Kathryn Tempest, Brutus: The Noble Conspirator (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 314 pp., $28.50.

ON A pleasant Sunday afternoon in the early 1980s, I was enjoying pre-brunch cocktails with a few friends in the ballroom of the old Townsend Mansion on Massachusetts Avenue (by then the long-time home of Washington’s Cosmos Club). One of my guests was accompanied by a rather charming, living political relic, former Sen. Eugene McCarthy, with whom I already had a nodding acquaintance. As the six of us chatted about everything from poetry, history and philosophy to the latest scabrous Capitol Hill gossip, it occurred to me that McCarthy—cultivated and principled, but also worldly wise and world weary—was one of the last throwbacks to an earlier age when America’s senate, at least in its better moments, had modeled itself on that of ancient Rome at its pre-imperial height. McCarthy, silver-haired, eloquent, well-read and something of a minor poet with a patrician veneer, could probably have held his own with Cicero. Even in the 1980s this made him something of an anachronism, and a retired one at that. By then New York’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan was probably the only serving senator whose erudition, rhetorical powers and grasp of history could match the standards and ideals of the Roman Senate at its best, even after, as was sometimes his wont, he’d had a few. Today, nobody in our senate—soused or sober—even comes close.

As McCarthy discoursed in rounded periods on the decline of the Senate as a deliberative body and the debasing of the executive branch by everyone from Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter—all while more and more unchecked power was being hoarded by the executive branch and a vast, unelected bureaucracy—I felt myself transported back in time. Change the names, dates and places, and the conversation could just as easily have been taking place in ancient Rome in 44 BC, shortly before the Ides of March.

Fast-forward thirty-five years to 2018 and the comparison is even more fraught. Many legislators, opinion leaders, and members of the old political and social order are predicting the imminent collapse of the American Republic. Traditionally respected news organs—print, electronic and broadcast—have abandoned even the pretext of objectivity and mounted 24/7 offensives while, all too often, the First Tweeter responds with childish and vindictive petulance. Politics, almost always a lagging social indicator, has descended to the same low level of ignorance, incivility and vulgarity that has characterized our popular culture as shaped and sold online, on television and radio, and at the movies since at least the 1960s.

All of which makes Kathryn Tempest’s new book about Marcus Junius Brutus—one of the leading senatorial conspirators in the successful plot to assassinate Julius Caesar in 44 BC—gripping but more than a little unnerving reading. I refer to it as a book rather than a biography because, while it offers the modern reader most of the sketchy and fragmentary evidence of Brutus’s life, it is at least as much concerned with the different ways in which he has been portrayed and “cast” by countless generations of scholars and partisans since he fell on his sword to avoid capture after losing the Second Battle of Philippi in October of 42 BC.

During all those centuries—and between warring schools of thought in each of them—Brutus has been characterized as everything from a liberty-loving tyrant slayer to a neurotic parricide, from a noble if conflicted idealist to a class-bound, calculating political opportunist. Tempest, senior lecturer in Latin literature and Roman history at the University of Roehampton, is a thoroughly qualified guide with a contagious enthusiasm for her subject. Readers looking for a flashy, melodramatic pop history of Brutus’s life and times, however, would be well advised to read her scholarly volume in tandem with the relevant chapters in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans.

TEMPEST’S BRUTUS is a very different book. It serves as the equivalent of a state-of-the-art atlas charting terrain and compiling sober facts, figures and informed conjecture to fill in the blanks and correct the errors and exaggerations inherent in Plutarch’s legendary epic. Both Tempest’s modern traveler’s guide and Plutarch’s well-spun tale are necessary to an understanding of Brutus as a man of his times and, perhaps, the significance of those distant times to our own. To a considerable extent, Tempest writes, her book examines

“how Brutus’ life has been recorded and transmitted from antiquity to today; a central contention is that, to appreciate Brutus the man, we must really probe the sources we use, to understand who is speaking and why. From there, my aim is to make a significant contribution to the way we think about Brutus’ life, as well as the conclusions we reach about how he conducted his political career. Even when some of the factual details might not in themselves be novel or surprising, I hope my analysis and evaluation of them will open up new approaches and different perspectives. To this end, this book will take an integrated approach to the topic, combining biographical exploration with historiographical and literary analysis. In so doing it will offer a sense of who Brutus was and why he acted in the way he did, while simultaneously digging far deeper into the presentation of Brutus in the ancient evidence than has hitherto been attempted.”

Tempest offers a number of useful—and sometimes surprisingly timely—insights. Sometimes they can be as basic as distinguishing between modern and ancient definitions of the same words. Brutus and his fellow assassins claimed to be the saviors of the res publica (Latin for “matters public” and the origin of the word “republic”) and the guardians of Roman libertas (liberty). But as senators and other holders of high office they were almost all members of a small, cultivated but self-centered oligarchy who felt that libertas applied first and foremost to themselves rather than the mass of their fellow citizens and that the responsibility for—and rewards to be gained from—res publica were their prerogative to the exclusion of most others.

In this their thinking closely resembled that of many more recent “aristocratic republics” from the Venetian Empire to the sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century Polish Commonwealth and even the aristocratic Whig ascendancy that triumphed in England after the (according to the members of the ascendancy) so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. All were characterized by governments built on a parliamentary or senatorial model that zealously limited both the executive authority of a monarch or first magistrate while also hoarding most of the wealth, land and power in the hands of a small aristocratic elite. The nearest parallel in American history would be the antebellum South, where a large slave population and the majority of poor whites were lorded over by a tightly knit, much-intermarried minority of Bourbons mouthing words like liberty and states’ rights while opposing any reforms that might loosen their own grip on power.

TO GIVE an idea of just how small and inbred the oligarchy in republican Rome was, one of Brutus’s leading co-conspirators in the plot to murder Julius Caesar, Cassius Longinus, was also Brutus’s brother-in-law. Pompey, the Roman consul and strongman eventually supplanted by Caesar—and whom Brutus alternately opposed, supported and then opposed again—had been implicated in the political murder of Brutus’s father. In the fullness of time, this did not prevent Brutus and Pompey from sharing the same wealthy, well connected father-in-law, Appius. And Julius Caesar himself carried on a well-known extramarital affair with Brutus’s mother, Servilia, which also led to rumors that Caesar was Brutus’s biological father. Were this the case—which it almost certainly was not, for chronological reasons that Tempest explains—then in murdering Julius Caesar Brutus would have committed an act of parricide as well as tyrannicide, a real-life Roman variation on the Greek tragedy of Oedipus Rex. One can only imagine what Sigmund Freud would have made of that.

Tempest’s Brutus emerges as an intelligent, patriotic and highly cultured man with a deep sense of ancestral obligation; he claimed descent from the early Roman hero Lucius Junius Brutus, who, according to national legend, expelled King Tarquinius Superbus (the “Haughty”) from Rome in 510 BC, thereby ushering in the Roman Republic. In addition, on his mother’s side, Brutus could claim kinship to “the republican hero Servilius Ahala, who was famous for killing Spurius Maelius in 439 BC on grounds that he was aspiring towards tyranny.”

Thus, by both nature and nurture, Brutus was shaped by a strongly “republican,” anti-dictator family tradition long before he began to form his own ideas. It is clear, however, that he embraced the family tradition wholeheartedly, and perhaps in part for career advancement, since he “was particularly proud of his claim to fame and the unique reputation it conferred upon him as a defender of the Roman Republic. As a result, he actively sought to nurture a very specific public profile.” This included, while a young official with the privilege of minting coins, promoting his ancestral link, in one case on a silver denarius featuring a goddess-like profile of Libertas (Lady Liberty) on one side and his ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus on the other. Thus, long before his confrontation with Caesar, “Brutus minted coins advertising his connection to Libertas; it was the same appeal he made after the assassination of Caesar when he and his supporters styled themselves as ‘Liberators.’”

This sort of high-minded positioning and idealized self-promotion did not prevent the young Brutus from using positions of public trust to practice a lucrative sideline in usury while serving in Cyprus and Cilicia, a fact not lost on his sometime mentor and occasional critic. While admiring the younger man’s intelligence and eloquence—Cicero himself being the greatest orator of the age—Cicero was always faintly ambivalent about the inner workings and motivations of his rising protégé.

TEMPEST DEFTLY chronicles the ups and downs of this historic relationship. Particularly valuable in this connection are Cicero’s letters to his trusted old friend, Atticus, in which he alternately praises and criticizes Brutus, sometimes doing both in the same letter. The correspondence between Cicero and Brutus himself is also revealing and, in the case of the early eighteenth-century British historian Conyers Middleton, led to the conclusion that there was a central contradiction or inconsistency in Brutus’s character quite out of keeping with “the noblest Roman of them all.” This inconsistency in his character, wrote Middleton,

“would tempt us to believe that he was governed in many cases by the pride and haughtiness of his temper, rather than by any constant and settled principles of philosophy, of which he is commonly thought to be so strict an observer.”

Writing later in the same century, Edward Gibbon took an even dimmer view of Brutus as would-be savior of the Roman Republic. In an essay less familiar to most readers than his Decline and Fall, and only published posthumously, Gibbon asserted,

“Neither as a statesman nor as a general did Brutus ever approve (sic) himself equal to the arduous task he had so rashly undertaken, of restoring the commonwealth; instead of restoring it, the death of a mild and generous usurper [Julius Caesar] produced only a series of civil wars, and the reign of three tyrants whose union and whose discord were alike fatal to the Roman people.”

In other words, even if the job Brutus undertook was a commendable one, he simply wasn’t up to it. This is a harsh verdict, but one that would seem to be justified by the historic results. Where Brutus did show an early and consistent pattern was in his program of calculated self-promotion. We should see him, Tempest writes, “not just as eloquent, cultured and an outspoken defender of the res publica, but as an active manipulator with his own interests, an independent operator who knew what he wanted and how to get it.”

IN FAIRNESS to Brutus, he lived in a period of political flux, when even the most principled of public men could find themselves conflicted and perplexed. Much as one might want to do the right thing, it wasn’t always clear what that thing was. In a tormented passage from one of his letters to Atticus, Cicero posed the problem in a series of hard questions, without pretending to have an answer to them. Some of today’s more hysterical celebrity threats to move to Canada or take to the streets after the election of Donald Trump could almost have been prompted by the questions posed by Cicero, even though the state of the American republic today is scarcely comparable to that of the Roman Republic in the first century BC:

“Should a man remain in his country under a tyranny? Should he endeavor to depose tyranny by all means possible, even if the existence of the state will be put to risk as a result? Should a man beware of the liberator in case that man is himself elevated? Should he try to help his country under a tyranny by seizing an opportunity and by diplomacy rather than by war? Should a statesman live quietly in retirement while his country is under a tyranny, or should he run every risk in defense of freedom?”

In his later years, Cicero usually opted for sitting it out rather than emigrating or joining the scrimmage, although that didn’t stop him from being killed by a vengeful Marc Antony in the end. Brutus was more actively engaged in the fray, first siding with Pompey against Caesar at the outset of the civil wars, then switching sides to Caesar and accepting numerous honors and awards from him before turning on him and, ultimately, plunging a dagger into him.

Perhaps the most intensely personal manifestation of Brutus’s calculating approach to public life involved a dramatic change in his private life. Shortly after returning to Rome from a stint as governor of Cisalpine Gaul, where he had been appointed by Caesar and, by all accounts, performed his duties honorably and efficiently, Brutus abruptly divorced Claudia, his loyal, irreproachable wife of a decade. Many people were baffled by this sudden abandonment of a loyal spouse, although the fact that her father, the wealthy and once-influential Appius Claudius, had picked the losing side in the late civil war and then died may help to explain matters.

But there could also have been a romantic angle since, “as insiders already knew, a second bride was waiting in the wings.” She was the devoted Portia, familiar from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Was it love, a cynical political move, or an impure blending of both? “As always,” Tempest observes, “several theories have evolved over Brutus’ decision to marry Porcia,” the daughter of Cato the Younger and the widow of Bibulus, both inveterate foes of Caesar.

Some biographers

“have sought to explain the seemingly inexplicable move and the speed with which the marriage was conducted by resorting to the idea that it was a genuine love match. Others see in Brutus’ marriage firm evidence of his sense of obligation to the dead Cato, and even more a move away from Caesar.”

In support of this one could cite the reactions of Servilia, Brutus’s mother, and Portia, who “did not take fondly to one another. . . . When we remember that Servilia was the friend and prior lover of Caesar, while Porcia was Cato’s daughter, the bad relations between mother and daughter-in-law are not altogether surprising.” But viewed from another angle, “Brutus had forced two diametrically opposed women each to be bound to him in terms of unfading loyalty—as mother and as wife.”

And there’s the rub. Tempest concedes,

“we cannot exclude the possibility that Brutus’ marriage to Portia was politically motivated after all. In fact, it was perfectly consistent with Brutus’ position in 45 BC as the natural heir to Cato’s circle [but also] as a champion of Caesar’s [attempt to fashion a new, conciliatory] res publica.”

Thus, when Caesar returned to Rome victorious in the late summer of 45 BC, Brutus had every reason to feel himself well-placed for a secure political future, convinced that “he had made the right decision in accepting the dictator’s pardon.” Yet, less than half a year later, Caesar would be stabbed to death on the senate floor and Brutus would be one of the lead assassins.

FROM THIS point on the detailed historical evidence is more plentiful and the outline of events is more familiar to modern readers. Caesar thrice refuses a kingly crown, offered by Marc Antony on the Lupercal. He assumes ever increasing powers and his supporters pile ever more slavish titles and honors on him. He even makes light of solemn republican institutions. When one of the two consuls he had hand-picked died on the very last day of the year, he frivolously appointed a new consul to fill the vacancy for just one afternoon, an otherwise forgotten notable of the day named Gaius Caninus Rebilis. Thus, quipped Cicero, engaging in a bit of black humor, “during the consulship of Caninius, you should know that no one had breakfast,” and “not one crime was committed.”

Perhaps most importantly, Caesar accepted the title of dictator perpetuo (dictator for life), which, while not establishing him as hereditary monarch, gave him a lifetime lease as absolute ruler of Rome. It was a lease that only death could break.

We may never know exactly what turned Brutus from one of Caesar’s most favored and presumably loyal subordinates into a leading conspirator against him. One can be fairly sure, however, that, to a man whose ancestral identity was tightly bound to the ideals—real and imagined—of the Roman Republic, and one who had proudly marketed himself as the heir to an ancestral history of devotion to libertas and resistance to tyranny, Brutus would have felt intense peer-group pressure to throw in his lot with the conspirators. In the tight, politically incestuous circle of the old republican oligarchy, he also may have assumed that the intensity of the feeling against Caesar was more widely shared outside that privileged elite than it really was. Whatever the reason, when Caesar, ignoring repeated omens and warnings, insisted on paying his ceremonial visit to the Senate during the ides of March, Brutus was there and did not hesitate to strike.

Even as assassinations go, it was a particularly messy affair. Like sharks in a feeding frenzy, some of the conspirators accidentally stabbed each other in their hysterical attempts to be in on the kill. Brutus himself received a few flesh wounds at the hands of his comrades, symbolizing, perhaps, that assassination is often a double-edged political weapon.

From almost the moment of Caesar’s death at their hands, the fortunes of his slayers began to tank. Successively outmaneuvered by first Marc Antony and then Octavian, they were driven from Rome and forced into a bloody, pointless civil war that ended in their defeat at the Battle of Philippi. In the aftermath, Brutus committed suicide rather than face the humiliation of surrender and almost certain execution.

“In all,” Tempest concludes, “Brutus emerges as a human being possessing some of the most admirable virtues, and a concomitant share of corresponding vices.”

“At times, he could seem arrogant, outspoken or rude—or, to put it another way, he was confident, candid and frank. It is easy to view him as demanding and humorless, or more positively as a man of purpose and gravity. He made his money by questionable means . . . We can criticize his side-switching and lack of constancy, or see a shrewd political player. . . . It is easy to mock his military failures or otherwise appreciate them as a sign of his magnanimity . . . But if at the end of this study there are questions that cannot be answered, we should be grateful that we can get so close as to be perplexed by a man of whom Cicero said: ‘You have a marvelous reputation for incredible virtues, which though they look disparate are harmonized by your prudence.’ . . . Even to those whom he knew in life, Brutus was an enigma.”

An enigma, or, perhaps, an outright contradiction.

Aram Bakshian Jr. served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and has written extensively on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts for American and overseas publications.