"Brutus, the Noble Conspirator" Topic

"Marcus Junius Brutus is one of the great names of Roman history. Central to the notorious conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of the dictator Julius Caesar on the Ides of March 44 BC, Brutus gave brief hope to those who longed for the restoration of republican government. Yet by August of the same year he was on his way from Italy to the Greek east; a little over two years later he had committed suicide in the face of defeat at the hands of Mark Antony and Octavian at the Battle of Philippi. Civil war did not come to an end with the death of Brutus, but now it was merely a conflict between rival dynasts. The republican system was dead.

Roman aristocrats of this period were acutely aware of the virtues of their ancestors. Brutus himself claimed descent on his father's side from Lucius Junius Brutus, who expelled Tarquin the Proud in 509 BC and was one of the two consuls for the first year of the Roman republic. Tracing the lineage of his mother, Servilia, Brutus could point to Servilius Ahala, who in 439 BC killed Spurius Maelius on the grounds that he was aspiring to tyranny. Yet in Brutus' own time it was not always so easy to decide who represented the better cause. When civil war broke out in 49 BC, Brutus was an instinctive supporter of the senate in its opposition to the demands of Julius Caesar. Yet to do so meant serving under a man – Pompeius Magnus – who had murdered Brutus' father when Brutus was no more than five and whom Brutus had openly attacked for his subversion of the republican constitution. If Caesar represented a worse cause still, he was also so close an intimate of Servilia that rumours circulated in antiquity that he was Brutus' true father…."
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Amicalement
Armand

There was nothing noble about Brutus. He was a murderer. Idealists are dangerous people.

Good book. I knew/know a little bit of Roman history and this helped me understand what was going on at this very specific point in time. Some people might label pragmatists as dangerous people too.

In history doing anything, including nothing can be extremely dangerous.

Rome had stumbled from political crisis to crisis for decades and in a system that could not be reformed due to social/political inertia something had to give until somebody came up with a workable solution.

Caesar was a radical who saw major opportunities and grabbed them, just as Brutus believed everything could nominally remain the same if the wrong people would go away.

They both represent the wrong answer to a problem neither understood. Caesar believed he could become the dictator of Rome and restore order, Brutus believed the genie could be put back into the bottle and the system would revert to whatever glorious period of perfection he was deluded to believe had existed at some point.

Brutus and the liberators could have bought the republic a reprieve, but sooner or later the system would come back for another cycle until either somebody made huge reforms or introduced personal rule.

It's hard to gauge if Brutus truly was an idealist or merely somebody who tried to put a halt to the ambitions of Caesar and hoped to get at least some of the perks of these actions. If Octavian and Mark Anthony had ever learned a key lesson it's that it pays off to show respect and pardon the defeated side. To pay tribute to Brutus and portray him as a noble Roman went a long way to ease things in the aftermath of the Civil War.

In the end Octavian as Augustus brought a much needed hotfix to Rome's problems and I seriously doubt that Brutus and the liberators would have had the foresight to implement any kind of solution other than pine for some long lost ideal period of the Republic and brace for the next political crisis.

Interesting….

Amicalement
Armand