Up yours and see you in HELL!
Julius Caesar’s murder sparked a blood-soaked manhunt to butcher his assassins. How appropriate, says a new book, that his last words were not ‘Et tu, Brute’, but...
BOOK OF THE WEEK THE LAST ASSASSIN: THE HUNT FOR THE KILLERS OF JULIUS CAESAR by Peter Stothard (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £20, 274 pp) CHRISTOPHER HART
IT WASN’T a mere street fortune- teller who warned Julius Caesar about the Ides of March, says Peter Stothard. It was Spurinna, ‘one of the readers of the state auguries, a more influential figure in Rome than any mere soothsayer.’ Caesar just laughed at her. He similarly dismissed rumours that his own horses had been seen weeping in their meadows, or ‘that a bird with a laurel in its beak had been torn apart by other birds in Pompey’s theatre’ — the very place to which, on that cold March morning, 44BC, he made his way for the senate meeting being held there, a short walk from the Forum.
His litter was carried by slaves — despite the warnings, he refused even to have an armed guard. The only men with weapons were the 19 assassins themselves, daggers concealed under folds of white linen: Brutus and Cassius, another Brutus called Decimus, who had dinner with Caesar only the evening before, and a lesser-known poet called Cassius Parmensis.
Just before noon, when Caesar was surrounded by petitioners, one of them, Tillius Cimber, ‘pretending to request mercy for his exiled brother,’ pulled at Caesar’s toga, dragging it from his shoulder and pinning back his arms. ‘Why, this is violence!’ cried Caesar, and shoved back one of his assailants, Casca. He had always been a fit, strong man, and resisted furiously, unarmed as he was. The daggers rained down.
Marcus Brutus stabbed Caesar in the thigh, and was wounded in his own hand — stabbed accidentally by another conspirator.
The famous ‘et tu, Brute?’ is a latin translation of the Greek, ‘kai su, teknon?’ Those last words have been varyingly translated over the centuries and millennia, says Stothard, from ‘even you, my son?’ to: ‘Up yours, and see you in hell!’
Finally, ‘blinded by blood,’ the womanising, world-bestriding colossus, perhaps the greatest military commander and most ambitious man who ever lived, ‘fell, taking his final stab wounds as he lay already dead on the lower steps’.
The assassins, starry- eyed idealists, expected Rome to reclaim its freedom gratefully. They also expected to bask in praise. ‘No praise came. The minutes passed.’ There was only a ‘dull stunned calm’. Bars and bathhouses closed, and slaves barred their masters’ doors.
MARCUS BRUTUS, his hand bandaged, addressed the gathering crowd and ‘spoke about political principle in his dry Greek style’. The crowd was unimpressed. Instead they set up an altar in Caesar’s memory, and butchered Cinna, one of the assassins, in the street. except they actually managed to kill an innocent poet of the same name. Other assassins fled home to hide out and wait.
Meanwhile Mark Antony’s military deputy marched into the city at the head of a legion of 8,000 men, and Mark Antony himself, ‘ bull- necked, ebullient,’ harddrinking, another brilliant general, tried to take control. Before long, Rome and her empire were plunged into agonising civil war, with more assassinations, tortures, exiles and competing armies of legionaries slaughtering each other.
Finally, emerging from the dust and ruins, came Octavius, Caesar’s great nephew and appointed heir. He was ‘rather a slim, frail boy,’ only just 18, who calmly and ruthlessly took up where Caesar left off, re-named himself Augustus, and eventually became Rome’s first emperor.
For a time there was an amnesty for the assassins, but soon a lex Pedia was drawn up, a law listing and condemning them all to death, and a colossal man-hunt began. Perhaps as a warning to the rest, the first assassin died horribly. Trebonius had taken refuge in the port city of Smyrna. ‘A soldier found Trebonius asleep in his room and casually, with a joke, said he had come for his head.’
Soon a far worse figure arrived: the dreaded Dolabella, along with his torturer known only as The Samarian. ‘He knew about heating knives, sharpening whips and hauling a human body on the rack of wood and iron that the Romans called a horse.’ It was a slow death. The torture lasted for two days.
Roman citizens in the past did not torture each other, says Stothard. But the world had changed.
In the ultimate insult, Trebonius’s severed head was used as a football, soldiers ‘kicking it along the pavements in sport, abandoning it beneath a statue of Caesar’.
Another, Basilus, was butchered by his own slaves. He was the sixth assassin to die, but it might also have been simple revenge. He ‘liked to mutilate members of his household for offences to domestic order. A lopped ear or nose to encourage good behaviour . . .’
The orator and philosopher Cicero was killed too, a sympathiser though not an assassin. His head and hands were cut off and hung up in garish display in the Forum. Mark Antony’s loathsome wife Fulvia commanded his tongue be jabbed with a hairpin. Free speech was indeed dead, and vengeance, ‘the darkest power of the human spirit’, was triumphant.
The greatest defeat was at the Battle of Philippi, in Greece, when Mark Antony finally destroyed the forces of Brutus and Cassius, though at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.
The two rebel leaders committed suicide, and a further seven of the assassins were slain, Mark Antony ordering ‘ killing tours of the battlefield’s furthest edges’, hunting from tent to tent.
At last there was only Cassius Parmensis, the 19th and last assassin. He sought refuge in Athens, city of poets and philosophers, embracing the teachings of the Athenian philosopher epicurus, which taught him — and every other Roman of taste — not to fear death: ‘Death brings neither pleasure nor pain. The only thing that is bad for me is pain. Thus, death is not bad for me.’
But, 14 years after his part in the assassination of Caesar, still he had nightmares about an approaching monster, and slept badly. He wondered if he might even be pardoned. Until the day Octavian’s emissary came . . .
The last Assassin is a compelling true- life thriller, profoundly researched, beautifully written, and a dire lesson in what happens when idealism meets tyranny and political freedom dies.