Chapter Seven - THE IDES OF MARCH

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE IDES OF MARCH

MARCH 15, 44 BCE - Theatre of Pompey, Rome

It was supposed to be a meeting.

A normal Senate session.
A day like any other in the city Caesar had conquered without ever laying siege to it.

But Rome was humming that morning.

The soothsayers had warned him, "Beware the Ides of March."
A note had been pressed into his hand that day with names listed and a plot detailed.
He never read it.

His wife Calpurnia begged him not to go. She said she’d seen it in a dream. The house collapsing and his body bleeding in her arms.

He almost listened.

But Decimus, one of the conspirators, one of his friends, came to his door and smiled.

“They’ll say you’re afraid.”

And that was all it took.

The Senate chamber was under repair. So they met instead in the Theatre of Pompey.

The irony burned.

Caesar had defeated Pompey years earlier, forced him from Rome, and chased him into Egypt, where he’d been murdered by opportunists.

Now Caesar would die in Pompey’s shadow. Beneath a statue of the man he’d replaced.

The conspirators waited, blades tucked in togas.
They weren’t warriors.
They weren’t butchers.
They were politicians, lawyers, and nobles. Men terrified of becoming irrelevant.

Caesar entered, robes flowing, laurel crown fixed, surrounded by senators who had once worshiped him.

It began with a distraction.

Tillius Cimber approached Caesar, pleading for the pardon of his exiled brother. Caesar denied it.

Cimber grabbed his toga.
Caesar shouted, "Why, this is violence!"

Then came the first strike.
Casca. A shallow stab.

Caesar turned. Grappled.
“Casca, you villain! What are you doing?”

Then the flood.

Brutus. Cassius. Decimus. The others.
They surrounded him like a pack of wolves around a dying lion.

He tried to fight back at first.
But when he saw Brutus, something in him gave way.

“Et tu, Brute?”

A question. A heartbreak.
Or maybe… a surrender.

He stopped resisting.

They stabbed him twenty-three times.

Only one was fatal.

He collapsed at the base of Pompey’s statue, his blood pooling beneath the feet of the man he’d once eclipsed.

And then… silence.

The senators fled, faces pale, robes splattered red.

They’d done it.

They’d saved the Republic.

Or so they thought.

At first, there was shock.

People wept in the streets.
Others cheered, briefly.
Then they realized:

What comes next?

There was no clear heir.
No new system.
Just a body, a vacuum, and a city on edge.

It didn’t feel like freedom.
It felt like aftershock.

Days later, Mark Antony gave Caesar’s funeral oration.

He read the will aloud:
Caesar had left money to the people.
He left his gardens for public use.
He named his grandnephew Octavian as his adopted son.

And as the crowd mourned, Antony unveiled the body.

Bloodstained. Mangled.
A wax figure showing each stab wound.

The crowd erupted.

They built a pyre in the Forum.
They burned Caesar’s body.
They tore the city apart looking for his killers.

The Republic had not been saved.

It had been lit on fire.

They didn’t just kill a man.
They created a martyr.
A myth.
A god.

The men who raised their knives believed they were restoring order.

Instead, they shattered it.

And as the flames rose over Caesar’s corpse… Rome looked into the smoke and saw Empire.