Brutus: Don’t Turn Your Back on Him
Et tu Brut, one of the great misquotes of history, nonetheless tells the story of a bewildered Julius Caesar as his friend and confidante Marcus Junius Brutus stuck a knife in his back.
The power politics of a great empire will always supersede the minor considerations of friends and family. As General Charles de Gaulle once so sagely remarked, there are no friends, only interests. This truism was proven on February 15, 44 BCE when more than thirty Roman senators attacked Caesar, and put an end to a meteoric career that threatened the republican nature of Rome.
The whole business was a betrayal, but not quite to the same extent as the personal betrayal that this represented on the part of Brutus. If one was to search ‘the greatest betrayals of all time’ you can bet that Judas Iscariot would top the list, but Brutus would be running a close runner up. The question, however, is: how close were these two men? Roman history is founded on just one or two written resources, with the weight of follow-on history drawn largely from these, and added to from material and archeological sources unearthed since. Our understanding of the relationship between Julius Caesar and Brutus is derived largely from Shakespeare’s rendering of the tale in his famous play, and in that context, Brutus is presented as a close friend and confidante of the great general, the one he would turn to above all others.
When one looks at the situation through that context, that stab in the back was one of the worst in history. The thesis of Shakespeare’s play, however, is simply that Julius Caesar returned from his monumental military campaigns at the head of an army determined to crown their general emperor. Caesar, of course, forswore any such ambition, but we all know better than that, and to save the integrity of the republic, and as a consequence of his ambition, Caesar had to go.
Brutus needed to get out of Dodge fairly quickly after the act, and the Republic did not survive for long after that, but for better or worse, the name ‘Brutus’ is synonymous with betrayal of the most heinous and personal kind.