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Brutus

Latin nameMarcus Junius Brutus

"The noblest Roman of them all," who assassinated Caesar

The Voice of the Senate · Statesmen & Reformers

The Ides of MarchRepublican idealPhilippi

Who they are

Brutus the Younger held himself to be a descendant of the elder Brutus who expelled the kings, and his mother Servilia was Caesar’s lifelong lover — the relationship between assassin and victim more tangled than a playwright would dare to write. In the civil war he took Pompey’s side, and after the defeat at Pharsalus was pardoned by Caesar and given high office, serving as governor of Cisalpine Gaul and as urban praetor. But as Caesar’s lifelong dictatorship came to look more and more like a crown, graffiti began to appear in the streets of Rome: "Brutus, are you asleep? You are no true descendant of his." In the end he led a conspiracy of more than sixty men. The assassination succeeded, but the Republic did not come back: Antony’s funeral oration inflamed the mob, and the assassins were driven from Rome. In two battles at Philippi in 42 BC he was defeated and killed himself, his last words said to be, "Virtue, you were only a name." Antony covered him with a robe and gave him honorable burial, calling him the only one of the assassins who acted for an ideal rather than a private grudge — "this was the noblest Roman of them all."

Key stories

Are you asleep, Brutus?

In the months before the assassination Romans wrote on the base of the elder Brutus’s statue, "Would that you were alive!" and on the younger Brutus’s judge’s bench, "Brutus, are you asleep?" Cassius used public opinion to force his hand: what Romans awaited was no one else but that name. The name was his asset and his shackle — the family oath of four hundred years before, "let no man be king," finally put the dagger in his hand. Caesar’s fondness for him was known to all, which made that blow the most famous ethical dilemma in Roman history: loyalty to a benefactor, or loyalty to the Republic?

The ghost at Philippi

Plutarch records that on the night before the campaign Brutus sat alone by his lamp and saw a huge dark shape standing in his tent. "Who are you?" "I am your evil genius, Brutus — we shall meet again at Philippi." In the first battle at Philippi he routed Octavian’s camp, but Cassius, misjudging the situation, killed himself; three weeks later, in the second battle, his whole army collapsed. He took his friends by the hand and bade them each farewell, saying he was happier than the victors — "what they won by injustice, I have left behind as a name won by virtue" — and then fell on his sword. Shakespeare put that ghost on the stage, and left the paradox of "the Republic dying by the hand of its defender" to every generation of the audience.