In 44 BC, a group of 60 Roman senators surrounded the most powerful man alive and stabbed him 23 times. They walked out of that room covered in his blood, and they expected a standing ovation. They didn’t get one. Instead, over the next 12 years, every single one of those men would be tracked down. Some were tortured so badly their own families couldn’t identify their remains. One was forced to watch his soldiers switch sides before being dragged through the mud and beheaded in front of strangers. Another killed himself over a battlefield mistake—a fog of war that didn’t even exist. Not one of them died of old age. And the strangest part, the teenage boy who destroyed them all wasn’t even supposed to matter. What happened to each of these men is far worse than what they did to Caesar. Crimson Historians covers the history that most channels are too afraid to touch. If you’re not subscribed yet, you’re missing the worst of it. Hit subscribe now.
The assassination of Julius Caesar was not a sudden act of rage. It took months to build. There were meetings held in private homes after dark. Names were written on lists and then burned. Senators who couldn’t be trusted were excluded. Senators who could be pressured were recruited. The entire operation ran on two things: resentment and fear. Resentment because Caesar had crushed every rival, absorbed every title, and bent every institution in Rome around himself. And fear because the men in that room believed that if they didn’t act now, the window would close permanently.
But conspiracies this large have a structural problem. 60 men keeping a secret means 60 points of failure, one loose conversation, one guilty conscience, one senator who drinks too much wine at dinner and says something he shouldn’t. So they moved fast and they built the entire plot around three men.
Gas Casius Longinus had once been one of the most decorated military commanders in Rome. He fought in the east. He survived the catastrophic defeat at Carhe where Rome lost 20,000 men to the Paththeians. He was resourceful, calculating, and bitter. Because despite all of it, Casius was always second. Caesar had promoted others ahead of him. Caesar had given away positions Casius believed he deserved. And when Caesar declared himself dictator for life, Casius saw a future where men like him would never rise again. Casius didn’t need to be convinced. He was the one doing the convincing. He wrote letters. He held meetings. He built the network. But Casius understood something critical about Roman politics, a conspiracy of bitter senators would look like a power grab. They needed someone above suspicion, someone the public loved. They needed Brutus.
Marcus Junius Brutus was Roman aristocracy at its most prestigious. His family traced their lineage to Lucius Junius Brutus, the man who had overthrown Rome’s last king and founded the republic itself. That name carried weight. Brutus was a philosopher. He studied ethics. He wrote about virtue and duty. He believed, or at least convinced himself, that the republic was a system worth dying for. Caesar knew all of this and trusted him anyway. He had pardoned Brutus after the civil war, promoted him to a key political position, and publicly treated him with what Romans described as fatherly affection. Some sources claim Caesar may actually have been his biological father, the result of an affair with Brutus’s mother, Civilia, decades earlier. Whether or not that was true, the relationship was real and Casius exploited it. Anonymous letters began appearing at Brutus’s home. Messages left on his ancestors statue in the forum, all saying the same thing: “Your ancestor saved Rome from a king. What are you doing?” Brutus joined the conspiracy and with his name attached, the assassination became something senators could frame as principle rather than ambition.
The third man is the one history books often skip and he might be the most important. Desimus Junius Brutus Albinus, not to be confused with Marcus Brutus, was Caesar’s closest personal friend. They had fought together in Gaul. Caesar had trusted him with independent military commands. He named Desimus as a secondary heir in his will. This was not a political ally. This was the man Caesar ate dinner with.
On the morning of March 15th, Caesar almost didn’t show up. His wife, Kalpernia, had nightmares. Reports of bad omens were circulating. Caesar told his staff he would skip the Senate session. The entire plot nearly collapsed. Desimus went to Caesar’s home personally. He told Caesar the omens were misread. He told him the Senate was preparing to offer him a new honor. He told him it would look weak to cancel because of a woman’s dreams. Caesar went. Desimus walked beside him all the way to the theater of Pompei. He led his closest friend into a room where 60 men were waiting with daggers hidden in their togas.
When the session began, a senator named Tillia Simba approached Caesar with a petition. He grabbed Caesar’s toga and pulled it down from his shoulder. That was the signal. Casa struck first. A clumsy slash to Caesar’s neck that barely broke skin. Caesar spun, grabbed the blade, and shouted. Then the rest closed in. 23 stab wounds inflicted by senators stumbling over each other. Some cutting their own allies in the frenzy. The attack was chaotic. It was messy. One ancient source records that most of the wounds were superficial. The fatal ones came from just two or three blades. Caesar fought back at first. Then he saw Brutus. He stopped resisting. He pulled his toga over his face and fell at the base of Pompy’s statue. The senators stood over the body, blood on their hands and their robes. Some smeared it on their faces. They raised their daggers and walked out into the forum, expecting cheering crowds.
The forum was empty. The people of Rome had heard screaming and ran.
What followed the assassination is one of the most catastrophic political miscalculations in recorded history. The conspirators had spent months planning how to kill Caesar. They had spent zero time planning what to do after. There was no speech prepared, no transition of power arranged, no military force secured, no message sent to the legions, no successor named. 60 men had just murdered the head of state in broad daylight. And their entire plan for the aftermath was, “The people will understand.”
The people did not understand. Mark Anthony was Caesar’s co-consul and his most loyal political ally. On the day of the assassination, Trebonius, one of the conspirators, had been specifically assigned to keep Anthony outside the chamber. Trebonius engaged him in conversation while the killing happened. The conspirators debated killing Anthony, too. Brutus refused. He argued that killing more people would make them look like tyrants rather than liberators. That decision would cost nearly all of them their lives.
Within hours, Anthony secured Caesar’s personal documents, his treasury, and his will. He convinced Caesar’s widow, Kalpernia, to hand over everything. Then he requested permission to speak at Caesar’s funeral. The conspirators agreed. Another catastrophic mistake.
Caesar’s funeral took place in the Roman forum. Thousands gathered—soldiers, citizens, freed slaves, merchants, the poor who had benefited from Caesar’s policies. Anthony stood over the body. He didn’t scream. He didn’t call for blood. What he did was more effective. He read Caesar’s will aloud. Every Roman citizen would receive 75 dramas, roughly 3 months of wages for a laborer. Caesar’s private gardens along the Tyber would be opened as public parks for the citizens of Rome forever. Anthony paused. He held up Caesar’s toga, torn, stained with visible stab wounds. He pointed to each cut and named the senator responsible. The crowd started weeping. Then Anthony asked a single question.
“Does this look like the body of a tyrant?”
The crowd surged. They ripped wooden benches from the forum, broke apart merchant stalls, tore doors off nearby buildings, and built a massive pyre right there in the open square. They cremated Caesar’s body on the spot. Then they grabbed torches from the fire and went hunting. Mobs swept through Rome that night. The homes of known conspirators were set on fire. A poet named Sinner, who had nothing to do with the assassination, was beaten to death in the street because he shared a name with one of the conspirators. The liberators barricaded themselves on the capital line hill with gladiators they had hired as bodyguards. Within 48 hours of killing Caesar, the men who planned to save Rome couldn’t safely walk through it.
Over the following weeks, a fragile truce held. Anthony negotiated an amnesty. The assassins wouldn’t be prosecuted, but Caesar’s laws and appointments would remain in effect. It satisfied no one. Brutus and Casius lingered in Rome for a while, but the streets were hostile. Veterans of Caesar’s campaigns cursed them openly. Public opinion had turned completely. One by one, the conspirators left the city. Brutus went to Athens. Casius went to Syria. Desimus went north to command his legions in Gaul. They told themselves they were regrouping. They were running.
And here’s where everything accelerates. Because while the assassins scattered across the Mediterranean, a new player arrived in Rome. An 18-year-old with no military experience, a frail body, and a name that would make him the most dangerous person in the ancient world. His name was Gas Octavius. Caesar had secretly adopted him and made him his primary heir. And what this teenager did over the next 12 years makes the assassination itself look like a footnote.
When Octavian arrived in Rome in April of 44 BC, no one took him seriously. He was 18. He had been studying in Appalonia, modern-day Albania, when news of Caesar’s murder reached him. His mother and stepfather told him not to go to Rome. They told him to refuse the inheritance. They told him he would be killed. He went anyway.
His first act was to legally adopt Caesar’s name. He became gas Julius Caesar Octavianis. And he immediately began using that name to recruit. Caesar’s veterans, tens of thousands of soldiers who had fought for years in Gaul and Africa and Spain had been promised land and money upon retirement. With Caesar dead, those promises were in jeopardy. Anthony had seized Caesar’s funds and was distributing them selectively. Octaven sold his own property. He borrowed from Caesar’s allies and he paid the veterans out of his own pocket. One by one, entire legions switched their loyalty. Anthony dismissed him publicly, calling him a boy who owes everything to a name. That boy would outlive him by decades.
By late 43 BC, the political situation had fractured into chaos. Anthony controlled the largest army. Octavian had the Caesar name and growing legions. Lepedus, another of Caesar’s former generals, held forces in Gaul and Spain. Rather than fight each other, they made a deal. On a small island in a river near Bologna, the three men met and formally divided the Roman world among themselves. They called it the second triumvirate. It was not a subtle arrangement.
Their first order of business was a list. The triumvas needed money. They needed to eliminate political enemies and they needed to send a message. So they revived an old Roman practice, the procription. A list of names posted publicly in the forum. If your name was on that list, you were legally dead. Anyone could kill you. Your property was seized by the state. Your family lost all legal protections. Anyone who sheltered you faced execution.
The first list contained 300 senators and 2,000 equestrians—members of Rome’s business and political class. Each triumva contributed names. The negotiations were transactional. Anthony wanted Cicero dead—Rome’s greatest orator and the man who had publicly attacked him in a series of devastating speeches called the Philippics. Octaven initially resisted. He eventually traded Cicero’s life for the deaths of his own political opponents on Antony’s list. Lepedus gave up his own brother. When the list went public, Rome descended into a killing frenzy.
Cicero was 63 years old. He had spent 40 years as the most influential voice in Roman politics. He had exposed conspiracies. He had defended the Republic in dozens of courtroom battles and Senate speeches. He believed until the end that words were more powerful than swords. When the prescription lists went up, Cicero tried to flee by sea. Bad weather forced his ship back to shore. His slaves carried him on a litter toward another port. Antony’s soldiers caught him on a road outside his villa. Cicero reportedly told his slaves to set the litter down. He looked at the centurion approaching and said:
“There is nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier, but do try to kill me properly.”
They cut off his head and both hands. Anthony had the head brought to him. According to multiple Roman historians, his wife Fulvia took Cicero’s head, placed it on her dining table, pulled out the tongue, and stabbed it repeatedly with a hairpin for all the speeches that tongue had made against her husband. The heads and hands were then nailed to the rostra in the forum, the very platform where Cicero had delivered his most famous speeches. The message was clear. Eloquence would not save you. And if Cicero, the most famous man in Rome outside of the triumverse themselves, could be killed and displayed like a trophy, then no one was safe.
The assassins of Caesar were next.
Gas Trebonius had one job during the assassination. Keep Mark Anthony out of the room. He did it. He stood in the corridor and engaged Anthony in conversation while the daggers came out. After the assassination, Trebonius fled east and eventually became governor of the province of Asia, modern-day Western Turkey. In early 43 BC, one of Antony’s commanders, Publius Cornelius Doleella, arrived in the region with an army. Doabella captured the city of Smyrna, where Trabonius was based. Trabonius was taken alive. What followed was not a quick execution. Doabella kept him alive for extended interrogation. Roman sources describe him being beaten and tortured over a period of days. When they were finished, Doabella had Trebonius beheaded. His head was kicked through the streets of Smeirna like a ball. Then it was sent to Anthony. Trebonius was the first of the assassins to die. He would not be the last.
Desimus Brutus, the man who had personally convinced Caesar to attend the Senate on March 15th, had been assigned the province of Sis Alpine Gaul after the assassination. He had legions. He had a strategic position. For a brief moment, he was one of the most militarily powerful conspirators. It fell apart quickly. When Anthony marched north to claim Gaul for himself, Desimus was besieged at the city of Mutina. The Senate, still partially sympathetic to the conspirators, sent armies to relieve him. Octavian was among the commanders. The siege was broken. Anthony retreated. But then Octaven turned. Rather than continue supporting the conspirators, Octaven made his deal with Anthony. Desimus suddenly found himself isolated, no allies, no political support, and surrounded by legions that no longer answered to him. His own soldiers began deserting. Desimus tried to flee north across the Alps to reach Brutus’ forces in Macedonia. He disguised himself. He traveled with a small escort through hostile territory. A GIC chieftain named Camealus captured him. Desimus reportedly tried to bribe his way out. It didn’t work. Camelas sent a message to Anthony asking what to do with the prisoner. The answer came back: “Kill him.” Desimus was executed in a remote village in Gaul. The man who had walked beside Caesar on the last morning of his life died far from Rome, abandoned by everyone he had trusted. His head was sent to Anthony between 43 and 42 BC.
The rest of the conspirators fell in a cascade. Minutius Basilus, who had been one of the more aggressive senators during the stabbing, was killed by his own slaves. They turned on him and murdered him in his home. Tillia Simba, the man who gave the signal by grabbing Caesar’s toga, fled east and attempted to build a naval force. He was defeated at sea and disappeared from the historical record. Most scholars believe he died during the fighting. Casa, the senator who struck the first blow, likely died at Philippi, though the exact circumstances are unclear. Some sources suggest suicide. Galba, Pontius, Aquila, and several others were killed in various skirmishes and battles during the civil wars that followed. The pattern was the same: Flee, fight, lose, die. No one came to save them.
But the two men who mattered most were still alive. Brutus and Casius, the leader and the architect, had spent the last two years raising armies in the eastern provinces. They had gathered 19 legions between them. They controlled Greece, Syria, and much of Asia Minor. They believed they still had a chance to save the republic. What happened next was the largest military confrontation of the Roman Civil Wars, and it ended with one of the most psychologically devastating sequences in ancient history.
By the autumn of 42 BC, two massive armies faced each other across a narrow plane in northern Greece near the town of Filipe. On one side, Brutus and Casius with roughly 100,000 men anchored on high ground, supplied by sea, and dug into fortified positions. On the other, Antony and Octavian with a slightly larger force, but exhausted from the march through Greece, low on supplies and dealing with Octavian’s chronic illness. By some accounts, Octaven was so sick he had to be carried on a litter. The strategic advantage belonged to Brutus and Casius. They had the better position. They had supply lines. All they had to do was wait.
Anthony knew this, so he forced the issue. Anthony launched a direct assault on Casius’s wing, driving through marshy terrain to attack the fortifications. The fighting was close, chaotic, and brutal—soldiers pushing through trenches and makeshift walls in hand-to-hand combat. Antony’s forces broke through. Casius’s camp was overrun. But on the other side of the battlefield, Brutus had launched his own attack and was winning. His forces smashed into Octavian’s wing, overrun the camp, and sent Octavian’s soldiers fleeing. Octavian himself barely escaped. One account claims he hid in a marsh.
The battle was a draw, but Casius didn’t know that. From his position, all Casius could see was his own camp burning and enemy soldiers everywhere. A cloud of dust from Brutus’ successful charge looked from Casius’s vantage point like more enemy reinforcements arriving. He sent a scout to check. The scout rode toward Brutus’s advancing cavalry, but couldn’t identify them through the dust. Casius waited. The scout didn’t return quickly enough. Casius concluded the battle was lost. He turned to his freed man, a man named Pinderas, and ordered him to carry out a pact they had made. If capture was imminent, Pinderas would kill him. Pinderas drove his sword through Casius’s neck. Casius died on the same dagger he had used to stab Caesar.
Minutes later, the scout returned. The cavalry were Brutus’s men. They had won their side of the battle. Casius had killed himself over a misread signal. When Brutus found the body, he reportedly called Casius “the last of the Romans,” but refused to hold a public funeral, fearing it would demoralize the troops.
He was right to worry. After the first battle, Brutus still had a viable army. His supply lines were intact. His position was defensible, but morale collapsed. The death of Casius had shattered something in the army’s confidence. Soldiers began deserting. Officers argued about strategy. Brutus, a philosopher, not a general, struggled to hold the coalition together. Anthony, meanwhile, kept probing. He extended his lines. He cut off water sources. He sent agents to bribe and recruit defectors. For 3 weeks, Brutus watched his army dissolve around him.
On October 23rd, 42 BC, Brutus launched a second attack. Historians debate whether he was forced into it by mass desertions, pressured by his officers, or simply couldn’t stand the waiting any longer. The result was decisive. Antony’s forces held, then counterattacked. Brutus’ lines broke. The retreat became a rout. By nightfall, Brutus had withdrawn to a hilltop with a handful of loyal officers. The army was gone. The cause was finished.
According to the historian Plutarch, Brutus spent his final night quoting a line from a Greek tragedy. He reportedly said that he had practiced virtue his entire life and found it to be nothing but a slave to fortune. At dawn, Brutus asked each of his remaining companions to help him die. All of them refused except one, his friend Strato. Brutus ran onto the sword.
When Anthony found the body, he reportedly covered it with his own purple cloak and ordered a proper cremation. Octavian, by contrast, had the head cut off and sent to Rome. He intended to place it at the foot of Caesar’s statue. The head never arrived. The ship carrying it sank during a storm.
Philippi didn’t end the killing. It ended the war. The remaining conspirators scattered across the Mediterranean—fragments of a failed revolution with nowhere to go. Some tried to build naval forces and fight on as pirates. Some tried to disappear into provincial obscurity. None of it worked. The triumvas had long memories and they had the entire Roman military machine at their disposal.
The last known surviving assassin was Casius Palmensis. He was a minor figure in the conspiracy, a senator and a poet. After Philippi, he joined Sexus Pompy’s fleet, then Antony’s forces, then tried to survive independently. In 30 BC, 14 years after Caesar’s death, Octavian’s agents tracked him to Athens. He was executed. Roman sources note that in his final days, Casius Palmensis was plagued by nightmares. He reported being visited in his sleep by a dark, enormous figure that refused to speak. He was the last of the assassins. After him, there were none.
Here’s what the assassination of Julius Caesar actually produced. 60 senators killed one man to prevent a dictatorship. Their act triggered 17 years of civil war. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians died across three continents. The Roman Senate became irrelevant. The legal and political institutions the conspirators claimed to protect were dismantled not by Caesar who was dead but by the wars fought in his name.
And the teenage boy everyone dismissed became Caesar Augustus. He ruled for 41 years. He held more power than Caesar ever did. He became a god officially deified by the Roman state just like his adopted father. The republic the assassins died for never came back. The dictatorship they killed to prevent became permanent. And Caesar, the man they dragged across a marble floor and left bleeding at the base of Pompy’s statue, was worshipped in temples across three continents for the next 400 years. Every single one of his killers is remembered for exactly one thing. And not one of them is remembered well.
