Who Marcus Brutus was, and why his part in the plot stung

Two men called Brutus

The Brutus of “Et tu, Brute?” is Marcus Junius Brutus. He was not the only Brutus in the plot. Suetonius names the leaders of the conspiracy as Gaius Cassius and Marcus and Decimus Brutus, and Decimus played a central part on the day itself: he is the man who, in all three ancient accounts, persuaded Caesar to leave his house and go to the Senate. Cassius Dio says Decimus was also called Junius and Albinus, and Plutarch calls him Decimus Brutus Albinus and says Caesar trusted him enough to name him as a second heir in his will. Shakespeare calls him Decius Brutus.

Both men had received favours from Caesar, and Dio says so of Decimus in as many words. But it is Marcus whom the later tradition remembers as the betrayer, and it is Marcus whose life Plutarch wrote. This reading follows him through the ancient sources, mainly Plutarch’s Life of Brutus.

A name with a history

Plutarch opens his Life of Brutus with an ancestor. Marcus Brutus, he says, was descended from the Junius Brutus who drove out the Tarquins, the kings of early Rome, and whose bronze statue, sword in hand, stood on the Capitol. Plutarch notes that enemies of Marcus denied the descent, because the old Brutus had put his own sons to death; he reports the philosopher Poseidonius’ answer that a third son, an infant, survived.

The name mattered in 44 BC because Caesar was suspected of wanting to be king. Dio describes how people who wanted Brutus to act played on it: they called out We need a Brutus. and wrote on his official seat the slogans Brutus, thou sleepest and Thou art not Brutus. Plutarch, in his Life of Caesar, reports the same kind of writing on Brutus’ tribunal. Suetonius quotes verses that set the first Brutus, who drove out the kings and became consul, against Caesar, who had driven out the consuls and was now made king. The point of all of it was pressure: a man with that ancestor was expected to act against anyone who looked like a king.

Dante noticed the doubling too. In the first circle of his Inferno, among the virtuous pagans, he places that Brutus who drove Tarquin forth, while Marcus Brutus is at the very bottom of hell. The reading on betrayal returns to that contrast.

Family and character

Brutus’ mother was Servilia. Plutarch says she was the sister of Cato, whom he calls Cato the philosopher, and that Cato was Brutus’ uncle and later his father-in-law, the man he admired more than any other Roman. Dio says the same about the relationship to Cato, and tells the story of Brutus’ wife Portia, Cato’s daughter, who wounded her own thigh to prove that she could keep a secret under pain, and so was told of the plot.

Plutarch draws Brutus as a man shaped by philosophy, especially the followers of Plato, and contrasts him with the hard original Brutus: the new one, he says, had tempered his nature with learning. He also reports a remark Caesar made after first hearing Brutus speak in public:

Enemy, pardoned, promoted

When civil war broke out between Caesar and Pompey, Brutus might have been expected to take Caesar’s side. Plutarch says his father had been put to death at Pompey’s instigation, and that Brutus had refused even to speak to Pompey. He joined Pompey anyway, Plutarch says, because he judged Pompey’s cause the better one for the state.

Caesar, according to Plutarch, ordered his officers not to kill Brutus in battle, and to take him prisoner only if he surrendered of his own accord. After Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus, which the Loeb editor’s notes date to August of 48 BC, Brutus escaped and wrote to Caesar, who not only pardoned him, but actually made him a highly honoured companion. Caesar later gave him charge of Cisalpine Gaul and, in a contest with Cassius, the most prestigious praetorship of the city. Plutarch reports Caesar’s judgment on that contest: Cassius had the better claim, but Brutus must have the post.

That is the background to the sting of the story. By the ancient accounts, Brutus was not simply a political opponent who struck a tyrant. He was a former enemy whose life Caesar had spared and whose career Caesar had advanced.

The story that he was Caesar’s son

Two ancient writers connect Caesar with Brutus’ mother. Suetonius, in a passage about Caesar’s love affairs, writes:

Plutarch goes further, but with care. He says that Caesar’s order to spare Brutus in battle was made out of regard for Servilia, that Caesar had been intimate with her when he was young, and that he had some grounds for believing that Brutus, who was born at about the time when her passion was in full blaze, was his own son. The sentence is hedged twice: Plutarch introduces it with “as it seems”, and what he reports is Caesar’s belief, not a fact about Brutus’ birth.

This is the passage that gives the Greek word teknon, “child”, its sharpest possible reading, and the guide’s reading on the last words explains why the word does not need it. The honest summary is that an ancient writer reports a belief, that the remark to Brutus is itself reported only as hearsay, and that nothing in the sources joins the two together.

Why he joined the plot

Plutarch is clear that Caesar sometimes suspected Brutus and still trusted him. When people warned him against Brutus, Caesar is reported to have touched his chest and said What? Think ye not that Brutus can wait for this poor flesh?, meaning that Brutus was the natural successor and had no need to hurry.

For the motive, Plutarch puts much of the weight on Cassius, who he says was moved by personal grievances as well as by hatred of tyranny. He sums up the difference in one sentence: Brutus, it is said, objected to the rule, but Cassius hated the ruler. Dio gives a fuller list of pressures on Brutus: the slogans about his ancestor, his relationship to Cato, his wife’s resolve, and his long opposition to Caesar, even after accepting favours from him.

Plutarch also records a judgment from Brutus’ enemy Mark Antony, said in the hearing of many people:

That verdict is the root of Antony’s famous tribute at the end of Shakespeare’s play, discussed in the reading on Shakespeare.

After the Ides: Philippi

The conspirators did not hold Rome. Brutus and Cassius left Italy and raised armies in the east, and they met the forces of Antony and the young Caesar, Octavius, at Philippi, in battles that the Loeb editor’s notes date to 42 BC. When he was about to take his army across from Asia, Plutarch says, Brutus saw an apparition in his tent at night. Asked who it was, it answered:

After the second defeat, Plutarch says, Brutus told his friends that they must escape, not with our feet, however, but with our hands, and fell on his own sword; some said his friend Strato held the sword for him. The same editor’s notes give his age at death as forty-three. Plutarch’s Life of Caesar adds that Cassius, after his own defeat at Philippi, slew himself with that very dagger which he had used against Caesar, and Suetonius says hardly any of the assassins outlived Caesar by more than three years. Antony, by Plutarch’s account, had Brutus’ body wrapped in his own most costly robe and sent the ashes to Servilia.

Next: How Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar turned the murder into a line