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, their social, moral, and religious foundations—had all predeceased Julius Caesar, eaten away by corruption, decadence, and the ancient Roman equivalent of insider trading—the running of the Republic as an enterprise of the aristocracy, by the aristocracy, for the aristocracy. In murdering Caesar, the conspirators were killing Rome’s greatest, most forward-looking 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 history 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 Austro-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, Franz 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 public works project by one Benito Mussolini nearly two millennia later.

What Caesar seems to have envisioned, many centuries before the concept even had a name, was a kind of constitutional monarchy. To give an idea of just how visionary this idea was in Caesar’s day, it was not applied by a major power in Western Europe until England’s so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, more than a millennium and a half after his death. Caesar’s political vision, besides coming centuries earlier, covered a far wider base: all free adult males in a Roman Imperium already encompassing considerable chunks of Europe, Africa, and Asia—a military, cultural, and economic colossus unrivaled to this day. As one mid-twentieth-century historian summed it up with a touch of hyperbole,

This conception of government, and Caesar’s reorganization of Rome and Italy, completed the miracle whereby the youthful spendthrift and roisterer had become one of the ablest, bravest, fairest, and most enlightened men in all the sorry annals of politics.

The man was that great rarity, a practical visionary. When, in his mid-fifties, not long before his assassination, he declared that, “I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory,” it was no idle boast. 

Within days of his death, the same fickle Roman mob that had passively acquiesced to Caesar’s murder was baying for the blood of the assassins. As Edward Gibbon pointed out in a little-read essay written after his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the conspirators had proved themselves woefully unequal to

…the arduous task [they] had so rashly undertaken, of restoring the commonwealth; instead of restoring it, the death of a mild and generous usurper [Julius Caesar] produced only a series of civil wars, and the reign of three tyrants whose union and whose discord were alike fatal to the Roman people.

The civil wars triggered by Julius Caesar’s assassination lasted fourteen years and form the backdrop for British author Peter Stothard’s clever, knowledgeable, sometimes idiosyncratic, and always evocative The Last Assassin. Much of the decisive action takes place at sea and the book itself—a mostly smooth blend of fact and intelligent imagination—resembles a form of hybrid rigging popular in the golden age of sail many centuries after Octavian—Julius Caesar’s nephew and adoptive son and heir, the future Caesar Augustus—defeated Mark Antony in a muddled naval engagement at Actium, thereby ending the Roman civil wars triggered by the assassination of Caesar.

Appropriately enough, the name of the rigging was inspired by a character from Greco-Roman mythology. Hermaphroditus, the legend goes, was the son of two deities, Hermes the Messenger and Aphrodite, Goddess of Love. He was so taken by the beauty of a nymph he spied one day a-bathing that the two intertwined forming a single being combining both sexes: the first Hermaphrodite. Thus, when eighteenth-century shipwrights developed a fast, trim craft that paired the square sails of a brig with the lateen sails of a schooner, they called it a Hermaphrodite Brig.

Stothard’s book is the literary equivalent of a Hermaphrodite Brig. It merges elements of two forms: scholarly history and historical novels. The result is a light, swift, highly mobile narrative, fleshing out real characters by fictional means grounded in the author’s sound, solid knowledge of his subject; a deft blend of narrative history and intelligent historical fiction. While either a longer, more fully developed historical novel, or a detailed, disciplined, strictly factual/analytical historical chronicle might have made for a more substantial work, The Last Assassin is achievement enough.

THE THREAD that ties sprawling locales and a teeming cast of characters together is the fate of Caesar’s assassins as, one by one, and sometimes in groups, they are hunted down by Caesar’s avengers, especially an impetuous Mark Antony and the cold, calculating Octavian. While tracking the lives and events surrounding many of the major historical figures of the period such as Cicero, Brutus, and Cassius, the most personalized—and fictionalized—parts of the book, including its opening and closing pages, focus on one of the B-list assassins, a competent mariner and shipwright who was also a minor literary man and epicurean philosopher, Cassius Parmensis. Parmensis’ insignificance is probably one of the reasons Stothard chose him as a sort of everyman protagonist. His very obscurity makes him a virtual tabula rasa, one Stothard can fill with his own opinions, interpretations, and speculations in a way that would have been impossible with a more familiar, documented, and self-defined historical figure.

Parmensis, Stothard informs us in his opening paragraphs,

…had been one of the lesser wielders of the daggers on the Ides of March, one of the common herd of conspirators, not a Brutus, not the other more famous Cassius, those men who were dead and already entering history. While, like others in the conspiracy, Parmensis was a writer of history himself, his name was not yet part of it. In his early forties, he was old enough respectably to retire. But, at a time when Caesar’s angry heir [Octavian] ruled supreme, he could not return to Italy, not to Rome, not to his once fertile home between the Rubicon and Po rivers. [In Athens] in the streets below the Acropolis, Parmensis had new admirers, a few former brothers-in-arms, even some readers for his poems and plays.

Since no written account by the real Parmensis has survived, much of the ensuing tale is seen by us third—rather than second—hand, through the eyes of a reconstituted Parmensis as imagined by Stothard. It is reminiscent of the British poet-novelist Robert Graves’ excellent historical novel Count Belisarius. A less celebrated (and never dramatized) work than his masterpiece, I Claudius, Count Belisarius recounts the career of the eponymous hero, the Emperor Justinian’s greatest military commander, from the perspective of a fictionalized court eunuch, as imagined by Robert Graves. But, eunuch aside, there was nothing hermaphroditic about Graves’ book; it was written and marketed as a pure, unambiguous historical novel.

Not so The Last Assassin, which its publishers describe rather vaguely as “an epic turn of history.” Fact, fiction, or mélange, Stothard is very good at summoning up the spirit of the moment and inserting his own clever asides without breaking the mood. In the case of the assassination of Caesar—a chaotic affair that quickly degenerated into something akin to a feeding frenzy of sharks, with predators attacking each other as well as their common prey—Stothard tells us that,

…Parmensis had struck his own dagger blow but whether it was on the body of Caesar or one of his fellow killers he could not be sure. All that most witnesses remembered, as though the act were an hour ago, was the blood on so much fine linen, the streams of red on white, like the misty end of a drinking party, no not quite like that. What it was like then was nothing like what it became.

There’s obviously a lot more Stothard in that last line than there is Parmensis, but it admirably fits the occasion. The same is true of this vignette from Caesar’s funeral, where the real body, the “diminished corpse,” takes a back seat to a surreal object that “looked much more like Caesar’s body” than the body itself, an object,

…so vivid that it could only be a model, an effigy in wax which turned on a spit so that each of the twenty-three wounds could be seen by those who delivered them. From beneath this eerie machine boomed another list, the names of the killers, slowly, individually … The voice was of an actor, hired by mourners or fired by passion of his own…

PERHAPS THAT actor was a distant ancestor of one of those spooky bit players in Fellini films, although there is almost as much suggestive of Sergei Eisenstein as Frederico Fellini in the author’s description of the scene. With the burial of Caesar, and Mark Antony’s reading of his will—or what Mark Antony chose to reveal of the will, since he didn’t share the document with anyone at the time—events moved swiftly. Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC. By the end of the next year, the assassins—the gang that couldn’t stab straight—fled Rome, and Mark Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus (the “Second Triumvirate”) were firmly in control of Rome and most of Italy. Meanwhile, Rome’s greatest orator, Cicero, finally found himself in a jam he couldn’t talk his way out of. As Caesar’s nephew, named in his will as adopted son and heir, Octavian had a vested interest in not only punishing Caesar’s murderers but also using their pursuit as a credential—certification that he was ordained by fate to be Caesar’s avenging son and, by implication, legitimate heir to Caesar’s role as head of the empire. Octavian’s pursuit and killing of the assassins—like Stalin’s pursuit and killing of Trotsky—was at once a purging of foes and a way of establishing himself as the ordained successor of Caesar.

Octavian might have been willing to make an exception of Cicero, since the latter had long denounced Caesar’s ambition but not actively participated in the assassination plot. But Mark Antony had a personal score to settle with the silver-tongued solon who had once declared that if “you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need,” even while making a fortune as a defense attorney specializing in defending wealthy, corrupt clients and indulging an insatiable appetite for amassing treasure and real estate. Cicero, who seems to have found his oratory almost as intoxicating as his listeners did, had indulged in a series of vitriolic speeches targeting Mark Antony. They were called “Philippics,” drawing a parallel to the Greek orator Demosthenes’ famous denunciations of Philip of Macedon as a barbarian threat to the Athenian, rather than Roman, republic.

When it comes to political invective, resentment rather than imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So deeply had Mark Antony resented Cicero’s barbs that, over Octavian’s mild objections, he ordered his pursuit and murder. Cicero tried to flee by sea, but he was not a good sailor and was so overcome by sea sickness that he had himself put ashore near his villa—one of many—at Formaiae. He seems to have had second thoughts the morning after, but they arrived too late. While being carried to the shore to re-embark he was overtaken by Mark Antony’s soldier-executioners. There, on a dusty road, according to Plutarch, “his person covered with dust, his beard and hair untrimmed, and his face worn with his troubles,” Cicero, finally at a loss for words, meekly yielded to his executioner. The head containing the silver tongue was severed from its body and delivered to Rome for public display along with Cicero’s right hand, presumably because it had been used to compose the offending speeches.

For his part, Octavian, while consolidating his own grip on power, never relented in his quest to bring Caesar’s actual assassins to what he considered justice. By the end of 42 BC, both lead assassins, Cassius and Brutus, had died by suicide after losing the dual Battles of Philippi to the joint forces of Mark Antony and Octavian. It is characteristic of the two victorious commanders that Mark Antony, a soldier’s soldier, was in the thick of the fighting while Octavian, feeling a bit under the weather, had viewed most of the action from the safety of a nearby swamp. Octavian ended up in charge of Rome and the heart of the empire while Mark Antony pursued dreams of eastern conquests that were consummated in Cleopatra’s boudoir rather than on the battlefields of Parthia.

By the end of 31 BC, Octavian, besides having dispatched most of Caesar’s assassins, had also disposed of his last serious rival for power, Mark Antony. At the rather farcical naval battle of Actium—in which the assassin Parmensis served—Mark Antony’s fleet was destroyed by Octavian’s technologically and tactically superior force. Octavian’s victory was made all the easier by the hasty departure of Cleopatra’s Egyptian fleet which was nominally allied to Mark Antony since his marriage to Cleopatra the previous year. Within another year, Cleopatra and Mark Antony had both committed suicide. Octavian, having formally annexed Egypt, was the undisputed ruler of an extended Roman Imperium.

THE LAST Assassin finishes where it began, with its title character experiencing uneasy night thoughts in his Athenian hideaway. As an epicurean,

In Athenian daylight he could remind himself that “death is nothing to me” … and that … “death brings neither pleasure nor pain.” In the darkness it was harder. At night, after the wind turned towards the sea and the scent of the flowers fell, he had begun to imagine a massive dark intruder disheveled and bearded, who would sever his head.

Parmensis’ primitive dream proved closer to the mark than his philosophical reflections for that was exactly how it ultimately came to pass: “Cassius Parmensis was the nineteenth and last assassin of Julius Caesar to die.” Octavian’s revenge was also Caesar’s. It turned out that the sickly eighteen-year-old nephew was a man with a plan and the single-minded determination to pursue it, doggedly and undistracted, while all around him seemingly braver, wiser, and cleverer men destroyed each other and themselves. Legitimacy was important to Octavian not only to secure his position as Caesar’s heir, but because his vision of Rome—similar but not identical to Caesar’s—hinged on reviving old Roman strengths and virtues. The restoration of duty, discipline, and devotion to ancestral values, and the grafting of them onto the citizens of a vast, multi-ethnic empire that had begun as a small, sturdy, and homogenous city-state, would occupy the man whom history now remembers as Caesar Augustus for the rest of a long, incredibly productive reign. It would also continue to give much to the world long after the golden age of the Pax Romana had been lost forever.

But as the great Augustan writer Livy noted, “Rome has so grown since its humble beginnings that it is now overwhelmed by its own greatness.” Perhaps the greatest of many Roman ironies is that Roman ideals—both republican and imperial—yielded their most impressive results when grafted onto sturdy stock elsewhere. The British Empire at its height was very much an Augustan venture, and our own founding fathers were inspired by many chapters from Roman history, not least the example of a Roman soldier patriot who saved the early republic, turned his back on power, and then returned to the shade of his own fig tree. His name was Cincinnatus and, when George Washington voluntarily retired after serving two terms as our first president, his grateful countrymen hailed him as the “American Cincinnatus.”

Efforts to channel the ancient Roman spirit closer to home were not always as successful. Benito Mussolini proclaimed a Second Roman Empire—which got no further than Albania and Ethiopia and, even there, didn’t last very long—and paid a great deal of lip service to Romanità (the concept of “Roman-ness”). But it mostly took the form of superficial trappings and grandiose public work projects. “Rome is our point of departure and reference,” Il Duce declared in 1922 on April 21, the traditional founding day of Rome. “It is our symbol or if you like, it is our Myth. We dream of Roman Italy, that is to say wise and strong, disciplined and imperial. Much of that which was the immortal spirit of Rome resurges in fascism.”

If you say so, Benito. The Italy that emerged from the renaissance into the modern world has made many contributions. As my friend Luigi Barzini wrote in his delightful, bittersweet book about his fellow countrymen, The Italians, 

Italians have discovered America for the Americans, taught poetry, statesmanship and the ruses of commerce to the English, military art to the Germans, cuisine to the French, acting and ballet dancing to the Russians, and music to everybody.

But there is one thing Italians have never really managed to accomplish. Caesar and Augustus—not to mention Mussolini—dreamed of transforming Italians into Romans. But in the end, the joke was on them. Instead of Italians turning into Romans, the Romans turned into Italians.

Aram Bakshian, Jr. served as an aide to presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan and has been widely published here and overseas on politics, history, gastronomy, and the arts.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.