What Really Happened to the Men Who Killed Julius Caesar?

What does a person who kills the world’s most powerful and feared man think will happen next? Most likely that everything will be over. That is exactly what the senators who stabbed Julius Caesar in 44 BC thought. They believed Rome was now free and would return to its former glory. But what actually happened was very different.

Because the events that began after Caesar’s death had even greater consequences than the assassination itself. Almost none of those involved in the assassination were ever able to live a normal life again. Imagine a life spent constantly on edge without a moment’s peace. Some tried to flee but were captured. For others, the humiliation did not end even after their deaths.

So, what really happened that day? And most importantly, what became of the people who killed Julius Caesar? Before we begin, I have a small request. If you enjoy learning about little-known events in history, please subscribe to the channel. Now that you are ready, let us uncover all the truths about what happened after Caesar’s death together.

On the 15th of March in the year 44 BC, a group of Roman senators surrounded Julius Caesar in a hall attached to the Theater of Pompey and stabbed him to death. Ancient writers tell us he was struck 23 times and that only one of those wounds, a blow to the chest, was actually fatal. The rest came from a crowd of men who were not trained killers and who in the panic and the crush of bodies sometimes wounded each other.

One of them drove a blade into the hand of Marcus Brutus, one of the ringleaders, by mistake. We do not know exactly how many men took part. The most commonly repeated ancient figure is around 60. These men believed that by killing one person, they could bring back the old Roman Republic. They were wrong. And nearly every one of them would pay for that mistake with his life in ways that ranged from the tragic to the grotesque.

This is an account of what happened next. Not to Caesar, whose death is famous, but to the men who killed him. Because the truly remarkable part of this whole affair is not the murder. It is that within a little over a decade, almost every single man who plotted against Caesar was dead. And not one of them died peacefully of old age.

Some fell in battle. Some were hunted down and beheaded. One was betrayed by a friend for money. One simply vanished from the record entirely. To understand how that happened, we have to start with the mistake they made in the first hour. The conspirators had planned the killing with great care.

They had decided who would draw Caesar aside, who would strike first, how they would surround him. What they had not planned at all was what to do the moment he was dead. There was no prepared speech, no chosen successor, no message sent to Caesar’s veterans, the tens of thousands of soldiers who adored him and had been promised land and money.

The entire strategy of the men who had just murdered the most powerful person in the Roman world rested on a single assumption. They believed that once the tyrant was gone, the republic would repair itself and a grateful people would carry them through the streets as heroes. So, after the killing, Brutus and the others walked out into the forum with their bloody daggers raised expecting cheers.

What they got was silence. The crowd did not understand what these men thought they had done. Ordinary Romans did not see a liberated republic. They saw the murder of the man who had given them grain, entertainment, and the promise of land killed by a group of wealthy senators who offered them nothing but a word, liberty.

Brutus climbed the speaker’s platform and gave a careful speech about freedom and the dignity of the Roman citizen. These were noble ideas, but the crowd watched him with suspicion because many of them remembered what Rome had been like the last time it lost a strong leader. Decades of civil war, proscriptions, and slaughter.

Caesar had ended that chaos. Now these men had brought it back and by the end of the day they understood the mood had turned. By nightfall, the liberators of Rome were not being carried on shoulders. They were barricaded inside a temple on the Capitoline Hill hiding from the very city they claimed to have freed.

There was one man whose survival would shape everything that followed and he was not even a conspirator. Mark Antony, Caesar’s loyal second in command and fellow consul, had been deliberately kept outside the hall in conversation while the murder happened. Some of the plotters had wanted to kill him, too. Brutus had refused, insisting the killing be limited to Caesar alone, so that it would look like justice, rather than a massacre.

That decision would prove to be one of the most consequential acts of mercy in Roman history. Antony, at first, did not feel safe. He fled home, and according to the sources, he exchanged his senator’s toga for the plain clothing of an ordinary man, and barred his doors, waiting for killers who never came. But by the next morning, he had grasped something the conspirators had not.

No one was hunting him. And if no one was hunting him, then no one was standing in his way. Antony moved with speed and skill. He went to Caesar’s widow and secured two things worth more than any army. Caesar’s private papers and Caesar’s will. He took control of Caesar’s house, and crucially, the state treasury.

He gathered veterans around him. Much of this was not strictly legal, but there was no one left with the authority or the nerve to stop him. In the space of a few days, the man who had hidden in disguise became the most powerful figure in Rome. And he had done it without drawing a sword. The conspirators made another fatal error.

They allowed Caesar to have a public funeral, and they allowed Antony to give the speech. Brutus could have forbidden it. He did not because he still believed in the forms of the old republic, in due process and public ceremony. Antony understood something Brutus did not. That a funeral could be a weapon.

What happened next is one of the most famous scenes in Roman history. And while the ancient accounts differ on the details, they agree on the effect. Antony had Caesar’s will read aloud to the people. In it, Caesar left money to every citizen of Rome and opened his private gardens for public use. The generosity of a dead man landed on the crowd like a slap.

Then Antony spoke. He did not rant. He listed the honors the Senate itself had granted Caesar and let the silence do its work. According to some accounts, he displayed Caesar’s blood-stained robe, holding it up and pointing to each tear left by each dagger. Other accounts describe a wax image of the body turned so the crowd could see every wound.

Whatever the exact staging, the result was an explosion. The grief of the crowd caught fire and the fire became literal. The people built a pyre in the forum from whatever they could tear loose and burn Caesar’s body then and there. Then they turned into a mob and went hunting for the conspirators. In the chaos, they caught a man named Cinna, an innocent poet who happened to share a name with one of the plotters.

He shouted his real name and profession. They tore him apart anyway. By the end of that night, the men who had killed Caesar were fugitives and Rome was no longer safe for any of them. Far from Rome in a town across the Adriatic, the news reached an 18-year-old who almost no one in the city had been paying attention to.

His name was Gaius Octavius. He was thin, often ill, unremarkable to look at, and he was Caesar’s great nephew. Caesar’s will did more than leave him money. It named him as Caesar’s adopted son and principal heir. Overnight, this teenager inherited both the largest private fortune in the Roman world, and far more dangerous, the name Caesar, and the loyalty that name carried among hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

Everyone around him told him to refuse it. The inheritance was a death sentence, they said. Walk away. Stay alive. The soldiers told him the opposite, to march on Italy at once and seize everything by force. He did neither. He went to Rome quietly, took the name of his adoptive father, and began patiently to claim what was his.

From this point on, the boy called Octavius increasingly styled himself Caesar, and history would come to know him by a title he had not yet earned. Augustus. The conspirators had killed one Caesar. They had, without knowing it, created another, and this one would outlast every single one of them. For a time, the young Caesar and Antony were rivals.

Antony had the treasury and the veterans, and treated the teenager with open contempt, snearing that the boy owed everything to a mere name. But Octavian was patient and far cleverer than anyone expected. He spent his own inherited money paying the gifts Caesar had promised the people, buying loyalty that Antony, sitting on the treasury, refused to spend.

Within months, the balance of power had begun to shift toward the boy. Then, in the year 43 BC, the three most powerful military men in the Roman world did something that changed everything for the conspirators. Antony, Octavian, and a general named Lepidus met and formed an official alliance to rule the state together, an arrangement history calls the Second Triumvirate.

They needed money to pay their enormous armies, and they needed to destroy their enemies. They solved both problems at once with a single horrifying instrument, the proscriptions. A proscription was a published list of names. Any man whose name appeared on it was declared an outlaw. He could be killed by anyone, his property seized, and a reward paid to whoever brought in his head.

It was murder made legal and profitable. The lists went up in the forum, and Rome became a place where a man could be betrayed by his own slaves, his own freedmen, even his own family, for the price on his head. To seal their alliance, each of the three men agreed to give up someone of his own, and the most famous name sacrificed was not even one of Caesar’s killers.

Cicero was the greatest orator of the age and the last great voice of the old republic. He had not taken part in the assassination, but he had thrown the enormous weight of his words against Antony in a series of blistering public speeches, and Antony wanted him dead. Octavian, who had once relied on Cicero’s support and protection, gave him up.

It is one of the coldest moments in his long career. Cicero tried to flee to the coast and escape by sea. According to the ancient accounts, he was seasick, turned back, and hesitated fatally. His hiding place was betrayed. The soldiers who caught him on the road were led, by a grim irony the sources note, by a man Cicero had once defended in court.

Cicero, aging and tired, is said to have leaned his head out of his litter, bared his neck, and told the soldiers to strike properly. They took his head and, on the express orders of Antony, his hands, the hands that had written the speeches against him. The head and hands were carried back to Rome and nailed up on the speaker’s platform, where Cicero had delivered those very speeches.

The ancient writers add a detail so cruel it has never been forgotten. Antony’s wife, Fulvia, is said to have taken the severed head, pulled out the tongue, and stabbed it repeatedly with a pin from her hair, taking revenge on the voice that had wounded her husband. Cicero was not a conspirator.

He was simply the man the new masters of Rome most wanted silenced. His death was the warning. Now the hunt for the actual killers began in earnest. Consider the fates of the men who had actually held the daggers. Gaius Trebonius has a grim distinction. His only job on the day of the murder had been to keep Antony talking outside the door, and he may have been the first of the conspirators to die.

While governing province in the East, he was captured by Caesar’s supporters. The sources say he was tortured for information over some days before being killed, and that afterward, soldiers treated his severed head as a plaything, kicking it through the streets. Decimus Brutus deserves particular attention because Caesar had trusted him deeply.

It was Decimus who had personally persuaded Caesar to go to the Senate that morning, talking him out of staying home when warnings and bad omens had made him hesitate. Caesar had trusted him so completely that he was named in the will as a secondary heir. When the wars turned against him, Decimus tried to flee across the Alps in disguise.

He was captured by a local chieftain who had once been his friend. The chieftain sent a message to Antony asking what to do. The reply was death. The man who had convinced Caesar to walk into that room was killed because another friend decided a reward was worth more than loyalty. These were not clean deaths in battle.

They were the deaths of hunted men, run down one by one, betrayed by people they had trusted. And still the two most important conspirators were alive and gathering an army. Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius, the two leaders of the conspiracy, had fled East and raised a large army. If the Republic was going to be restored by force, it would be here.

But before the final battle, the ancient writers record something strange about Brutus, a scene they clearly found unsettling. Plutarch tells us that one night, as Brutus sat awake by a single lamp, a monstrous and silent figure appeared in his tent. When Brutus asked what it was, it answered that it was his evil spirit, and that he would see it again at Philippi.

Then, it vanished. A dream, a fever, guilt working on a tired mind. We can read it however we like. But the ancient audience understood it as an omen, and the omen kept its promise. The two armies met at Philippi, in Macedonia, in the year 42 BC, in what was really two battles spread over about 3 weeks.

In the first, the fighting was confused and split. On one part of the field, Brutus actually broke through and overran the enemy camp. But on the other part, Cassius was defeated by Antony, and here the confusion turned fatal. Cassius, whose eyesight was poor, saw a body of horsemen riding toward his friend and assumed they were enemies come to capture him.

In fact, they were friends bringing good news. Believing all was lost, Cassius covered his face and had one of his own men kill him. He died because of a misunderstanding on the very day that part of his cause had not yet been lost. When Brutus found the body, he is said to have called Cassius the last of the Romans.

Three weeks later, came the second battle at Philippi. This time, Brutus was pushed into fighting before he was ready, by soldiers impatient for a decision. His line broke. By nightfall, the cause of the conspirators was finished. Brutus escaped into the hills with a small group of loyal officers. He spent the night by a fire, and then, rather than be captured, he chose to die.

He asked one companion after another to hold a sword so he could run onto it. Several refused. At last, one held it steady, and Brutus killed himself. He was in his early 40s. Antony, who found the body the next morning, is said to have covered it with his own fine cloak, a gesture of respect for a defeated enemy.

Whatever else Brutus had been, and the ancient world argued fiercely over whether he was a hero or a murderer, he had been sincere in his belief that he was saving the Republic. That belief had now cost him everything, and it had saved nothing. With Brutus dead, the organized resistance was over.

But the count of the conspirators was not quite complete, and the last chapters are the strangest of all. Take the case of Casca. He was, by tradition, the man who struck the very first blow against Caesar, the one who began it all. And yet, after Philippi, Casca simply disappears from the record. There is no account of his capture, no report of his death, no grave.

A man whose dagger opened the most famous assassination in history vanishes from history without a trace. We do not know how or when he died. He is simply gone. And then, there is the last man standing. His name was Cassius of Parma, a minor figure in the plot, barely mentioned in most accounts of the murder itself.

Yet, he outlived every other conspirator. For years, he survived in exile in a world steadily being swallowed by the young Caesar. The ancient writers say that in his final years, he too was visited, like Brutus, by a dark and silent figure in the night. A phantom that came to him without a word. Guilt, legend, or invention, the sources found it fitting that the last of Caesar’s killers should be haunted by the same kind of specter that had haunted the first of them to fall.

In the year 30 BC, 14 years after the daggers came out in Pompey’s Hall, Octavian’s men finally tracked Cassius of Parma down in Athens and killed him. He was the last. 60 men, or thereabouts, had stood together on the Ides of March, convinced they were ending a tyranny. It had taken 14 years and two civil wars, but now every one of them was gone.

Not a single one had lived long enough to die of old age in peace. Step back and consider what these men had actually achieved. They had killed Julius Caesar because they feared he would make himself a king and destroy the Republic. And here is the terrible irony that hangs over everything. In killing him, they did not save the Republic. They destroyed it.

The chaos that followed the assassination, the proscriptions, the civil wars, the hunting down of the conspirators, all of it cleared the field of every rival until only one man was left standing. The thin, sickly teenager they had never thought to fear. Octavian, now calling himself Caesar, would defeat even Antony in the end and become the first Roman emperor under the name Augustus.

The republic the conspirators had died to protect was gone forever. In its place stood exactly the thing they had killed to prevent. One man ruling alone. Every one of them died for a republic that was already gone. And the throne they had committed murder to keep empty was filled anyway by a man who watched them destroy each other and then quietly sat down upon it.

As you can see from what we just saw, Julius Caesar’s assassins believed that their actions would change the fate of Rome. But the irony is that in fact, the only thing that changed was Rome’s ruler. While trying to save the republic, they unwittingly paved the way for the imperial era. Perhaps this is one of the most fascinating aspects of history.

Sometimes people believe with all their hearts that they are doing the right thing. But in the end, the outcome turns out to be the exact opposite of what they expected. Before I wrap up, I would like to leave you with one final question. If you had lived during that time and truly believed that Caesar was a threat to Rome, would you have drawn that dagger, too?