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BRUTUS
When Brutus was a child, he learned about all the great republican heroes. He was the descendant of Lucius Brutus, and a scion of Rome, a city founded on the killing of kings. He was taught as a child what bravery was, and he kept his principles even until the end of the Republic.
SCAEVOLA
Gaius Muncius, a young boy of noble birth, became indignant. He thought it was a shame that even under kings Rome had never been besieged by enemies, but now, while free, they were blocked by the Etruscans whom they often outfought. He thought this must be rectified through something brave and daring.
BRUTUS
Brutus thought it was a shame that even while Rome had no more kings, there was still war, strife, and discord. Caesar could not be brought out of power- that much was clear. He was dictator in perpetuum, consul of the year, and was given the power to appoint tribunes and legates in the following years. What should one do when liberty slips out of their fingers like sand?
SCAEVOLA
First he thought he might make his way to the enemy camps unseen.
BRUTUS
At the beginning he thought, just like everybody else, that it would pass by. All political strife had an end, did it not? Even Sulla had retired.
SCAEVOLA
Then he feared that without the consuls permission, he could be caught by the guards and treated like a deserter- a charge the state would uphold- so he went to the senate.
BRUTUS
At some point in the chaos, Brutus realized that nothing would happen without him taking action. He saw what the state had become, and he realized that he fought not a Roman citizen, but a king. Regicide is a much different charge than murder. So he went to Cassius.
SCAEVOLA
“I want to cross the Tiber,” he said, “and enter the enemy camp, if I can, if the Gods let me. Not for riches or revenge- I have something else in mind.”
The senators approved this.
BRUTUS
“I want to kill Caesar,” Brutus said, “because he’s made himself into a king.”
Years and days and centuries later, Cassius will be credited with seducing Brutus into conspiracy. But he just shook his head.
“For the sake of the Republic,” Brutus said. It sounded like begging.
“It won’t be noble,” Cassius replied. “It’ll be for revenge, for his riches, for the Civil War that’s fresh in everybody’s minds. The public won’t see it as a regicide- it’ll be the action of two angry men.”
“Two of us,” Brutus said. The words tasted bitter in his mouth, because he knew Cassius was right. It would be two men against a Consul, Dictator, and Pontifex Maximus. “What if there were more?”
“Are there?”
“Not yet,” Brutus said, “But there will be.”
SCAEVOLA
So Scaevola set out, hiding a sword beneath his clothes.
BRUTUS
So the plans were made, and Brutus was going to kill a king.
SCAEVOLA
Whereby he came to the enemy camp, and took his stand among the king’s tribunal. By some fate, the soldiers were being paid that moment, and there was a scribe sitting with the king, dressed like the king, whom all the folk approached.
BRUTUS
It took more time than Brutus would have liked to find men willing to slaughter Caesar on the floor of Pompey’s theater. Not that senators loved him, or that men wanted him alive, but fear captures all men, and there were many who cared for themselves more than for the Republic, who would rather betray justice than risk their own necks.
The main divide in the conspiracy was whether or not to leave Mark Antony alive. There were two kings, some men argued, and they both must be slain.
But others still saw Caesar as the serpent’s head: When it was cut off, no more would grow to take its place. The longer a conspiracy goes, the more chance it has of being found out, or so was thought by Brutus, who set the date of the assassination before Caesar left for Parthia, lest the sixty men he had behind him lose their wits and their honor.
SCAEVOLA
Fearing to question which man was Porsinna, for he might be recognized as a Roman, fate blindly drove the deed, and the scribe was who he slew.
BRUTUS
It was a horrible deed, to cut down Caesar, and even worse before the meeting began. Sixty senators hid daggers underneath their togas, ready to do the deed, and then Caesar simply did not arrive. Bad dreams, it was reported, so Decimus went to collect him like a pig to the slaughter house.
For a terrifying second, Brutus thought he might fail. He thought he might take his dagger out of his toga and plunge it into his own heart, but he caught Cassius’s eye, and Cassius shook his head imperceptibly. It was a slight turn, to anybody else watching, but Brutus knew what it meant. He was not yet allowed to die for his country.
SCAEVOLA
As he ran through the discordant crowd, he cut a way through with his blade. The guards came running to the clamor, and he was seized, dragged before the king.
BRUTUS
It all broke into chaos when Casca pulled the sleeve of Caesar’s toga down, ripping apart the pin that held the fabric together. Caesar cried out, but his words were not understood, as the senators descended on him like vultures to pick over a lamb.
Brutus could hardly believe the deed was done. It seemed so implausible that what they had meant to do would actually be completed, that he had nothing to say: He only stared at the old man who, in his last minutes, had tried to cover his face with his toga.
The whole senate house seemed to be in shock, just like Brutus was. There was an absolute silence just before chaos broke out, and Cassius spoke.
SCAEVOLA
Though he had no-one beside him, and fortune was so bleak, he spoke like one more to be feared than one who was fearing. “I am a Roman,” he said, “A citizen, and Gaius Muncius is my name. I am an enemy, so as your enemy, I wished to slay you, and I can die as well as I can kill: I am Roman by my steadfast endurance. I am not the only one who wants you dead, there are many men who wait to take my place for honor. So in this war make yourself ready, if you care, for every hour hence the enemy will be on your doorstep, and you will have to fight for your life. This is the war we Roman boys declare. Fear not the battle lines, nor a dreadful fight. It will be you and a single foe every time.”
BRUTUS
Brutus found himself shoulder to shoulder with Cassius after the act was done, a gash in his hand from where Cassius had tried to get a second strike at the dictator. “This is what happens to tyrants,” said Cassius, and then the clamor began.
In truth, Brutus had not planned what would happen after the success of the assassination, so he found himself swept up in the crowd, some of which wanted him dead, and the others who had been his allies. He could no longer tell who was who, and somebody had ran out of the curia shouting that Caesar was dead, which only caused more discord in the streets as the common people found out about their loss, and who had done it.
Brutus fled.
SCAEVOLA
The king was both angered and scared by the looming danger, so he ordered Muncius thrown in the fire, unless Muncius would reveal the Roman plots, set so vaguely in front of him.
“Look at me!” Muncius said. “See how little I value my body when great glory is put on the line.”
With that, he thrust his right hand into the sacrificial flames.
BRUTUS
He ended up in Cassius’s house as always, having his bleeding hand tended to by servants while Cassius monitored them closely.
“I didn’t mean to,” Cassius said, though that meant nothing when Brutus was dripping blood onto the couches they had reclined on just days earlier. He did not think he would ever be able to use his hand, and he thought that was funny, in a way.
Brutus held up his right hand, still bleeding, so the rivulets of blood ran down his arm in a fascinating pattern. “See how little I value my body when the fate of the country is at stake?”
“You never valued your body in the first place,” Cassius said sadly as he took Brutus’s wounded hand in his two healthy ones. It was more intimate than Brutus had thought it could have rightly been, but the care that was written on every line of Cassius’s face spoke for itself.
“Look at me,” Brutus said, cupping Cassius’s cheek with his one good hand. “You have nothing to apologize for. We succeeded today.”
Cassius looked as if he wanted to say something, but refrained from doing so. He shook his head and finished wrapping Brutus’s hand in linen himself.
SCAEVOLA
When his hand burned as if he could not feel it, then the king was moved by this audacity. He leapt up from his chair and ordered the boy removed from the altar, saying “Go you away, you who have harmed yourself more than me. I would find you a hero if you fought for my country, such is your valor. But you are my enemy, so I will send you away free and unhurt.”
BRUTUS
“We have to go away from here,” Cassius said. His voice sounded calm and measured, but there was an undercurrent of fear to him.
“It’ll make us look guilty,” Brutus said, thinking of how the conspirators had hid in the Capitoline after their march through the city, how Brutus’s hands were stained not with Caesar’s blood, but his own. How the crowd did not know that and whispered about men who clog the rivers with blood and refuse to wash afterwards.
“We are guilty,” Cassius said.
“We killed a king,” Brutus shot back. “Regicide is a noble cause.”
“But you're forgetting,” Cassius said. “He wasn’t a king. He was Caesar.”
Brutus let that sink in. How Caesar made himself more powerful than a god and yet never took on the name of monarchy. Because of that, Brutus never killed a king. He killed a powerful man, an autocrat, a dictator, but never a king, and though killing men like that was a noble deed, it was not one that granted him amnesty.
“We have to go quickly,” Brutus said.
SCAEVOLA
Then Muncius, as if he were giving a favor back, said “Since you hold bravery a virtue, I will tell you what no torture could have gotten out of me. There are three hundred of the boldest youths in Rome, all waiting for their turn to cut you down. Fate chose me first, and however the lots fall, we will attack you again and again, until Fortune has you dead.”
BRUTUS
And Antony had said at the funeral speech:
“Brutus is an honorable man. I would find him a hero if he fought for justice rather than the selfish whims of his friends, manipulated into the role of a tyrant killer by those still looking to the early republic for exemplars. But-” And here, a sneer: “He is an honorable man on a dishonorable mission. Did we refuse to fight Hannibal when we found he destroyed no temples? When long ago, the Gauls sacked our city, did we love them for their strength and submit eagerly? Brutus may be an honorable man, but honor can be found outside of those who love Rome.
Caesar too was an honorable man, and he died on the floor in front of a statue of the man he vanquished. Is that what honor buys a man? Caesar gave clemency to all who approached him- to Brutus, even- and he is now dead, given not even time to cover his face with his toga. Is that what honor buys a man?”
And Brutus had said: “We look to the past for examples of the present. My ancestor killed a king, and I was called for that duty just as he was, and so it is done, and so I grieve.” (Here, Brutus holds up his bloodied hand.) “I too lost my hand for the Republic, and I also have suffered great things to keep our nation intact. The man who laid on the senate floor was as much a father to me as he was to our country. You grieve for him, as is right to do.”
SCAEVOLA
From then on Muncius was known as Scaevola, because of the loss of his hand.
BRUTUS
Nobody would equate Brutus with Scaevola. Scaevola's deed was noble.