The Death Of Caesar Was A Turning Point In Roman History

The Death of Caesar was a turning point in Roman history. It started a civil war that resulted in the eventual creation of the Roman Empire, and the end of the Roman Republic. Three accounts that portray the murder of Caesar: Suetonius’ Life of Caesar, Plutarch’s Life of Caesar, and Nicolaus’ Life of Augustus all tell separate stories, even though they were all derived from the same event. All of the stories are technically the same story; Caesar was warned by omen, dreams, and soothsayers that there was danger coming to him on the Ides of March, but Decimus Brutus convinced him to come to the senate meeting, and once there he was murder by a group of senators. But the devil is in the details, and all three stories portray the same story …show more content…
Suetonius focuses on what happened leading up to the murder, where Caesar was hailed as king by the plebs. While Plutarch wrote heavily about what happen after the act was committed: the parade of people happy with the murder, the reading of Caesar’s last will, and the rioting that was directed towards the murderers. Nicolaus’ account vividly depicts the act of the murder, where he describes the scene as if “they were fighting over Caesar” slashing and stabbing at Caesar and each other (Nicolaus, Augustus 24). Suetonius and Plutarch’s accounts of the murder are the most similar to each other, which may be because they wrote at similar times and under the similar thinking styles of the day, which was stoic philosophy. Nicolaus wrote his account at about the beginning of the first century, about 100 years before Suetonius and Plutarch, giving him an entirely different generational view point, and opinion of the …show more content…
He died a hero in the eyes of some and a tyrant in the eyes of others, but that will always be disputed. The validity of the accounts can be recognized be the fact that the stories all follow the same pattern; Caesar receives bad omens, Caesar disregards the bad omens and goes to the senate, Caesar is ambushed and murders. After he is murdered the sources diverge, with Nicolaus in favor of the murder and Plutarch and Suetonius opposed to the murder, and the accounts cannot all be reliable. To get better picture of what happen that day, on the Ides of March, 44 BC, is to look at even more sources written about the murder and the events before and after it took place such as Virgil, Livy and their contemporaries. Caesar was murdered because he was a tyrant, but before he was titled a