Hauntingly, Shakespeare presents us with the horrific premonition of Calpurnia and her unheeded warning to her husband.
Thus, one is prompted to ask if Julius Caesar knowingly allowed himself to be murdered.
Calpurnia beseeches Caesar:
Caesar, I never stood on ceremonies,
Yet now they fright me. There is one within,
Besides the things that we have heard and seen,
Recounts most horrid sights seen by the watch.
A lioness hath whelped in the streets,
And graves have yawned and yielded up their dead.
Fierce fiery warriors fight upon the clouds,
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol.
The noise of battle hurtled in the air.
Horses do neigh, and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.
O Caesar, these things are beyond all use,
And I do fear them.
(The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. II.ii.13-26)
Did Brutus and Cassius overtly succeed in their conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar, or did Julius Caesar strategically concede to the events of that fateful day memorialized as the Ides of March?
Tradition holds that Caesar, caught off guard, fell victim to the wounds inflicted by his political enemies in the Senate. Yet, it is possible to formulate another explanation.
Despite centuries of experimentation and the demands of practicality, from 217 BC, the consular year began on the Ides of March but in 153 BC the new consuls took office on the first day of January.
The elections of the consuls could take place months earlier, in July or August, so that the consuls-elect could have institutional visibility for a smooth transition.
The solicitation and cultivation of candidates would have obviously preceded the elections.
Brutus and Cassius and the allied assassins could strategically interfere with Caesar’s plans by acting on a day of historic significance, the Ides of March, also dedicated to Jupiter.
Prior to his death, Caesar had provided for his succession by adopting, as his heir, his grand-nephew Octavian, and by mentoring Marcus Antonius, especially during the period retroactively referred to by scholars as the first “triumvirate.”
Once Caesar was murdered, Octavian and Marcus Antonius assumed control of the Roman “res publica,” essentially fulfilling the installation of the two consuls, in accordance with tradition.
Lepidus, who had aligned himself with them, died soon after Caesar’s murder.
Marcus Antonius was fit for the task, having trained with Caesar in Gaul and in Italy for the period spanning 59 — 44 B.C.
Likewise, Octavian, the eventual Caesar Augustus, received invaluable administrative mentoring from Caesar once he had returned victorious from Gaul in 49 B.C.
Cunningly, Caesar had already eliminated his successors’ potential rivals. Crassus, the triumvir, had died under suspicious circumstances in Parthia, and Pompey was murdered by Cleopatra’s henchmen in Egypt.
Interestingly, the presumed “ringleaders” of Caesar’s assassination faced extinction themselves. Brutus committed suicide and Cassius was killed in the skirmish at Phillipi.
Why would Caesar have planned such an outcome for himself?
Reasonably, he would not have wanted to die in battle because that ignominy would have diminished his valor and manliness.
Nor would he, ravaged by some sort of episodic malady, allow himself to die as a man weakened by disease and a victim of a morbid seizure.
One can ask what would have been the most fitting method of death for a populist leader so keen on preserving his machismo for posterity, while capitalizing on his already “best laid plans” for his succession.
The answer is straightforward and anti-climactic. Given the prospect of dying on his sickbed, or, inconceivably, falling in battle, Caesar did what he did best — he strategized.
How could he secure the smoothest transition once he was gone, and how could he preserve the popular reverence which he so rightfully deserved, even to the point of deification?
One answer persists. By facing the assassins’ daggers, he conceded to a scenario whereby he remained forever memorable and memorialized.
He died on behalf of the people of Rome, his life extinguished by the senatorial old guard.
Arguably, Caesar strategically acquiesced to the betrayal by Brutus and others and willingly endured the temporary suffering imposed by the reportedly twenty-three dagger wounds of the assassins, as reported by Suetonius.
Or, did he really acquiesce? Perhaps, in one of the masterful reversals of all time, Caesar outsmarted his fellow senators.
Consider the state of the science of poisoning in the Late Republican era and in the Mediterranean world of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra.
In Book I of his satires, Horace told of the vocational poisoner, Canidia, who with Martina and Locusta became the infamous trio of female poisoners in Roman times.
The speeches of Marcus Tullius Cicero have confirmed the high incidence of murder by poison in the Classical period, and it is the tradition that Cleopatra committed suicide by poison in 30 B.C.
It is also quite possible that Caesar, having secretly eaten a poisoned fig or mushroom, or something tainted with poison, while on the way to the Curia Pompeiana, was already dying as Brutus and others struck the first blows.
Imagine the new-found irony in the phrase, “Beware the Ides of March.”
Noting the events which followed the death of Caesar tells us as much as the events which preceded the dreaded Ides of March.
Could it be that Caesar is laughing ironically from his tomb?
Mary Brown, President of the Philadelphia Classical Society and the Executive Director of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, teaches Latin at Saint Joseph’s University.
