Brutus and Cassius have been stitched up by history. Two men who thought they were saving Rome from tyranny, only to be remembered as treacherous backstabbers. The irony is that they were fighting to preserve the very thing their enemies claimed to be upholding – republican values. But history, being what it is, tends to favour the winners, and the winners were Caesar’s lot.
Let’s not pretend Julius Caesar was just another statesman. He was dismantling the republic one decree at a time, concentrating power in his own hands, bypassing the Senate, and making himself dictator for life. The warning signs were all there. Brutus and Cassius, steeped in Rome’s old traditions, saw where this was going and acted. The Republic had been through enough – civil wars, power grabs, strongmen treating the state like their personal fiefdom. They thought killing Caesar would stop the rot. In their minds, it was a noble act, a reset button for Rome’s institutions. But populism has a way of making tyrants look like saviours. When the people are desperate for stability, they’ll cheer for a strongman and sneer at those warning about democracy’s erosion. Brutus and Cassius might have been guardians of the Republic, but they were no match for Caesar’s cult of personality.
The problem was that the people loved Caesar. He had done what Rome’s dithering elite had failed to do – stabilised the chaos, handed out land, given the common folk something to cheer about. Brutus and Cassius, by contrast, were senators, and senators were not exactly the people’s favourites. To them, the assassins didn’t look like liberators, they looked like privileged patricians who had murdered the man who got things done. This is the danger of populism – it doesn’t care about principles, only about results - and emotions. Whether a leader is concentrating power or hollowing out institutions doesn’t matter if they’re keeping the grain dole flowing. The Senate might have breathed a sigh of relief, but the streets of Rome howled for vengeance. Mark Antony, ever the opportunist, whipped up the mob and turned Caesar into a martyr. Brutus and Cassius were forced to flee.
Then along came Augustus, the man who really finished off the Republic, though he did it with a lot more subtlety. He understood that to secure power, he had to make Caesar’s death a tragic betrayal rather than a necessary course correction. He painted Brutus and Cassius as treacherous villains, not defenders of Rome’s institutions. He also ensured that the official version of history made them look like fools who had misjudged the moment. After all, a Republic that doesn’t actually get restored looks a lot like a coup gone wrong. And populism thrives on such failures. Augustus didn’t need to take power by force – he let the people hand it to him. His rule was just as autocratic as Caesar’s, but by packaging it in populist rhetoric, he ensured that Romans welcomed their new emperor rather than resisted him.
Shakespeare didn’t do them any favours either. His Julius Caesar gave Brutus a touch of tragic nobility but still made him look like an overthinking idealist who let himself be outmanoeuvred by a more charismatic opponent. And the play’s most famous speech? Mark Antony’s, of course. The moment Brutus and Cassius lost the PR battle was when Shakespeare handed Antony the best lines. “Friends, Romans, countrymen” is one of the greatest rhetorical demolitions in history, and it ensured that generations of theatre-goers saw the assassins as the bad guys. Populism, after all, is about theatre as much as politics. It’s about turning complex issues into emotionally charged spectacles. Antony played the crowd like a master showman, reducing the question of tyranny and republicanism to a simple matter of grief and vengeance. And the crowd lapped it up.
But if you strip away the propaganda, Brutus and Cassius were trying to prevent the very thing they’ve been accused of – the destruction of the Republic. They weren’t opportunists, they weren’t scheming to seize power for themselves, and they certainly weren’t acting on some petty personal grievance. They genuinely thought they were saving Rome from a monarchy in all but name. It just turned out that Rome, or at least the people in it, had already decided they preferred a strongman to a squabbling Senate. That’s the reality of populism – it turns democracy into a spectator sport where the loudest, most dramatic figure wins. Brutus and Cassius were playing by the old rules, but the game had changed.
Had they won, we’d be reading about them as the saviours of Roman liberty, the men who prevented tyranny. But they didn’t win. And in history, losing means you don’t get to write the story. They took a gamble, thinking the republic could be salvaged, but by the time Caesar fell, it was already too late. The people had moved on. The old order was finished. Augustus saw to it that Brutus and Cassius were remembered as murderers rather than statesmen, and Rome marched steadily on towards Empire. The lesson? You can fight for principle all you want, but if you lose, history will call you a traitor. And if the people have already bought into the strongman’s vision, you might as well be shouting into the wind.
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