De Morti Caesaris

How ought we to react, O noble Romans, to the cruel murder of our champion and leader, Gaius Julius Caesar? What words can adequately describe our grief? Never before in the history of this great city has such a horrendous crime been perpetrated. There have been assassinations before, both private and political, but never one of such as this. Both its nature and scope are unprecedented in all previous acts of wickedness. Government officials have been killed before, but never one in a position of such rank, honor, and authority. No greater crime could have been or ever will be committed against the state. Let me recount to those few of you who may not have heard the specifics. While Caesar was in the senate house yesterday, he was surrounded by a group which, feigning to beg for a pardon, brutally stabbed him to death on the senate floor. Consider the nature of this act. Where was it done? The senate was being held yesterday in the temple in Pompey’s theater complex. Their action, therefore, is reprehensible as both a religious and legal crime. Who did it? They are senators who, rather than serving the state, have done it the greatest possible harm. These men claim that Caesar was a tyrant, but what was their relationship to him? They were all previous enemies of Caesar, to whom he had showed extraordinary clemency in pardoning for their past actions against him. Look at how they have repaid him for his generous and kind nature. How can they claim one such as him to be a tyrant? The senate and the people, themselves included, approved his position as he held it, and they had extolled him for his beneficence while in that office. They do not seem to understand the full implication of his mercy, however. A Sulla, given Caesar’s position of dictator, would have had them killed on one of his proscription lists long before they had a chance to praise or assassinate him. Has Caesar not proven innumerable times that he is not a tyrant or king? Has he not turned down three times a crown offered to him? Did he not hold a position which innumerable others have held throughout the history of Rome? Even with his term as dictator having been extended to an unprecedented length, he did not show himself to be cruel or tyrannical, but rather just and merciful. Even Romulus had a more violent nature as king than Caesar as dictator, but he is praised to the heavens, and Caesar has been cut to the dirt. In anger over a small dispute, Romulus killed his brother in his rise to power. Caesar pardoned even his worst enemies in his rise to power. How do they claim him to be anything but a dictator worthy of admiration for his achievements and his character? It is madness. But they have well proven themselves to be mad. They have shed blood in the public eye in a sacred place. They have killed the leading man of the state, who has done more than any other to increase the power and glory of Rome. Through his proconsular command in Gaul and Briton, he has given the world a testimony of Roman power abroad, through his addition of the territories of conquered barbarians; and he has done the same at home, through the lavishing of money from those campaigns towards new buildings in the fire-ravaged forum. These men have decapitated the very government itself. Moreover, they have executed the man who, more than anyone else, has supported the common people of Rome. This is an act of treason. It is intended to both debilitate the state and demoralize its people by slaying the respective leader of both. Since the conspirators were on the losing side of the last civil war, they want to start another with the hopes of success. They do this at the expense of the state and the people of Rome. This act is as clear a statement as they could make that, in their consideration, their interests are above both yours, O people of Rome, and those of the state itself. Have we not been subjected to enough violence already? Have we not seen enough of civil wars? I will not stand for a civil war based on the personal bitterness of a few aristocrats, especially if it comes as a result of such a horrendous crime. Do not support them, O Romans; they are not espousing any cause but their own. Think of the man they have killed. Think of the character one must have to so brutally and publicly kill a one such as Caesar. He was as high ranking an official as our governmental tradition allows, let us do him his appropriate honor in burial according to that tradition. He deserves every funeral rite this state has ever given to its greatest leaders and heroes. When we have thus buried him and, by extension, buried our own grief and outrage at this atrocity, let us then calmly and deliberately decide what to do with these conspirators, for something surely must be done.