The Ides Revisited

A return to the day that shook Rome to its core, and has echoed through the ages. By Peter Tonkin.

As the incident itself demonstrates, few things can change more radically and unexpectedly than politics. From a contemporary viewpoint, however, a couple of shallow but engaging parallels can be drawn between the motivations of Caesar’s murderers and the situations faced by modern politicians.

There seems little doubt that the group of men and women Gaius Cassius Longinus and Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus gathered around themselves in early 44 BCE saw themselves much as Senators in Washington seemed to see themselves in mid-January 2021 – faced with a dangerously powerful populist leader they believed to be slipping out of control, whose supporters proved willing to assault public buildings - even the Capitol - and who had already apparently attempted a dangerous power-grab. Their situation in 44 BCE was compounded by the fact that they had no Constitution, no Article 25 and no Impeachment process. Further, the leader they so distrusted was not trying to calm things down as he was coming to the end of his term in office. He had just been appointed Dictator for life and made no secret of the fact that he wanted to be king.