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Plutarch presents the reconciliation of Brutus and Cassius in his Life of Brutus. Cassius is driven to make peace by one politically decisive consideration: everyone he approaches with the proposal of a violent attempt to eliminate Caesar replies that he would be party to it only if Brutus were to take the lead. Should Brutus refuse, then any such enterprise must be considered a failure, precisely because Brutus had rejected it. This is why Cassius decided to restore the contact with Brutus that had been broken off when he found himself competing with him for the praetorship.

Having related the reconciliation of Brutus and Cassius, Plutarch informs us that both began to get in touch with their friends. But he really only relates the steps taken by Brutus. According to Plutarch, Brutus received only two notes: both from persons who had had very close ties to Cato and would later die at Philippi in the republican ranks — Statilius and Favonius. Favonius, the fanatical Catonian, said that ‘civil war is worse than illegal monarchy’. Statilius was scornful, and said that ‘it did not become a wise and sensible man to be thrown into turmoil and peril for the sake of feeble and foolish folk’.

The death of the consuls at Mutina left a vacuum at the summit of the administration at Rome, which in the short term gave more scope to those like Cicero who were pursuing the interests of the conspirators and wished to maintain the fight with Antonius. This chapter focuses on Cicero's correspondence for three more months, which mainly consists of campaign reports by the commanders of the armies and Cicero's replies, sometimes encouraging and sometimes revealing the fragility of the situation in Italy. The correspondence with Marcus Brutus; and how, upon his death, Cicero' life became a weapon in literary struggle between the new Caesar and his opponents are discussed.

Before 133 BC, the Roman republic had solved political crises by compromise and without violence; after that year, murder was acceptable in Roman politics, and the civil wars followed. Was it what Tiberius Gracchus did that made the difference, or what was done to him? The former, according to the optimate tradition, was followed by Cicero — as if legislation in the People's interest were enough to justify killing the legislator. This chapter investigates the history of that idea, and its application by Cicero and Brutus to the murders of Clodius and Caesar. It is clear from the Pro Milone and from Cicero's correspondence that the optimates automatically equated successful popularis politicians as Greek tyrants, and applied Plato's analysis of the ‘tyrannical man’ as a self-evident justification for murder.

In Republican Rome, it was a father's task to instruct his son and turn him into a worthy representative of his family. However, social reality did not confirm the picture of an exclusive father-to-son relationship since the concept of imitatio patris was challenged by high mortality rates as well as divorce and remarriage. It can be shown that the fragmentation of Roman families was countered by substitute parenting, especially by cognate kin or by the single mother herself thereby offering an alternative role model. However, the primary aim of Roman socialization, the ideal of imitatio patris to perpetuate the agnatic lineage not only in name but also in action, was thus missed and was replaced with the exercise of imitatio alieni. To outline the alternatives to paternal socialization, four different cases of surrogate parenting is discussed in which the impact on the moulding of tradition can be observed.

This chapter examines three types of face-threatening act that regularly occur in the social interaction and correspondence of Roman aristocrats: making requests, issuing refusals, and offering advice. As the discussion shows, various conventionalized expressions of redressive politeness arose in Roman epistolary manners in order to ease the social tension often caused by these situations. Typical strategies used when making a request include acknowledging explicitly the imposition upon the addressee and offering a ready-made “out” (a valid reason for refusing). Conversely, when issuing a refusal, a Roman patron would often be careful to give reasons for his decision and to show that the refusal was not an easy one to make. Finally, when offering advice (especially to powerful peers), the Roman aristocrat frequently took pains to stress that such suggestions should not be taken to imply a certain ignorance on the part of the addressee. The extent to which this strategy prevailed shows again the Roman grandee's concern with personal status and dignitas. This latter topic is analyzed with reference in particular to the letters of Pompey and Decimus Brutus, and to the conventionalized use of the Latin phrase ut facis.

This chapter considers the role of polite language in the political negotiations that followed Caesar's assassination in 44 B.C. It examines in particular the correspondence of Mark Antony with the leaders of the conspirators, Marcus Brutus and Cassius Longinus, and the letters exchanged between Cicero and Munatius Plancus. In the former case, Brutus and Cassius appear to deploy a highly respectful and restrained manner in order to present themselves as solid, conservative types, an image necessary given their radical use of violence against Caesar. Antony, by contrast, seems to have adopted a harsher, more abusive style in his later public letters in order to define himself more starkly as a Caesarian staunchly opposed to the assassins. In the following year, Cicero and Munatius Plancus employed affiliative politeness with remarkable energy during their high-stake political negotiations. The latter's eventual defection to Antony highlights the duplicitous potential inherent in this type of language, even though both parties seem to have been well aware of the political game they were playing. In this connection, Cicero's correspondence with Octavian and Dolabella during this period is also examined.

There is a tradition that pays particular attention to the role of Cassius in the events leading to Caesar's murder. It emerges here and there in the sources and may well provide a valuable element of information. The clearest text is also the most interesting: Plutarch's account of the coup at the beginning of his Life of Brutus, which uses sources very close to the events and the protagonist. Describing the beginning of the conspiracy, Plutarch tells how Brutus was gradually won over by Cassius to the idea of eliminating the ‘tyrant’ by assassination, despite the very high favour he enjoyed with Caesar. Here Plutarch uses a particularly significant expression: ‘Indeed, had he wished it, he might have been first among Caesar's friends and exercised the greatest power; but the party (hetairia) of Cassius drew him away from such a course’. In the rest of his account Plutarch clearly describes the further efforts of ‘Cassius' hetairia’ to draw Brutus in.

With Cato dead at Utica, laudationes of the republican martyr and model Stoic followed one upon another. It was Cicero, with his innate imprudence, who inaugurated the series of posthumous commemorations whose political significance as ‘opposition’ is plain. At the request of Marcus Junius Brutus, Caesar's favourite, but Cato's nephew and admirer, Cicero began writing a Laus Catonis as early as April 46 bc, as soon as the news reached Rome of Cato's suicide in Africa.

Speaking in the Senate on 19 September 44 bc, in the absence of Cicero, Antony made a serious accusation: ‘When Caesar had been slain, Brutus, whom I name with respect, at once lifting high his bloody dagger, shouted for Cicero by name, and congratulated him on the recovery of freedom’. From Brutus' remark Antony concluded, perhaps rightly, that Cicero was not unaware of the conspiracy. In the Second Philippic, a savagely Demosthenian reply that was never delivered, Cicero accurately quotes Antony's words and hits back with a detailed and deadly polemical retaliation: he recalls the blackest stain on Antony's ‘Caesarian’ career — his complicity in the plan to assassinate Caesar the previous year, shortly after Munda. Cicero's reminder was also a gift to Octavian, since at the time he actually published this damaging pamphlet he was already in touch with Octavian.

The conspirators lost everything in the moment when they left the body of the dictator unattended and abandoned the idea of getting rid of it by throwing it into the Tiber. The Caesarians begin to regain ground when they were able to make political and emotional capital out of the corpse, whose cumbrous presence weighed increasingly heavily, and in the end decisively, on Roman politics. In the very first moments after the murder, Brutus and the others make every possible effort to get the situation under control. Their efforts were mostly doomed to failure. The fact that for a brief moment they seemed to have succeeded is demonstrated by Antony's panic: he dressed as a plebeian and fled. Brutus tried to talk to the senators, but they were bent on fleeing with all speed from the scene of the attack they witnessed. Neglecting to dispose of the body and proceeding to a renunciation of all Caesar's works, they could think of nothing better than to go to the Capitol, waving their daggers and calling on imaginary citizens to ‘make the most of their freedom’. In the space of a few hours the conspirators lost all the advantages of surprise and the confusion of their opponents, by trying to present to the people some abstract ‘freedom’.

Cicero conceived literature as a social undertaking in which texts not only expressed the preferences of communities engaged in their revision, but by being the topic of discussion could also be used as the basis for community formation. I believe that this led Cicero to articulate a surprising view on literary finish: he valued the incomplete over the complete precisely because what was not yet perfect could be discussed and therefore serve as the site of communal dialogue.

This chapter examines what constitutes, and how one may cultivate, a properly masculine self. It argues that Brutus creates a teleological history of Roman rhetoric in which Cicero, with a potent ambiguity, presents himself as the end of his narrative: he is both the culmination of the history of rhetoric and the conclusion of that tradition in a Rome dominated by Caesar. It adds that in the Brutus, self-fashioning appears as literary polemic, particularly in Cicero's attacks against the ‘Atticists’, who constructed their regime of oratorical purity and restraint in opposition to Cicero's alleged ‘Asianist’ bombast, license, and emotionalism. It narrates that the Brutus defends Cicero's oratorical style and that it gave further evidence of the content of their polemics, a dispute which applies literary aesthetics to the body and this indicates that these disputes over style involved issues fundamental to these orators' selfhood.

This chapter considers the average orators of the Republic, reasonably talented and who had a fair success in politics. Cicero describes in his Brutus orators who had no talent (ingenium) but who gained recognition through their industry (industria). Examples of the ‘common orator’ are the Scribonii Curiones, a three-generation family of orators, grandfather, father and son. Curio pater was sometimes laughed at by his audience and once even abandoned by the bystanders during a trial. However, the three of them could deliver effective political speeches and thus build prestige and authority. This essay explores these three orators in order to understand how the mass of the common orators acted and employed their oratory skills in competitive politics. In the case of the Curiones, the fragments and testimonia of their speeches show their rhetorical strategies and their effectiveness in decision-making from the period of C. Gracchus until the outbreak of civil war in 49 bc.

Marcus Iunius Brutus was one of the most important politicians active at the end of the Republic. Cicero gives a very positive judgment of Brutus’ oratorical skills, but none of his speeches has survived complete, and the fragments of his orations have not aroused much interest among scholars. This chapter provides a re-evaluation both of Brutus’ eloquence and its links with his understanding of philosophy, and of his relationship with contemporary Roman politicians and parties. The links between Brutus’ speeches and politics are clear and important: all his orations are connected with some of the most difficult situations during the late Roman republic: Pompeius’ dictatorship (52 bc); the defences of Titus Annius Milo (52 bc) and king Deiotarus (47 bc); the laudatio of Cato Uticensis (45 bc); and the oratio in contio Capitolina, pronounced the day after Caesar’s death.