He was a tyrant, but he was our tyrant

by Andrew Whittaker
March 15th, 2010

It’s always worth keeping an eye over your shoulder on a day like today. It’s the Ides of March, the day (the 15th – the Romans used ‘ides’ to mean the middle of the month) on which Julius Caesar was slain by Brutus in 44BC.

You might imagine he was surreptitiously jabbed with a knife in some murky corridor, but no, he apparently died from 23 stab wounds, as the conspirators each took a turn on the floor of Pompey’s theatre where the senate was about to sit (captured in the above painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme), some apparently stabbing each other by accident in the frenzied attack.

Caesar’s assassination retains a fascination even now – in Italy and beyond – some 2,054 years after the event. The British Museum in London is staging a temporary exhibition of the gold medal made to commemorate the event back in the 1st century BC; one side shows the head of Brutus, the other a pair of daggers, a freeman’s hat (because the conspirators hoped to ‘save’ the Republic by killing Caesar) and the wording ‘Eid Mar’.

In Italy, tyrant or not, Caesar’s legend is often still celebrated. The residents of Rome, in particular, retain a fondness. Today, on the Ides of March, they lay wreaths at the feet of Caesar’s statue beside the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and place flowers on the site in the Roman Forum where his body was cremated, now just a muddy pile of rocks.

It makes you wonder what place the tyrants of the 20th century will hold in public affections 2,000 years from now.