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

by Strauss, Barry

  Around June 42 B.C., Brutus and Cassius met at the city of Sardis in western Anatolia. They resolved various differences and decided to head to Macedonia. After leaving Lepidus behind to hold Italy, Antony and Octavian had crossed the Adriatic Sea with nineteen legions. On paper, that meant 95,000 men, but the real number was probably only about half as much. They were also supposed to have had 13,000 cavalrymen. For their part, Brutus and Cassius had seventeen legions—supposedly 85,000 men but, again, the real number was probably only half. In addition, they are said to have had 20,000 horsemen. Even with the figures cut in half, a massive number of legionaries—around 90,000 all told—were preparing to meet. The largest showdown of the era loomed.

  Various eastern allies sent troops to help Brutus and Cassius, primarily cavalry. Deiotarus sent both infantry and cavalry. The king of Parthia sent a contingent of archers. This was a tribute to Brutus’s and Cassius’s diplomacy. In late 43 B.C., they had sent the son of Caesar’s old friend-turned-enemy, Labienus, to Parthia. He negotiated the support.

  In the summer of 42 B.C., outside the city of Cardia on the Gallipoli Peninsula, Brutus and Cassius gathered their combined forces. These very large armies had to be fed, housed, exercised, inspired, and, above all, paid.

  The commanders did not disappoint. For a year or more they had been raising money by diplomacy or force. Now they had a variety of coins issued by their officials, probably using one or more of the mints of Macedonia.

  Brutus had learned his lesson. Unlike in the days following the Ides of March, he would not stint the soldiers. As Appian says, he and Cassius had raised plenty of money to pay them. They worried especially that the large portion of their soldiers who had fought for Julius Caesar might now defect to his adopted son, Octavian. According to Appian, Cassius addressed this point in a speech to the assembled troops. He told them that, whoever the general, they were always fighting for the same cause—Rome. But Brutus and Cassius were not so naïve as to rely on words. Every legionary got 1,500 denarii, every centurion 7,500, and every military tribune 15,000. These were generous sums. They didn’t match the amount that Antony and Octavian promised their men in the case of victory—5,000 denarii (20,000 sesterces) each. They were outdone by the sums at Caesar’s Triple Triumph in 46 B.C., where the payout began at 6,000 denarii per legionary. Brutus and Cassius paid their men before the battle. They already had the money while Antony and Octavian Caesar only promised to get it—they didn’t have it yet, a point that, according to Appian, Cassius emphasized to his soldiers. Even Caesar paid his men only after they had fought for him in Gaul and the Civil War. It’s often risky to pay someone in advance but no doubt Brutus and Cassius felt they had to do so to win over Caesar’s former soldiers. Perhaps as well the two assassins were overcompensating for the mistake of not wooing the soldiers after the Ides of March. In any case, now they surely pointed out that victory would bring even more loot.

  The gorgeous array of money illustrated a variety of themes, among them, heroes of the Roman past, gods, and eagles. One coin, issued by Brutus and Casca, shows Neptune with a trident on one side as a symbol of republican sea power. The other side shows a winged victory holding a palm and a broken diadem with a broken scepter under her feet—symbols of success over Caesar’s would-be kingship. The inscription says “BRUTUS IMP,” Brutus Imperator.

  One coin, however, stands out from the rest. Issued by Brutus, it is a small, silver denarius, and it may well be the most famous coin of ancient Rome. A gold version, an aureus, exists as well. On its obverse the coin shows Brutus in profile. He wears a beard as a sign of mourning for the Republic. Still, it is a strange image considering that Caesar had been criticized for breaking with precedent and becoming the first Roman ever to depict himself on coins. Now, Brutus, identified as an IMPERATOR, strikes a very unrepublican pose. Yet there was a war to be won. That came first—constitutional niceties could wait for later.

  The other side of the coin is even more surprising. The coin shows on its reverse a pileus or freed slave’s cap above the inscription EID MAR—that is, an abbreviation of “IDES OF MARCH.” On either side of the cap stands a military dagger, point facing down. It is an arresting image.

  With the prospect of a great battle against the armies of Antony and Octavian looming, the military imagery makes sense. But that, of course, was not the primary meaning of the daggers on this coin, at least not for those who issued it.

  Writing centuries later, Dio offers an identification of the two military daggers, making this one of the few coins mentioned by an ancient writer:

  In addition to these activities, Brutus stamped upon the coins which were being minted in his own likeness with a cap and two daggers, indicating by this and by the inscription that he and Cassius had liberated the fatherland.

  In short, the two military daggers are meant to represent the weapons used by the two leaders of the anti-Caesar movement on the Ides of March. Even for a gathering of soldiers, this was blunt.

  As noted earlier, each of the two daggers on the coin has a different hilt. The cruciform hilt might have been Brutus’s dagger, and the two-disk hilt might have been Cassius’s. A less speculative point comes from noticing what the daggers have in common. They are both precisely military daggers—pugiones (singular, pugio) in Latin. The Romans distinguished the military dagger from the sica, a curved dagger of Thracian origin, which was not normally carried by Roman soldiers. The sica, in Roman eyes, was a weapon for cutthroats; a word for “murderer” or “asssassin” is sicarius, literally, “a sica-man.”

  After the Ides of March, Caesar’s friends claimed that the assassins were mere murderers. But through imagery this coin argues that the Ides of March was an honorable act carried out by the tools of Roman soldiers, as the military daggers show. It was an act not of murder but of liberation, as the freed-slave’s cap shows.

  Of course the soldiers who took Brutus’s coin in 42 B.C. knew that their commanders’ daggers had killed Caesar. They understood the symbolism of the military dagger as a tool of tyrannicide. They were already familiar with the gruesome reality of the weapon. They understood that they were getting paid to use the military dagger, along with the sword and the spear, to finish what Brutus and Cassius had started.

  PHILIPPI AND AFTERWARD

  The great confrontation took place outside of Philippi, a city in eastern Macedonia, on the Via Egnatia and near the Aegean coast. The number of combatants was huge. The site bespoke destiny. A famous warrior, King Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, had founded the city and named it after himself. Even the spirits played their part. One night before he took his army across the Hellespont, Brutus saw a vision of his evil genius—the bad fortune or bad judgment that the Romans believed each person has. The vision warned Brutus, “you will see me at Philippi.” The vision supposedly appeared again on the night before the final battle. In the heat of combat at Philippi the next day, Cassius supposedly saw Caesar’s ghost dressed in his reddish purple commander’s cape.

  As the great clash approached, Brutus wrote with courage and acceptance to Atticus. Either they would free the Roman people, Brutus wrote, or they would die and be freed from slavery. Everything was safe and secure, he added, except for the knowledge of whether they would live free or die.

  The odds were good for Brutus and Cassius at Philippi. Their numbers were strong and they had an excellent position on the high ground straddling the Roman road. Mountains protected their northern flank and a marsh protected their southern flank. In Cassius they had a very good commander, and in Brutus, a competent one. They controlled the sea and had their fleet nearby on an island from which it could bring supplies to a port not far from their camp. Octavian and Antony, by contrast, were short of food. So the pressure was on them, while Brutus and Cassius could sit back and let the enemy starve.

  They had the help of several of their fellow assassins. Cimber—the drunkard and brawler—had helped them seize this position from an advance guard
of the enemy. Publius Servilius Casca, the first man to strike Caesar on the Ides of March, served under Brutus as a commander. There was also a veritable roll call of Roman nobles, including the son of Cato.

  Antony was a resourceful general. He was by far the most experienced of the four commanders present. He managed to sneak around Brutus and Cassius’s position and threaten their supply route. Then he started building fortifications to cut the enemy off from the sea and their supplies, so Brutus and Cassius had to begin a counterfortification to stop him. On or around October 3, Antony attacked, and with such success that he took not only the counterfortifications but also Cassius’s camp. Cassius’s men fled in a rout. Meanwhile, to the north, Brutus’s men managed to take Octavian’s camp, even though they were poorly disciplined and failed to listen to Brutus’s orders.

  Octavian himself was ill and was not there. His main contribution to victory was to survive unharmed. Afterward, reports credited him with paying careful attention to divine signs. They said that in response to one person’s vision, he put on Caesar’s ring as a good luck charm. In response to another vision, he left his tent beforehand and so avoided harm.

  Forced to withdraw to a hill for safety, Cassius mistakenly thought he saw Brutus’s army routed as well. He preferred suicide to capture, so Cassius had a freedman decapitate him. Some ancient writers said that the man killed him without orders. It was Cassius’s birthday.

  Cassius was a politician of conviction, one of the Best Men through and through, hostile to Caesar and to anything that smacked of one-man rule. If Plutarch is right, Cassius spurred on the plot to kill Caesar. Given his military background, Cassius surely played a major role in working out the details of the assassination. He pushed consistently for a hard line, both for killing Antony and for denying Caesar a public funeral, but Brutus overruled him. But killing Antony might have unleashed Lepidus and his legion on the assassins on the Capitoline Hill and denying Caesar a public funeral might only have furnished a grievance for the riot that was probably inevitable. Cassius demonstrated strategic insight in the two years after the assassination, back in the eastern Mediterranean that he knew well. His methods were brutal at times but he did a superb job of putting together an army to challenge Antony and Octavian.

  Brutus had Cassius buried in secret, so as not to depress the army. He mourned Cassius as “the last of the Romans,” a man whose prowess would never be seen again. It would certainly not be seen in Brutus’s camp. Even if Cassius had lived, it is unclear that he could have outfought Antony. With Brutus in command, his army’s chances plummeted because Brutus was no general. Decimus was—and the army’s chances would surely have improved if Decimus had survived and reached them to hold a position of command.

  Brutus distrusted the loyalty of Cassius’s men and he suffered at least one notable defection. Deiotarus’s general, noticing which way the wind was blowing, switched to Antony. One wonders if the old king, with his usual ruthlessness, had ordered his commander to pick the winner. Brutus also knew that the enemy was still trying to cut him off. So, three weeks later, on October 23, he attacked. After a long, fierce fight, the enemy broke Brutus’s line.

  Antony was the architect of victory at Philippi—a thorough, decisive victory. Brutus and Cassius’s stand for the Republic was over. Now, if not earlier, Brutus might have reconsidered his decision to spare Antony on the Ides of March.

  Brutus managed to escape the battlefield. Traveling in the hills with a few friends, he quoted Greek poetry that night under the stars. After some time passed, he decided to end it all. He told his friends that he blamed fortune but he would die happy. Unlike the victors, he said, he left behind a reputation for virtue, while his enemies were unjust and wicked. So Plutarch tells the story, relying on the eyewitness account of Brutus’s friend and fellow student Publius Volumnius. For once, Plutarch is more credible than the other versions.

  Philippi devastated the ranks of the assassins and their supporters. Neither Publius Servilius Casca nor Cimber is ever heard from again. They are presumed either to have fallen in battle or committed suicide afterward. Other nobles joined the ranks of the fallen, including the son of Cato.

  The poet Horace made his peace with the new regime after fighting against it at Philippi. He criticized Brutus’s poor generalship and described the battle as “when virtue broke.” “Virtue” in Latin is virtus, a word combining manly prowess with moral excellence. In his own lifetime, Brutus was famous for virtus and proud of it, but now it came into question. Why hadn’t he been a better general at Philippi? Why did he kill himself instead of fighting on? So men asked at first.

  In the long term, though, an afterglow of glory attached itself to Brutus. He was remembered not as the Loser of Philippi, but instead as the Man of Virtue, as he is in Plutarch. Brutus had a good press, and that owed something to his connections and to Servilia’s, but there was more to the matter than that. Brutus appealed to the Romans. He was both a figure out of their steely, Central Italian past and a suppler, more forward-looking practitioner of Greek wisdom. Make no mistake about it—if Brutus’s action on the Ides of March horrified the people of Rome, it also electrified them. By drawing his dagger and stabbing Caesar, Brutus proved his courage. As Plutarch says, even those who hated him for killing Caesar couldn’t help but find something noble in him.

  Brutus was not the woolly-eyed idealist that he is sometimes portrayed as. Although Antony’s generalship destroyed Brutus, Brutus was not wrong to have spared him on the Ides of March. Without Antony’s moderating hand it’s not clear that the assassins could have survived the vengeance of Lepidus and his men. Nor could Brutus have predicted Octavian’s effectiveness and how that would push Antony into destroying Decimus. In any case, Brutus had warned Cicero not to trust Octavian. If Brutus had had his way, Decimus would have allied with Antony against Octavian. The world might have looked very different if that had happened. Brutus might just have saved the Republic.

  And yet the ancients couldn’t resist a series of ghastly, comic anecdotes about the fate of Brutus’s corpse. For example, the story goes that when Antony found Brutus’s dead body, he had it wrapped in his most luxurious reddish purple robe—the mark of a Roman commander. Then some thief stole the robe and Antony had him executed.

  After having Brutus’s body cremated, Antony sent the ashes home. And so, late in 42 B.C., a messenger arrived at Servilia’s villa, either a town house in Rome or one of her country places in Antium or near Naples. He brought an urn. It carried all that was mortal of her only son—all, that is, except his head, if we can believe the source that says that Octavian had it cut off just as Decimus’s head was cut off. According to the source, Brutus’s head was sent to Rome to place at the foot of a statue of Caesar as revenge. But the head never made it there, because during the sea voyage to Rome, the sailors tossed it overboard as bad luck during a storm, like the biblical Jonah. As Servilia looked at the urn containing the remains of Brutus, what did she think? Did she tote up the corpses? In addition to her son and his wife, Porcia, her son-in-law, Cassius, also lay dead. Or did Servilia take comfort in the thought of her son’s glory? Of Servilia, not another word is heard. The sources do not mention her again.

  “This was the noblest Roman of them all,” says Shakespeare’s Antony on finding Brutus’s body. He is echoing the sentiments about Brutus that Plutarch ascribes to him in another earlier context. In the earshot of many, says Plutarch, Antony once declared that Brutus was the only conspirator against Caesar who was motivated by the splendor and nobility of the deed; as for the others, only hate and jealousy moved them.

  In truth, Antony was a noble Roman as well, a man of the old school. He belonged to Brutus’s generation. Like Brutus, he took his bearings from a world that was disappearing around him. Not so Antony’s twenty-one-year-old co-commander at Philippi. Octavian treated the Roman past with breezy insincerity.

  Brutus said that Antony would pay the penalty for his folly. Instead of standing up to
be counted with the likes of Cato, Cassius, and Brutus himself, Antony had made himself Octavian’s accessory. Brutus predicted before the decisive encounter at Philippi that if Antony wasn’t defeated with Octavian, then the two men would soon be fighting each other. He was right.

  THE LAST ASSASSIN

  Philippi was a massive victory for Antony and Octavian, but there was still work to do to bring the Roman world under their thumb. The republican fleet, led by Sextus Pompey from his base in Sicily, still controlled the sea. In the following years, Sextus Pompey first brought the triumvirs to the bargaining table and then destroyed two of Octavian’s fleets before finally losing decisively at sea in 36 B.C. Afterward he fled to Anatolia, where he was caught and executed.

  Lepidus suffered a steady decline. In 40 B.C. he had to trade Nearer Hispania and Narbonese Gaul for the less strategic province of Roman Africa. From there he helped Octavian against Sextus Pompey—and only too well, as Pompey’s troops eventually defected to Lepidus. He wanted to add Sicily to his portfolio, but Octavian was strong enough to push Lepidus aside. In 36 B.C. Lepidus was forced into permanent exile south of Rome at Circeii, a beautiful but lonely seaside spot, famous only for its oysters.

  Antony and Octavian divided the Roman Empire between them. Antony took the East and Octavian the West. That left Octavian the unpopular job in Italy of confiscating land for veterans. The result pleased the ex-soldiers but meant ruin for many other Italians. Military gravestones around Italy record the new prosperity, while contemporary poetry echoes the misery of the dispossessed. Fulvia, Antony’s formidable wife, and Lucius, his surviving brother, stirred up so much opposition to the land grab that it came down to war around the Central Italian town of Perusia (modern Perugia). Octavian’s forces won. If the report is not just propaganda, they then massacred a large number of enemy senators and knights on the altar of the Deified Julius on the Ides of March. It was virtually a human sacrifice for Caesar’s ghost. They let Fulvia and Lucius go free.