The 23 Stab Wounds That Killed Julius Caesar in the Theatre of Pompey on 15 March 44 BCE and Started a 14-Year Civil War

By February 44 BCE Julius Caesar’s political position had become unsustainable. The senate had voted him dictator perpetuo — dictator in perpetuity — on 14 February 44 BCE. The title was without precedent in 460 years of Roman political history. The conventional Republican dictatorship was a temporary emergency office of six months. Caesar’s was unlimited.

The visible monarchical implications were not lost on the Roman political class. The republican-leaning senators — including many of Caesar’s former officers and political allies — began to organise a counter-response in late February. The conspiracy that emerged numbered approximately 60 senators. The two senior conspirators were Marcus Junius Brutus (whose mother Servilia had been Caesar’s mistress in the 60s BCE) and Gaius Cassius Longinus.

The execution date was set for 15 March 44 BCE — the Ides of March in the Roman calendar — at the senate meeting scheduled at the Curia of Pompey, the small senate hall adjacent to the Theatre of Pompey in the Campus Martius.

What the haruspex said

Caesar’s haruspex — the official Etruscan seer who read the entrails of sacrificed animals for omens — reportedly warned him on 15 February (during the Lupercalia festival) and again on the morning of 15 March that great danger threatened him on or before the Ides of March. Caesar dismissed both warnings. His personal physician Antistius had also advised against attending the 15 March senate meeting; Caesar overruled him.

The conventional Shakespearean version of the warning is the line “Beware the Ides of March” delivered by an unnamed soothsayer to Caesar in Act 1 of Julius Caesar. Shakespeare drew this from Plutarch (Life of Caesar 63), which gives the same scene more cautiously and without the specific phrase.

The morning

Caesar arrived at the Curia of Pompey at about 11 a.m. on 15 March 44 BCE. He had been delayed by domestic discussion — his wife Calpurnia had had a nightmare the previous night and had begged him not to attend — but had been persuaded by the conspirator Decimus Brutus to attend after all.

Mark Antony — who was Caesar’s senior loyal lieutenant and would have been a defensive ally — was deliberately detained outside the building by the conspirator Gaius Trebonius. Antony was kept in conversation while the assassination proceeded.

Caesar took his seat on the curial chair. Tillius Cimber approached him with a petition (concerning the recall of his exiled brother). Other conspirators gathered around as if to add their voices to the petition. At a prearranged signal — Cimber pulled at Caesar’s toga — the senators drew the daggers they had been concealing under their formal robes.

Publius Servilius Casca struck first, aiming for Caesar’s neck. The blade glanced off the collarbone. Caesar, struck from behind, turned. He grasped Casca’s arm. He reportedly said in Greek: “Adelphe, ti poieis?” — “Brother, what are you doing?”

The other conspirators stabbed simultaneously. The struggle moved from the chair toward the base of the curia’s central statue of Pompey. Caesar received 23 stab wounds — to the chest, the back, the abdomen, the throat, and the face. Plutarch records that he attempted to defend himself until he saw Marcus Brutus among the attackers, at which point he covered his face with his toga and ceased to resist. The famous “Et tu, Brute?” of Shakespeare is a Renaissance literary reconstruction — the contemporary sources do not record it; the closest contemporary version is Suetonius’s Kai sy, teknon (“You too, child”), addressed to Brutus, but Suetonius records this as itself uncertain.

Caesar fell at the base of Pompey’s statue. The senators left the body where it fell and marched out of the curia to the Capitoline Hill to declare the restoration of the Republic.

The autopsy

The physician Antistius examined the body in the Curia later the same day. His autopsy report — the first recorded autopsy in Western historical practice — does not survive but is summarised by Suetonius (Divus Julius 82).

Antistius identified 23 separate stab wounds. He concluded that only one — the second wound, to the chest — was independently fatal. The other 22 were either glancing, partial, or struck non-vital tissue. Caesar had died of the chest wound; the remaining 22 wounds had been delivered to a body that was already dying.

The report is forensically significant because it establishes that the assassination was, in numerical terms, less efficient than the senators had intended. Of approximately 60 conspirators with drawn daggers, only one had struck cleanly. The others had been impeded by the press of the crowd, by Caesar’s defensive movements, and by their own inexperience with close-quarters knife combat. Several of the conspirators reportedly stabbed one another inadvertently during the struggle.

What followed

Mark Antony’s funeral oration on 20 March 44 BCE — the speech that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar III.ii dramatises — converted Roman popular opinion against the conspirators. Brutus, Cassius, and most of the senior conspirators fled Rome within days. The Liberators’ War of 44-42 BCE pitted the conspiracy against the new political alliance of Antony, Caesar’s adopted heir Octavian, and Caesar’s cavalry commander Lepidus.

The decisive engagement was the Battle of Philippi in October 42 BCE in Macedonia. Cassius killed himself after the first engagement; Brutus killed himself after the second. Most of the surviving conspirators were killed or executed within the following year.

Antony and Octavian then turned against each other across 14 years of further civil war. The Battle of Actium of 2 September 31 BCE ended the conflict. Octavian assumed the title Augustus on 16 January 27 BCE and ruled as the first Roman emperor for the next 41 years.

The Roman Republic was over. The assassination at the Theatre of Pompey, which had been intended to restore the Republic, had instead accelerated its complete collapse.

The Theatre of Pompey survived as a Roman entertainment building for approximately 600 years and was largely demolished in the medieval period. The site of the Curia is now under the modern Largo di Torre Argentina in central Rome — a small archaeological park now also famous as the principal Rome cat sanctuary, which has cared for the city’s stray cats at the site since the 1990s.