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'Caesar led the Gauls in triumph, led them to the senate house;
Then the Gauls put off their breeches, and put on the latus clavus.''
When Quintus Maximus, whom he had appointed consul in his place for three months, was
entering the theater, and his lictor called attention to his arrival in the usual manner,
a general shout was raised: "He's no consul!" At the first election after the
deposing of Caesetius and Marullus, the tribunes, several votes were found for their
appointment as consuls. Some wrote on the base of Lucius Brutus' statue, "Oh, that
you were still alive"; and on that of Caesar himself:---
'First of all was Brutus consul, since he drove the kings from Rome;
Since this man drove out the consuls, he at last is made our king."
More than sixty joined the conspiracy against him, led by Gaius Cassius and Marcus and
Decimus Brutus. At first they hesitated whether to form two divisions at the elections in
the Campus Martius, so that while some hurled him from the bridge [the pons
suffragiorum, a temporary bridge of planks over which the voters passed one by one, to
cast their ballots] as he summoned the tribes to vote, the rest might wait below and slay
him; or to set upon him in the Via Sacra or at the entrance to the theater. When,
however, a meeting of the Senate was called for the Ides of March in the curia
adjoining the Theater of Gnaeus Pompeius, they readily gave that time and place the
preference.
LXXXI. Now Caesar's approaching murder was foretold to him by unmistakable signs. A few
months before, when the settlers assigned to the colony at Capua by the Julian Law were
demolishing some tombs of great antiquity, to build country houses, and plied their work
with the greater vigor because as they rummaged about they found a quantity of vases of
ancient workmanship, there was discovered in a tomb, which was said to be that of Capys,
the founder of Capua, a bronze tablet, inscribed with Greek words and characters to this
purport: "Whenever the bones of Capys shall be moved, it will come to pass that a son
of llium shall be slain at the hands of his kindred, and presently avenged at heavy cost
to Italia." And let no one think this tale a myth or a lie, for it is vouched for by
Cornelius Balbus, an intimate friend of Caesar. Shortly before his death, as he was told,
the herds of horses which he had dedicated to the river Rubicon when he crossed it, and
had let loose without a keeper, stubbornly refused to graze and wept copiously. Again,
when he was offering sacrifice, the soothsayer Spurinna warned him to beware of danger,
which would come not later than the Ides of March; and on the day before the Ides of that
month a little bird called the king-bird flew into the Curia of Pompeius with a
sprig of laurel, pursued by others of various kinds from the grove hard by, which tore it
to pieces in the hall. In fact the very night before his murder he dreamt now that he was
flying above the clouds, and now that he was clasping the hand of Jupiter; and his wife
Calpurnia thought that the pediment of their house fell, and that her husband was stabbed
in her arms; and on a sudden the door of the room flew open of its own accord. Both for
these reasons and because of poor health he hesitated for a long time whether to stay at
home and put off what he had planned to do in the senate; but at last, urged by Decimus
Brutus not to disappoint the full meeting which had for some time been waiting for him, he
went forth almost at the end of the fifth hour; and when a note revealing the plot was
handed him by someone on the way, he put it with others which he held in his left hand,
intending to read them presently. Then, after several victims had been slain, and he could
not get favorable omens, he entered the Senate in defiance of portents, laughing at
Spurinna and calling him a false prophet, because the Ides of March were come without
bringing him harm; though Spurinna replied that they had of a truth come, but they had not
gone.
LXXXII. [44 B.C.] As he took his seat, the conspirators gathered about him as if to pay
their respects, and straightway Tillius Cimber, who had assumed the lead, came nearer as
though to ask something; and when Caesar with a gesture put him off to another time,
Cimber caught his toga by both shoulders; then as Caesar cried, "Why, this is
violence!" one of the Cascas stabbed him from one side just below the throat. Caesar
caught Casca's arm and ran it through with his stylus, but as he tried to leap to his
feet, he was stopped by another wound. When he saw that he was beset on every side by
drawn daggers, he muffled his head in his robe, and at the same time drew down its lap to
his feet with his left hand, in order to fall more decently, with the lower part of his
body also covered. And in this wise he was stabbed with three and twenty wounds, uttering
not a word, but merely a groan at the first stroke, though some have written that when
Marcus Brutus rushed at him, he said in Greek, 'You too, my child?" All the
conspirators made off, and he lay there lifeless for some time, until finally three common
slaves put him on a litter and carried him home, with one arm hanging down. And of so many
wounds none turned out to be mortal, in the opinion of the physician Antistius, except the
second one in the breast. The conspirators had intended after slaying him to drag his body
to the Tiber, confiscate his property, and revoke his decrees; but they forebore through
fear of Marcus Antonius the consul, and Lepidus, the master of horse.
LXXXIII. Then at the request of his father-in-law, Lucius Piso, the will was unsealed
and read in Antonius' house, which Caesar had made on the preceding Ides of September at
his place near Lavicum [September 18, 45 B.C.], and put in the care of the chief of the
Vestals. Quintus Tubero states that from his first consulship until the beginning of the
civil war it was his wont to write down Gnaeus Pompeius as his heir, and to read this to
the assembled soldiers. In his last will, however, he named three heirs, his sisters'
grandsons---Gaius Octavius (to three-fourths of his estate), and Lucius Pinarius and
Quintus Pedius (to share the remainder). At the end of the will, too, he adopted Gaius
Octavius into his family and gave him his name. He named several of his assassins among
the guardians of his son, in case one should be born to him, and Decimus Brutus even among
his heirs in the second degree. To the people he left his gardens near the Tiber for their
common use and three hundred sesterces to each man.
LXXXIV. When the funeral was announced, a pyre was erected in the Campus Martius near
the tomb of Julia, and on the rostra a gilded shrine was placed, made after the model of
the temple of Venus Genetrix; within was a couch of ivory with coverlets of purple and
gold, and at its head a pillar hung with the robe in which he was slain. Since it was
clear that the day would not be long enough for those who offered gifts, they were
directed to bring them to the Campus by whatsoever streets of the city they wished,
regardless of any order of precedence.
At the funeral games, to rouse pity and indignation at his death, these words from the Armorum
of Pacuvius were sung:---- 'Saved I these men that they might murder me?" and words
of a like purport from the Electra of Atilius. Instead of a eulogy the consul
Antonius caused a herald to recite the decree of the Senate in which it had voted Caesar
all divine and human honors at once, and likewise the oath with which they had all pledged
themselves to watch over his personal safety; to which he added a very few words of his
own. The bier on the rostra was carried down into the Forum by magistrates and
ex-magistrates; and while some were urging that it be burned in the temple of Jupiter of
the Capitol, and others in the Curia of Pompeius, on a sudden two beings [cf. the
apparition at the Rubicon] with swords by their sides and brandishing a pair of darts set
fire to it with blazing torches, and at once the throng of bystanders heaped upon it dry
branches, the judgment seats with the benches, and whatever else could serve as an
offering. Then the musicians and actors tore off their robes, which they had taken from
the equipment of his triumphs and put on for the occasion, rent them to bits and threw
them into the flames, and the veterans of the legions the arms with which they had adorned
themselves for the funeral; many of the women too, offered up the jewels which they wore
and the amulets and robes of their children. At the height of the public grief a throng of
foreigners went about lamenting each after the fashion of his country, above all the Jews,
who even flocked to the place for several successive nights.
LXXXV. Immediately after the funeral the people ran to the houses of Brutus and Cassius
with firebrands, and after being repelled with difficulty, they slew Helvius Cinna when
they met him, through a mistake in the name, supposing that he was Cornelius Cinna, who
had the day before made a bitter indictment of Caesar and for whom they were looking; and
they set his head upon a spear and paraded it about the streets. Afterwards they set up in
the Forum a solid column of Numidian marble almost twenty feet high, and inscribed upon
it, "To the Father of his Country." At the foot of this they continued for a
long time to sacrifice, make vows, and settle some of their disputes by an oath in the
name of Caesar.
LXXXVI. Caesar left in the minds of some of his friends the suspicion that he did not
wish to live longer and had taken no precautions, because of his failing health; and that
therefore he neglected the warnings which came to him from portents and from the reports
of his friends. Some think that it was because he had full trust in that last decree of
the senators and their oath that he dismissed even the armed bodyguard of Hispanic
soldiers that formerly attended him. Others, on the contrary, believe that he elected to
expose himself once for all to the plots that threatened him on every hand, rather than to
be always anxious and on his guard. Some, too, say that he was wont to declare that it was
not so much to his own interest as to that of his country that he remain alive; he had
long since had his fill of power and glory; but if aught befell him, the Republic would
have no peace, but would be plunged in civil strife under much worse conditions.
LXXXVII. About one thing almost all are fully agreed, that he all but desired such a
death as he met; for once when he read in Xenophon [Cyropedeia, 8.7] how Cyrus in
his last illness gave directions for his funeral, he expressed his horror of such a
lingering kind of end and his wish for one which was swift and sudden. And the day before
his murder, in a conversation which arose at a dinner at the house of Marcus Lepidus, as
to what manner of death was most to be desired, he had given his preference to one which
was sudden and unexpected.
LXXXVIII. [44 B.C.] He died in the fifty-sixth year of his age, and was numbered among
the gods, not only by a formal decree, but also in the conviction of the common people.
For at the first of the games which his heir Augustus gave in honor of his apotheosis, a
comet shone for seven successive days, rising about the eleventh hour [about an hour
before sunset] and was believed to be the soul of Caesar, who had been taken to heaven;
and this is why a star is set upon the crown of his head in his statue. It was voted that
the curia in which he was slain be walled up, that the Ides of March be called the
Day of Parricide, and that a meeting of the senate should never be called on that day.
LXXXIX. Hardly any of his assassins survived him for more than three years, or died a
natural death. They were all condemned, and they perished in various ways---some by
shipwreck, some in battle; some took their own lives with the self-same dagger with which
they had impiously slain Caesar.
Source:
The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, C. Tranquillus Suetonius
From: Suetonius, 2 vols., trans. J. C. Rolfe, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, and London: William Henemann, 1920), Vol. I, pp. 3-119
Scanned by: J. S. Arkenberg, Dept. of History, Cal. State Fullerton. Prof. Arkenberg
has modernized the text.
The following changes to the printed text of Suetonius were made by Prof Arkenberg.;
- Text was modernized in several ways.
- While many of the annotations are those of J. C. Rolfe, many are Prof Arkenberg's,
based on more recent knowledge of Roman life (and several of Rolfe's ones too were
changed.)
- Roman names were substituted for most of the provinces (Hispania for Spain), for
example, to avoid the impression by some people that Caesar might have been visiting
Madrid, or that when he went to Britain (as Rolfe has the spelling), he was going London
to visit the queen!
- Roman proper names were substitued throughout (Pompeius for Pompey, Marcus Antonius for
Mark Antony). The familiar ones are fine for Shakespeare, but this isn't Shakespeare.
- Latin names and terms in preference to Rolfe's practice of using British terms (thus,
"plebeians" or "the people" instead of "the commons", or
"the Senate" instead of "the House")
- "Legal cases" or "lawsuits" were substitued for what Rolfe called
"taking the assizes".
- Rolfe's annotations were altered to bring out the sexual aspect of many remarks (found
more in Julius than in Caligula) and jeers of the time (eg., in Caligula, Rolfe has
Caligula boasting of his "uprightness" when the reference is to the staying
power of his erection...)
This text a mirror copy from the Internet Ancient History
Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts
related to medieval and Byzantine history.
Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the document is copyright.
Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational
purposes and personal use. No representation is made about texts which are linked
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document, indicate the source. No permission is granted for commercial use.
© Paul Halsall, October 1998
halsall@murray.fordham.edu
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