Among the leading figures arriving at the theater was Marcus Tullius Cicero, now in his early sixties and by Roman standards an old man but still handsome, with full lips, a decisive nose and beetling brows. Rome’s most famous orator and one of the pillars of the Republican tradition, he was in theory in political retirement. Having sided against Julius Caesar in the recent civil war, he had reluctantly come to terms with the new regime. He still kept abreast of events. A witty man, he could seldom resist making topical jokes, often at the most inopportune moments. At the moment he was worrying about what new flattering honor the Senate might be preparing to award Caesar.
When Cicero got out of his litter, surrounded by hangers-on waiting for his latest bon mot, he noticed leading members of the government mingling with the crowd. There was Marcus Junius Brutus, a member of one of Rome’s oldest families and a favorite of Caesar’s. He was joined by Caius Cassius Longinus, who had just arrived after being delayed by his son’s coming-of-age ceremony. They were soon deep in a private conversation. An acquaintance interrupted them, whom Cicero heard to say mysteriously that he hoped they would accomplish what they had in mind, but that they should hurry. Brutus and Cassius reacted nervously and seemed ill at ease.
A rumor suddenly went round the gathering dignitaries that Caesar would not be attending the sitting after all. He and his wife had passed a restless night and both had had bad dreams. His doctors were advising him to stay at home, fearing a recurrence of the dizzy fits from which he suffered. Furthermore, the omens from the morning’s animal sacrifice were discouraging.
Nevertheless, the great man at last arrived at about eleven o’clock, wearing the gold-bordered purple toga and high red boots that generals wore at their victory ceremonies. Fifty-six years old, he was tall, fair and well-built, with a broad face and keen, dark brown eyes. Years of ceaseless campaigning had left their mark on his constitution and he looked older than his years. Known for his personal vanity, he kept his thinning hair neatly trimmed and his face shaved. (According to gossip, he was also in the habit of depilating his pubic hair.)
The Senators, who had been standing around talking, walked into the hall ahead of Caesar, but one of them came up to him and engaged him briefly in animated conversation. Meanwhile, Mark Antony, the Dictator’s right-hand man, was detained in an anteroom by someone with urgent business.
Caesar was moving away from his litter when a teacher of public speaking whom he knew, a certain Artemidorus, confronted him. He handed over a note which he said should be read immediately. The Dictator was struck by the urgency in the man’s voice and kept the letter in his hand, though the pressure of the occasion put the document out of his mind and he was never to read it.
Most Senators settled down on their benches, but a number stood around Caesar’s gilded ceremonial chair. AS an elder statesman, Cicero had a place of honor on a front bench. Meanwhile, outside the theater, further sacrifices were being conducted. Once more the slaughtered victims revealed unfavorable signs and more animals had to be brought forward, one after another, to see if better omens could be found. Caesar, losing patience, turned away and faced west, supposedly an unlucky direction.
A religious official who had previously warned him that the Ides of March would bring danger caught Caesar’s eye. Caesar remarked jokingly: “Where are your predictions now? The day you were afraid of has come and I’m still alive.” “Yes, come, but not yet gone,” was the dry reply.
The Dictator was again on the point of calling off the sitting when attendants announced that the Senate was ready. One of his staff intervened. “Come on, my dear fellow, there’s no time for this nonsense. Don’t put off the important business which you and this great assembly need to deal with. Make your own power an auspicious omen.” He led Caesar by the hand into the crowded chamber. On the Dictator’s appearance everyone stood up. The men gathered round his chair closed in on him as he sat down.
Cicero had a perfect view of what happened next.
A Senator called Tillius Cimber grabbed Caesar’s purple toga like a suppliant, preventing him from standing up or using his hands. Caesar was furious. “Why, this is violence!” he shouted.
“What are you waiting for, friends?” cried Tillius, pulling the toga away from Caesar’s neck.
Publius Servilius Casca, who was standing behind the chair, aimed a blow at Caesar’s throat, but Caesar, well-known for his lightning reactions, wrenched his toga from Tillius’s grasp and the blow miscarried, only wounding him in the chest. Then, springing from his seat, he whirled round to grab Casca’s hand and rammed his writing stylus into his arm. The man yelled in Greek to his brother, standing nearby, who drove a dagger into Caesar’s side, which was exposed in the act of turning.
The Senators in the body of the hall were in a state of shock. Only two of them tried to intervene, but they were driven off. No one else moved to help the stricken man.
Given no forewarning of what was to happen, Cicero saw to his astonishment that one of his closest friends, Marcus Brutus, was leading the bloodstained throng as it hacked and thrust at its victim. Cassius, who gave Caesar a glancing blow across the face, was in the melee too. Clearly, there had been a conspiracy and, equally clearly and hurtfully, Cicero had not been invited to join it.
Caesar kept twisting from side to side, bellowing like a wild animal. He was cut in the face and deep under one flank. The assassins accidentally stabbed one another rather than their target and it almost looked as if they were fighting among themselves. Then Brutus wounded Caesar in the groin. The dying man gasped: “You too, my son?” Either in response to this culminating betrayal or because he saw he had no hope of survival, he wound himself in his toga, unfastening the lower part to cover his legs, and fell neatly at the base of Pompey’s statue. No one would be allowed to see him defenseless. The conspirators went on savaging the body.
The audience of Senators had no idea whether or not they too were under threat and they were not waiting to find out. There was a scuffle at the door as everyone pushed to leave.
Then Brutus walked to the center of the hall. He brandished his dagger, shouted for Cicero by name and congratulated him on the recovery of freedom. The retired statesman, who had apparently made his peace with the tyrant, was suddenly pushed to center stage. Hitherto scarcely able to believe his eyes, he could now scarcely believe his ears. It was almost as if the assassination had been staged especially for him—as a particularly savage benefit performance.
What had happened was a mystery to him. Even in the terror of the moment he actually had no regrets for Caesar. Quite the opposite.… But he could not begin to understand why a superannuated statesman, a self-confessed collaborator, was now being hailed as a symbol of Republican values and traditional liberties by the very man, Brutus, who had not trusted him enough in the first place to let him join the conspiracy to rid Rome of its tyrant.
Cicero did not linger in the empty hall but made his way back to his house on Palatine Hill, while a thunderstorm burst overhead. One thing at least was clear to him. His shouted name meant that he was forgiven, and that after all his compromises and disappointed hopes, the steps for which he had been bitterly censured and even accused of cowardice, he was no longer peripheral to the future of Rome.
Later, when he had time to reflect, Cicero thought back to the heyday of his political career nearly twenty years previously. During his Consulship he had put down an attempted coup by a dissolute nobleman, Lucius Sergius Catilina, a friend of Caesar’s but a much less talented politician, and had enforced the execution of his leading followers. Although he had been a member of the Senatorial oligarchy, Catilina had wanted to pull it down. Where he had tried and failed, Caesar had succeeded. But now he too had been destroyed and the Republic had been saved again. Brutus’s cry linked the past with the present and was an implicit invitation to Cicero to return to active politics.