The line in the play
The words most people know come from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in the first scene of the third act. The conspirators crowd around Caesar with a petition. In the stage direction of the Project Gutenberg text, Casca stabs Caesar in the neck, several other conspirators follow, and Marcus Brutus strikes last. Caesar speaks one line before he dies:
Et tu, Brute?
Then fall, Caesar!
The Folger Shakespeare edition numbers it as line 85 of the scene and prints the two halves on one line, joined by a dash and closed with a full stop where the Project Gutenberg text has an exclamation mark. The words are the same in both. In the play the line is the whole of Caesar’s answer to the attack. He makes no speech of protest and says no farewell; the stage direction simply has him die, and the senators and people retire in confusion.
The first half of the line is in Latin and the second half is in English, and it is the Latin half that people remember. To see why it has the shape it does, it helps to take the words apart and then to look at what the ancient historians actually wrote.
Why “Brute” and not “Brutus”
Latin changes the ending of a noun according to its job in the sentence. When a person is being spoken to directly, the noun takes a form called the vocative. Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar, published online by Dickinson College Commentaries, explains that nouns of the second declension ending in -us keep an old -e in the vocative singular. Its example is the word for a slave: servus becomes serve when someone is addressed.
Brutus is a name of exactly that type, so a Latin speaker addressing him would say Brute. The final letter is not a misprint, an English spelling or a nickname. It is ordinary Latin grammar, and it signals that Caesar is speaking to Brutus directly, not about him.
The other two words are short and common. Tu is “you”, said to one person. Et is most familiar as “and”; at the head of a question like this one it carries the sense of “you as well” or “even you”. Read together, the Latin half of the line asks: you too, Brutus? This guide offers that reading of the two small words as a plain gloss rather than from a cited dictionary. The comparison with the Greek below shows the same pattern in the ancient texts.
The words the ancient writers recorded
Three ancient writers tell the story of Caesar’s murder at length: Suetonius in his Life of Julius Caesar, Plutarch in his Lives of Caesar and of Brutus, and Cassius Dio in Book 44 of his Roman History. None of them gives the Latin words et tu, Brute.
Suetonius comes closest. In the Loeb translation by J. C. Rolfe he says that Caesar died uttering not a word, but merely a groan at the first stroke
. Then he adds a second version, carefully marked as other people’s report: though some have written that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him, he said in Greek
, and the words follow in translation:
You too, my child?
In the Latin text of Suetonius, the Greek is printed in Greek letters inside the Latin sentence: καὶ σὺ τέκνον
, which can be written in Roman letters as kai su teknon. The first two words, kai su, are what Rolfe translates as “you too”. They line up word for word with the Latin et tu: a small word for “and” or “also”, then the word for “you”.
Cassius Dio reports the same question in the same hedged way. In the Loeb translation of 1916, after describing a silent death, Dio comments This is the truest account
, and then notes that some writers added a remark to Brutus:
Thou, too, my son?
Plutarch, the third writer, gives no words to Brutus at all. In his Life of Caesar the only words Caesar speaks during the attack are addressed to Casca, the first attacker, in Latin. The reading on Caesar’s last words compares the three accounts in detail.
“My child” or “my son”?
Rolfe’s Suetonius has “my child” and the Loeb Dio has “my son”. Both are fair renderings of the same Greek word. The Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott, published online by the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University, defines τέκνον (teknon) as “child”. It adds that in Homer the singular appears only when someone is being addressed, as a form of address from elders to younger people, which the lexicon renders as my son, my child
.
That usage matters for how the remark has been read. An older man calling a younger one teknon need not be claiming to be his father: the word can be affectionate, familiar or reproachful without saying anything about family. At the same time, the ancient writers knew a story that Caesar believed Brutus might be his son, which gives the word a sharper edge for some readers. Plutarch tells that story in his Life of Brutus, and the reading on Brutus sets out exactly what he says and how cautiously he says it. The lexicon cannot settle which sense, if any, was meant. It only shows the range the word could carry.
A Latin line with no ancient source
Put the pieces together and an odd fact appears. The ancient tradition, where it gives Caesar any words for Brutus, gives them in Greek, and both writers who report them say plainly that they are passing on what others said. The Latin form et tu, Brute is not found in any of the three ancient accounts this guide uses. It is the form found in Shakespeare’s play, and for English readers the play is where the line comes from.
The Folger Shakespeare Library notes that Julius Caesar was first published in the First Folio of 1623 and that this text is the source of all later editions. Every printed “Et tu, Brute?” in an edition of the play goes back to that printing. Whether Shakespeare took the Latin wording from somewhere else or chose it himself is a question this guide leaves open: none of the sources it relies on answers it, so it makes no claim either way.
In short
The Latin words are Shakespeare’s line. The ancient question is in Greek, it is reported as hearsay, and the two writers who report it both say first that Caesar died without a speech.
Example: one sentence, two languages
Worked example
This example shows how the Suetonius passage is built, using his Latin text and Rolfe’s translation side by side. It describes no real reader or classroom.
The Latin sentence reads, in part, etsi tradiderunt quidam Marco Bruto irruenti dixisse
, followed by the Greek words. Rolfe renders that part as though some have written that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him, he said in Greek
. Three things are worth noticing. First, tradiderunt quidam, which this guide glosses as “some have handed down”, puts the report at arm’s length. Second, Brutus is described as rushing at Caesar; the sentence does not say that he had struck yet. Third, Suetonius switches language mid-sentence and keeps the Greek in Greek letters, so the quoted words stand out from his own Latin.
What to say when someone quotes it
None of this makes the line less powerful. It makes it more interesting. A careful way to put it is this: in Shakespeare’s play, Caesar’s last words are “Et tu, Brute?”; in the ancient historians, he died with a groan or in silence, or, as some reported, asked Brutus in Greek whether he too was among the attackers. The play compressed a hedged, two-language, disputed story into three Latin words and one line of English, and that version is the one the world remembers.
Next: The Ides of March, 44 BC, as the ancient writers tell it