What America should heed from Julius Caesar’s assassination

It being the Ides of March, I thought it might be worth reflecting briefly on the most famous event that occurred on this day: the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. One of the great ironies surrounding that bloody event is that, for all of the upheaval it occasioned, it failed utterly in its stated purpose. The conspirators sought — or said they sought — to overthrow a dictator and restore the Republic. 

“The Republic,” “the Republic,” “the Republic”: that was the phrase they uttered ad nauseam. But the Roman Republic, devised to govern a city state, was overwhelmed by the cosmopolitan responsibilities of empire. By Caesar’s day, the Republic was a tottering and deeply corrupt edifice. As Caesar himself put it, cynically but not inaccurately, “The Republic is nothing, merely a name without body or shape.” 

By killing Caesar, the conspirators merely hastened the Republic’s collapse. The assassins thought that by killing Caesar they had killed tyranny. They hadn’t. Removing Caesar did nothing to remove Caesarism, i.e., absolute rule by one man, which emerged from the bloodbath of the Ides of March unscathed. “The world without Caesar,” Barry Strauss notes in his book on Caesar’s murder, “was still a world about Caesar.”

Roman politics by the late Republic was a contest between two factions, the “optimates” or “best men,” wealthy aristocrats who had traditionally controlled the Senate, and the “populares,” who favored the people’s assemblies. These were not political parties but nodes of interest that Romans on their way up the career ladder catered to. 

Caesar, though he hailed from a minor patrician family, relied on and exploited the latter. He came by it naturally. His uncle, Gaius Marius (167-86 BC), the ambitious general and statesman who modernized the Roman army and opened it to landless citizens, was a vigorous proponent of the cause of the populares. He was also ruthless in suppressing his political enemies. 

On the other side was his younger rival, Lucius Sulla (138-78 BC), the general who revived the old institution of dictatorship and then set about purging his political enemies even more thoroughly than Marius had. The young Caesar barely escaped his wrath. “There’s many a Marius,” Sulla mused, “in Caesar.”

Between them, Marius and Sulla trampled on laws and conventions that had ruled the Roman Republic for centuries. It was illegal for a general to bring armed troops into the city proper. First Marius and then Sulla flouted this law and deployed their legions as a vigilante force, slaughtering their political opposition in Rome. They displayed the heads of their enemies, real and imagined, on the Rostra in the Forum, bloody reminders of the wages of civil war and an important marker in the dissolution of the Republic.

By the time Caesar entered politics, an uneasy order had been restored, but the rivalry between the optimates and the populares was still going strong. When Caesar’s term in Gaul ended in 50 BC, the Senate ordered him to leave his armies and return to Rome. Caesar faced a difficult decision. If he returned to Rome unarmed, he knew he would almost certainly face prosecution for various torts, real and fabricated. Would he do as the Senate demanded? Or would he brazen it out?

You know the answer. 

I have always been slightly puzzled about what exactly Caesar did to rouse the murderous fury of men, many of whom, after all, had been loyal supporters and, in some cases, friends. Yes, Caesar had had himself named dictator, but Rome had had plenty of dictators. True, the emergency office was supposed to be limited to six months and Caesar had that modified to “dictator in perpetuity.” Yet I suspect that Adrian Goldsworthy was right, in his biography of Caesar, when he observed that “it was not so much what Caesar was doing as the way he was doing it that bred discontent amongst the aristocracy.” 

And, remember, the conspiracy against Caesar was largely an aristocratic coup, not a popular uprising. There had been some grumbling about Caesar’s recent triumphs: were these not celebrations of one group of Romans killing other Romans? A proper triumph should celebrate Roman victory over foreigners, not fellow citizens. But for the most part, the people adulated Caesar.

All told, there were about sixty people in on the plan, though only a dozen or so wielded daggers on the Ides of March. At the innermost center of the conspiracy were Decimus Brutus, the one really close friend of Caesar’s among the conspirators, Marcus Brutus and Cassius: “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look,” Shakespeare has Caesar muse. “He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”

In the end, the conspirators decided to kill Caesar at the Senate meeting scheduled for the morning of March 15. Caesar had lately dismissed his personal bodyguard of Spanish soldiers and would be accompanied only by a handful of lictors, ceremonial attendants. The meeting, by the way, was not in the Senate House near the Capitoline Hill, as in Shakespeare, but just west of the city proper in the portico of the splendid temple complex that Pompey had built twenty years earlier in the Field of Mars.

After Caesar had settled himself in front of the senators, the conspirators crowded around him with a petition. One of them seized hold of Caesar’s toga so tightly that the dictator couldn’t rise. “Why, this is violence!” Suetonius has Caesar say. Then Caesar’s toga was pulled from his shoulders, the sign for attack. It was a melée. Several of the conspirators were themselves injured, including Marcus Brutus, who suffered a stab wound in the hand. The suddenness of the attack stunned the Senate. Only two of Caesar’s friends attempted to intervene. At first, Caesar fought back, but then, overwhelmed, he fell and pulled his toga over his face. It was all over in minutes. Julius Caesar lay lifeless in a pool of blood at the foot of a majestic statue of his great rival Pompey.

No fewer than eight ancient sources tell us that Caesar’s body had received twenty-three stab wounds. According to a doctor called Antistius, who examined the body, only one was fatal. It is perhaps worth noting that Dante, with characteristic moral insight,  locates Brutus and Cassius in the fourth ring of the ninth circle of hell, a spot reserved for those who had betrayed their benefactors. They join Judas Iscariot, all three of whom, protruding from Satan’s mouth, Dante describes as being gnawed upon for all eternity.

In his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, Edmund Burke, writing about the court of George III, noted with pointed understatement that “It was soon discovered that the forms of a free, and the ends of an arbitrary Government, were things not altogether incompatible.” It is a phenomenon that we conjure with to this day. We have elections. We have institutions whose prerogatives are supposedly limited by law. But to what extent does the American Republic circa 2024 live up to the ideals of limited government envisioned by the Founders?

The assassination of Julius Caesar took place more than 2,000 years ago. But its significance continues to resonate. Fully tracing those resonances would fill a book. For now, I will leave you with my favorite line from Giuseppe Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard: “If we want things to stay the same, a lot of things are going to have to change.” The Roman Republic had to change if it was going to endure. That insight escaped the wit of the conspirators and their allies. A look at the world today suggests that this is a paradox we neglect at our peril.