“My soldiers have experienced my generosity and my courage,” Decimus wrote. Then Caesar came along and offered Decimus the chance to restore his house’s name.ĭecimus was a soldier at heart, educated but rough and ambitious, as his surviving correspondence shows. But Decimus’s father had a mediocre career and his mother dabbled in revolution. His grandfather extended Rome’s rule to the Atlantic, in Spain. He always fought for Caesar, never against him, and so he held a place in Caesar’s inner circle.ĭecimus belonged to the Roman nobility, the narrow elite that ruled both Rome and an empire of tens of millions of people. Caesar pardoned Brutus and Cassius and rewarded them with political office but he didn’t trust them. Only when he started winning the war did they defect to his cause. In fact, they opposed Caesar during his bloody rise to power in a civil war. (Credit: Fototeca Gilardi/Getty Images)ĭecimus was closer to Caesar than either Brutus or Cassius was. But often-overlooked ancient sources make clear that Decimus was a leader of the conspiracy.īrutus and other conspirators after killing Julius Caesar. Shakespeare mentions Decimus but misspells his name as Decius and downplays his role. Shakespeare puts two men in charge of the plot to kill Caesar, Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus (he of the famous “lean and hungry look”). Because Shakespeare all but leaves him out of the story, Decimus is the forgotten assassin. Decimus was a distant cousin of Marcus Brutus. The worst traitor was another man: Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus. WATCH: Full episodes of Colosseum online now. And Brutus was neither his closest friend nor his biggest betrayer, not by a long shot. “Et tu, Brute?” – “You too, Brutus?” is what Shakespeare has Caesar say in the Tragedy of Julius Caesar. It was Caesar’s friend, Marcus Junius Brutus. But who was to blame?Īs readers of William Shakespeare know, a dying Caesar turned to one of the assassins and condemned him with his last breath. The spectators didn’t know it yet but they were witnessing the last hours of the Roman Republic. It was a little after noon on the Ides of March, as the Romans called the mid-day of the month. The dictator fell bleeding to his death from 23 stab wounds before the horrified eyes of the rest of the house. a group of Roman senators murdered Julius Caesar as he sat on the podium at a senate meeting.
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