Dr. Strauss discussing the assassination of Julius Caesar and his new book about it. Image via The Cornell Review.
Shakespeare was a playwright, not a historian, says Professor Barry Strauss ’74, so we should not expect him to tell the true story of the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 B.C. That does not mean the true story is any less entertaining.
Strauss is the Chair of the History Department here at Cornell, and an author of six widely acclaimed books on history, including The Battle of Salamis published in 2004 and The Spartacus War in 2006. His latest book, The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination, was published March of this year, and was the subject of his lecture on Wednesday at Olin Library.
According to Strauss, one of the central conspirators in the assassination of Caesar is a Roman Senator named Decimus. In Shakespeare’s play, this character’s name is changed to Decius and appears but briefly in one scene. However, his role in play and in real life are nearly the same: it is he who convinces Caesar to show up at the Senate on the fateful day. As we know from Shakespeare, Caesar’s wife Calphurnia convinces her husband to remain at home that day, fearing the worst, until Decimus tells him that following the whimsy of a woman would sully his reputation among the Senators and in Rome.
Caesar trusted Decimus. Strauss even said the night before the assassination Decimus dined with Caesar at his villa outside Rome. Yet, out of all six major historical accounts of the assassination, it is only in the writings of a oft-forgotten scholar named Nicholas of Damascus that Decimus takes on the central role in the assassination plot Strauss argues he did in fact play.
A large portion of Strauss’s lecture was dedicated to the life of Caesar and what drove 60 or so out of the 900 Roman Senators to stab the warrior-statesman to death. To say the Senators were trying to save the Roman Republic from the dictatorship and possible kingship of Caesar is not false, but an oversimplification nonetheless. According to Strauss, the Senators were driven by self-interest, lust of power for themselves, and a desire to maintain the status quo which benefited them so much.
Caesar, though a salient threat to Roman proto-democracy, was positioned to push through a number of positive reforms that would have drastically altered the Roman Republic. One such reform, Strauss mentioned, was Caesar’s plan to tap into the natural and human resources of the Roman hinterlands to strengthen the empire rather than just extract wealth from them to build Rome the city. The idea of elevating conquered non-Romans (even if from slave to, say, second-class citizen) was alarming to the Senators and a threat, they perceived, to their monopoly on political power and Rome’s riches.
All in all, the lecture was a fascinating one. At the end of it, I asked if Caesar really did utter those famous words, “Et tu, Brute?” (“And you, Brutus?”), as he lay dying. Strauss said the words do not show up in any of the major historical accounts, and that they were invented in Elizabethan theater. He did note, however, that some historical accounts state Caesar, in Greek, told Brutus something similar, referring to him as his “child.” It was a rumor back then, and still neither proven nor disproved today, that Brutus was the illegitimate child of Caesar; alternatively, Caesar might have called Brutus his child to simply rile him up, as a sort of last laugh, because patricide was one of the most heinous, dishonorable crimes in Rome.
Aside from his writing, lecturing, and teaching, Strauss is the founder and director of Cornell’s program on Freedom and Free Societies.
