Roman Affairs.

• Author: Bakshian, Aram
• Position: The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar

Peter Stothard, The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 274 pp., $27.95.

History is mainly a matter of unforeseen outcomes yielding unintended consequences. The assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC offers a striking case in point. Hoping to bring back the (largely imaginary) good old days of the early Roman Republic, a privileged, patrician clique of Roman senators led by Gaius Cassius Longinus (Shakespeare's "lean and hungry" Cassius) and Marcus Brutus (Shakespeare's "noblest Roman of them all") murdered a brilliant soldier-statesman in what they convinced themselves was a heroic act of tyrannicide. In fact, it offered a reminder that all rogues led to Rome. Although he carefully avoided involvement with the assassination plot, the great Roman orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero, was all in, arguing that Julius Caesar had

...conceived a great desire to be king of the Romans and master of the entire world and accomplished this. Whoever says that this desire was honorable is a madman, since he approves of the death of the laws and liberty, and considers their hideous and repulsive suppression glorious. There was, however, a crippling flaw in Cicero's argument. The "laws and liberty"-and, more particularly, theit social, moral, and religious foundations--had all predeceased Julius Caesar, eaten away by corruption, decadence, and the ancient Roman equivalent of insidet trading--the running of the Republic as an enterprise of the aristocracy, by the aristocracy, for the aristocracy. In murdering Caesar, the conspitators were killing Rome's greatest, most forwardlooking leader in a doomed effort to preserve something that was already dead.

They were also committing what may have been the most consequential political assassination in the histoty of the world, although a strong case could be made for Gabrilo Princip's 1914 slaying of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a much less formidable individual but a victim whose rank and position as heir to the Austto-Hungarian throne made his death the detonator for a devastating global war. By the time the whole shebang was over it had shaken the social and political order of modern Europe to its foundations in ways from which it is only now beginning to recover. But if Franz Ferdinand's death was as consequential as Caesar's, his life certainly was not. A crotchety neurotic, Ftanz Ferdinand had a rational vision for reforming the ramshackle multi-national, multi-lingual empire he was supposed to inherit, but his personality and intellect were probably not up to the job, even if the cataclysm of World War I had been averted.

Caesar, on the other hand, was a brilliant Renaissance man 1,500 years before there was a Renaissance. He played many roles in his lifetime--youthful playboy, corrupt political machine boss, brilliant propagandist, conquering military hero on an epic scale, and an administrative reformer of genius, to name only a few. Throughout his mature career, he adhered to a sound if somewhat cynical apothegm: "If you must break the law, do it to seize power; in all other cases observe it."

Even in the pursuit of power Caesar preferred, whenever possible, to do it by the book. Almost all of his many promotions--including the erection of monuments in his honor, his virtual deification, and his proposed lifetime lease on executive power--had been sought through the proper channels, including action by a Roman Senate that he incrementally padded by such measures as placing all free-born Italians on the same legal footing as the citizens of Rome and enfranchising Cisalpine Gaul. Although his political roots were populist, in the tradition of Marius and the Gracchi brothers, Caesar carried out a program of welfare reform that slashed the number of Roman citizens on the grain dole--the ancient Roman equivalent of a universal food stamp entitlement--by more than half (from 320,000 to 150,000) by imposing a means test. He initiated a census for the whole Italian peninsula and introduced the "Julian" calendar, which remains the standard to this very day, and he had plans to drain the Pontine marshes to eradicate malaria. That commendable goal, after Caesar's murder, remained on the back burner until it was finally undertaken as a massive...