that Caesar be declared king. To soften the blow, it’s possible that the title was meant to apply only outside of Rome—in Rome he would remain as dictator. But no less an authority than Cicero, who knew Cotta, stated that the rumor was false. In fact, the purpose of the Senate meeting was for Caesar to get Antony to give up his opposition to naming Dolabella as consul in Caesar’s absence. The question is: did the conspirators believe the rumor, and if so, did it give them a nudge?

  In any case, they decided to strike in the Senate. Shakespeare writes that Caesar was murdered in the Senate House on the Capitol—that is, on the Capitoline Hill. The dramatic setting on high mirrors Caesar’s pride and its undoing. But it is not true. The Roman Senate met from time to time on the Capitoline Hill, although in the Temple of Jupiter and not the Senate House, which was located elsewhere. But the Senate did not meet on the Capitoline on the Ides of March.

  Unlike most modern senates, the Roman Senate had several different venues for meetings. They were all formally temples, including the Senate House itself, because legally the Senate could render a formal opinion only in consecrated space. Usually, though, the Senate met in the Roman Forum, where the Curia or Senate House was located. Originally called Curia Hostilia, after Rome’s legendary third king, Tullus Hostilius, the Senate House was destroyed and rebuilt more than once. In 44 B.C., it was in the process of being rebuilt again by Caesar himself to be given his family name—it would be called the Julian Senate House (Curia Julia). And so, with construction still in progress, the Senate met in various other locations. The typical meeting place in this period was the Temple of Concord in the far west of the Forum.

  But on March 15, the Senate met in the Portico of Pompey. To be precise, it met in the Senate House of Pompey (Curia Pompei or Curia Pompeia), a structure at the eastern end of that large complex opening onto the Portico and built to house Senate meetings. There were gladiatorial games in the Theater of Pompey that day, and Senate meetings were held in the Senate House of Pompey on days when there were games or shows in the theater.

  The irony of attacking Caesar in a building dedicated to his enemy Pompey was clear. “It seemed as if some god was leading the man to the justice of Pompey,” writes Plutarch. But the Portico of Pompey was a monument to Pompey’s vain ambition, not to his loyalty to the Republic. “Murder for Pompey” was the slogan of a faction, not of men who put country above party. Worse still, the Senate House of Pompey was consecrated space, which made the conspirators not only murderers but also temple violators. Still, the conspirators planned to seize the public relations high ground.

  They planned not just an assassination but an event. The conspirators believed that a murder in full view of the Senate would seize the public’s imagination. “They thought that the act,” wrote Appian, “precisely because it took place in the Senate, would appear to have been done not as a plot but on behalf of the country. . . . And the honor would remain their own because people would be well aware that they had begun it.”

  Then too, there was great symbolism in the Senate murder. It was believed that the senators assassinated the legendary Romulus after he changed from king to a tyrant. Plutarch cites a story that Romulus was killed in a Senate meeting in a temple, of all places, but the killers hid the body and kept the deed quiet. According to Appian, the conspirators of 44 B.C. believed that the Romulus story would resonate if they killed Caesar in a Senate meeting. Perhaps they also took note of an alternate version of Romulus’s death in which the Roman nobility murdered Romulus at a meeting not of th
e Senate but of the assembly, when people were distracted by a violent rainstorm. The assembly supposedly took place, like the Senate meeting of the Ides of March, in the Field of Mars, where the Portico of Pompey was located.

  To turn from politics to security, the Portico of Pompey was a godsend. The plotters faced threats both inside the Senate House and out, but the layout of the Portico favored them. The entrance to the Senate House of Pompey was in the Portico. If necessary, the conspirators could close off access to the complex. They had the manpower to do so on that day.

  GLADIATORS AND SOLDIERS

  A large group of gladiators gathered in the Portico of Pompey on the morning of the Ides. They were a team—a “family,” as the Romans called groups of gladiators, no doubt named, as was usual, after their owner. They were probably known as the FAMILIA GLADIATORIA D BRUTI ALBINI, the gladiatorial “family” of Decimus Brutus Albinus.

  The huge complex of the Portico, one of Rome’s architectural wonders, held a theater at one end and a Senate House at the other, with a four-sided colonnade and park in between. Laid out as a rectangle, the Portico stretched eastward from the theater nearly 600 feet and was nearly 450 feet wide. The gladiators were positioned somewhere in the colonnade or the park. (At this hour of the day, there were probably none of the park’s famous whores there to distract them.) The men were armed and preparing for a fight, but not an ordinary one.

  Gladiatorial games were, in fact, underway in the theater—a venue for such events—but Decimus’s men weren’t part of them. Instead their job was to kidnap one of the gladiators who had violated his contract with Decimus by selling his services to the organizer of those games. Perhaps the organizer was an ambitious young official eager to catch Caesar’s eye by his expenditure on public entertainment. The gladiator was clearly a good fighter—not one of those posers who fell over if you blew on him—and Decimus, his owner, said that he wanted him for his own upcoming games. This, at least, is the story told only by Nicolaus of Damascus. Others say that the gladiators were there to take part in the games, but Nicolaus’s version is more plausible because it leaves the gladiators free to move at a moment’s notice, which they couldn’t do if they were competing. In any case, it speaks volumes about the level of violence in ancient Rome that Nicolaus’s tale seemed perfectly normal.

  The Romans took gladiatorial contests as seriously as we take football games today. By investing in a gladiatorial “family,” a politician like Decimus hoped to win popular acclaim and political capital. The Romans called the games “gifts”—gifts to the people, that is. But Decimus was also investing in protection because gladiators doubled as private security forces. Many elite Romans, their names a roll call of republican glory—Cato, Sulla, Scipio—and their professions ranging from jurors and generals to art collectors, all employed gladiators as armed guards.

  Take Birria and Eudamus, surely the most notorious gladiatorial guards of the era. In 52 B.C., they provoked a brawl on the Appian Way near Rome that led to the murder of the politician Clodius. Clodius was a Populist and demagogue, while Birria and Eudamus worked for his conservative archenemy, Milo. It was the evening of January 18 and they were bringing up the rear of the guard protecting Milo and his wife, Fausta, who were traveling in a litter. Then they came upon Clodius and his men. Eudamus and Birria started an argument and they noticed Clodius looking at them menacingly. So Birria ran Clodius through in the shoulder with his weapon, a rhomphaia.

  This was no mean feat. The rhomphaia was a big, double-edged iron sword featuring a long wooden handle. It has been compared to a polearm or to the halberd used by Swiss armies in the Renaissance. The rhomphaia was a Thracian weapon, which suggests that Birria was Thracian. It required strength and skill to wield the rhomphaia properly. Considering that Clodius had the advantage of being on horseback while Birria was on foot, his achievement in wounding Clodius was all the greater. As an example of just what a gladiator could do in a fight, it helps explain why even veteran Roman soldiers were reluctant to attack gladiators.

  Clodius’s men carried him to the nearest tavern to recover, but Milo was hot on their heels. Milo ordered his men to drag him out and kill him, which they did. But the people loved Clodius and they mourned him mightily. There was a riot at his funeral in Rome that burned down the Senate House and upended the Republic. When Milo was put on trial, he got the best defense attorney money could buy: Cicero. The authorities surrounded the courthouse with soldiers in order to intimidate the jurors. The authorities wanted a guilty verdict to calm the people, and they got it. Milo was condemned to exile.

  We don’t know how many gladiators Decimus had, but the sources say there were a lot of them. Given their later role protecting the conspirators, it’s hard to imagine fewer than 50 gladiators, but 100 or more is not out of the question. Too large a number of gladiators might have aroused suspicion, but Decimus was very close to Caesar, so few men would have dared challenge him. And Decimus was a very good liar indeed. No doubt he told Caesar about his plan to recover his wayward gladiator, and maybe the dictator smiled wryly at the thought of the fights he had once instigated in the streets of Rome. Maybe Decimus even reassured Caesar that the gladiators would double as security for him.

  Caesar himself might have given these gladiators to Decimus as a token of friendship. Caesar had a fondness for gladiators. “He squandered all the power of his supreme talent,” complained Cicero, “on levitas popularis,” meaning “popular shallowness.” He was Rome’s greatest gladiatorial entrepreneur. Not only did he give Rome’s most lavish gladiatorial games ever, but he also took a personal interest in the sport. The day before he crossed the Rubicon in January 49 B.C., he devoted several hours to watching gladiators training. In that same year he is recorded owning a very large number of gladiators in Capua, Italy’s great training center for gladiators.

  Decimus’s gladiators could be useful in several ways. If a fight broke out to protect Caesar, the gladiators could intervene. If the assassins killed Caesar but then came under attack, the gladiators could protect them. If necessary, the gladiators could block the entrances to the Portico, and the Senate House had no direct access to the street—one had to go through the Portico. But the biggest threat that the gladiators faced lay not in the Portico but about half a mile away.

  There, on the Tiber Island, a Roman legion had pitched its leather tents. If Cassius Dio is right, they were out on maneuvers in the suburbs of Rome that morning. In any case, by the afternoon they were back in camp and ready to be sent out on assignment.

  Readers of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar will have the impression that Rome on the Ides of March was a civilian city. Nothing could be further from the truth. Outside the Sacred Boundary or pomerium, the ancient heart of Rome, the city was bristling with soldiers, both active-duty and demobilized. Armed soldiers were not allowed within the Sacred Boundary, a rule that was not always honored, but Caesar seems to have followed it.

  The Tiber Island troops were under the command of Lepidus, a loyalist of Caesar who was about to finish his term as Master of the Horse, and so, the dictator’s deputy. In four days, Lepidus was scheduled to leave Rome to take up a new job as governor of two important provinces, Narbonese Gaul (southern France) and Nearer Hispania (northeastern Spain), no doubt escorted by his legion. He was with the legion on the morning of the Ides.

  Their camp on the Tiber Island made them an intimidating presence in Rome, even if they were less than full strength. In principle, a legion was made up of five thousand men, but legions were often understrength and Lepidus’s force almost certainly was because you could not fit five thousand men on the island. It is no bigger than an average city block today. In antiquity, temples, shrines, and their grounds covered the island, leaving little open space.

  We don’t know much about the men but we can be sure that they were not new recruits. Perhaps some of them had served with Lepidus in Hispania during his earlier mission there. The cool professionalism that they would soon display
shows that they were experienced troops. Perhaps Caesar thought of Lepidus’s men as a deterrent to any would-be assassins, an insurance policy of sorts. If so, the policy had an additional protection clause—a second group of soldiers in Rome.

  They were Caesar’s discharged veterans. Between 47 B.C. and 44 B.C., up to fifteen thousand were settled on land in Italy but Caesar was still in the process of settling many more there. Some of those who already had land came to Rome to escort their old chief on his way to the Parthian front on March 18.

  The veterans were stationed in temples and sacred precincts in various places outside the city walls of Rome. Like the men on the Tiber Island, they were armed. They were planning to march out to their new lands in the old-fashioned Roman style, following a banner, in military formation, led by a colonial commission. Presumably, they too would leave on March 18 for their new homes in Italy. Cicero called these veterans “country folk but very brave men and excellent citizens.” They were certainly loyal to Caesar, but their commitment to the Senate was another matter.

  No group of gladiators could protect the conspirators from thousands of Caesar’s angry veterans for long, but they might give the conspirators enough time to persuade Caesar’s angry soldiers that Rome’s new leaders were offering even better terms for resettlement. And so there would be handshakes instead of civil war.

  CRIES AND WHISPERS

  Senate meetings began in the early morning. In times of emergency, meetings began at daybreak or even earlier, although legally a vote could not be taken before sunrise. On this day, though, the Senate probably met at what the Romans called the third hour, that is, around 8 or 9 A.M., when courts usually began the day. Yet the scheduled hour came and went, and Caesar was nowhere to be seen.

  While they were waiting for the dictator to arrive, the praetors went about their business, which they carried out in the Portico of Pompey. Plutarch marvels at the calm and composure with which Brutus and Cassius listened to petitions, resolved disputes, or judged cases. He even mentions a litigant who promised to appeal to Caesar against Brutus’s unfavorable verdict. Brutus replied, with a philosopher’s precision, that Caesar neither did nor would prevent Brutus from behaving according to the laws.