Most Romans believed that Cæsar was preparing to dissolve the republic once and for all. In desperation, his rivals banded together with the few stalwarts who thought the republic could be preserved, and they plotted his assassination. A key to the conspiracy was the participation of a new Brutus, who would bring the legitimacy of his ancestor’s heroic tyrannicide to this rather underhanded bit of political violence.
Instead of confronting Cæsar in a fair fight, the assassins planned to kill him when he was unarmed at a regular meeting of the Senate on March 15, known as the Ides of March. The defenseless Cæsar was stabbed thirty-three times and bled to death. Marcus Junius Brutus then led the attackers to the Capitoline – where the bronze statue of his ancestor still stood – and declared to the Romans that they were free again.1414
Plutarch, Brutus 14–18.
Cæsar does not seem to have been taking serious precautions to prevent this turn of events. He had dismissed his personal guards some weeks before, perhaps realizing that he would not survive the tumultuous breakdown of the republic. He had lived by the sword and was likely to die by it, but he might be able to arrange things so that his sister’s grandson Octavian could assume power after him and set the Roman world to rights.
Silver denarius minted for Marcus Junius Brutus, 43–42 BC. The reverse shows the dagger that Lucius Junius Brutus pulled out of Lucretia and the dagger that Marcus used to kill Cæsar.
Octavian eventually did just that, but only after decades of bloody and destructive conflict to subdue rival claimants to power – beginning with the dispatching of Brutus and his co-conspirators, and culminating in the defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. It was becoming clear that the system fashioned for a small city-state was not equal to governing a sprawling empire. But even as Octavian restructured Rome’s government – and acquired an imperial title, Augustus – he was mindful of the power of the Roman past.
The deeds of the republic’s heroes had been reverently passed down, becoming more awe-inspiring with each generation. Their rigorous moral code and self-sacrifice stood in stark contrast with those who had mired Rome in civil war, from Sulla to Mark Antony. They even looked different, as their rough faces – immortalized in official portraits and innumerable private busts lining the shelves of upper-class homes – gave a mute reproach to their effete descendants who swathed themselves in luxuries imported from Egypt and Byzantium.
For Titus Livius, a scholar and distant cousin of Augustus’s wife, Livia, those heroic stories were not mere legends. They were proof of Rome’s early greatness, which could serve as the foundation for even greater achievements under Augustus and his successors. Following the example of the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides, he embarked on a sweeping study of Rome’s history from its origins to his own time. In forty years of writing, he produced a massive work organized into 142 scrolls, titled Ab urbe condita libri, “Books from the Founding of the City,” but more commonly known as The History of Rome.
In his introduction to the history, Livy advised his contemporaries to look back to their city’s origins for the keys to their own character. Despite all the recent bloodshed and upheaval, he saw a grand symmetry in Roman history, from the violence surrounding the first Brutus at the birth of the republic, to a rebirth after the equally violent killing of Julius Cæsar by the second Brutus. Even though Livy was intimate with the newly imperial Julian family, who viewed Cæsar as their divine primogenitor, he rather boldly framed the act of the second Brutus as justified by fears that Cæsar was trying to establish one-man rule.1515 Livy’s narrative proved compelling, and The History of Rome was widely read and copied, becoming an authoritative source book for subsequent historians from Tacitus to Edward Gibbon. Though many of Livy’s later chapters were lost in the eventual breakup of the Roman Empire, the early ones survived, and generations to come would be fascinated by his harsh yet heroic telling of the story of Brutus and the founding of the Roman Republic.
Livy, Periochæ (fragments of Ab urbe condita, from Book 116, http://www.livius.org/li-in/livy/periochae116.html.
Palazzo Carpi, Rome: 1550 AD
The home of a member of the Roman Inquisition might not seem like a comfortable place for someone who had just been exonerated of a heresy charge, but to a man of Ulisse Aldrovandi’s inclinations, Cardinal Rodolfo Pio da Carpi’s palace in Rome was irresistible. It was stuffed with every manner of collectable, from gems and minerals to prized antique marbles to Renaissance canvases by masters such as Raphael, not to mention one of the finest libraries in the city.
Aldrovandi was a polymath who would later be renowned for his study of natural history and his specimen collections. During his months of house arrest in Rome waiting for his trial, he became keenly interested in the city’s ancient heritage – which was only natural for someone named Ulisse after the hero of Homer’s Odyssey (with a brother named Achilles). Cardinal Pio da Carpi was an avid collector of antiquities, and he knew that Aldrovandi was taking notes on the best collections of classical sculpture in Rome for a publication on the subject. Given how quickly great collections were generally sold after their owner died, inclusion in a catalogue to preserve at least the memory of a collection would have been highly desirable.
Aldrovandi had already visited the cardinal’s exquisite villa on the Quirinal Hill and explored the exceptional array of antiquities housed there – a collection so fine in a place so beautiful that he had declared it an earthly paradise.1616 The Quirinal had been part of the city proper in ancient times (as it is today), but in 1546 it was more suburban, almost rural. Over the course of the thousand years since the Western Roman Empire had ceased to exist, the city had slowly contracted. With aqueducts cut off and drains clogged, Rome became marshy and unhealthy, reverting to a set of villages surrounded by the rotting remains of a glorious past. Cattle were put to pasture in the Forum, the Colosseum was used as a stone quarry, and the temple complex on the Capitoline crumbled away. Countless treasures had vanished without a trace, among them the bronze statue of Brutus, which for centuries was known only from accounts in ancient texts.
Ulisse Aldrovandi, Le antichità de la città di Roma (1556), 299.
Marcus Junius Brutus (so-called, now generally identified as Agrippa Postumus), 1st century AD.
It would have taken less than an hour to walk from the cardinal’s villa on the Quirinal to his palazzo in the heart of town, close to the Tiber. While the large-scale antiquities were stored at the villa, Pio da Carpi kept many smaller pieces, notably portraits, in the palazzo. He led Aldrovandi through two rooms packed with heads of emperors and their families, including Carcalla, Agrippina, Julia (daughter of Titus), and Septimus Severus, as well as several Alexander the Greats and a fine Philip of Macedon. Aldrovandi dutifully noted the identifications when known, and scribbled “non conosciuta” in his notebook when they were not.
Both men paused respectfully to gaze up at a marble bust with a Latin inscription that had pride of place over the door leading out of the second room.
“Not only is he beautiful, it is a most rare piece,” said the cardinal. “You recognize him, of course?”
“Of course. The second Brutus. Marcus Junius. And the epitaph – is it a parent lamenting that faithfulness