Killing Jesus: A History

Caesar inside the Senate. These killers are not soldiers or angry citizens but self-styled “Liberators” comprised of dozens of Caesar’s closest friends and trusted allies, men of regal bearing and upbringing whom he trusts completely and with whom he has shared many a meal and battlefield victory. These rogue senators are uneasy about Caesar’s ever-growing power and his desire to be king. Such a promotion would ensure not only Caesar’s authority for life but also that it be passed down through his will to the heir of his choice. That Caesar publicly refused a crown when his good friend Marc Antony recently tried to place one upon his head does not appease them. With these thoughts, along with nagging doubts that they might not have the guts to follow through on their assassination plan, the rebel senators have waited in their Senate seats all morning, freshly sharpened pugiones concealed beneath the thick folds of their togas.
    The Liberators are in the minority—just sixty men among nine hundred—and if they lose their nerve, there is every chance they will be imprisoned, executed, or exiled. Caesar is known to be a benevolent man, but he is also quick to exact revenge, such as the time he ordered the crucifixion of a band of pirates who had kidnapped him. “Benevolent” in that instance meant executioners dragging the razor-like steel of a pugio across each pirate’s windpipe before nailing him to the cross, so that his death might be quicker.
    Some of the senators, such as general and statesman Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus, have fought in battle and are well acquainted with the act of killing. Brutus, as he is known, was the one sent to Caesar’s home to lure him to the Senate when it appeared he might not show up this morning. It was Caesar who named Brutus to the position of praetor, or magistrate. But Brutus’s family has a long tradition of rejecting tyrants, beginning in 509 B.C. with Junius Brutus, the man credited with overthrowing Tarquinius Superbus and ending the Roman monarchy. That act of rebellion was as cold-blooded as the murder the Liberators have planned for Caesar.
    Other senators, such as the heavy-drinking Lucius Tillius Cimber and his ally Publius Servilius Casca Longus, have the soft and uncallused hands of elected officials. Wielding a killing blade will be a new sensation for them.
    Murdering Caesar is the boldest—and most dangerous—of ideas. He is not like other men. In fact, he has become the greatest living symbol of Roman power and aggression. Caesar has so completely consolidated his hold on Roman politics that the only likely outcome of this murder will be anarchy, and perhaps even the end of the Roman Republic.
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    This is hardly the first time someone has wanted Julius Caesar dead. The one million inhabitants of the city of Rome are reactive and unpredictable. Caesar is known by everyone and admired by most. Since the age of fifteen, when his father suddenly died while putting on his shoes one morning, Caesar has endured one challenge after another in order to make himself a success. But each contest has made him stronger, and with each hard-won triumph his legend—and his power—has grown.
    But in terms of sheer glory, legend, and impact, no moment will ever match the morning of January 10, 49 B.C. Caesar is a great general now, a fifty-year-old man who has spent much of the last decade in Gaul, conquering the local tribes and getting very rich in the process. It is dusk. He stands on the north side of a swollen, half-frozen river known as the Rubicon. Behind him stand the four thousand heavily armed soldiers of the Legio XIII Gemina, a battle-hardened group that has served under him for the last nine years. Rome is 260 miles due south. The Rubicon is the dividing line between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy—or, more germane to Caesar’s current situation, between freedom and treason.
    The population of Gaul has been devastated by Caesar’s wars. Of the four million people who inhabited the region stretching from the Alps to the Atlantic, one million have been killed in battle and another million taken into slavery. After capturing Uxellodunum, a town along the Dordogne River near modern-day Vayrac, Caesar cut off the hands of every man who’d fought against him. And during his epic siege of Alesia, in the hills near what is now called Dijon, he surrounded the fortress with sixty thousand men and nine miles of fierce fortifications. All this