Marcus Junius Brutus

Roman official

• Born: c. 85 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Probably Rome (now in Italy)
• Died: October 23, 42 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Philippi, Macedonia (now in Greece)

As leader and conscience of the conspiracy that assassinated the dictator Julius Caesar, Brutus attempted to restore the Roman Republic but instead ushered in the Roman Empire.

Early Life

According to his family’s traditions, Marcus Junius Brutus (BROO-tuhs) was a descendant of the legendary Lucius Junius Brutus, who had founded the Roman Republic. According to these accounts, in 509 b.c.e. Lucius Brutus expelled the last of the early Roman kings, Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud), and established the Republic, serving as its first consul. So devoted to liberty and the new Republic was Junius Brutus, according to Plutarch and other biographers, that he condemned to death his own sons when they plotted to restore Tarquinius and the monarchy. The family line continued, Plutarch explained, because only the two older sons were condemned; an innocent younger brother survived to be the ancestor of Marcus Brutus.

The Junius family continued its active role in Roman life. Marcus Junius’s father, of the same name, was an adherent of Gaius Marius during the civil wars with Cornelius Sulla. In 77 b.c.e. the elder Brutus surrendered to the Sullustian general Gaius Pompeius (better known as Pompey Magnus, or Pompey the Great) and was put to death. Despite this, in later years Brutus’s son would be allied with Pompey against Julius Caesar, believing Pompey to be a champion of the Republic.

Marcus Brutus was connected with other famous republican figures of Roman history. Through the family of his mother, Servilia, he was related to Servilius Ahala, who had killed a potential tyrant in fifth century Rome. His uncle on his mother’s side was the famous Cato Uticensis (Cato of Utica), who was one of the most notable of the opponents of Julius Caesar and who committed suicide amid the ruins of Utica following the collapse of the Republic. Following the death of her first husband, Servilia married D. Junius Silanus and had three daughters. The eldest of them, Junia, married M. Aemilius Lepidus, who became a member of the Second Triumvirate with Gaius Octavian (later the emperor Augustus) and Marc Antony. A second daughter, Junia Tertia, married Cassius, along with Brutus a key conspirator in the plot against Julius Caesar; thus, Brutus and Cassius were brothers-in-law.

Marcus Brutus followed the traditional course of studies for an aristocratic Roman. He was well educated in Greek literature and philosophy and in Latin rhetoric. He continued his schooling in Athens, where his teacher, Pammenes, was described by the famous orator Marcus Tullius Cicero as the most eloquent man in Greece. While in Athens, Brutus was exposed to the philosophical schools of the Stoics and the Platonists; the latter had an especially profound influence on him.

Life’s Work

His education complete, Brutus returned to Rome to pursue the cursus honorum (literally, the “course of honor”), which took members of the patrician class, such as Brutus, through a series of public offices and duties to the highest rank of all, the consulship. Among his earlier offices, Brutus was in charge of the mint—where, significantly, he issued coins with the head of Liberty on one side and a portrait of his ancestor Lucius Brutus on the other. He was a quaestor for the province of Cilicia in Asia Minor, and he became increasingly known as a successful advocate in the Roman law courts. In 54 b.c.e., he married Claudia, daughter of Appius Claudius; he divorced her in 45 and married his cousin Porcia, daughter of Cato.

In this marriage and in his public life, Brutus had positioned himself with the opponents of Julius Caesar. When the antagonism between Caesar and Pompey erupted into outright civil war, Brutus sided with Pompey as being the defender, such as he was, of the traditional Republic. He fought in Pompey’s army at the decisive Battle of Pharsalus in 48 b.c.e., but after that defeat he quickly settled with Caesar and received a pardon.

Despite his Pompeian associations and his family’s traditional hostility, Brutus was highly regarded by Caesar, who arranged for his continued advance, including service in 46 b.c.e. as proconsul of Cisalpine Gaul, one of Rome’s most important strategic provinces. In 44 b.c.e. Caesar appointed Brutus praetor urbanus, the highest official in Rome itself.

It was during this period that the conspiracy against Caesar was taking shape. Following the defeat and death of Pompey and the destruction of his remaining forces, Julius Caesar had become preeminent in the Roman world. In February of 44 b.c.e., he was appointed dictator for life, an unprecedented step. Along with this came outward marks of almost monarchical dignity, including a statue among the Roman kings, a special seat at the theater, a raised throne in the senate house, religious rites associated with him, and the naming of a month, July, in his honor. All these struck at the traditional liberties of Rome; perhaps worse for men such as Brutus and Cassius, they destroyed their prospects for advancing on the cursus honorum.

According to the historians Plutarch and Appian, Cassius was the leader of the conspiracy against Caesar and pressured Brutus into joining, knowing that to Brutus, his reputation for honesty and virtue was essential. The writer Dio Cassius, on the other hand, says that Brutus himself took the lead from the beginning, inspired largely by the memory of his family’s active opposition to tyranny.

Eventually there were some sixty conspirators involved; their motives were mixed and their goals uncertain. Brutus and Cassius seem to have thought that once Caesar was dead, the traditional Republic would naturally return. In this, they ignored more than half a century of vicious civil war, first between Marius and Sulla and then between Caesar and Pompey. When the conspirators struck on the ides of March in 44 b.c.e., they succeeded in killing Julius Caesar, but they signally failed to kill caesarism.

For several months following the assassination, Brutus remained on his estates outside Rome. During this time, Marc Antony and Gaius Octavian, Caesar’s grand-nephew, who had been adopted in the dictator’s will and who therefore styled himself as Gaius Caesar, began to forge an alliance against the conspirators. In 43 b.c.e. Brutus and Cassius left Italy for the eastern provinces, Brutus going to Athens and Cassius to Syria. Moving with considerable speed, Brutus raised an army and took effective control of the provinces of Greece, Illyria, and Macedonia. He was soon joined by Cassius with additional troops from Asia Minor.

In Italy, Antony, after an initial defeat, had linked with Octavian, and the two had consolidated their hold over Rome. Joining with Lepidus, Brutus’s brother-in-law and Caesar’s former master of the horse (second in command), they formed the Second Triumvirate. It was about this time, according to Plutarch and other writers, that Brutus’s wife Porcia committed suicide, either by swallowing live coals or from breathing charcoal fumes until she was overcome. Her suicide, and Brutus’s calm acceptance of it, became famous examples of traditional Roman Stoicism in the face of great personal adversity.

In the spring of 42 b.c.e., both the republicans under Brutus and Cassius and the triumvirs Antony and Octavian had moved armies into Macedonia. In October, after months of maneuvering, the opposing forces met near the town of Philippi. According to his biographers, on the march there Brutus had been awakened in his tent by an apparition. Some claimed it was the ghost of Caesar; others, Brutus’s evil genius. All agreed the specter warned Brutus, “I will see you again at Philippi.”

There were two battles at Philippi, both marked by confusion. In the first battle, Brutus’s forces defeated the troops under the command of Octavian and captured his camp, although Octavian escaped. At the same time, however, Antony’s troops had overwhelmed those of Cassius, who, unaware of Brutus’s victory, retreated into the hills and killed himself rather than be captured. As the fighting died away, Brutus collected the republican forces and held his position.

The second and decisive battle of Philippi came relatively shortly thereafter. The joint army of Antony and Octavian appeared to be in a bad situation, short of supplies and suffering from the inclement weather. After three weeks, Brutus, urged on by his lieutenants and the ardor of his troops, launched an attack that was initially successful but that could not be sustained. By the end of the day, the forces of Antony and Octavian had completely routed the republicans. Fleeing from the battlefield, Brutus escaped the vengeance of the triumvirs by committing suicide by falling on his sword.

In a scene made famous by William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar (c. 1599-1600), Antony and Octavian praised Brutus as “the noblest Roman of them all” and promised an honorable funeral. According to Plutarch, this is indeed what happened, and the assassin’s ashes were carried back to his mother, Servilia. The historian Suetonius, however, asserts that Octavian had Brutus’s head sent back to Rome to be thrown at the feet of a statue of Julius Caesar. Dio Cassius further embroiders this tale by adding that the head never reached Rome: During a storm, the superstitious sailors in the vessel carrying the head cast it overboard, fearing it was bringing them bad luck. Whatever the ultimate fate of Brutus’s body, with his death came the effective end of the Roman Republic.

Significance

Marcus Junius Brutus is one of the most ambiguous figures of classical antiquity. During his lifetime, he was acclaimed by many, Cicero among them, as one of the noblest figures of the dying Republic, and he was seen as representing one of its last, best hopes for revival. Yet he was unable to transform his commitment to those historic principles into effective action. His role in the assassination of Caesar could be seen either as a selfless action to restore the old and proper order or as the result of a self-centered and selfish vision of a member of the patrician order intent only on personal and family honor. In later years, Brutus would be honored by the French Revolution (1789) as the first of the champions of humankind. Centuries earlier, Dante Alighieri in La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802) had placed Brutus and Cassius, along with Judas Iscariot, in the mouth of Satan as among the foremost sinners and ingrates of all creation for the murder of Julius Caesar, the divinely ordained founder of the Roman Empire.

Whatever Brutus’s reputation, the immediate and enduring impact of his deed was undeniable: The assassination of Julius Caesar ended the danger a single individual posed to the Republic, but it also revealed how corrupt and weakened the Republic had become and made its fall inevitable. Where Caesar had openly asserted his desire for power and prominence, his nephew and successor Octavian, later the first emperor, Caesar Augustus, was more circumspect and more successful. Where Caesar had flirted with the hated title of king, Augustus was content with the more modest “princeps,” or first among equals. This pretense of republican forms masking the reality of Imperial rule was the most lasting and certainly the most unintended legacy of Marcus Junius Brutus.

Bibliography

Clarke, M. L. The Noblest Roman. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981. Provides an outstanding brief biography of Brutus the man and a survey of his reputation over the centuries.

Grant, Michael. Caesar. Chicago: Follett, 1975. An excellent introduction both to the lives of Caesar, Brutus, and other major figures and to the milieu of the late Republic. Copiously and carefully illustrated.

Heitland, William E. The Roman Republic. 1909. Reprint. Holmes Beach, Fla.: Gaunt, 1998. The chapters on the efforts of Brutus, Cassius, and others to restore the Roman Republic after the assassination of Caesar are of considerable help in understanding the fundamental changes that swept the Roman world and led, eventually, from Republic to Empire.

Plutarch. Lives. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962. The classic account of the life, deeds, and death of Brutus. This brief biography gives the modern reader a sense of what Brutus’s contemporaries thought of him and how they viewed their world.

Syme, Ronald. The Roman Revolution. 1939. Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. The fundamental modern study of the transformation of the state and society of Rome between 60 b.c.e. and 14 c.e. Does an excellent job of placing Brutus within the context of his time.

Wistrand, Erik. The Policy of Brutus the Tyrannicide. Goteborg, Sweden: Kungl, 1981. An in-depth examination of Brutus’s motives and expectations in the assassination of Julius Caesar; especially good in its study of the relationship between Brutus and Cicero.