Twenty-three stabs

We're back at the site of the hall, because this is where the morning ends.

Caesar arrived around midday. Marcus Antonius, his closest ally and the one person present who could have turned dangerous, was held up in conversation at the entrance by one of the conspirators.

Inside, a senator stepped up to him with a petition about his banished brother, and while Caesar was brushing it off the others closed in around him. Someone pulled the toga from his shoulder, and the first blow landed in his neck.

What came next was chaos. The men struck all at once, and in the confusion they even caught each other, and Brutus ended up with a wound on his hand. Of the twenty-three wounds, the doctor who examined the body said only one was fatal.

The most famous line from that afternoon comes from a play. Shakespeare turned it into ”et tu, Brute”, while the Roman sources say Caesar said nothing at all, or something in Greek along the lines of ”you too, child”, his way of showing his shock at the man he had spared.

When it was over, he lay at the foot of the statue of Pompey. The other senators fled the hall, the assassins walked out into the street with their knives raised, and the city was left behind with no one who knew what was supposed to happen now.

We take Via delle Botteghe Oscure eastwards and keep going until we reach the open ground of the Forum.