Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March

On the Ides of March, 15 March 44 BC, Rome’s most powerful man walked into a Senate meeting and never walked out. The session was held in the Curia Pompeia, an annex of the Theatre of Pompey, because the usual Senate house was being rebuilt. There, a conspiracy of roughly sixty senators — led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus — closed in.

They had cause for alarm. Earlier that year Caesar had been named dictator perpetuo, dictator for life, a title that looked uncomfortably like monarchy to men raised on republican tradition. Crowding around as if to petition him, the conspirators drew daggers.

Slumped against the pedestal of Pompey’s statue, Caesar died, having been stabbed twenty-three times.

The plotters expected to be hailed as liberators. Instead the killing triggered fresh civil wars, Caesar’s posthumous deification, and within two decades the rise of his heir Augustus as Rome’s first emperor — the very outcome they had killed to prevent.