The assassination of Caesar and its aftermath: the conspiracy of the Liberators (Marcus Brutus, Cassius and Decimus Brutus) and the mixture of ideological and personal motives that drew more than sixty senators into it; the assassination in the Curia of Pompey on 15 March 44 BC; the immediate aftermath - the Senate's amnesty debate, the reading of Caesar's will, Antony's funeral oration and the fury of the mob; the failure of the Liberators; the rise of Octavian, the formation of the Second Triumvirate in 43 BC and the proscriptions; the deification of Caesar and the sidus Iulium; and the road to the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 BC

What this dot point is asking

NESA wants you to explain WHY a large group of senators conspired to kill Caesar, HOW the assassination was carried out on the Ides of March 44 BC, and WHY the killing destroyed the Liberators rather than restoring the Republic they claimed to be saving. That means handling the conspiracy and its mixed motives (the ideological opposition of Brutus and Cassius, the personal grievances of others, the alarm at Caesar's honours), the assassination itself in the Curia of Pompey, and then the crucial aftermath: the Senate's amnesty debate, the reading of Caesar's will, Antony's funeral oration and the fury of the mob, the failure of the Liberators, the rise of Octavian, the Second Triumvirate and proscriptions of 43 BC, Caesar's deification, and the road to Philippi in 42 BC. It is partly a narrative dot point, but the exam always asks you to ARGUE about motive, responsibility and consequence, not just to retell the murder.

The answer

The conspiracy: the Liberators and their motives

By early 44 BC, Caesar's accumulation of honours had alarmed a broad section of the senatorial elite. He had been made dictator perpetuo (dictator for life) in February 44 BC, an office that made a mockery of the annual, collegial magistracies at the heart of the Republic. At the Lupercalia on 15 February 44 BC, Mark Antony publicly offered Caesar a diadem, the symbol of Hellenistic kingship; Caesar refused it, but the episode, whether a staged test of opinion or a genuine offer, confirmed the fear that he was aiming at regnum, the kingship Romans had abhorred since the expulsion of the early kings.

The conspiracy that formed in response was large, involving more than sixty senators (Suetonius, Divus Iulius 80). Its leaders embodied different strands of motive. Marcus Junius Brutus, a descendant of the Brutus who had helped expel the last king, carried the heaviest ideological weight; he had fought against Caesar at Pharsalus, been pardoned, and yet came to see Caesar's rule as tyranny incompatible with libertas. Gaius Cassius Longinus, also a pardoned Pompeian, brought organisational drive and, ancient sources suggest, a sharper edge of personal resentment. Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus was the most striking recruit: a loyal Caesarian general named in Caesar's own will, whose participation shows the discontent reached inside Caesar's own circle. The plot therefore mixed high principle (the restoration of the Republic) with private grievance, thwarted ambition and fear for the future under a permanent autocrat.

The Ides of March: the assassination, 15 March 44 BC

The Senate was due to meet on the Ides of March (15 March) 44 BC, days before Caesar planned to leave Rome for a major campaign against Parthia. Because the regular senate house was being rebuilt, the meeting was held in the Curia of Pompey, a hall attached to the Theatre of Pompey in the Campus Martius. Ancient tradition surrounds the day with omens: the seer Spurinna's warning to beware the Ides, and the disturbed dreams of Caesar's wife Calpurnia. Decimus Brutus is said to have talked Caesar out of staying home.

As Caesar took his seat, Lucius Tillius Cimber approached with a petition to recall his exiled brother and seized Caesar's toga, the agreed signal. Publius Servilius Casca struck the first blow, and the conspirators closed in. Suetonius records that Caesar received twenty-three wounds, only one of them fatal (Suetonius, Divus Iulius 82). Caesar fell dead at the base of the statue of Pompey, his old ally turned rival, in the hall Pompey had built. Suetonius notes that Caesar mostly said nothing, though some reported he said in Greek to Brutus "kai su, teknon" ("you too, child?"); the famous "Et tu, Brute" is Shakespeare, not an ancient source.

The immediate aftermath: amnesty, will and funeral

The Liberators had expected the city to rise in gratitude. Instead the plebs were stunned and hostile, and the conspirators withdrew to the Capitol. Mark Antony, the surviving consul, held his nerve. On 17 March 44 BC the Senate met in the Temple of Tellus and, on a compromise influenced by Cicero, reached a fateful bargain: a general amnesty for the conspirators, so that the killing was neither punished nor formally endorsed, but in exchange all of Caesar's acts (acta) were ratified, and Caesar was to receive a public funeral and have his will honoured. This preserved the entire Caesarian settlement and the positions the dictator had distributed, gutting the Liberators' claim to have restored the old order.

The reading of Caesar's will was a turning point. It left Caesar's gardens across the Tiber to the Roman people and 300 sesterces to every citizen, and it named his eighteen-year-old great-nephew Gaius Octavius as principal heir and adopted son. The bequests reminded the plebs of Caesar's generosity and cast his killers as ingrates.

At the funeral, around 20 March 44 BC, Antony delivered the funeral oration. He displayed Caesar's blood-stained toga, and, according to Appian, a wax effigy showing the twenty-three wounds. Public grief turned to fury; the mob built an impromptu pyre and cremated Caesar in the Forum, then attacked the houses of the conspirators. Within weeks Brutus and Cassius were forced to flee Rome, first to the countryside and then to the eastern provinces.

The failure of the Liberators

The Liberators failed for reasons that were political, not military. They had struck down Caesar but left his power base untouched, and three decisions proved fatal. First, Brutus vetoed the killing of Antony, wanting the deed to read as a principled tyrannicide rather than a factional massacre; this left Caesar's ablest lieutenant alive, in office, and in control of Caesar's papers and the state treasury. Second, they made no plan to seize the machinery of the state, waiting for a Republic to restore itself spontaneously. Third, they badly misjudged the loyalty of the plebs and Caesar's veterans, who mourned rather than celebrated. Cicero, broadly sympathetic to the cause, later lamented that the deed had been done with the courage of men but the planning of children (Ad Atticum). The self-styled restorers of liberty were driven from the city they claimed to have freed.

The rise of Octavian and the Second Triumvirate, 44-43 BC

Into the vacuum stepped the least expected figure. Gaius Octavius, Caesar's eighteen-year-old great-nephew and now, by the will, his adopted son and heir, arrived in Italy in the spring of 44 BC, took the name Gaius Julius Caesar (Octavianus) and began raising a private army from Caesar's veterans on the strength of that name and inheritance. Cicero, in his Philippics, attacked Antony savagely and sought to use the young Caesar as a counterweight, famously implying the youth should be praised, honoured and then discarded. At the war around Mutina in April 43 BC, Octavian and the two consuls defeated Antony, but both consuls died, leaving Octavian in command and unwilling to be discarded by the Senate.

Rather than destroy each other, the Caesarian leaders combined. In late 43 BC Antony, Octavian and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus met near Bononia and agreed to share power. The alliance was formalised by the lex Titia on 27 November 43 BC as the triumviri rei publicae constituendae ("three men for the restoration of the Republic"). Unlike the informal First Triumvirate of 60 BC, this Second Triumvirate was a legally constituted magistracy with a fixed five-year term and near-dictatorial powers.

The proscriptions and the deification of Caesar

The triumvirs' first act was terror. Reviving Sulla's method, they issued proscriptions: published lists of the condemned whose property was seized and whose killers were rewarded. The most famous victim was Cicero, murdered on 7 December 43 BC, his head and hands displayed on the Rostra from which he had spoken against Antony. Ancient sources give figures of hundreds of senators and thousands of equites; these are ancient estimates (Appian) rather than verified counts.

At the same time, Caesar's memory was raised to divine status. During the funeral games of July 44 BC (the ludi Victoriae Caesaris), a comet blazed for several days; it was interpreted as Caesar's soul ascending to the gods and became known as the sidus Iulium, the "Julian Star" (Suetonius, Divus Iulius 88; Pliny, Natural History 2.93-94). On 1 January 42 BC Caesar was formally deified as Divus Iulius, the Deified Julius. This transformed Octavian's position: as the adopted son of a god he could now style himself divi filius, "son of a god," a claim advertised on coinage and unavailable to any rival.

The road to Philippi, 42 BC

While these events unfolded in the West, Brutus and Cassius had built a formidable power base in the East, seizing Macedonia and Syria and raising armies and money. The triumvirs Antony and Octavian crossed the Adriatic to confront them. The armies met near Philippi in Macedonia in October 42 BC in two engagements. In the first battle, Cassius, wrongly believing the day and his colleague lost, took his own life. About three weeks later, in the second battle, Brutus was defeated and also died by his own hand. Philippi extinguished the Liberators' cause and the last serious Republican army; the men who had killed Caesar to save the Republic had instead cleared the way for its Caesarian heirs.

How to read a source on this topic

Sources for the Ides and its aftermath fall into groups with very different reliability profiles, and the exam rewards candidates who flag the difference. The near-contemporary evidence is dominated by Cicero, whose letters (Ad Atticum, Ad Familiares) and speeches (the Philippics against Antony) capture the crisis in real time, but always from a committed partisan of the conspirators' cause; his approval of the deed and his manoeuvring around Octavian must be read as advocacy. The main narratives, Suetonius (Divus Iulius, early 2nd century AD), Plutarch (Lives of Caesar, Brutus and Antony, early 2nd century AD), Appian (Civil Wars, 2nd century AD) and Cassius Dio (Roman History, 3rd century AD), were written generations later, drawing on earlier sources now lost and often shaping events into moral or dramatic set-pieces (the omens, the funeral, Antony's rhetoric). Nicolaus of Damascus, writing a Life of Augustus under Octavian's patronage, is early but openly favourable to the heir. Archaeological evidence, above all the coinage of the Liberators and of Octavian, is contemporary and datable but is propaganda, not neutral record; the Liberators' own coins celebrating the deed and Octavian's sidus Iulium coins are each a designed message.

Three habits for using any such source: identify WHO produced it and WHEN relative to 44 BC; separate what it claims from what it can prove; and move from content, to reliability, to usefulness, to perspective before reaching a judgement.

Historians

Ronald Syme (The Roman Revolution, 1939) reads the assassination as politically futile: the Liberators had no constructive programme, and the deeper revolution, the replacement of the oligarchy by a monarchy, rolled on regardless of Caesar's death. His lens treats Octavian's rise as the real story of the period.

Christian Meier (Caesar, English translation 1995) argues that Caesar had made himself so central that the old Republic could not simply resume once he was gone; the conspirators, in this reading, killed for a world that no longer existed and could not be recreated by the act of killing.

Adrian Goldsworthy (Caesar: Life of a Colossus, 2006) stresses the conspirators' practical failures, above all sparing Antony and neglecting to plan for the aftermath, as decisive; for Goldsworthy the plot was undone less by deep historical forces than by concrete political miscalculation.

Used together, these positions let you argue a graded answer: the killing failed both because of structural change (Syme, Meier) and because of avoidable choices (Goldsworthy).