And some of the major events of his career even now stand out in the history of the West: the brutally successful conquest of Gaul, which was deemed mass genocide even by some Romans the civil war that he waged on his political enemies in the city (effectively declared when he marched, with his army, across that famous river Rubicon, which marked the boundary between the province of Gaul and Italy, and onto the city of Rome itself) and, after his victory in that war, the gradual subversion of the traditional democratic structures of Rome, eventually, in the last months of his life, being made ‘Dictator for Life’, the precursor of the long line emperors that were to follow him. Vici’, but not ‘Et tu Brute?’ – that was Shakespeare’s invention). He has given us some of the common catch-phrases of political life (‘crossing the Rubicon’) and some still familiar Latin slogans (‘Veni. Julius Caesar is the best-known name in Roman history. As often in human history, it was easy enough to get rid of an autocrat, harder to get rid of autocracy itself.
#ASSASSINATION OF JULIUS CAESAR SERIES#
In fact, their deed led directly to a series of civil wars that brought about exactly that: one-man-rule for the rest of Roman time. The assassins may have imagined they were saving Rome from one-man-rule. More important, the whole murderous moment was too little too late. Many ordinary Romans were devastated by the death of the man they saw as their hero and the story goes that one particular group of the plebs was confused, upset and very angry when they streamed out of a gladiatorial show very soon after the murder, only to bump into Caesar’s corpse being hurried away by a few loyal followers, the dead man’s arms awkwardly hanging down from the litter on which he was carried. Despite some of their over-confident claims, they did not have widespread backing from the population at large. They killed the intended target, but in the process wounded many of their own allies in what we would call ‘friendly fire’.
The assassins – a motley group of high-minded libertarians, who objected on principle to Caesar’s ‘dictatorship’, and political chancers, who were out for their own ends – were singularly inefficient.
#ASSASSINATION OF JULIUS CAESAR CODE#
It was no accident that in 1865 the assassins of Abraham Lincoln chose ‘Ides’ as their secret code word.īut, famous as it was, this defining moment of political violence was in many ways a botched job. And it has set the template for political killing ever since. For many of the Roman emperors who followed Caesar likewise came to violent ends (it was a rarity for the rulers of the Roman world to die in their beds). The murder of Julius Caesar on 15 March 44 BCE – the ‘Ides of March’ in the Roman calendar – is the world’s most famous assassination.
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