erase whatever image you have of julius caesar’s end. forget any elegant, solemn ceremony in the grand senate chamber, with immaculate togas and classical dignity. it was a chaotic, dirty, out-of-control scuffle. and what has come down to us is something close to the first documented crime scene in history: the ides of march of 44 bce were, above all, a logistical disaster.
the first nuance is the place. the senate was not meeting that day in the usual curia: the old curia hostilia had burned down in 52 bce, and the new curia iulia, commissioned by caesar himself, was barely beginning to rise. the session was held in the curia pompei, a hall annexed to the portico that closed off the monumental complex of the theatre of pompey, at the far end opposite the stage. there a group of conspirators cornered caesar — the ancient sources put the conspiracy at more than sixty names, eighty according to nicolaus of damascus, though we know the identity of only about twenty. and the assault was chaos: the senators rushed at him with such panic and clumsiness that they wounded one another in trying to reach him. according to nicolaus of damascus — the sole source for the detail, which neither suetonius nor appian records — cassius even gashed brutus on the hand, while another of the conspirators came away with a wound to the thigh. killing a man surrounded by jittery accomplices proved far less surgical than legend would have it.
caesar resisted at first — he seized the arm of casca, the first to strike, and ran it through with his graphium, the writing stylus — but, seeing himself lost, he made the final gesture tradition attributes to him: he covered his head with his toga and drew down its folds to fall with decorum. the body of the most powerful man on the planet lay at the foot of the statue of pompey, his old rival, until three slaves picked it up and carried it home on a litter.
the most powerful man in the world ended up carried home by three slaves on a litter, with one arm hanging out.
and here comes the detail that gives this whole piece its title. at home, a physician named antistius examined the corpse and counted the wounds: twenty-three stab wounds. but his report added a fascinating detail: of all of them, only one would have been fatal — the second wound he received, to the chest. the rest were superficial or secondary. that examination is often presented in popular accounts as the first documented autopsy in history. the label is open to debate — in alexandria, herophilus and erasistratus had already practised human dissection in the iii century bce — but it can fairly be defended as the first medico-legal report we have any record of. and while we are at it, a myth worth dismantling: no, the word “forensic” was not born here. it is often said to come from antistius reading his report “in the forum” (forum), but forensis — “of the forum, of public and legal matters” — already existed long before and did not arise from this case. it is etymological legend.
now for the historiographical nuance, which is worth pausing on. the detail of the “single fatal wound” comes from a single source, suetonius, who wrote a century and a half later and had a reputation for collecting juicy gossip. no other ancient author confirms it, and modern historians handle it with kid gloves: it may be a real piece of data inherited from some record, or it may be one of those neat anecdotes suetonius repeated without checking. what is certain is this: the twenty-three wounds and the chaos. the single-stab detail is plausible, but not proven..
the ending has the usual bitter irony. the conspirators called themselves “liberators” and believed that by killing caesar they were saving the republic from tyranny. the result was the exact opposite. the brutality of the act, far from restoring liberty, unleashed a fresh round of civil wars that ended up producing augustus and burying for good the very regime they had set out to rescue. they meant to save the republic with twenty-three stab wounds, and the only thing they stabbed to death was the republic itself.
