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AT WHAT HOUR DID THE MURDERERS OF JULIUS CAESAR GATHER ON THE IDES OF

MARCH 44 B.C.?*

John Ramsey

Although the subject of this essay falls outside the principal scholarly interests of the honoree of this volume, I trust that it will serve as an acceptable tribute to my esteemed University of Illinois colleague William Calder III. Bill appre-ciates, I know, an argument that presents a discovery that is both new and true. In this case, we shall be examining a date, the Ides of March, that is fraught with grave implications for the course of Roman history. We shall also see an illustration of the principle that deuterai phrontides sometimes prove to be best. In this instance, these second thoughts are mine because I have to confess that up until recently, I blindly followed the herd and stated unequi-vocally that the Roman senate gathered at sunrise on the Ides and waited a full five hours for the Dictator Caesar to put in a belated appearance.1 I was mistaken, and I now want to set the record straight.

My revision of the standard view yields two positive outcomes. The first of these is to call into question the widely accepted belief that the senate customarily met at the hour of sunrise. This is a canard that deserves to be challenged and laid to rest, though admittedly it is difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate false notions that are so firmly entrenched. The correction of this

* I thank the following scholars for reading and commenting on earlier presentations

of this thesis: Michael Alexander, Jerzy Linderski, Gesine Manuwald, John Morgan, and Mark Toher. The usual disclaimer applies that I alone am responsible for the short-comings that remain.

1 I did so both in “‘Beware the Ides of March!’ An Astrological Prediction?” CQ 50 (2000) 453 and in my commentary on Cicero’s Philippics 1 & 2 (Cambridge 2003) 2. I thank Mark Toher for directing my attention to the apparent conflict in the ancient sources, without, of course, claiming his assent to the solution that I present in this paper.

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mistaken belief is not a trivial matter because it leads, in turn, as we shall see, to a better understanding of the typical pattern of the Roman day and how social relationships functioned between patrons (grandees in the senate) and their humble clients. The second and no less important consequence of accep-ting the revision of the communis opinio that is put forth in this paper will be a greatly enhanced appreciation for the sophistication of the plot that was for-med to murder Julius Caesar. We shall discover that the leading members of the conspiracy played a far deeper game of deception during the hours leading up to Caesar’s assassination than has hitherto been realized.

To summarize what we know about the timeline on that fateful day: Suetonius (Iul. 81.4) informs us that after a lengthy delay, Caesar at last left his home (the domus publica, at the eastern edge of the Forum) and set out to join the senate at about the 5th Roman hour (quinta fere hora). This puts his departure at sometime between 10 and 11 AM, the interval to which the 5th hour corresponds at that time of year (“Stundentafel,” D-G 3.773). The site of the meeting was the Curia Pompeia,2 a chamber attached to the eastern wall of the portico that lay directly behind the stage building of the Theater of Pompey in the Campus Martius.3 Caesar nearly sent his consular colleague Mark Antony to dismiss the senators because of bad omens, poor health, and frightening dreams, but the conspirator D. Brutus persuaded Caesar to over-come his hesitation and be carried in his litter to the Campus Martius (Suet. loc. cit.; Nic. Dam. 23.84; Plut. Caes. 64; App. B Civ. 2.115). The communis opinio would have us believe that the senate had been waiting since dawn at approximately 6 AM, and that roughly five hours elapsed before Caesar arrived belatedly close to the hour of 11 AM.4

2 Cic. Div. 2.23; Nic. Dam. 23.82; Liv. Per. 116; Plut. Brut. 14.2 (ed. Ziegler); Suet.

Iul. 80.4. 3 See LTUR 1.334–35 and L. Richardson, A New Topographical Dictionary of An-

cient Rome (Baltimore 1992) 104. It is said to have been the custom of the senate to meet in the Curia Pompeia on days when shows were to be held in the theater (App. B Civ. 2.115) – in this instance, a show of gladiators (Nic. Dam. 25.92), under the cover of which the conspirators stationed gladiators of their own nearby to lend support, if need be (Nic. Dam. 26a.98; Dio 44.16.2).

4 E.g., Erich Becht, “Regeste über die Zeit von Cäsars Ermordung bis zum Um-schwung in der Politik des Antonius,” diss. Freiburg (1911) 71, a work still well worth

When Did Caesar’s Murderers Gather on the Ides of March? 353

The trouble is, two sources that we have no reason to distrust point ines-capably to the conclusion that the senate was definitely not convened at dawn. According to Valerius Maximus (8.11.2), on the morning of the Ides (mane)5 Caesar and the haruspex Spurinna called at the house of Cn. Domitius Calvi-nus (cos. 53), Caesar’s magister equitum designate for 43. They did so, we are told, to fulfill an obligation (ad officium), and so they encountered each other by chance (forte) on the last of the thirty days during which Spurinna had warned Caesar to beware of danger. Caesar could not resist twitting the seer by pointing out that the Ides had come, to which Spurinna archly replied that they had not yet gone. Valerius’ sole reason for reporting the visit of Caesar and the seer to Calvinus’ house was to provide a context for the ominous exchange of words concerning the Ides, which has been immortalized for the English public by Shakespeare (Julius Caesar 3.1.1-2). Other sources relate Caesar’s encounter with the seer without giving it a specific setting (App. B Civ. 2.149; Dio 44.18.4), or they shift the meeting to later in the morning, either to when Caesar was on his way to the Curia Pompeia (Plut. Caes. 63.6) – the context adopted by Shakespeare – or to when Caesar was about to enter the chamber after receiving unfavorable omens from the preliminary sacrifices (Suet. Iul. 81.4). The only clue in Valerius as to why Caesar called on his neighbor Calvinus, whose home was but a stone’s throw from Caesar’s,6 is provided by the expression ad officium. Both Caesar and Spurinna are said to have paid their visit to fulfill some obligation, and the presence of the haruspex points to preparations being made for the performance of a public sacrifice. Two plausible contexts for that sacrifice can be offered, the first being slightly less attractive than the second.

consulting, despite its age, for the period 15 March to 1 June 44 B.C.; more recently, N. Horsfall, “The Ides of March: Some New Problems,” G&R 21 (1974) 191–99, esp. 199; Ramsey 2000 (above, n. 1); and Jürgen Malitz, ed. Nikolaos von Damaskus, Leben des Kaisers Augustus (Darmstadt 2003) 162 n. 276.

5 Appian (B Civ. 2.149) likewise places the meeting “at about dawn” (per‹ tØn ßv). 6 On the location of Calvinus’ house, on the south slope of the Velia, near the Regia,

see LTUR 2.93. Platner-Ashby 179 and 356 mistakenly assign its construction to the principate of Augustus because they misinterpret Festus 142 L, who merely informs us that a balnearia was added to Calvinus’ house in the Augustan age. I thank J. Linderski for discussing with me by e-mail the correct interpretation of the passage in Festus.

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One possibility, as suggested by Becht,7 is that Caesar, as pontifex maxi-mus, was making ready to perform with his fellow pontifex Calvinus8 the customary annual sacrifice to the minor divinity Anna Perenna on her festival day.9 That ceremony would have caused Caesar and his party to journey some distance from the Forum and from the site of the senate meeting in the Campus Martius because we know that the shrine of Anna Perenna was located in a grove, beside the via Flaminia, at the first milestone.10 This puts the sanctuary near the Pincian Hill, a bit north of the site of the later imperial Mausoleum of Augustus, near the modern Porta del Popolo, close to the Tiber.11 The precise nature of the ritual that took place in that grove on the Ides of March is beyond recovery on the basis of our extant sources, and we cannot say whether it would have called for the presence of the pontifex maximus in the age of Caesar. In all likelihood the ceremony was not of major importance in the first century B.C. because Ovid passes over it in silence in his Fasti despite describing at length how the common folk kept holiday (3.523–42) and relating various legends associated with the introduction of the worship of Anna Perenna (3.543–696).12

7 Op. cit. (above, n. 4) 7 n. 2. 8 It is a likely inference, based on the passage in Val. Max., that by 44 B.C. Calvinus

had been co-opted as a priest by his friend Julius Caesar; he was most certainly a ponti-fex by 40 (ILS 42). See G. J. Szemler, The Priests of the Roman Republic, Collection Latomus vol. 127 (Brussels 1972) 137.

9 Macr. Sat. 1.12.6 et publice et privatim ad Annam Perennam sacrificatum itur ut annare perennareque commode liceat (“people go to perform sacrifices for Anna Perenna both publicly and privately so as to be granted leave to spend the year and to spend many years agreeably”). Lydus (Mens. 4.36) attests the annual offering of public prayers for well-being.

10 Fasti Vaticani (CIL 12.342). 11 See M. Piranomonte (ed.), Il Santuario della musica e il Bosco Sacro di Anna

Perenna (Milan 2002). The latest inscriptions are reproduced in l’ Année Epigra-phique, 2003 [2006], nos. 251–53. I thank J. Linderski for calling my attention to these publications.

12 Horsfall (above, n. 4) 196–97 even questions whether Ovid’s description of the frolicking crowd can be trusted, speculating that the poet has exaggerated the popu-larity of the festival in his day. W. Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic (London 1916) 50 concludes that the festival had died out by the early empire

When Did Caesar’s Murderers Gather on the Ides of March? 355

A second and more promising explanation for the early morning visit that Caesar and Spurinna paid to the house of Calvinus ad officium is that Caesar, Calvinus, and the haruspex were making ready to perform the sacrifice of the white ewe-lamb (alba agna), the ovis Idulis (Festus p. 93L), that was owed to Jupiter on the Ides of every month (Ov. Fast. 1.56). All Ides, we know, were feriae Iovi (Macrob. Sat. 1.15.15). The sacrifice, which was performed in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline, was preceded by a procession along the via Sacra (Varro, Ling. 5.47), which just happens to be the street next to which Calvinus’ house stood.

Surely one or the other of these priestly duties was a factor that Caesar must have taken into account when he decided upon a suitable hour for sum-moning the senate. It would hardly make sense for Caesar to convene his fellow senators at dawn, only to keep them waiting at least an hour or two until he and Calvinus performed religious rites that could not have been carried out before sun-up. When we recall that Caesar had recently offended a great many senators by his failure to rise from his seat to greet a delegation of senators who had come to confer new honors upon him,13 it surpasses belief that Caesar would pour salt into the wound by deliberately setting a meeting of the senate for an hour at which he knew in advance he himself could not be present.14

The second passage that contradicts the standard assumption that the senate met at dawn on the Ides is found in Plutarch. In his Brutus (14.4), Plutarch tells us that on the morning of the Ides, M. Brutus armed himself with a dagger and set out from his house, while the other conspirators ga-thered at the house of Cassius to honor his son by conducting him down into the Forum on the occasion of his donning the toga virilis.15 Presumably Brutus because of the absence of any mention of it in the “rustic calendars or in those of Philocalus and Silvius.”

13 Liv. Per. 116; Nic. Dam. 22.78–79; Plut. Caes. 60.4–8; Suet. Iul. 78.1; Dio 44.8. 14 I owe this telling observation to M. Toher, by private correspondence. 15 Cassius’ son is attested solely by this passage (Münzer, RE 10.1 s.v. “Iunia Tertia

(206);” D-G 2.128 n. 3), and he presumably perished, as did many of his generation, in the civil wars, perhaps even with his father at the Battle of Philippi. His presumed age of about sixteen in March 44 suits that of his father, since the elder Cassius was born sometime before 85 B.C. and so was a man in his early forties. There is, furthermore,

356 John Ramsey

joined this group at Cassius’ house because he was the boy’s uncle,16 and it would be highly unlikely for him to be absent from such an important family occasion. The choice of date for this celebration is eminently plausible. Ordinarily March 17th, the Liberalia, was the preferred day for celebrating a young man’s coming of age,17 but since Cassius’ future after the Ides was uncertain at best, he may have felt it prudent to hold the ceremony two days early so as to be sure to see this milestone in his son’s life.18 Of course the gathering of friends and the venue (the Roman Forum) also provided excellent cover for the leading members of the conspiracy to assemble early in the morning and go over their plans without arousing the least suspicion. They might even keep an eye on Caesar and his fellow priest Calvinus and the haruspex Spurinna as the priestly group made their way to the Capitoline temple of Jupiter with the ovis Idulis. What does not make sense, however, is for Brutus, Cassius, and the others to take any risk whatsoever of not being present when Caesar arrived at the Curia Pompeia in the Campus Martius. The success of the conspirators’ plan, we know, depended on a scheme to intercept Caesar and his party at the entrance to the senate chamber and to detain Caesar’s chief henchman Mark Antony outside the hall (Cic. Phil. 2.34; Fam. 10.28.1). If, as everyone has assumed, Caesar called a meeting of the senate for sunrise in the Campus Martius, how could the conspirators so openly flout that summons and occupy themselves with a coming of age ceremony, which every reason to accept Plutarch’s account of the coming of age ceremony because the biographer appears to be exceptionally well-informed about the activities of the conspirators on the morning of the Ides. Plutarch most likely drew upon one of the memoirs written to celebrate the life of Brutus that he occasionally cites, either that of young Bibulus, Brutus’ stepson (Brut. 13.2, 23.7), or of Brutus’ friend Empylus (Brut. 2.4); so C. Pelling, “Plutarch’s Method of Work in the Roman Lives,” JHS 99 (1979) 74–96, esp. 83. For a detailed discussion of Plutarch’s likely use of the memoir by Bibulus, see C. Theander, “Plutarchs Forschungen in Rom,” Eranos 57 (1959) 99–131, esp. 122–26.

16 Cassius’ wife, Iunia Tertia (RE 206), was Brutus’ half-sister. 17 H. H. Scullard, Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic (Ithaca 1981) 92. 18 Mark Toher has suggested to me that Cassius, anticipating the worst, was possibly

seeking to make his son’s inheritance more secure by conferring on him the manly gown, but Michael Alexander and Bruce Frier assure me that the assumption of the toga virilis had no effect on the law of succession.

When Did Caesar’s Murderers Gather on the Ides of March? 357

took them to the Forum after sun-up? They surely had no way of knowing in advance that Caesar would delay his departure from his home until shortly after ten o’clock in the morning because his wife Calpurnia had had alarming dreams in the night, and because Caesar himself had experienced a restless night and was suffering from ill health upon awaking.

Modern scholars typically note in passing the evidence furnished by Vale-rius Maximus 8.11.2 and chapter 14 of Plutarch’s Brutus without perceiving the enormous contradiction those activities of Caesar and of the conspirators pose for the standard assumption that Caesar called a meeting of the senate for dawn on the Ides.19 The contradiction disappears, however, as soon as we dispel two false premises, one of which is that sunrise was the normal meeting time for the senate,20 and the other of which is the mistaken belief that Dio (44.16.2) assigns the meeting on the Ides of March 44 to daybreak. As evidence that the senate normally met at sunrise, Mommsen (loc. cit.) cites the following ten passages (numbered to facilitate discussion below, with in-clusion of the relevant time expression): (1) Cic. De orat. 3.1.2 mane, (2) Fam. 11.6.3 mane; (3) Liv. 36.21.6 prima luce; (4) Dion. Hal., Ant. Rom. 12.2.1 ßvyen ¶ti; (5) Plut. C. Gracch. 14.1 ëma dÉ ≤m°r&, (6) Plut. Cic. 15.4 ëmÉ ≤m°r&, (7) Plut. Cic. 19.1 ëma dÉ ≤m°r&, (8) Plut. Brut. 19.4 ëma dÉ ≤m°r&; (9) App. B Civ. 3.50 ëma dÉ ≤m°r&; (10) Dio 58.9.4 ëma tª ߃. Pierre Willems (loc. cit.) adds three further passages, (11) Liv. 22.7.14 ab orto usque ad occidentem solem, (12) 27.50.4 ab orto sole ad occidentem; (13) Dio 44.16.2 ëma ߃, and a fourth is cited by Butler-Cary, (14) App. B Civ. 2.126 ¶ti prÚ ≤m°raw.21

We may note to begin with that the two passages of Cicero (nos. 1–2) fall short of stating that the senate met at dawn, informing us merely that the meeting took place “in the morning” (mane). This statement, as we shall see, fits the revised view that will be presented in this paper concerning the usual

19 So, for instance, Becht, (above n. 4) 7; D-G 3.649; Jane Bellemore, ed., Nicolaus

of Damascus, Life of Augustus (Bristol 1984) 111; and Malitz (above, n. 4) 162 n. 276. 20 The standard view in handbooks on the Senate: e.g., P. Willems, Le Sénat de la

République Romaine vol. 2 (Paris 1883) 147; Th. Mommsen, Staatsr. 3.2.920; M. Bonnefond-Coudry, Le Sénat de la République Romaine (Rome 1989) 227.

21 H. E. Butler and M. Cary, ed. Suetonius, Divus Iulius (Oxford 1927) 147.

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meeting time of the senate. Furthermore, passage 2 (Fam. 11.6.3) simply states that Cicero himself arrived mane and that his unexpected attendance caused a sensation which attracted a large throng of his fellow senators to the meeting. Hence, Willems (op. cit. 147 n. 8) logically segregated the two Ciceronian passages from the other evidence that he used to argue that the senate normally convened at dawn.

Next, it should be pointed out that on thirteen of the above fourteen occasions there was an atmosphere of high tension or urgency necessitating a consultation of the senate at the first available moment, as soon as the sun was up.22 No. 13 (the meeting on the Ides of March), as will be demonstrated shortly, does not share this characteristic. In the case of the other thirteen meetings, however, there is often peril affecting the very survival of the state. The passages cited above concern, respectively (1) a meeting called on the Ides of Sept. 91 B.C., in the midst of the turbulence caused by the tribune Livius Drusus; (2) a meeting called by the tribunes on 20 Dec. 44 to discuss the safety of the consuls-designate and to react to a defiant edict recently received from the proconsul of Cisalpine Gaul, D. Brutus; (3) a meeting in 191 B.C. to hear an eagerly awaited message that had been brought to Rome from Greece just before dawn to report on progress in the war against Antiochus and the Aetolians; (4) a meeting summoned by the Dictator Cin-cinnatus to deal with the crisis precipitated by the plebeian leader Maelius in 439 B.C.; (5) a meeting summoned by the consul Opimius in 121 to react to the murder of Opimius’ attendant Antyllius on the previous day by partisans of C. Gracchus; (6) a meeting at the time of Catiline’s conspiracy convened by the consul Cicero in 63 to examine anonymous letters that had been delivered in the night and warned of a massacre; (7) a meeting convened by the consul Cicero on 3 Dec. 63 to question Catiline’s co-conspirators who had been ar-rested during the preceding night; (8) a meeting assigned to 18 Mar. 44 amidst the crisis that followed Caesar’s murder; (9) a continuation, on 2 Jan. 43, of the emergency meeting called on 1 Jan. to debate whether Mark Antony

22 No decree of the senate could be passed before sunrise or after sunset (Gell.

14.7.8), and so, for instance, when in 168 B.C. ambassadors arrived from Macedonia in the evening (vesper), since it was too late to summon the senate, the consuls convened a meeting on the next day (postero die, Liv. 44.20.1).

When Did Caesar’s Murderers Gather on the Ides of March? 359

should be declared a public enemy; (10) a meeting called by the emperor Tiberius in A.D. 31 to bring about the sudden and unexpected downfall of his powerful minister Sejanus; (11) a series of emergency meetings held by the praetors over the course of several days in 217 B.C. after news of the defeat at Lake Trasimene had reached Rome; (12) a day-long vigil of the senate, which anxiously awaited news of the consul Claudius and his army in 207 B.C. in the campaign against Hannibal; (13) the arrival of the conspirators at the Curia Pompeia on the Ides of Mar. 44; and finally, (14) the meeting called by Mark Antony on 17 Mar. 44 B.C. to resolve the crisis triggered by Caesar’s murder.

The meeting on the Ides of March 44 (no. 13) clearly does not fit the pat-tern because it was not called to react to an urgent matter or to a crisis. Quite the contrary. The senate was summoned merely to debate Mark Antony’s long-standing objection to the election of his personal enemy P. Dolabella to a suffect consulship to fill the vacancy that would occur when Caesar left Rome for his Parthian campaign (Cic. Phil. 2.88). This was not a new topic, nor was it a topic of high drama. Caesar even came close to postponing the meeting altogether because of his ill heath and bad omens. What we should notice, too – a detail that may have caused Mommsen (loc. cit.) to omit Dio 44.16.2 from his collection of evidence pointing to sunrise meetings of the senate – is that Dio in that passage does not state that the whole senate met ëma ߃23 but rather that the conspirators gathered at sunrise and “began to call upon Caesar to make his appearance.” Given the fact that Brutus and Cassius and some of the others were engaged in the toga virilis ceremony in the Forum, the group that assembled early at the Curia Pompeia, in the Campus Martius, must have been a subset of the more than sixty who joined the plot.24

23 ߃ is, in fact, a correction by Reiske of …w found in the cod. Laurentianus, one of

the chief MSS for this part of Dio. As M. Toher has suggested to me, …w may have originated from a marginal gloss on ëma sunel°ghsan that later crept into the text. Furthermore, Reiske’s emendation was doubtless grounded on the widely accepted belief that the senate customarily met at dawn.

24 The number of conspirators is said to have surpassed sixty (Suet. Iul. 80.4; Oros. 6.17.2; Eutrop. 6.25), one source claiming there were as many as eighty (Nic. Dam. 19.59). Appian (B Civ. 2.111, 113) gives the names of fifteen; some twenty can be identified (RE 10.255).

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The only other passage that might conceivably be interpreted as placing the meeting on the Ides at dawn is found in Nicolaus of Damascus (23.84), but the language is too imprecise to permit any firm conclusion in the absence of supporting evidence.25 According to this text, D. Brutus pointed out to Caesar that he should not be influenced by the ominous dreams of his wife Calpurnia and cancel the meeting of the senate, which had assembled and been awaiting his arrival “since (early) morning” (§j •vyinoË). The expression §j •vyinoË, however, is no more precise than mane in the two Ciceronian passages above and does not permit us to determine the hour at which the senate convened relative to Caesar’s departure from home, which we noted above is assigned by Suetonius to about the 5th hour.26

All becomes clear, and the apparent conflict in our sources vanishes, if the first two hours of the day were reserved, as usual, for the morning salutatio (Martial 4.8.1), and the senate was to have met on the fateful Ides at, perhaps, the 3rd hour (ca. 8–9 AM), the time when courts typically began the day (Martial 4.8.2). That hour may well have suited the senate on most occasions when there was no emergency. Of course, the ancient sources are ordinarily silent concerning the precise hour at which the senate met because such details were far too mundane to merit inclusion. It is, rather, on those occasions when the senate met at an unusually early or an unusually late hour that the detail is likely to assume importance and receive mention. So, for instance, balancing the sunrise meetings of the senate reviewed above, we occasionally hear of the senate meeting in the afternoon (Dio 40.49.5 t∞w de¤lhw), or as late as the 10th hour, i.e. c. 3 PM (App. B Civ. 1.30 émf‹ dekãthn Àran), or simply late in the day (Cic. Qfr. 2.1.1 sero).27

25 Hence, it is not included by Mommsen, Willems, or Bonnefond-Coudry in their

lists of evidence for sunrise meetings of the senate. 26 Cf. Xen. Hell. 1.1.5 for a comparable use of §j •vyinoË meaning from some,

unspecified time in the morning. Unfortunately, this expression is found nowhere else in the extant works of Nicolaus of Damascus, and so it is impossible to determine its precise meaning based upon other occurrences in the same author.

27 The principle that an exception to a normal practice is likely to receive notice in the sources, whereas the norm does not, can be illustrated by speculating that, if many centuries from now future historians trouble themselves to learn when the President of the United States arose from his bed in the morning and met with his National Security

When Did Caesar’s Murderers Gather on the Ides of March? 361

If the senate was to have met at the 3rd hour on the Ides, all of the pieces of evidence fall neatly into place. There is more than enough time for Caesar to perform, with Calvinus and Spurinna, the sacrifice to Jupiter (or to Anna Perenna?) and for the chief conspirators to meet, without arousing suspicion, under the guise of honoring Cassius’ son at the toga virilis ceremony. While M. Brutus and the others reviewed their plans for the murder, another group of their co-conspirators arrived by pre-arrangement at the meeting place of the senate as early as sun-up (Dio 44.16.2) so as to be in position and leave no-thing to chance, just in case Caesar turned up a bit ahead of time.28 As the day unfolded, Caesar kept postponing his departure from home and nearly sent word to cancel the meeting, causing the senators to wait for some considerable time (iam dudum opperientis, Suet. Iul. 81.4). However, the inconvenience experienced by the majority of the senators (excluding the subset of con-spirators who arrived at sun-up) was a delay of closer to two, as opposed to five hours. This wait from the 3rd hour to the 4th, and from the 4th to the 5th, still allows more than sufficient time for the senators to become convinced that Caesar had cancelled his intention to attend the session (Dio 44.18.1) and for Caesar’s servant to remove the Dictator’s gilt chair from the meeting chamber after he concluded that it was not going to be occupied that day (Dio 44.17.3). Such a two-hour delay was no trivial matter to be sure, and if the bulk of the senators arrived in time for a meeting summoned for c. 8 AM (the 3rd hour), the statement of Nicolaus of Damascus (23.84) that the senators had

Council, they will be far more likely to find this information preserved in notices of meetings of the NSC called to react to, for instance, the Bay of Pigs fiasco in the Kennedy administration (April 1961), or the failure of Operation Eagle Claw, the attempt to rescue the fifty-three hostages at the US embassy in Tehran (April 1980), or Operation El Dorado Canyon, the bombing of targets in Tripoli and Benghazi (April 1986).

28 Since C. Trebonius (cos. 45) was assigned the task of detaining Mark Antony out-side the Curia and detaching him from Caesar (Cic. Phil. 2.34, 13.22; Fam. 10.28.1), we can speculate with some assurance that Trebonius must have been among the conspirators who went straight to the Campus Martius and did not call at Cassius’ house in the early morning hours. Based upon this conclusion, we can further surmise that other “Caesarians” among the conspirators (e.g., D. Brutus, the two Cascas, and Tillius Cimber) doubtless formed the core of the group that arrived early in the Campus Martius.

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been awaiting Caesar’s arrival §j •vyinoË (“from early morning”) makes perfectly good sense in the context of a remark made to Caesar at c. 10 AM. A two-hour delay was long enough nearly to unnerve the conspirators (App. B Civ. 2.115) and to cause them to send one of their members, D. Brutus, who had Caesar’s trust, to persuade him to overcome his hesitation and make the journey to the Campus Martius (Dio 44.18.1). However, to assume that Brutus, Cassius, and all the others hung about, doing nothing, for five full hours grossly distorts the timetable of events on the Ides.29

What we gain from this re-examination of the evidence is two-fold. First, we should now discard the commonly held belief that the senate normally met at sunrise. How, one might ask, could clients anticipate the absence of their patroni and not waste precious time and effort by turning up on such days for the customary morning salutatio when their senatorial friends would not be at home to receive them? If it were indeed the practice of the senate to meet at dawn, as scholars have assumed, the inconvenience suffered by disappointed callers must have been a terribly common occurrence. We would expect, therefore, the satirists, or a poet like Martial, to have a field day with this frequent annoyance, and yet there is no trace of such a complaint. Second, and in the near term, we gain from our modern-day perspective of terrorist plots a much improved appreciation for the planning and care that went into the murder of Julius Caesar. There was, first of all, a division of the conspirators into two separate groups, the Caesarian faction proceeding directly to the Campus Martius an hour or two before the meeting was to be held, while the ex-Pompeians first gathered in the early morning hours at the house of Cassius and then accompanied Cassius’ son to the Forum as part of the celebration of his donning the toga virilis for the first time. The way in which the group in

29 Plutarch (Brut. 14.6-7) and Appian (B Civ. 2.115) try to fill in some of this “dead”

time by having Brutus, the praetor urbanus, and Cassius, the praetor peregrinus, carry out the duties of their offices by hearing disputants while they were waiting at the portico of Pompey for Caesar’s belated arrival (some two hours under the revised reckoning here). However, this judicial activity is clearly an impossibility because the Ides of March was feriae, a festival day sacred to both Jupiter and Anna Perenna, and on such days a proclamation enjoined citizens to refrain from litigation and disputes: ut litibus et iurgiis se abstinerent (Cic. Div. 1.102); cf. Isid. De Nat. Rerum 1.4, feriati dies in quibus res divina fit et abstinere homines a litibus oportet.

When Did Caesar’s Murderers Gather on the Ides of March? 363

the Forum went about a seemingly normal routine on the morning of the Ides should drive home upon us what cool-headed and determined folk they were. The plot that was laid against Caesar was much more sophisticated and well-executed than has hitherto been imagined. Brutus, Cassius, and the others who met at Cassius’ house at the crack of dawn must have required nerves of steel in order to give the impression that they were merely performing business as usual.