ASSASSINATION OF JULIUS CAESAR March 15, 44AD In modern times, the IDES OF MARCH is best known as the date on which Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC. Caesar was stabbed to death at a meeting of the senate. As many as 60 conspirators, led by Brutus and Cassius, were involved. According to Plutarch,[a seer had warned that harm would come to Caesar no later than the Ides of March. On his way to the Theatre of Pompey, where he would be assassinated, Caesar passed the seer and joked, The ides of March have come, meaning to say that the prophecy had not been fulfilled, to which the seer replied Aye, Caesar; but not gone. This meeting is famously dramatised in William Shakespeares play Julius Caesar, when Caesar is warned by the soothsayer to beware the Ides of March.[ The Roman biographer Suetonius[ identifies the seer as a haruspex named Spurinna. Caesars death was a closing event in the crisis of the Roman Republic, and triggered the civil war that would result in the rise to sole power of his adopted heir Octavian (later known as Augustus). Writing under Augustus, Ovid portrays the murder as a sacrilege, since Caesar was also the Pontifex Maximus of Rome and a priest of Vesta. On the anniversary of Caesars death in 40 BC, after achieving a victory at the siege of Perugia, Octavian executed 300 senators and knights who had fought against him under Lucius Antonius, the brother of Mark Antony. The executions were one of a series of actions taken by Octavian to avenge Caesars death. Suetonius and the historian Cassius Dio[ characterise the slaughter as like a religious sacrifice, noting that it occurred on the Ides of March at the new altar to the deified Julius.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 16:30:35 +0000
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