Marcus Junius Brutus and Julius Caesar
Perhaps best known as the addressee of Julius Caesar‘s final words and lines, “Et tu, Brute?” from Shakespeare’s play, Marcus Junius Brutus (85 – 42 BC) was the Roman dictator’s friend, son of his longtime mistress, and the most famous of his assassins. Incongruously, Brutus’ father had been betrayed and murdered by Pompey the Great, yet he ended up fighting under Pompey’s command against Caesar.
Following his father’s murder, Brutus was raised by his uncle Cato the Younger, a conservative reactionary who became an avowed enemy of Caesar, whom Brutus initially supported, only to turn against him when he started viewing him as a would-be king. When Caesar invaded Italy in 49 BC, Brutus went against him and joined the ranks of his enemies, fighting under Pompey.
However, Cesar defeated Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC, after which Brutus surrendered, and was pardoned and restored to favor. Brutus’ resentment against the dictator and his mother’s lover remained, however, and when a faction of Roman Senators formed to do Caesar in, Brutus eagerly accepted their invitation to join their secret group, which styled itself “The Liberators”. Brutus was a great symbolic catch, because he was a descendant of Lucius Licinius Brutus, the Roman Republic’s founder who had chased the last king out of Rome.
On the Ides of March in 44 BC, Brutus delivered a stab wound to Caesar during his assassination that day. The assassins were pardoned by the Senate, but a riot soon thereafter forced Brutus and his coconspirators to flee Rome. The following year, Mark Antony and Caesar’s nephew and heir, Octavius, got that amnesty revoked, and had the Senate declare the dictator’s assassins murderers. Civil war erupted again and ended with the assassins defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC, after which Brutus committed suicide rather than fall in Octavius’ clutches.