Nor was it as though he would be in Rome for much longer. He was due to leave for Parthia on 18 March. True, a soothsayer had advised him to beware the Ides, which fell that month on the fifteenth, but Caesar had never shown much regard for superstitions. Only in his private conversation did he betray any intimations of mortality. On the evening of the fourteenth, one month after being appointed dictator for life, Caesar dined with Lepidus, the patrician who had joined his cause in 49 BC and was now his deputy in the dictatorship, a position officially entitled the ‘Master of Horse’. Confident that he was among friends, Caesar dropped his guard. ‘What is the sweetest kind of death?’ he was asked. Back shot Caesar’s response: ‘The kind that comes without warning.’26 To be warned was to be fearful; to be fearful was to be emasculated. That night, when Caesar’s wife suffered nightmares and begged him not to attend the Senate the next day, he laughed. In the morning, borne in his litter, he caught sight of the soothsayer who had told him to beware of the Ides of March. ‘The day which you warned me against is here,’ Caesar said, smiling, ‘and I am still alive.’ ‘Yes,’ came the answer, swift and inevitable. ‘It is here – but it is not yet past.’27
The Senate that morning had arranged to meet in Pompey’s great assembly hall. Games were being held in the adjacent theatre, and as Caesar descended from his litter he would have heard the roars of the Roman people thrilling to spectacles of blood. But the noise would soon have been dimmed by the cool marble of the portico, and even more by that of the assembly hall that waited beyond. Pompey’s statue still dominated the Senate’s meeting-space. After Pharsalus it had been hurriedly pulled down, but Caesar, with typical generosity, had ordered it restored, along with all of Pompey’s other statues. An investment policy, Cicero had sneered, against his own being removed – but that was malicious and unfair. Caesar had no reason to fear for the future of his statues. Nor, walking into the assembly hall that morning and seeing the senators rise to greet him, for himself. Not even when a crowd of them approached him with a petition, mobbing him as he sat down in his gilded chair, pressing him down with their kisses. Then suddenly he felt his toga being pulled down from his shoulders. ‘Why,’ he cried out, startled, ‘this is violence!’28 At the same moment he felt a slashing pain across his throat. Twisting around he saw a dagger, red with his own blood.
Some sixty men stood in a press around him. All of them had drawn daggers from under their togas. All of them were well known to Caesar. Many were former enemies who had accepted his pardon – but even more were friends.29 Some were officers who had served with him in Gaul, among them Decimus Brutus, commander of the war fleet that had wiped out the Venetians. The most grievous betrayal, however, the one that finally numbed Caesar and stopped him in his desperate efforts to fight back, came from someone closer still. Caesar glimpsed, flashing through the mêlée, a knife aimed at his groin, held by another Brutus, Marcus, his reputed son. ‘You too, my boy?’30 he whispered, then fell to the ground. Not wishing to be witnessed in his death-agony, he covered his head with the ribbons of his toga. The pool of his blood stained the base of Pompey’s statue. Dead, he lay in his great rival’s shadow.
But if there appeared to be symbolism in this, then it was illusory. Caesar had not been sacrificed to the cause of any faction. True, one of the two ring-leaders of the conspiracy had been Cassius Longinus, one of Pompey’s former officers. But when Cassius had argued for the assassination not only of Caesar but also of Antony and Lepidus, and a wholesale destruction of the dictator’s regime, his case had been overruled. Brutus, the other leader, and the conscience of the conspiracy, had refused to hear of it. They were conducting an execution, he had argued, not a squalid manoeuvre in a political fight. And Brutus had prevailed. For Brutus was known to be an honourable man, and worthy to serve as the spokesman and avenger of the Republic.
In the beginning there had been kings, and the last king had been a tyrant. And a man named Brutus had expelled him from the city and set up the consulship, and all the institutions of a free Republic. And now, 465 years later, Brutus, his descendant, had struck down a second tyrant. Leading his fellow conspirators out of Pompey’s great complex, he stumbled and ran in his excitement across the Campus. Holding his bloodstained dagger proudly aloft, he headed for the Forum. There, in the people’s meeting-place, he proclaimed the glad news: Caesar was dead; liberty was restored; the Republic was saved.
As though in derisory answer, from across the Campus came the sound of screams. The spectators at Pompey’s theatre were rioting, crushing one another in their panic. Wisps of smoke were already rising into the sky; shops were being smashed as looters set to work. More distantly, the first wails of grief could be heard as Rome’s Jews began the mourning for the man who had always served as their patron. Elsewhere, however, as news of what had happened spread across the city, there was only silence. Far from rushing to the Forum to acclaim the liberators, citizens were rushing to their homes and barring their doors.
The Republic was saved. But what was the Republic now? Stillness hung over the city and no answer could be discerned.
THE DEATH OF THE REPUBLIC
The Last Stand
Crisis or no crisis, the Season remained inviolable. Spring, flower-bright and crystalline, was when fashionable society decamped out of town. April 44 BC was no different. In the weeks following Caesar’s murder Rome began to empty. Many of those shuttering up their mansions must have felt relieved to be leaving the febrile, panic-racked city behind. Not that the country was without its own headaches. Cicero, for instance, arriving at his favourite villa just south of Rome, found it full of builders. He decided to continue on his way and headed south for the Bay of Naples – where he was promptly ambushed by surveyors. It appeared that a retail complex he had inherited in Puteoli was showing cracks. Two shops had actually collapsed. ‘Even the mice have moved out,’ Cicero sighed, ‘to say nothing of the tenants.’ Drawing inspiration from the example of Socrates, however, the landlord professed to be sublimely indifferent to his real-estate problems: ‘Immortal gods, what do such trivialities matter to me?’1
Yet the consolations of philosophy had their limits. At other times Cicero would confess to being in a permanent mood of irritation. ‘Old age’, he complained, ‘makes me ever more dyspeptic.’2 Now in his sixties, he felt himself a failure. It was not only his political career that had imploded. So too, over the previous few years, had his family life. First, amid much bitterness and mutual recrimination, he divorced his wife of more than thirty years and hitched himself to one of his wealthy, teenage wards. Twitted for marrying a virgin at his age, Cicero goatishly retorted that she would not be staying a virgin for long – but nor did she stay a bride. Only weeks after the wedding Cicero’s daughter, Tullia, died of complications following childbirth. Cicero was devastated. His new wife, transformed from trophy to unwanted distraction, was sent packing back to her mother, while Cicero, obsessively, tended the flame of his grief. Tullia, affectionate and intelligent, had been her father’s dearest companion. Now, with her gone, Cicero was desolate. His friends, perturbed by what they saw as unmanly emotionalism, sought to remind him of his duties as a citizen, but the old catchwords, once such an inspiration, served only to deepen his sense of despair. Painfully, to a well-wisher, he sought to explain: ‘There was a time when I could find in my home a refuge from the miseries of public life. But now, oppressed by domestic unhappiness as I am, there is no doing the opposite – no taking refuge in the affairs of state, and the comforts they once offered. And so I stay clear of both the Forum and of home.’3 Glimpsed in the mirror of Cicero’s grief, the Republic appeared to have taken on his daughter’s semblance: that of a young woman, goddess-like, beloved … and dead.