12 - The Aftermath of the Ides

Summary

When Caesar had fallen at the foot of Pompey’s statue Brutus lifted his dagger and called aloud on Cicero’s name, congratulating him on the recovery of liberty. The nervous old man had not been in the plot, but was a very senior consular and the embodiment of Republican principle; if Brutus hoped, however, for prompt endorsement or even help in keeping the senators in their places he did not get it. They fled in terror, and there was panic in the streets outside. The conspirators, guarded by a body of gladiators previously posted at hand by D. Brutus, made their way instead to the Forum and harangued whomever they could find there, stressing that they had only aimed to kill a tyrant, not to seize anything for themselves. Meeting with no great enthusiasm, they occupied the Capitol, either as a symbolic step, or from fear of the veterans in the city, who were bound themselves to fear for their allotments. And hither Cicero and other senators did come to congratulate them, while young Dolabella appeared in the Forum in the consular insignia which he had been promised when Caesar should have left Rome. Antony, the other consul, had fled to his house; Lepidus, Caesar’s magister equitum, who had troops close at hand, may have seemed the greater threat.

Though we know more about the next year than any other in Roman history, mainly because Cicero’s correspondence is here so rich, the precise course of events in the next few days is hard to reconstruct; there are probably no contemporary letters, and Dio and Appian, our fullest sources, are often contradictory or probably inaccurate. Cicero, however, said later that the spirit of the ‘liberators’ was as manly as their plans were childish – he had urged that the Senate should be summoned to the Capitol, and power seized. Later at least, he thought Antony should have been killed too. Instead, the conspirators sent to treat with Antony and Lepidus.

To kill a consul, even one irregularly appointed, would be a poor start to the restored res publica; but an immediate declaration by the Senate that Caesar had been a tyrant would have strengthened the hands of the ‘liberators’.