I had been a Senate clerk for eleven years. My work was to record what was said and done in the sessions — to be the memory of the institution, which required that I be present but not visible, audible but not heard. In eleven years I had recorded debates on taxation, on military appointments, on building projects, on the thousands of ordinary administrative matters that constitute the actual work of governing an empire. I had never recorded a murder.
The session was scheduled for the Theatre of Pompey because the Curia Julia, the Senate's regular meeting place, was under reconstruction. We had met in the theatre before; it was not unusual. I arrived early, as I always did, arranged my writing materials, and noted the attendance as senators filed in.
Caesar arrived last, as he often did. He was fifty-five years old and walked with the deliberate pace of a man who has learned that people will wait for him. He sat in his chair — a gilded chair, a gift, his enemies said proof of his monarchical ambitions — and the session began.
The Petition
A senator named Tillius Cimber approached Caesar with a petition regarding his exiled brother. This was the signal, though I did not know it was a signal. As Caesar declined the petition, Cimber seized his toga with both hands. Caesar said — and this I recorded in my notes because it was the kind of statement a clerk notes: Why, this is violence.
Then Casca struck the first blow, from behind, a glancing cut to the neck. Caesar grabbed Casca's arm. Then the others came forward and the session ceased to be a session and became something for which I did not have a category in my records.
I did not run. I want to record this accurately: I did not run, and I did not stay out of courage. I stayed because I was frozen, which is a different thing, and because my feet appeared to have made a decision independent of my mind. I stood at the side of the chamber with my stylus in my hand and I watched.
What I Saw
Most of the senators fled immediately — not the conspirators, not Caesar, but the two hundred and some others who had come for an ordinary session and found themselves in a room with men with daggers. They went through the doors in a mass and the theatre was suddenly much emptier, and what remained was the conspirators and the body and the clerks and slaves along the walls who, like me, had not yet moved.
Caesar fell at the base of Pompey's statue. I note this detail because I noted it then: that Julius Caesar, who had defeated Pompey in the civil war that made him master of Rome, died at the foot of Pompey's image, which is either a coincidence or the kind of symmetry that history arranges without being asked to.
The conspirators left quickly, going out into the city with their daggers still bloody, calling out that they had restored liberty, that the tyrant was dead, that the Republic lived. The streets were not, from what I heard afterward, receptive to this message.
The Counting
I counted the wounds. Twenty-three. I wrote this number in my record along with the date and the location and the names of the senators who had been present, which I had recorded at the start of the session and which now constituted, I understood, a list of witnesses and potential suspects and future historians' sources all at once.
The physician Antistius was brought in and he examined the body and said that of the twenty-three wounds, one — only one — had been mortal. I wrote this down too. Twenty-three men had struck a man twenty-three times, and only one blow had killed him. I do not know what conclusion to draw from this. I wrote it down because it was a fact and a clerk's job is to record facts and not conclusions.
Mark Antony spoke at the funeral four days later. I was there. I recorded what he said. The crowd's response to what he said I could not record accurately because it was too loud for individual words and became simply sound — the sound of fifty thousand people deciding something together in a Roman street, and the decision they were making was not the one the Liberatores had planned for.
Narrator's note: Publius Servilius is a fictional figure. The events of March 15, 44 BC — the Pompey statue, Caesar's last words, the count of wounds, Antistius' finding, and the aftermath — are drawn from Suetonius' Life of Julius Caesar, Plutarch's Lives of Caesar and Brutus, and Appian's Civil Wars.