Men and motivesīy the time Julius Caesar stepped in front of the Senate on that fateful day, the Roman Republic had been ailing for years. In the suddenly silent curia, only a bloody corpse remained.
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Plutarch describes the assassins’ sense of elation as they too left the Senate house, “not like fugitives, but with glad faces and full of confidence.” They hurried to broadcast to the people that Rome was rid of its tyrant. At that moment it wasn’t clear among the group who was a conspirator, and whether the attack would extend to any of Julius Caesar’s supporters. The remaining senators fled in terror, fearful that they would be pursued. Once Caesar was dead, Brutus walked to the center of the curia to speak, but no one stayed to listen. Suetonius describes how Antistius, a physician, examined the body (in one of the world’s first recorded autopsies) and found that one wound alone had been fatal: “the second one in the breast”-a blow credited to Gaius Casca, in Nicholas’s account. It would have been impossible for more to have simultaneously attacked a single person given the logistics and the venue’s dimensions-a space that led to friendly-fire casualties during the attack, with Cassius cutting Brutus’s hand, and Minucius stabbing Rubrius in the thigh.Ĭaesar himself was stabbed 35 times, in Nicholas’s telling Appian, Plutarch, and Suetonius put the figure at 23. Yet when a forensics expert reconstructed the crime in 2003, he concluded that only five to ten assailants could have actually stabbed Caesar during the fray. Everyone wanted to seem to have a part in that murder, and there was not one of them who failed to strike his body as it lay there.” “Under the mass of wounds,” Nicholas writes, “ fell at the foot of Pompey’s statue. Caesar died “uttering not a word but merely a groan at the first stroke.”ĭio Cassius, a Roman historian writing in the third century, says that Caesar was caught off guard by the attack and could not put up a defense.“y reason of their numbers Caesar was unable to say or do anything, but veiling his face, was slain with many wounds.” With his right hand he pulled his toga up to cover his head with his left, he loosened its folds so that they dropped down, and kept his legs covered as he fell. After being stabbed several times,“ith rage and outcries Caesar turned now upon one and now upon another like a wild animal.”In Suetonius’s version, however, Caesar stopped fighting after the first two blows. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īppian’s account is similar.
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