Marcus Junius Brutus

Marcus Junius Brutus was born in 85 BCE into one of Rome's most self-conscious political families. The Junii Bruti claimed descent from Lucius Junius Brutus, the semi-legendary figure credited with expelling Rome's last king in 509 BCE and founding the Republic ^[1]. That ancestry was not a private matter of pride. Statues, coins, and public rhetoric kept the memory alive, and contemporaries expected any Brutus to carry the family's anti-monarchical reputation into public life ^[2].

His father, also named Marcus Junius Brutus, supported the rebel commander Marcus Aemilius Lepidus and was put to death in 77 BCE on the orders of Pompey the Great, a killing the son never forgave ^[1]. His mother, Servilia, was one of the most politically astute women of the late Republic and, for many years, the mistress of Julius Caesar. That connection gave rise to ancient gossip, repeated by Plutarch, that Caesar might have been Brutus's natural father, though the chronology makes this very unlikely ^[3].

After his father's death, Brutus was raised in the household of his uncle Cato the Younger, the Stoic senator who became the era's loudest defender of traditional republican government. Cato supervised his education, and Brutus absorbed both his uncle's philosophical seriousness and his hostility to concentrated power ^[2]. He studied rhetoric and philosophy at Athens, developing a lifelong attachment to the Academic school of Greek philosophy, and later wrote treatises on virtue and duty that survive only in fragments ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Marcus Junius Brutus in the 50s BCE would have found a rising aristocrat with a mixed record. He began his public career in 58 BCE as an assistant to Cato during the annexation of Cyprus, and in the same period he lent money at ruinous interest to the city of Salamis on that island. When the affair surfaced years later, the governor Cicero was startled to find that Brutus's agents had demanded 48 percent interest, four times the legal rate, and had used cavalry to besiege the local council ^[5].

Despite that episode, Brutus cultivated a reputation for learning and gravity. He was admitted to the college of pontiffs, married Claudia, daughter of the senator Appius Claudius Pulcher, and became known as a capable orator in a generation that prized eloquence above almost every other skill ^[2]. Cicero, the leading stylist of the age, dedicated several works to him, including the dialogue on oratory that bears his name, the Brutus ^[4].

When civil war broke out between Caesar and Pompey in 49 BCE, Brutus faced a hard choice. Pompey had killed his father, yet Cato and the senatorial cause stood with Pompey. Brutus chose the Republic over the grudge and joined Pompey's camp ^[1]. After Caesar's victory at Pharsalus in 48 BCE, he wrote to the victor, received a prompt pardon, and entered Caesar's service. Caesar made him governor of Cisalpine Gaul in 46 BCE and city praetor for 44 BCE, marks of exceptional favor ^[3].

By early 44 BCE Caesar had been named dictator for life, and the offices, honors, and rituals accumulating around him looked to many senators like monarchy in all but name. Graffiti appeared on the statue of the ancestral Lucius Junius Brutus and on the praetor's own tribunal, urging him to live up to his name ^[3]. Gaius Cassius Longinus, his brother-in-law and a hardened soldier, pressed him to lead a conspiracy, knowing that the Brutus name would give the plot moral cover that Cassius alone could not supply ^[1].

More than sixty senators eventually joined. On 15 March 44 BCE, the Ides of March, they surrounded Caesar at a Senate meeting held in the Curia of Pompey and stabbed him twenty three times ^[2]. Plutarch and Suetonius both record the tradition that Caesar ceased to resist when he saw Brutus among the attackers. Suetonius reports, while doubting it, the story that Caesar's last words were a Greek phrase meaning "you too, child", the remark that later hardened into the Latin tag "Et tu, Brute" through Shakespeare ^[3].

The conspirators had planned the killing carefully but had no plan for what followed. Brutus insisted, against Cassius's advice, that Mark Antony be spared, arguing that the group were tyrannicides, not butchers. Antony survived, delivered Caesar's funeral oration, and turned the Roman crowd against the assassins. Within weeks Brutus and Cassius found it unsafe to remain in Italy ^[1].

Brutus divorced his first wife Claudia in 45 BCE and married his cousin Porcia, the daughter of Cato, who had died at Utica the previous year rather than accept Caesar's pardon. The marriage joined the two most prominent names of the republican opposition, and ancient writers treated Porcia as a full partner in her husband's politics. Plutarch tells the famous story that she wounded her own thigh to prove she could keep the secret of the conspiracy ^[3]. Accounts of her death vary; the best known tradition holds that she killed herself after Brutus's defeat, though some sources place her death earlier, from illness ^[2].

Away from politics Brutus was a genuine intellectual. He wrote philosophical works with titles such as On Virtue and On Duties, composed poetry, and produced summaries of Roman historians ^[4]. His prose style was deliberately austere. Cicero, who favored fuller rhythms, teased him about it in their correspondence, some of which survives and offers a rare window into the friendship and friction between the two men ^[5].

Among the Marcus Junius Brutus facts that surprise modern readers, his financial hardness ranks high. The Salamis loan scandal sits awkwardly beside his philosophical writings on virtue, and historians have long debated whether the contradiction reflects ordinary aristocratic practice or a real flaw in his character ^[5].

Leaving Italy in the summer of 44 BCE, Brutus went east and set about building an army. He seized control of Macedonia and Greece, won over legions stationed in the region, and raised money from provincial cities, sometimes brutally. He minted coinage to pay his troops, including a famous silver denarius showing his own portrait on one side and, on the other, a liberty cap between two daggers above the legend EID MAR, the Ides of March ^[6]. Putting his own face on a coin was, ironically, a practice Caesar had pioneered.

In Rome, Antony and Caesar's heir Octavian formed the Second Triumvirate with Lepidus in 43 BCE, outlawed the assassins, and killed hundreds of their supporters in the proscriptions, Cicero among them ^[1]. In 42 BCE the triumvirs crossed to Greece with a massive army. The two sides met at Philippi in Macedonia in October of that year.

The campaign was decided in two battles about three weeks apart. In the first, Brutus's wing broke through Octavian's camp while Antony overran Cassius's position; Cassius, misinformed about the overall result, killed himself. In the second battle, on 23 October 42 BCE, Antony and Octavian defeated Brutus decisively. He escaped with a remnant of his force, concluded that the cause was finished, and died by suicide, reportedly with the help of a companion who held the sword ^[2]. He was around 43 years old. Antony, by most accounts, treated the body with respect and had it cremated, sending the ashes to Servilia ^[3].

Few Romans have been judged so differently by different ages. To the ancient defenders of the Republic, and to many later republicans, Brutus was the model of principled resistance to tyranny. To others he was the archetype of ingratitude, the man who killed a benefactor. Dante placed him, with Cassius and Judas Iscariot, in the mouths of Satan at the very bottom of the Inferno, the harshest verdict in Western literature ^[7]. Three centuries later Shakespeare reversed the picture in Julius Caesar, presenting him as an honest idealist undone by his own scruples and giving Antony the line calling him "the noblest Roman of them all" ^[8].

Among Marcus Junius Brutus achievements, the assassination itself is the act history remembers, yet its practical result was the opposite of what he intended. The removal of Caesar did not restore the Republic; it opened thirteen more years of civil war that ended with Octavian, renamed Augustus, holding more complete power than Caesar ever had ^[1]. Historians still debate whether the Republic could have been saved by 44 BCE at all, or whether Brutus was defending a constitution that had already stopped working ^[2].

Any Marcus Junius Brutus biography must also reckon with what survives of the man himself: fragments of his philosophy, letters exchanged with Cicero, the EID MAR coins now prized as some of the most historically charged objects of the ancient world, and a name that entered common speech as shorthand for betrayal ^[6]. The evidence shows neither a monster nor a saint, but a Roman aristocrat who took his family's legend seriously enough to kill for it, and then to die for it.