Caesar was stabbed to
death at a meeting of the senate. As many as 60 conspirators, led by Brutus and Cassius, were involved. According to Plutarch,
a seer had warned that harm would come to Caesar no later than the Ides of
March. On his way to the Theatre of
Pompey, where he would be assassinated, Caesar passed the seer and
joked, "The ides of March have come," meaning to say that the
prophecy had not been fulfilled, to which the seer replied "Aye, Caesar;
but not gone." This meeting is famously dramatized in William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, when Caesar is warned
by the soothsayer to "beware the Ides of March."
Caesar's death was a
closing event in the crisis of the Roman Republic, and
triggered the civil war that would result in the rise to sole
power of his adopted heir Octavian.
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