Calvisius offers a richer story. He was an Italian from Spoletium (Spoleto) who made his way in the world as a soldier. During the Civil War he served as one of Caesar’s officers. In 48 B.C., after they crossed the Adriatic, Caesar sent Calvisius with five cohorts and a few horsemen—about 2,500 men—through the rugged Greek hill country of Aetolia to the fertile plain on the Corinthian Gulf. There he met up with friendly locals and expelled enemy garrisons from the cities. That won Caesar the territory and a rich source of grain for his troops. After Caesar’s victory in the Civil War, Calvisius was rewarded with a term as governor of the Roman province of Africa (modern Tunisia). He was currently praetor.
Calvisius and Censorinus were about to have their finest hour together.
Of all of Caesar’s friends in the Senate House that day, they were the only two to come to his defense. Everyone else was too shocked and horrified to react, according to Plutarch. Precisely how and when Calvisius and Censorinus responded is not known. Nicolaus tells us only that the conspirators bore down on them and that the two resisted for a little while before they fled because of the number of their opponents. This is another sign of careful planning by the conspirators, who were prepared to meet resistance. More men might have risen to Caesar’s aid and in that case the reserve force of gladiators would have come in handy.
Calvisius and Censorinus are forgotten today. In practical terms, they accomplished nothing. But they went down on the honor roll of the party of Caesar’s friends.
POMPEY’S REVENGE
A physician named Antistius examined Caesar’s body afterward. Perhaps he was one of the doctors who advised Caesar on the morning of the Ides against going to the Senate. In any case, Antistius concluded that of the twenty-three wounds, only one was fatal—the second wound, which was in his breast. Assuming that this was Gaius Casca’s wound to Caesar’s ribs, then he was the man who actually carried out the murder. That only one wound was fatal would not be surprising, because it is not easy to inflict a fatal stab wound—not in the heat of a nervous moment, and not through a heavy woolen toga and tunic. We can’t be certain that Antistius was right, however.
With his death, Caesar closed a circle. In 60 B.C. he had joined Pompey and Crassus to divide the Roman state behind the scenes like three potentates. Crassus was tortured and then killed by the Parthians to whom he had surrendered after Carrhae in 53 B.C. After turning on Caesar and losing at Pharsalus, Pompey was murdered on the beach in Alexandria in 48 B.C. Now Caesar was dead and a round of murder and betrayal was over.
The irony of the great Caesar being killed in Rome was lost on no one. The conqueror of the world was murdered within a mile or two of his birth. Florus, a first-century A.D. Roman writer, probably put it best, “Thus he who had filled the whole world with the blood of his fellow-citizens at last filled the Senate House with his own.”
Caesar was a master commander, a deft politician, an elegant orator, and a lapidary literary stylist. His victories in the field, his championship of the common man and the provinces, his wit, his verve, his charm, and his vision of reform all continue to excite admiration. His cold-blooded career of killing in Gaul still horrifies. His egotism seemingly knew no bounds.
Conqueror, creator, and dictator, Caesar was great but at least in the last stages of his career, not wise. His job after civil war was to heal Rome. Instead, he took with one hand what he gave with the other. He pardoned his noble enemies without asking their pardon in return. He spared their lives but in some cases not their land. He gave them the titles they coveted while shrinking their power. The cruel truth is that he might have been better off killing his noble enemies from the outset.
He passed laws to help the masses but he curbed elections and so weakened self-government. After going to war in the name of the People’s Tribunes, he threatened one People’s Tribune with death and deposed two others.
Caesar showed off when he should have worked behind the scenes. He rebranded the center of Rome with his family’s name, as if the city were his property. He made himself dictator for life and flaunted the trappings of monarchy. He took the queen of Egypt as his mistress and allegedly the mother of his son and installed her in his villa on the edge of town. He promoted his eighteen-year-old grandnephew over his forty-year-old lieutenants and hinted that he intended to build a dynasty. He began a new war that threatened to win him overwhelming power.
After offending both masses and elite, Caesar refused to take a proper bodyguard because it was beneath the dignity of a man of destiny such as himself. He dared his enemies to strike and so they did.
Caesar fell at the foot of the statue of Pompey, his former political partner, his former son-in-law, and his former archenemy. The blood flowed from his woolen garments to the statue base.
Writing within months if not weeks of the event, Cicero highlights the irony of it all,
In that Senate, the greater part of which he had chosen, in Pompey’s Senate House, in front of the statue of Pompey himself, with so many of his centurions watching—that he was to lie there, slaughtered by the most noble of the citizens (some of whom he furnished with everything they had) and not only would none of his friends approach his body but not even any of his slaves.
Julius Caesar lay dead, but the Republic he had left behind, still seethed in agony. Julius Caesar was dead but not buried.
9
A REPUBLIC IN THE BALANCE
IT WAS A SCENE OUT of the Roman past. The senators, wrapped in their togas and accompanied by their armed slaves, marched through the streets of Rome. They folded their togas around their left arms like shields as their ancestors did a century earlier when they killed the Gracchi and their revolutionary supporters. The senators this day had a bodyguard of gladiators, while their ancestors had Cretan archers, but otherwise, the groups were similar. One foot in the past, the men who killed Caesar marched to restore the Republic.
On the afternoon of the Ides of March, the conspirators executed the second part of their plan. The first part, assassinating the dictator in the Senate House of Pompey, had succeeded. Now came the next phase. The plan: While they rallied public support and protected themselves from the vengeance of Caesar’s soldiers, the Senate would retake control of the Republic. Then they would look beyond Rome and take control of Caesar’s thirty-five legions while preventing rebellion and securing the frontiers. But things didn’t work out that way.
The conventional wisdom about the assassins is that they knew how to kill their man but they hadn’t the slightest idea what to do next. Like all hindsight, that view is twenty-twenty. It goes back to Cicero, who confided in a letter in May 44 B.C. that he thought the assassination was done “with manly spirit but childish judgment.” Cicero was too harsh. Caesar’s killers achieved their goal of stopping one man from ruling Rome. Now they wanted to revitalize the Republic.
Who would represent the conspirators to the Senate and the people after the assassination? Not Decimus—he was a military man. He had spent most of his adult life in Gaul and had little experience of Roman politics. Besides, he quickly became the focus of public anger after the assassination. Decimus’s job was to provide the assassins security with his gladiators. He probably wanted to settle things in Rome quickly and then head for his comfort zone—the governorship and the armies of Italian Gaul.
Cassius knew Roman politics better but he too was a soldier at heart. As an accomplished orator and a man admired for his character and his famous name, Brutus was the clear choice as the public face of the conspiracy. But could he outmanuever Antony and Caesar’s other leading supporters?
The Ides of March was a cleanup, not a coup, as Brutus saw it. Once the tyrant was removed, the Republic would function constitutionally again. The wisdom of the Senate would then guide both the people and the elected officials who executed the laws. This was a moderate goal but revolutions are hard on moderates. Revolutions reward extremes. Brutus wanted to return power to the Senate and the people, but the Senate lacked lead
ership and the people were divided. That left the army. In the five years since Caesar crossed the Rubicon, no one had ruled Rome without an army. And for sixty years before that, the shadow of military dictatorship often loomed. Only a miracle could leave the army out of the equation now.
Did the assassins understand that? Apparently they did but not well enough. They might have reasoned that with Caesar gone, his men would be loyal not to his memory but to whoever seemed to be the new Caesar—to whoever seemed strong enough to get them land and money. Even Brutus knew that but he miscalculated. He underestimated the price it would take and the speed and the determination with which Caesar’s veterans would come to Rome to demand it.
The conspirators failed to expect the unexpected. Brutus, Cassius, and Decimus thought they could light a political fire and neatly put it out, but you cannot manage a revolution. They worried about their peers like Antony and Lepidus. Instead, their fate rested in the hands of Caesar’s veterans. The conspirators should have worried about them, just as they should have worried about a precocious teenager who was not even in Italy—Octavian.
MARCH 15: FROM THE PORTICO OF POMPEY TO THE CAPITOLINE HILL
Uproar followed the death of Caesar. The senators fled the room shouting. The crowd outside the Senate House cried out in response. Some said the whole Senate had joined in the murder, others that a great army had come for the deed. Meanwhile, spectators ran from the gladiatorial games in the Theater of Pompey about six hundred feet away at the other end of the Portico. Rumors flew of gladiators or soldiers on a rampage.
Antony quickly made his way home, afraid for his life. The story that he exchanged his consul’s toga for slave’s clothes in order to escape sounds like something an enemy made up later. Still, some Romans hid themselves in their homes; some put on disguises and fled to their country villas. Everyone expected a bloodbath as in past Roman revolutions.
Meanwhile, the assassins emerged from the Senate. Brutus spoke. Some say that earlier he tried to address the senators in the Senate House of Pompey but they ran for the door. Appian says the conspirators expected the other senators to join them enthusiastically once they saw the assassination. In fact, many senators supported them, but fear ruled the moment. And yet, this was only the first scene of the drama that was Rome after Caesar. There would be time for political calculation later.
Others say that Brutus spoke to the people outside the Senate chamber and that other assassins spoke there, too. Brutus tried to calm the crowd. More important, he seized the rhetorical high ground. There was no reason to be upset, he said, because nothing bad had happened. This was not murder, said Brutus, but the killing of a tyrant.
First came the daggers, then the honeyed words, and then came more daggers. That was the conspirators’ strategy. Killing Caesar did not give them the keys to the kingdom—it merely opened the door. To take control of Rome they had to negotiate with Caesar’s advisors, win the support of the urban plebs, and neutralize Caesar’s soldiers. That would take time, which required a defensive base as well as a publicity and diplomacy blitz.
The conspirators now made a show of force by marching from the Portico of Pompey to the Roman Forum and up the Capitoline Hill, a distance of a little more than one-half mile. They had planned this move in advance. They had no intention of going alone. Cassius, Brutus, and Decimus led them, along with Decimus’s gladiators as well as a large number of slaves, no doubt all armed.
In the most arresting image of the afternoon, the conspirators walked in the streets of Rome with their daggers drawn—“naked,” as the ancient expression says—and their hands still bloody. Nicolaus says they ran in flight; Plutarch says they were most definitely not in flight but were radiant and confident. They agree that the men cried out as they went that they had acted on behalf of the public’s liberty. No doubt, but there was also a warrior’s simple pride in having killed a rival. Their bloody parade was something like a gladiator’s victory lap in the arena. Appian claims that one assassin carried a freedman’s felt cap on the end of a spear as a symbol of liberty. Cicero claims that some of them called out his name as they marched.
There is more to trust in the report that some non-assassins now took out their weapons and joined the march to the Capitoline. Between them, Appian and Plutarch name some half-dozen men. There was Marcus Favonius, the friend of Cato whom Brutus rejected for the conspiracy. Publius Cornelius Lentulus Spinther was the son of the consul of 57 B.C. Later he wrote to Cicero and had the nerve to lie, saying that he shared in the deed and the danger with Brutus and Cassius. One Gaius Octavius was probably Gaius Octavius Balbus, no doubt a senator. Marcus Aquinus and one Patiscus both later fought for Brutus and Cassius. Lucius Staius Murcus fought for Caesar in the Civil War but now changed sides. He would soon become governor of Syria. Finally, there was Dolabella, Caesar’s handpicked consul-in-waiting, who jumped ship and joined the assassins.
People ran through the streets to the Forum, galvanized by the news of Caesar’s murder. Yet the center of Rome was probably less crowded than usual because many had gone to celebrate the Anna Perenna festival. Still the sources report looting and frightened people barricading themselves into their homes—perhaps accurate descriptions of panic.
The Capitoline was the smallest of Rome’s hills. At about twenty-three acres in size, it was not much bigger than today’s St. Peter’s Square, but it was a natural fortress lined by rocky cliffs. The Capitoline Hill’s main landmark was the huge Temple of Jupiter in the south, Rome’s most important religious site. The northern end of the hill was known as the Arx, or Citadel. It had no walls but it was a natural fortress. The Citadel held a temple of Juno, the Roman mint, and a place of augury, where you could see all the way to the Alban Mount nearly twenty miles to the south. The saddle between the two hills was called the Asylum. Legend has it that Romulus made the place a sanctuary for foreign refugees that he wanted to attract to Rome. Several steep staircases and stepped streets provided access to the top but they could be blocked. In short, the Capitoline was easily defensible.
As soon as they reached the Capitoline, the conspirators divided the terrain into sectors and formed a defensive perimeter. The high ground was a force multiplier so they had chosen well. Anyone who attacked them on the Capitoline faced a bloody battle.
The hill was a symbolic as well as physical plateau. Between the Citadel and the Temple of Jupiter, the Capitoline Hill stood for Rome’s heart and sinew, as if it were a cross between the Vatican and the Tower of London. There the men who killed Caesar could both give thanks to the gods and look down on their enemies. One source put it plainly when he said that the assassins “occupied the Capitol.”
MARCH 15: THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE
If they used their legion and their veterans against the assassins’ gladiators, Caesar’s loyalists would have had the upper hand militarily. But on the afternoon of March 15, the focus was on persuasion. The assassins tried to win the support of the Roman people, who were divided. Some thought the killing of Caesar was the fairest of deeds and some thought it the most foul. To those who favored the assassins, Caesar had misused his mighty power and so was “justly slain”—iure caesus, to use a term from the old Roman law code, the Twelve Tables. To Cassius, Caesar was “the wickedest man ever killed.” To Cicero, the conspirators were liberators who rightly placed the liberty of their fatherland before the ties of friendship.
Other Romans still supported Caesar. To Caesar’s dear friend Gaius Matius, Caesar was a great man who had tried to leave all Romans safe and sound only to be murdered by those close to him. As Caesar’s friends saw things, the dictator showed mercy to his opponents, and they paid him back with treachery and ingratitude. Caesar’s supporters could accuse the killers of being motivated by “jealousy of his fortune and power.” The assassins also seemed impious. By killing Caesar in a hall where the Senate met, the assassins acted in consecrated space. They were guilty, in effect, of committing murder in a temple.
The Rom
an people could forgive the assassins or condemn them. But how did you win the support of the Roman people? There were no opinion polls and no plebiscites. What mattered most was how the people reacted to public speeches. Applause, cheers, boos, and even rioting would be the signs of the public will.
For five days after the assassination, the Public Meeting (contio, in Latin) served as the instrument for gauging public opinion. It was a formal gathering called by a magistrate, featuring a variety of speeches but no voting. Public Meetings typically took place in the Roman Forum adjacent to the Capitoline Hill on the southeast. At least five separate Public Meetings were held between March 15 and March 19.
The Capitoline provided easy access to the Forum. The Rostra or Speaker’s Platform lay practically at the foot of the hill. There, the conspirators could take part in the contest for popular support. They had a chance to win over the ordinary people of Rome—the urban plebs. The plebeians were longtime backers of Caesar, but in the last six months they had started to change their minds. The plebeians loved election campaigns because they brought attention and payoffs from men running for office. But Caesar cut back on elections because he appointed most public officials himself. The plebeians resented that and they also resented his attack on their champions, the People’s Tribunes. That gave Brutus and Cassius an opening, and so did Antony’s unpopularity.
Death of Caesar : The Story of History's Most Famous Assassination (9781451668827) Page 16