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 His
approaching murder was foretold by many prodigies. The statue
of Jupiter at Olympia, which he had ordered to be taken to pieces
and moved to Rome, suddenly uttered such a peal of laughter that
the scaffoldings collapsed and the workmen took to their heels;
and at once a man called Cassius turned up, who declared that
he had been bidden in a dream to sacrifice a bull to Jupiter.
The Capitol at Capua was struck by lightning on the Ides of March,
and also the room of the doorkeeper of the Palace at Rome. Some
inferred from the latter omen that danger was threatened to the
owner at the hands of his guards; and from the former, the murder
of a second distinguished personage, such as had taken place long
before on that same day. The soothsayer Sulla, too, when Gaius
consulted him about his horoscope, declared that inevitable death
was close at hand. The lots of Fortune at Antium warned him to
beware of Cassius, and he accordingly ordered the death of Cassius
Longinus, who was at the time proconsul of Asia, forgetting that
the family name of Chaerea was Cassius. The day before he was
killed he dreamt that he stood in heaven beside the throne of
Jupiter and that the god struck him with the toe of his right
foot and hurled him to earth. Some things which had happened on
that very day shortly before he was killed were also regarded
as portents. As he was sacrificing, he was sprinkled with the
blood of a flamingo, and the pantomimic actor Mnester danced a
tragedy which the tragedian Neoptolemus had acted years before
during the games at which Philip king of the Macedonians was assassinated.
In a farce called Laureolus, in which the chief actor falls
as he is making his escape and vomits blood, several understudies
so vied with one another in giving evidence of their proficiency
that the stage swam in blood. A nocturnal performance besides
was rehearsing, in which scenes from the lower world were represented
by Egyptians and Aethiopians.
On the ninth day before the Kalends of February [January 24, 41
A.D.], at about the seventh hour he hesitated whether or not to
get up for luncheon, since his stomach was still disordered from
excess of food on the day before, but at length he came out at
the persuasion of his friends. In the covered passage through
which he had to pass, some boys of good birth, who had been summoned
from Asia to appear on the stage, were rehearsing their parts,
and he stopped to watch and encourage them; and had not the leader
of the troop complained that he had a chill, he would have returned
and had the performance given at once. From this point there are
two versions of the story: some say that as he was talking with
the boys, Chaerea came up behind, and gave him a deep cut in the
neck, having first cried, "Take that," and that then
the tribune Cornelius Sabinus, who was the other conspirator and
faced Gaius, stabbed him in the breast. Others say that Sabinus,
after getting rid of the crowd through centurions who were in
the plot, asked for the watchword, as soldiers do; and that when
Gaius gave him "Jupiter," he cried "So be it,"
and as Gaius looked around, he split his jawbone with a blow of
his sword. As he lay upon the ground and with writhing limbs called
out that he still lived, the others dispatched him with thirty
wounds; for the general signal was " Strike again."
Some even thrust their swords through his privates. At the beginning
of the disturbance his bearers ran to his aid with their poles
[with which they carried his litter], and presently the Germans
of his body-guard, and they slew several of his assassins, as
well as some inoffensive senators.
He
lived twenty-nine years and ruled three years, ten months and eight
days. His body was conveyed secretly to the gardens of the Lamian
family, where it was partly consumed on a hastily erected pyre and
buried beneath a light covering of turf; later his sisters on their
return from exile dug it up, cremated it, and consigned it to the
tomb. Before this was done, it is well known that the caretakers
of the gardens were disturbed by ghosts, and that in the house where
he was slain not a night passed without some fearsome apparition,
until at last the house itself was destroyed by fire. With him died
his wife Caesonia, stabbed with a sword by a centurion, while his
daughter's brains were dashed out against a wall.
One
may form an idea of the state of those times by what followed. Not
even after the murder was made known was it at once believed that
he was dead, but it was suspected that Gaius himself had made up
and circulated the report, to find out by that means how men felt
towards him. The conspirators too had not agreed on a successor,
and the senate was so unanimously in favor of re-establishing the
republic that the consuls called the first meeting, not in the senate
house, because it had the name Julia, but in the Capitol; while
some in expressing their views proposed that the memory of the Caesars
be done away with and their temples destroyed. Men further observed
and commented on the fact that all the Caesars whose forename was
Gaius perished by the sword, beginning with the one who was slain
in the times of Cinna.
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