Marcus Junius Brutus is one of the great names of Roman history. Central to the notorious conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of the dictator Julius Caesar on the Ides of March 44 BC, Brutus gave brief hope to those who longed for the restoration of republican government. Yet by August of the same year he was on his way from Italy to the Greek east; a little over two years later he had committed suicide in the face of defeat at the hands of Mark Antony and Octavian at the Battle of Philippi. Civil war did not come to an end with the death of Brutus, but now it was merely a conflict between rival dynasts. The republican system was dead.

Roman aristocrats of this period were acutely aware of the virtues of their ancestors. Brutus himself claimed descent on his father’s side from Lucius Junius Brutus, who expelled Tarquin the Proud in 509 BC and was one of the two consuls for the first year of the Roman republic. Tracing the lineage of his mother, Servilia, Brutus could point to Servilius Ahala, who in 439 BC killed Spurius Maelius on the grounds that he was aspiring to tyranny. Yet in Brutus’ own time it was not always so easy to decide who represented the better cause. When civil war broke out in 49 BC, Brutus was an instinctive supporter of the senate in its opposition to the demands of Julius Caesar. Yet to do so meant serving under a man – Pompeius Magnus – who had murdered Brutus’ father when Brutus was no more than five and whom Brutus had openly attacked for his subversion of the republican constitution. If Caesar represented a worse cause still, he was also so close an intimate of Servilia that rumours circulated in antiquity that he was Brutus’ true father.

After Pompey’s defeat at the battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC, Brutus was among the first to make his peace with Caesar. He worked to secure reconciliation between the warring parties and in 46 BC accepted the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul. By 44 BC he was serving as urban praetor, a magistracy second in authority only to the consulship, and he must have seemed to Caesar a reliable friend and associate. Yet Caesar’s ever more nakedly monarchical mode of government and pretensions to divinity could not but alienate those who had hoped that he would restore the old order after years of chaos. Brutus, Cassius and their fellow conspirators could see only one way forward: assassination. They styled themselves liberators but others saw them as traitors and parricides. Either way, their success was shortlived and their hopes died with them.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Matthew Leigh is Professor of Classical Languages and Literatures at the University of Oxford.

Brutus has gone down in history as the ultimate traitor, but this painstakingly researched book shows that Brutus' motivation for the murder of the man who was effectively his foster father is much more complicated than popular history would have it. We know so little about Brutus, really, just fragments of his life are recorded by writers such as Cicero and Plutarch, as well as a few of his letters to Cicero giving his own point of view, that making judgements about his motivations is a fraught practice. Nevertheless, Tempest gives as complete a picture as is possible from 2 millennia away, especially given that even to his contemporaries Brutus was somewhat of a mystery. Tempest puts much of his motivation down to his extreme awareness of his family history, two of his ancestors were famous for having dispelled tyrants, and Brutus was intensely aware of the pressure on him to live up to the family tradition. Not an easy read much of this book, the actual assassination itself is only briefly covered, much of the text is a rather dry dissertation on the motivations and actions of the conspirators before and after, but it is worth perservering with because Tempest gives an excellent account of the machinations in Rome immediately after the assassination, when confusion clearly reigned and frightened people clearly had no idea which way to turn. The long, slow fallout which eventually leads to Brutus and Cassius facing Antony and Octavian in battle at Phillippi is then covered in great detail, ending with Brutus' dramatic suicide. I found this book an amazing read, others less interested in the minutiae of history may struggle, but its certainly a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the tortured history of the last years of the Roman Republic. ( )