The Ides of March and its aftermath
Two great misconceptions surround Julius Caesar. The first is that he wanted to be king; several sources tell us that his right-hand man Mark Antony once tried to place a crown upon his head during the Lupercalia but Caesar refused, to the rapturous applause of the crowd. The second is that Caesar was an emperor. Part of the confusion relates to the word “emperor”. Coming from the Latin imperator, it actually meant military general or conqueror, just as imperium (from which we get our word “empire”) referred to conquered territories.
Like Sulla before him, Julius Caesar actually declared himself dictator: still not a savoury title but one that was legal nonetheless. Dictatorship didn’t have the cultural baggage it has today, where it evokes despotic images the likes of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Kim Jong-un. Instead it meant temporarily abandoning the rule of two consuls for one-man rule, in order to guide Rome through a period of serious trouble. Problematically, Caesar added the addendum perpetuo meaning that he was setting himself up as a dictator for life.
This proved too much for staunch republicans who saw in Caesar a potential tyrant or, worse, king. On the Ides of March (15, 44 BC) he was surrounded by a group of senators in newly constructed Senate House incorporated within the Theatre of Pompey complex. There, beneath a statue of his old rival, he was stabbed to death in a messy, mismanaged assassination. According to the biographer Suetonius, who had access to Caesar’s autopsy report, only one Caesar’s 32 wounds was lethal; that inflicted by his old friend, Brutus.
The conspirators might have killed the tyrant, but his laws, legacy and example survived him. They hadn’t accounted for how popular he’d been, and with an enraged Roman populace vying for their blood they fled east. Caesar’s vast wealth passed to his nephew and adopted heir, Octavian. Along with his finances, Octavian also inherited Caesar’s political ambitions. The first step was to avenge his uncle and bring the conspirators to justice, which he did by forming an uncomfortable alliance with Mark Antony and Marcus Lepidus (the Second Triumvirate).
In November 42 BC the Triumvirate came up against Caesar’s assassins and the leaders of the republican faction, Brutus and Cassius, at Philippi in Greece. Brutus and Cassius were defeated, committing suicide shortly after, and with the East liberated and the external threat neutralized (at least for the moment), the triumvirs went about partitioning up the Roman Empire: Octavian taking Spain and Italy, Antony taking the East, and Lepidus taking Africa.