Assassination of Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar, the Roman general and statesman who had recently been declared dictator for life, was assassinated on 15 March, the Ides of March, 44 BCE, stabbed to death by a group of Roman senators during a Senate meeting held at the Theatre of Pompey in Rome. The conspiracy, numbering as many as sixty senators, was led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, who feared that Caesar's accumulation of personal power, following his victory in Rome's civil war, was ending the Republic's traditional aristocratic government in favor of permanent one-man rule. Rather than restoring the Republic as the conspirators had intended, the assassination instead triggered a further round of civil wars among Caesar's rivals for power, chiefly between Caesar's designated heir Octavian and Mark Antony against the assassins, and later between Octavian and Antony themselves. Octavian's eventual victory in 30 BCE ended the Republic for good and left him, under the name Augustus, as Rome's first emperor, so that Caesar's assassination is widely regarded as the event that set the Republic's final collapse irreversibly in motion.