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- Brutus, who was deeply committed to the ideals of the Roman Republic, found Caesar’s rise to absolute power increasingly difficult to accept. As Caesar accumulated titles and honors, declaring himself dictator for life in 44 BCE, Brutus began to see his actions as a direct threat to Roman liberty.
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Brutus emerges as the most complex character in Julius Caesar and is also the play’s tragic hero. In his soliloquies, the audience gains insight into the complexities of his motives.
- Julius Caesar
Here, Brutus argues with Cassius regarding their original...
- Julius Caesar
Brutus, who was deeply committed to the ideals of the Roman Republic, found Caesar’s rise to absolute power increasingly difficult to accept. As Caesar accumulated titles and honors, declaring himself dictator for life in 44 BCE, Brutus began to see his actions as a direct threat to Roman liberty.
In this video, actor Alex Waldmann describes Brutus as someone who is at 'the right hand of Caesar’ with influence over him but he adds that 'the idea of kingship is painful for him’. Brutus is known as an honourable man, yet he takes the lead in a murder plot and delivers the last wound to Caesar.
- Overview
- Caesar’s Assassination Unleashes a Brutal Fight for Power
- Augustus Establishes the Roman Empire
- HISTORY Vault: Colosseum
Julius Caesar’s killers attempted to thwart a dictator. They inadvertently created an emperor.
By the time Julius Caesar stepped in front of the Roman Senate on the Ides of March in 44 B.C., the nearly 500-year-old Roman Republic had been ailing for years. Wealth inequality, political gridlock and civil wars had all weakened the republic in the century prior to Caesar’s ascension to power.
Caesar’s increasingly autocratic reign further threatened the republic. He bypassed the Senate on important matters, controlled the treasury and earned the personal loyalty of the republic’s army by pledging to give retiring soldiers property from public land or use his personal fortune to buy it himself, according to Edward Watts, author of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny. He emblazoned his image on coins and reserved the right to accept or reject election results for lower offices. As Caesar transacted public business from a gold-and-ivory throne, rumors swirled that he would declare himself king.
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In the first weeks of 44 B.C., Caesar was proclaimed “dictator for life.” His life, though, wouldn’t last much longer.
Fearful that the concentration of absolute power in a single man threatened the republic’s democratic institutions, dozens of senators who called themselves the “Liberators” plotted to kill the dictator. On March 15 in 44 B.C., Caesar was stabbed 23 times by conspirators who believed themselves to be saviors of liberty and democracy. Instead, the daggers they thrust into Caesar dealt a fatal blow to the already wounded Roman Republic.
One of the assassination’s leading planners, Marcus Junius Brutus, had prepared to deliver a speech celebrating the Roman Republic’s restoration right after Caesar’s murder. He was shocked to find that outrage, rather than praise, greeted news of the dictator’s killing. If Caesar had been an autocrat, the lower and middle classes didn’t seem to mind as they benefitted from his radical reforms such as the cancellation of debts and adjustment of the tax code.
Instead of stabilizing the Roman Republic, the assassination plunged it into another civil war as Caesar’s supporters battled the assassins and then each other. Although former deputy Mark Antony positioned himself as Caesar’s rightful successor by delivering a powerful funeral oration, the slain ruler had pre-empted that outcome. In his will, Caesar had named his sickly, 18-year-old great-nephew Octavian as his primary heir and provided for his adoption.
Augustus Caesar
Having eliminated his rivals and seen the support given to Caesar by the masses, Octavian established absolute rule over the former republic and surpassed the power of his great-uncle. He approved of all candidates standing for election, while the powerless Senate rubber-stamped his decisions. By providing for soldiers’ retirements, he ensured their personal loyalty to him. Citizens in towns across Italy and the western Mediterranean were compelled to swear their personal loyalty to Octavian. Throughout Roman territories, coins, statues and even silverware bore his image.
The Senate in 27 B.C. bestowed the title “Augustus” upon Octavian, which according to Roman historian Cassius Dio signified “that he was more than human.” Augustus ruled as Rome’s first emperor—although he never took that title for himself. “He was a very shrewd politician," Strauss says. “He had a lot of tricks, and one of them was to pretend that what was happening wasn’t really happening. He said that he restored the republic and never used the terms dictator or king, instead calling himself Rome’s ‘first citizen.’”
When a crisis of flooding, famine and plague besieged Rome in 22 B.C., citizens did not agitate for a restoration of the republic, but instead locked up a group of senators and threatened to burn them alive if Augustus was not named dictator. They believed that Augustus alone could save them. The freedom they sought was one from war, hunger and chaos.
The Roman Empire is vividly brought to life through the lens of the Colosseum.
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Oct 23, 2024 · The carefully considered assassination of Julius Caesar, a supposed tyrant in the making, is the deed for which Marcus Junius Brutus has gone down in history. This legendary act leaves us with the impression that Brutus was a nobleman of high moral standing and unbending principles, largely due to Shakespeare’s portrayal of him in Julius Caesar.
Long optimistic about Caesar’s plans, Brutus was shocked when, early in 44, Caesar made himself perpetual dictator and was deified. Brutus joined Cassius and other leading senators in the plot that led to the assassination of Caesar on March 15, 44 BCE.
The conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar began with a meeting between Cassius Longinus and his brother-in-law Marcus Brutus [15] in the evening of 22 February 44 BC, [16] when after some discussion the two agreed that something had to be done to prevent Caesar from becoming king of the Romans.
