Death of Caesar : The Story of History's Most Famous Assassination (9781451668827) by Strauss Barry

Author:Strauss, Barry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

MARCH 17: RECONCILIATION

That same day, March 17, the conspirators invited the Roman people to the Capitoline and a large number accepted. Brutus addressed them, speaking, it seems, either in or near the Temple of Jupiter, where the Senate often met. Appian reports what Brutus is supposed to have said. After delivering the speech, Brutus prepared it for publication. Appian’s words might reflect the published version.

Before publication, Brutus sent a draft to Cicero for his comments. Cicero wrote privately that the speech was the height of elegance in both its sentiments and its words but that it lacked fire. Cicero wanted thunderbolts in the manner of Demosthenes, the great Greek orator who combined elegance with gravitas. Appian’s version of the speech has no thunderbolts but it is a hard-hitting speech.

Brutus met head-on the charges against the conspirators, that by killing Caesar they violated their oaths and by occupying the Capitol they were making peace impossible. As for the latter charge, Brutus said they were forced to take refuge on the Capitoline Hill because of the sudden and unexpected attack on Cinna. That was false since the conspirators climbed the hill before that attack, but it made for a good story. Turning to the subject of Caesar, the oath to hold him sacrosanct was made under compulsion, said Brutus, so it had no force.

Brutus painted a scathing but accurate portrait of Caesar. The defrocked governor of Gaul invaded his own country, killing a large number of its best and noblest citizens, including the strongest supporters of the Republic. He denied Romans their liberty and insisted that he, Caesar, arrange all things according to his command. He attacked the People’s Tribunes, officials whom all Romans were sworn to consider sacred and inviolable.

Then Brutus turned to a key constituency, Caesar’s veterans. He understood their anxiety about getting or keeping the land that Caesar had promised them. Brutus protested what he called slander directed against him and the other conspirators. They would never take the veterans’ new holdings away from them. The men deserved those lands because of their glorious service in Gaul and Britain. Brutus objected only to Caesar’s practice of stealing property from his political enemies in Italy. The conspirators would now pay compensation to the former landowners from public funds but they would guarantee the veterans what they now had. They swore that by the god Jupiter himself.

Caesar, said Brutus, purposely drove a wedge between the veterans and the former landowners to stir up trouble. Sulla behaved similarly. Brutus cleverly lumped Caesar and Sulla together, which might have reminded some in the audience that Brutus’s father was a Populist who had opposed Sulla. To sum up the speech in a phrase, Caesar was a tyrant.

Fine words but not enough. In retrospect, Brutus’s speech was a lost opportunity. To succeed in Roman politics now, you couldn’t just let the soldiers keep what they had—you had to give them more. Caesar’s generosity was yesterday’s news. Rather than waste precious resources on his rich, landowning friends, Brutus should have lavished those resources on the soldiers.

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