Dan Snow's History Hit - The Hunt For The Killers Of Julius Caesar

Episode Date: October 1, 2020

Peter Stothard joined me on the podcast to discuss the assassination of Julius Caesar. Many men killed Julius Caesar. Only one man was determined to kill the killers. From the spring of 44 BC through one of the most dramatic and influential periods in history, Caesar's adopted son, Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, exacted vengeance on the assassins of the Ides of March, not only on Brutus and Cassius, immortalised by Shakespeare, but all the others too, each with his own individual story.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

This episode of the podcast is with Peter Stothart. He is an ortho. He's just written a book about the assassins of Julius Caesar, really. One of the most infamous political assassinations in history. He's stabbed by other members of the Senate, jealous of his power or who feared his power. And the reason we're putting this one out today is because this is a huge week for anniversaries from the ancient world, the classical world. It's the anniversary of the Battle of Salamis. Apparently it's not the 2000th anniversary, apparently it's the 1999th, because the year zero was not a year. So all of my celebratory tweets and thoughts and things are completely wrong,

not for the first time that's happened. Battle of Gargamelah, gigantic battle in which Alexander the Great finally decisively won control of the Persian Empire. As everybody knows, by that extraordinary flanking attack out to the right, then back into the centre, heading for the Persian king himself. Astonishing act of military, it's a decapitation of the enemy, astonishing charismatic leadership by Alexander. I mean, it's a remarkable battle. Elysia, also the anniversary of Elysia this week. Julius Caesar's gigantic victory in Gaul.

At one stage, he was besieging the Gauls and was himself besieged. Again, personal leadership and valour important to that victory. But the Battle of Philippi, which saw Mark Antony and Octavian defeat some of Caesar's assassins. You'll be hearing more about them in this podcast. And because it's all about classical history, this week I want to tell you all about our new podcast. It's called The Ancients. It's with our in-house ancient historian Tristan Hughes. We call him the Tristorian on History Hit Team. He has got a podcast out about Agrippa, who was kind of the, well, he was sort of Octavian's right-hand man. That's putting it politely. I think he was

sort of the military genius behind the man who would become Augustus. So interesting podcast about him. Great podcast, not just about the classical world, but looking at, for example, the Polynesian seafarers of the Pacific, my personal favourite subject of mine, and so other aspects of ancient history as well. So not just obsessed with the Mediterranean basin. So please go and check out The Ancients wherever you get your podcasts. In the meantime, though, let's get back to Peter Stothard, talk about the assassination of Julius Caesar. Enjoy. Hello, Peter. Thank you very much for joining us.

Hi, great to be with so many people. Well, it's great to have you here talking about one of the most famous, infamous events in recorded history, the assassination of Julius Caesar. Let's start with Caesar himself. He wasn't the emperor of Rome, was he? What office did he hold at the time of his death? And let's talk a little bit about his rise as well, but start by telling me about exactly kind of the power he held when he was killed. He was called dictator for life, which was an unusual title for a Roman and worried a lot of his friends who thought that, OK, him being dictator, they'd had dictators before. OK, perhaps being dictator for life. But suddenly some of them started looking around and saying, maybe he wants to be dictator, not just his own life, but to choose his successor and choose his successor after that. And that to them was basically going back to like having a king.

And having a king was the thing which Rome defined itself as not having. And so when a lot of his friends started to see that not only was he extremely powerful, but also wanted to be even more powerful still and choose other people, his sons or otherwise, to be kings. At that point, people started getting very anxious and a plot started to develop. And how did Caesar become dictator for life? Because he was as brilliant a politician as he was a military commander. He was pretty good at both. What advantages did he set out within life? Was he a man of great wealth or connection at the beginning of his career? He was a man of good connection, but there were many men who had many more connections.

He was an extraordinary speaker. We know he was an extraordinary writer, and writers like to think that you can tell something about someone by the way they write, but he was a very, very clear thinker, clear describer, great sort of calm propagandist of himself. He really did understand politics and was extraordinarily successful at it, but he was working within a system which couldn't cope with either its own growth the extraordinary power that it gave to people who had conquered provinces he conquered gaul of course but also it couldn't it couldn't cope with people who became too powerful to fail and caesar's problems was that he you know he conquered gaul he'd done everything you possibly could and then the rules said that he had to give

it all up because the roman system checks and balances. It's a bit like you're talking about Trump at the moment. You know, the rules say that if he loses, he has to give up. But sometimes people get very frightened of what will happen if they give up. You know, someone might put them in court. They might try them. They might do things that they don't want to happen to them.

And so they have to keep on going. And that's when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in the famous phrase, brought troops into Italy, which he wasn't really supposed to do. And then there was a civil war against Pompey, famous Pompey, who was actually in many ways not that unlike Caesar. One of them was going to beat the other and Caesar won. And once Caesar had won, he was the most powerful man in Rome, most powerful man really ever been in Rome. And a

number of things followed from that. A lot of people had worked with him very closely and they knew what kind of a man he was and they worried what kind of a ruler he might be you know if he got even more power than he had and then there were other people around him who perhaps thought that since they'd fought so hard for him over the years they should have been more rewarded themselves other people who were just jealous that other people had been rewarded there were people who just were jealous about what caesar could do, whether it was sleeping with their wives or stealing the pet lions that they had planned for an entertainment show.

He got to a point in his life and in the life of the Roman Republic where people feared that there was only one way he could go, and that was to make himself king and an hereditary monarch. And therefore, people had to decide what was the appropriate

response to that not everybody thought you should kill him a lot of people thought you shouldn't and they gave very interesting arguments about whether you should kill someone who you think is going to be a tyrant or not but enough people decided that they should kill him to kill him he phenomenally successful military commander conquered the whole of gaul unimaginable scale of violence there and almost genocide. Invaded England twice, invaded Britain twice, wrote about it, an amazing commander. But when he was dictator of Rome, what did he do? Did he change Rome?

What was the domestic policies like within Rome during that period? Well, he didn't have much time as dictator of Rome, as dictator for life, before they killed him. He spent a lot of his time planning to do what he was going to do if he'd survived on the Ides of Rome, as the Tater for life, before they killed him. He spent a lot of his time planning to do what he was going to do if he'd survived on the Ides of March, which was to invade to the east. He wanted to take over Parthia, modern Iran, and the big empire over there. He felt that taking Gaul wasn't really enough, and that Alexander the Great, who was his great hero, had won all his laurels and all his money in the east, and that you weren't really a superhero unless you'd conquered in the east as well as in the West. So most of the time, I think,

when he was planning his life as dictator for life was actually his next military campaign. This group of people that began to want to assassinate him, they were just worried about somebody wielding that much power, were they? What alternative system did they have in mind if there was one? Could they agree? Well, that was the big problem, of course. They didn't agree. They didn't have any idea of what they wanted to happen afterwards. The notion of consequences of an action, which seems so important to us. Most of the ideas, you know, when we talk about what are your policies, you know, why do you do something to a modern politician? It's about what outcome do you think is going to come from them? But these are different people. Studying Roman history is an art of

tightrope walking. You look down one side of the tightrope and everybody seems a bit like us. They do have policies. They are interested in the water supply and the roads and stuff. But also you look down the other side and they're enormously conscious of the past, of their honour, of their place in history. What was the right thing to do? They could decide that something was the right thing to do,

almost regardless of the consequences. So some of them hoped that once Caesar was killed, everything would go back to normal, because they had all got nice jobs. Most of the killers were very close to Caesar. They were very powerful in the state. They all had nice jobs set up for next year, where they could rule provinces and make money and lead armies and all the things that they liked to do.

And so they didn't really want to rock the total boat. They just wanted to get Caesar out of the way. And they thought it would all go back to normal. Well, the wiser people said, look, you know, if you have an assassination, you'll get a civil war. Subsequent history showed that was often the case too, that you just create a vacuum into which people are going to fight over. And then there was a big argument amongst these very wise men,

for the most part, arguing about what was the right thing to do. Was having a dictator so much worse than having a civil war? Which is the lesser of two evils? Which was the most likely to give you a happy, successful life for yourself or for the country? And they argued about this almost in a sort of philosophical seminar way. And they came up with different conclusions, but enough of them came to the conclusion that Caesar should be killed for him to be killed. In your book, you also have those philosophical debates about assassination, don't you? And you bring it up to the modern day, talk about Macbeth, the discussions within Macbeth about whether it's right to kill a king. And also

you have very interesting thoughts about Tony Blair thinking about Saddam Hussein. The first book I ever wrote, one of the most extraordinary times of my time as a journalist, was when I happened to be in Downing Street with Tony Blair during the Iraq War. Long story how that happened, but it did, and I stayed there with him throughout the entire war. Tony Blair was in some ways a Roman politician in that respect, because he believed that just because he could get rid of Saddam Hussein, because the Americans wanted to do it for different reasons, he should do it. So the notion that just because you can, if something is right, and you can do it, should you do it, was for him an important idea. And people said to him, well, why don't you get rid of Mugabe? Why don't you get rid of the Burmese lot? And he said, well, I can't. But if there's something that is

the right thing to do that you can do, then you should do it. The consequences of him doing it were catastrophic in very many ways. You mentioned Macbeth. Macbeth Shakespeare got it right pretty much the very first time the word assassination was used in English, in Macbeth, where Macbeth is considering killing Duncan. And he says that if the assassination could gather up the consequence within itself, then this blow would be the be-all and end-all. That would be over.

But of course, the blow never is the be-all and end-all, and the blow doesn't gather together the consequences with it. The consequences come afterwards, and they're not always the ones that you want. And the assassins of Julius Caesar found this very much because they debated amongst themselves what was the right thing to do, whether, for instance, whether civil war was better than living under a tyranny. When it came to it, they had to fight that war, for instance, whether civil war was better than living under a tyranny. When it came to it, they had to fight that war. And their old world was never going to be the same again. What they got at the end of it was not only a dictator for life, but Julius Caesar's adopted son, who became the emperor of a whole dynasty. And tell me about who these assassins

were. We've got famously Brutus and Cassius, but there were a whole gang of them, weren't there? Well, yeah. The one I choose to go for is Cassius Parmensius, his name was, and he was the one who lasted the longest. Because what happened after the assassination was that Octavian, who was Caesar's heir, only a teenager, remember, he was only 18 when Julius Caesar was killed,

and nobody expected, certainly not his adoptive, not his step-parents or his friends or anybody. I mean, no one thought that he would cross the ocean. He was at university in Greece. And when he heard that Julius Caesar had made him his heir, everybody thought he might just come back and try and get some money, possibly.

But instead, he came back. And as soon as he came back as Caesar's heir, he realized that Caesar's name was the most potent thing he had. And that these soldiers who fought for Caesar really just wanted to fight for another Caesar. They weren't interested in liberty or the restoration of the republic they weren't interested in restoring a lot of aristocratic tossed jobs that Caesar had maybe clipped a bit of their power their power where they weren't interested in that they wanted to fight for another Caesar and so Octavian systematically in a way which I describe, took out every single one of the people

who killed his adopted father. And my story is the story of the first assassin he got and then the second and the third, right up to the last assassin, Cassius Parmensis, who lasted till 30, it took 14 years. And so looking at it through that lens allows you to see all the assassins. We're normally rather neglected.

As you say, they just talk about Brutus and Cassius because they're in Shakespeare's play. It's a bit parts for a few others. But it was very important, the assassination, that it was a joint enterprise of lots of people. That's what made it politically a runner. And they used daggers because, you know, everybody wanted to get a dagger blow in

because that made it a corporate political act as opposed to a sort of assassination by a guy running a sword through you in the back alley, which would have been a much better way of killing Jesus, but wouldn't have had the political clout that came from, you know, 20, 30, 40 of his friends and rivals sticking a dagger into him in the Senate. And each one of those had slightly different reasons. We can talk about they are they were some of the reasons that we can all we can

understand today some of them which are jealous of caesar they thought they thought that they were perhaps why was caesar so much better than them i think brutus and cassius both had a bit of that in them some of them thought that they should have been better rewarded for helping caesar some of them thought that they were just jealous that other people had got almost as good rewards as them and hadn't risked their lives in Gaul for Caesar. There were people who just didn't like the idea of anybody being powerful enough to pardon them.

Julius Caesar was a great pardoner. He was very, he prided himself on his clemency. He was a bit of a genocidist in Gaul, okay? But when it came to his fellow Roman leaders, he was more inclined to pardon them than to kill them. But of course, if you pardon someone who's very proud, they can hate you more than if you let them go. Caesar had built up a wide range of personal hatreds from his own behaviour,

as well as the general anxiety about the fact that he wanted to make himself a king. general anxiety about the fact that he wanted to make himself a king. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not

only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. What did the assassins hope would happen next? They hoped that there would be a lot of popular support for them, not just amongst fellow senators,

many of whom shared their dislike and wish that caesar would go away and even if they hadn't joined the conspiracy or hadn't been asked would at least support them and the most famous of those was cicero who you know who they didn't dare or didn't like the idea of necessarily getting involved in the conspiracy but as soon as caesar was deadicero jumped in and said, this is absolutely wonderful, guys. I love you all. You're absolutely great. Where do we go from here?

So they were hoping for a lot of that. They got some. And they were also hoping for a lot of support from the ordinary people of Rome, sort of voters, if you like. And down the line, they were hoping that there would be support for soldiers who they believed would fight

for the old idea of the Roman Republic and would be as for soldiers who they believed would fight for you know the old idea of the roman republic and would be as worried about caesar's tyranny as they were now that they got some support from the uh fellow senators but it was very and they they left the senate they could see that it wasn't fantastically popular they spread out they went back up onto the capital hill to negotiate with see at that time, Caesar's main man, Mark Antony. But Mark Antony was perfectly happy to negotiate, too. They all really wanted a quiet life at that point. And they would very happily just divided up all the good jobs and continued with all the sharing the power that Caesar had had amongst themselves.

And so the assassins were quite hopeful at that point. amongst themselves and so the assassins were quite hopeful at that point but then it was it was clear we're not shakespeare famous you know friends romans countryman speech mark anthony well probably some truth in it not not completely it's probably a bit over overstated it's a play after all but mark anthony did see that the people were not as supportive of the assassins as perhaps he thought they might be or they thought they might be and so he started hedging his bets but they still did a deal they all gathered in a temple temple of telus under a great map of italy and they did a deal where they said look we're not going to praise you assassins we're not going to say that you did the right thing but we're not going to pursue you either and. We're not going to say that you did the right thing, but we're not going to pursue you either.

And we're going to basically pretend that Caesar never happened. And that seemed quite a good compromise. A lot of people liked that idea amongst the ruling class, if you like. But the people were a bit nervous about it. And as soon as the teenage Octavian arrived on the scene, it was quite clear that he only had to say,

avenge Caesar. And he was going to get a huge amount of support. And so Mark Antony, who to begin with, was quite diplomatic and was trying to sort of do a deal and did do a deal with Cicero and the assassins. Mark Antony was, in order to represent Caesar's side, was drawn more and more away from diplomacy and forgiveness and let bygones be bygones, and more and more into a series of vengeful wars and pursuits and pogroms and prescriptions against all the assassins. So one man's desire for vengeance dragged the other players in his wake. And so that was then what happened. And my story is the story of the hunt that followed after that.

So Octavian, even as a teenager, he arrives with a pretty clear idea of what he wants, does he? It's not absolutely clear. I find that a little hard to believe that he did, though some people think that he did. I don't think it's normal. I think most likely is that he came

looking to see what the score was. I mean, pretty amazing, you know, 18, no reason to expect this. Well, we don you know, 18, no reason to expect this. Well, we don't know that he had any reason to expect it. He knew Caesar a bit, but not that much. And he was the grandson of Caesar's sister, one of Caesar's sisters. He wasn't the only grandson. He got the nod and he came over.

And I suspect that he smelt the breeze very quickly. He was a young boy and he wasn't trammeled by a whole lot of conceptions about what should and shouldn't be done he could just see that if you called yourself Caesar and your name was Caesar and his name was Caesar then he was able to take over to continue where

Julius Caesar had to stop but he was a very canny politician he proved himself very canny very quickly and the story then moves on from there. Go on. You mentioned that the assassins are all hunted down. Some of them are defeated in battle, but others had sort of lonely deaths, did they? A bit of a spoiler alert here, but run through some of the ways in which they were run to ground and dealt with. The first assassin to die was a man called Gaius Trubonius. He was a rather scholarly general.

It was almost a sort of literary critic. He was a collector of Cicero's speeches, but he was a powerful general. And he had been promised by Caesar that he would be the governor of Asia. And so he went straight off there to take over his job, which Caesar had given him, because part of the compromise was everybody kept the jobs that Caesar had told them that they could have. So he went off to take his.

But unfortunately for him, a crazy man called Dolabella, who was one of Caesar's thugs, and who was constantly, most of his life, trying to foment revolution so that there would be an end to debt, because he was hugely in debt. So every so often he would try to pass laws and rabble-rouse to get all debts cancelled. So he wasn't very popular with the upper classes, or at least the rich upper classes. Anyway, because Caesar had taken a fancy to him, he was going to be the consul, the top job after Caesar had left for Parthia. Anyway, Dolabella went off to take what he thought was going to be his job. Anyway, Dolabella went off to take what he thought was going to be his job.

He passes by Trebonius and Trebonius is tortured to death in a way which was absolutely shocking to Romans. You had one senator in a room in Greece with a Sumerian torturer with sort of hot irons and a rack, killing another Roman senator over two days in revenge for the, well, in revenge, who knows? He might have wanted money, he might have wanted revenge, but it was an absolutely brutal assault, which the enemies of Mark Antony made a great deal of. And Cicero, who was at that stage very much with the assassins, made a big attack on, a series of attacks,

brutal oratorical attacks on mark anthony heavily fueled by the torture and death of the first assassin so trebonius was the first assassin to die and then we have a more formal warfare don't we what talk talk me through the the kind of the final stage of a few of the assassins who actually tried to take on anthony octavian in battle. Anthony and Octavian were sometimes on the same side and sometimes on different sides. It was a complicated area to get your head around, even at the time. And it's been very difficult for historians ever since. The big battleground was the area of what is now northern Italy, which was then southern Gaul, which was where Cassius Parmensis came from in Parma, where the ham and the cheese came from then and come from now.

One of the assassins who was closest to Caesar, Decimus Brutus, who does appear in Shakespeare's play, he had been awarded the prize of being governor of that part of Gaul. So he goes off there to take that. And then Antony decides that he wants that job and he's going to take it from Decimus Brutus decide you know can't really decide what to do so he ended up with about three or four different armies fighting in disgusting wet damp low-lying mud in northern italy it was the worst kind of civil war that the romans had who didn't want caesar to die had warned against. Because the Romans often won battles pretty easily. The most brutal battles that take place were between fellow Romans.

And a lot of blood was shed in the mud of Parma, which was Cassius Parmensis' hometown. The whole Parma was pretty much destroyed, completely destroyed in a revenge attack by Mark Antony's brother. And it was very, very messy, extremely bloody, very unpleasant. Decimus Brutus tries to escape to join Marcus Brutus and Cassius, who were in Greece. He tried to go over land. He's caught by a Gallic tribal chief and he's killed.

God knows how he was killed. And's he becomes the second the second assassin to die so a mixture of formal violence and torture and sort of assassination looking at the assassins as a group did any we'd mentioned this a bit earlier but is it possible to see that any of their aims were met did it change anything or did it just deliver the roman world into the hands of an even greater caesar well that's Caesar. That's exactly what it did. None of their aims were met, except possibly, I suppose, you could say that Brutus' aims were met, since Brutus' aims, as much as we can understand him,

was to become the person that we're talking about now. I mean, he had an extraordinary sense of his place in Roman history and what was the right thing to do for him, his family, and his place in the universe. I mean, they have a very high view of their high moral tone, if you might say. So a success for Brutus, but for the rest of them, disappointment. When is your book out, Peter? October 1st in Britain and November 1st in the US.

It's called The Last Assassin. Go and get everyone. Thank you very much, Peter, for joining us on this episode of History Hit Live. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it and I hate myself.

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