However, for Julius Caesar he was not all rosy:he was balding, which caused him a lot of anxiety, and he tried to hide it with a “curtain” and the use of the civic crown. It seems that he also had epilepsy, which affected his health. He wasn't young and he knew it. His rise had not been easy. He had been born into a noble family, but not too powerful financially. He was persecuted by Sulla, and his political and military career took off very slowly:before the statue of Alexander the Great, housed in the temple of Hercules in Gades, he burst into tears, since at the age of the Macedonian's death he was still he had achieved nothing of the kind. Later, a political career in crescendo , his alliance with Pompey and Crassus −the triumvirate−, his brilliant conquest of Gaul and the civil war that allowed him to become the master of Rome, in all but name.
But no one is immortal, as the imperator was reminded Roman who was celebrating a triumph −although the data on this particular is confusing−, and the turn of the bald divine was going to arrive on a day in March of 44 a. C., when he fell stabbed to death. If today there are still many crimes that are never clarified, the mists of time make it even more complicated to know the details of that one. One of the problems that we find is that almost all the news that has reached us is much later than the fact, already written under a form of established imperial government. Of the contemporaries, we hardly find remnants, such as those left by Cicero or Nicholas of Damascus in his writings. Even so, it is a sufficiently traumatic and important episode for many ancient authors −Appian, Suetonius, Plutarch, Dion Cassius...− to consider it a clear reference and write about it, largely drawing from previous ones.
Almost all of us have thought about how the Grim Reaper will get us. Plutarch says that when Caesar was asked how he wanted to die, he said unexpectedly. Fate would grant another one of his wishes, the last, although in reality only excessive confidence made him unexpected. The sources tell us about omens and warnings about the ides of March , like that of the haruspex Espurina or the ominous dream of his wife, Calpurnia, and of herds of sacred horses that wept bitterly, or of prophecies in ancient tombs that were being demolished. But even ancient authors, many of whom must have believed in omens, acknowledge that some seem like later inventions. Realistically, the conspiracy was made inevitable by Caesar's own behavior. He had already achieved perpetual dictatorship, and there were rumors that he intended to be acclaimed king by the Senate. Not only that, but Suetonius affirms that he said in public and without any qualms, that "the Republic was nothing, a simple name without body or figure".
Opposition and conjuring
Even so, and although less aware of the importance of propaganda than the one who, after another bloody civil war, would be his successor, the future Augustus, he knew perfectly well that everything had a limit . He could not ignore the deep Roman sense of freedom and political autonomy. The Senate voted to dedicate a temple, in his name, to Libertas . A statue to the same deity was erected in the forum. The construction of a new forum was part of a whole evergetic and propagandistic program and the temple to Venus Genetrix it reminded the people of the supposedly divine ancestry of the Julius, as a descendant of Aeneas and, therefore, of the goddess Venus herself. Caesar tried to sell his role as liberator, refounder of Rome and providential character, flirting like a Hellenistic monarch with the idea of his divinity.
But there are ways to kill a god. Opposition to his government was far from scant, and in the conspiracy More than sixty senators participated. There were three leaders, curiously people who were from Caesar's inner circle or had been favored directly by him. The civil wars had ended, but in a false way. His causes, his roots and grudges had not died, neither in Farsalia nor in Munda. Nor the heralded clementia of Caesar −which he only applied to other Romans, she was not as lenient with the Gauls, as Vercingetorix would lament in the Tullianum− he healed all the wounds. The first ringleader of the conspiracy was Gaius Cassius Longinus. He had been a supporter of Pompey, but was pardoned by Caesar, who had continued to further his political career. The second was Tenth June Brutus, Caesar's personal friend; he had fought with him in Gaul and on the expedition to Britannia, as well as owing his political career to him. In fact, he was one of Caesar's heirs. But you have to consider that, despite his Caesarian alignment, almost all of his family had sided with Pompey and the optimates . Another member of that gens also participated in this plot, Marcus Junius Brutus . Although Longinus had been a supporter of Pompey, he too had been pardoned by Caesar and reinstated. In fact, he had continued to hold political office. It has even been speculated that Caesar was an illegitimate son, given the love relationship between him and his mother Servilia, an unfounded rumor since when Brutus was born Caesar he would have been barely fifteen years old and his affair with Servilia would have been much later. /p>
We must bear in mind that both Tenth and Marco were descendants of Lucius June Brutus, one of the legendary founders of the Republic and the cause of the fall and assassination of Tarquin the Proud, the last king of Rome. The parallelism with Caesar was evident and did not go unnoticed by contemporary sources either. Suetonius says that they appeared painted on the statue of Lucius June Brutus, wishing that he still lived, and others on a statue of Caesar, in which they accused him of wanting to become rex. Cicero, shortly after the assassination, reproached Antony in his second Philippic having offered a crown to Caesar in the Lupercalias, which he ostensibly rejected:"Is there anything more undignified than the fact that the one who placed the crown lives, when everyone recognizes that the person who rejected it has been justly killed?" On the other hand, Nicholas of Damascus was not naive and, beyond the ideals of the Republic, the idealized or reviled figure of the tyrannicides and Cicero's defense of assassins as heroes of freedom, affirmed that the real cause of the conspiracy was the lust for power. In the end, being Caesar instead of Caesar was a great temptation. Nor had Caesar's clemency been a gesture of selfless kindness, not even to his mistress's son. Love weighed much less in Rome than the political and economic capacity that said woman had, even if she was in the shadow of her, and her family.
The Ides of March
After considering other options −among which was throwing Caesar from a bridge!− the conspirators decided to carry out their action taking advantage of a senate meeting in Pompey's curia that It would take place on the Ides of March. That morning Caesar felt unwell, and her wife Calpurnia confessed her dire hunch to him and begged him not to go to the senate. The conspiracy might have been foiled, since Caesar would shortly be leaving to undertake his new campaign, so Tenth Brutus was sent to persuade him to go to the senate. César agreed, and accompanied by whom he believed to be his friend, headed towards his destination. Before entering, Artemidorus of Cnido, a philosopher, gave him a letter in which he warned him of the conspiracy, but Caesar did not read it. He also crossed paths with Espurina, the augur he had tried in vain to prevent him:
Caesar entered Pompey's theater, and the conspirators swarmed around him, as if to pay him respect. One of them, Tulio Cimber, approached him, pretending to want to make a request, and, being rejected by César, grabbed him by the shoulders so that another conspirator, Servilio Casca, dealt him the first stab in the neck. It was the signal for the rest to get ready to unload their daggers on the body of the dictator, who sustained twenty-three stab wounds, and who had the presence of mind to cover his face with his toga and face death as he had lived, without fear.
It is an ironic wink that Caesar died at the foot of the statue of Pompey, his rival for being the first man in Rome. What would come later would be another struggle for that position, an atrocious period of civil wars, of iron years, which would end up giving the Republic the final straw and leading, definitively, to a one-person government, the Principality, with an Augustus who capitalized with tremendous sagacity the political legacy of his great-uncle and turned Rome into an empire without end in time or space:a world-state.
Bibliography
- Griffin, M. (ed.) (2009):A Companion to Julius Caesar . Oxford:Blackwell.
- Osgood, J. (2019):Rome. The creation of the world-state . Madrid:Awake Ferro Editions.
- Toner, J. (2020):Infamy. The crimes of ancient Rome . Madrid:Awake Ferro Editions.
- VV.AA. (2014):Ancient and Medieval Ferro Awakens #25:From Octavian to Augustus.
- VV.AA. (2013):Ancient and Medieval Ferro Awakens #19:Caesar vs. Pompey.
- Yavetz, Z. (1983):Julius Caesar and His Public Image . London:Thames and Hudson