![]() This was too much for many Senators, who feared a return to the days of monarchical rule and the curbing of their own ambitions by the power of Caesar. In the final year of his life, Caesar was declared Dictator in Perpetuum, or ‘Dictator for Life’, by the Roman Senate. He had returned to Rome in triumph, and through massive and blatant abuse of the political system had effectively become king in all but name – ‘king’ being a dreadful word in the Roman Republic. ![]() The so-called ‘Tusculum portrait’, the only surviving depiction of Caesar from his lifetimeĬaesar had then set about ending a civil war in Egypt before crushing the last remnants of Pompey’s army. Many Senators had opposed Caesar and joined Pompey, but Caesar made a policy of forgiving these men and welcoming them back into the fold – a move that would backfire horribly when many of these pardoned Senators were the ones who killed him. In the years before his assassination, Caesar had done everything he could to consolidate political and military power in Rome in himself. In 48 BC, he had defeated his great rival Pompey the Great in a bloody civil war that had left him as the single most powerful man in the Roman state. What is the true story behind the bloody murder of the most powerful man in the western world on the 15th March 44 BC? Caesar takes no notice, of course, and ends up the worse for it.īut what really happened? Shakespeare is one thing, but that is fiction, and fiction is rarely a good historical source. In his play Julius Caesar, Shakespeare has a soothsayer warn the returning general early on to “Beware the Ides of March”. This is no accident the Ides of March, 44 BC – 2060 years ago today – was the date of Julius Caesar’s murder, made famous by William Shakespeare. ‘The Ides of March’ has become a by-phrase for a dark day, when something absolutely dreadful happens. There’ll probably be a whole post about the Roman calendar at some point, but for now all that’s important is that the 15th of a month is ‘the Ides’. Today is the 15th March, what the Romans would have called ‘the Ides’.
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