Gaius Cassius Longinus

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Denarius (42 BC) issued by Cassius Longinus and Lentulus Spinther, depicting the crowned head of Liberty and on the reverse a sacrificial jug and lituus. From the military mint in Smyrna

Gaius Cassius Longinus (Classical Latin: [ˈgaː.i.ʊs ˈʊs ˈlɔŋ.gɪ.nʊs]; October 3, before 85 BC – October 3, 42 BC) was a Roman senator, a leading instigator of the plot to kill Julius Caesar,[1] and the brother in-law of Marcus Junius Brutus.


Early life

Little is known of Gaius Cassius' early life, apart from a story that he showed his dislike of despots while still at school, by quarreling with the son of the dictator Sulla.[2] He studied philosophy at Rhodes under Archelaus and became fluent in Greek.[3] He was married to Junia Tertia (Tertulla), who was the daughter of Servilia Caepionis and thus a half-sister of his co-conspirator Brutus. They had one son, who was born in about 60 BC.[4] In 53 BC he took part in the Battle of Carrhae lost by Marcus Licinius Crassus against the Parthians.

Civil war

Cassius returned to Rome in 50 BC, when civil war was about to break out between Julius Caesar and Pompey. Cassius was elected tribune of the Plebs for 49 BC, and threw in his lot with the Optimates, although his brother Lucius Cassius supported Caesar. Cassius left Italy shortly after Caesar crossed the Rubicon. He met Pompey in Greece, and was appointed to command part of his fleet.

In 48 BC, Cassius sailed his ships to Sicily, where he attacked and burned a large part of Caesar's navy.[5] He then proceeded to harass ships off the Italian coast. News of Pompey's defeat at the Battle of Pharsalus caused Cassius to head for the Hellespont, with hopes of allying with the king of Pontus, Pharnaces II. Cassius was overtaken by Caesar en route, and was forced to surrender unconditionally.[6]

Caesar made Cassius a legate, employing him in the Alexandrian War against the very same Pharnaces whom Cassius had hoped to join after Pompey's defeat at Pharsalus. However, Cassius refused to join in the fight against Cato and Scipio in Africa, choosing instead to retire to Rome.


Cassius spent the next two years without office, and apparently tightened his friendship with Cicero.[7] In 44 BC, he became praetor peregrinus with the promise of the Syrian province for the ensuing year. The appointment of his junior and brother-in-law, Marcus Brutus, as praetor urbanus deeply offended him.

Although Cassius was "the moving spirit" in the plot against Caesar, winning over the chief assassins to the cause of tyrannicide, Brutus became their leader.[8] On the Ides of March, 44 BC, Cassius urged on his fellow liberators and struck Caesar in the chest area. Though they succeeded in assassinating Caesar, the celebration was short-lived, as Mark Antony seized power and turned the public against them. In letters written during 44 BC, Cicero frequently complains that Rome was still subjected to tyranny, because the "Liberators" had failed to kill Antony.[9] According to some accounts, Cassius had wanted to kill Antony at the same time as Caesar, but Brutus dissuaded him.[10]


Cassius' reputation in the East made it easy to amass an army from other governors in the area, and by 43 BC he was ready to take on Publius Cornelius Dolabella with 12 legions. By this point the Senate had split with Antonius and cast its lot with Cassius, confirming him as governor of the province. Dolabella attacked but was betrayed by his allies, leading him to commit suicide. Cassius was now secure enough to march on Egypt, but on the formation of the Second Triumvirate, Brutus requested his assistance. Cassius quickly joined Brutus in Smyrna with most of his army, leaving his nephew behind to govern Syria.

The conspirators decided to attack the triumvirate’s allies in Asia. Cassius set upon and sacked Rhodes, while Brutus did the same to Lycia. They regrouped the following year in Sardis, where their armies proclaimed them imperator. They crossed the Hellespont, marched through Thrace, and encamped near Philippi in Macedon. Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian (later known as Augustus) and Mark Antony soon arrived, and Cassius planned to starve them out through the use of their superior position in the country. However, they were forced into a pair of battles by Antony, collectively known as the Battle of Philippi. Brutus was successful against Octavian, and took his camp. Cassius, however, was defeated and overrun by Antony. Cassius, unaware of Brutus' victory, gave up all for lost, and killed himself with the very same dagger he used against Julius Caesar.[11] The date of Cassius' death is the same as that of his birth, October 3.[12] He was mourned by Brutus as "the Last of the Romans" and buried in Thasos.[13]


"Among that select band of philosophers who have managed to change the world," writes David Sedley, "it would be hard to find a pair with a higher public profile than Brutus and Cassius — brothers-in-law, fellow-assassins, and Shakespearian heroes," adding that "it may not even be widely known that they were philosophers."[14]

Like Brutus, whose Stoic proclivities are widely assumed but who is more accurately described as an Antiochean Platonist, Cassius exercised a long and serious interest in philosophy. His early philosophical commitments are hazy, though D.R. Shackleton Bailey thought that a remark by Cicero[15] indicates a youthful adherence to the Academy.[16] Sometime between 48 and 45 BC, however, Cassius famously converted to the school of thought founded by Epicurus. Although Epicurus advocated a withdrawal from politics, at Rome his philosophy was made to accommodate the careers of many prominent men in public life, among them Caesar's father-in-law, Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus.[17] Arnaldo Momigliano called Cassius' conversion a "conspicuous date in the history of Roman Epicureanism," a choice made not to enjoy the pleasures of the Garden, but to provide a philosophical justification for assassinating a tyrant.[18]

Cicero associates Cassius's new Epicureanism with a willingness to seek peace in the aftermath of the civil war between Caesar and Pompeius.[19] Miriam Griffin dates his conversion to as early as 48 BC, after he had fought on the side of Pompeius at the Battle of Pharsalus but decided to come home instead of joining the last holdouts of the civil war in Africa.[20] Momigliano placed it in 46 BC, based on a letter by Cicero to Cassius dated January 45.[21] Shackleton Bailey points to a date of two or three years earlier.[22]

The dating bears on, but is not essential to, the question of whether Cassius justified the murder of Caesar on Epicurean grounds. Griffin argues that his intellectual pursuits, like those of other Romans, may be entirely removed from any practical application in the realm of politics.[23] Romans of the Late Republic who can be identified as Epicureans are more often found among the supporters of Caesar, and often literally in his camp. Momigliano argued, however, that many of those who opposed Caesar's dictatorship bore no personal animus toward him, and Republicanism was more congenial to the Epicurean way of life than dictatorship. The Roman concept of libertas had been integrated into Greek philosophical studies, and though Epicurus' theory of the social contract admitted various forms of government based on consent, including but not limited to democracy, a tyrannical state was regarded by Roman Epicureans as incompatible with the highest good of pleasure, defined as freedom from pain. Tyranny also threatened the Epicurean value of parrhesia (παρρησία), "free speech", and the movement toward deifying Caesar offended Epicurean belief in abstract gods who lead an ideal existence removed from mortal affairs.[24]

Momigliano saw Cassius as moving from an initial Epicurean orthodoxy, which emphasized tolerance and detachment, to a "heroic Epicureanism."[25] For Cassius, virtue was active. In a letter to Cicero, he wrote:

Sedley agrees that the conversion of Cassius should be dated to 48, when Cassius stopped resisting Caesar, and finds it unlikely that Epicureanism was a sufficient or primary motivation for his later decision to take violent action against the dictator. Rather, Cassius would have had to reconcile his intention with his philosophical views. Cicero provides evidence[28] that Epicureans recognized circumstances when direct action was justified in a political crisis. In the quotation above, Cassius explicitly rejects the idea that morality is a good to be chosen for its own sake; morality, as a means of achieving pleasure and ataraxia, is not inherently superior to the removal of political anxieties.[29]

The inconsistencies between traditional Epicureanism and an active approach to securing freedom ultimately could not be resolved, and during the Empire, the philosophy of political opposition tended to be Stoic. This circumstance, Momigliano argues, helps explain why historians of the Imperial era found Cassius more difficult to understand than Brutus, and less admirable.[25]

In literature

In Dante's Inferno (Canto XXXIV), Cassius is one of three people deemed sinful enough to be chewed in one of the three mouths of Satan, in the very center of Hell, for all eternity, as a punishment for killing Julius Caesar. The other two are Brutus, his fellow conspirator, and Judas Iscariot, the Biblical betrayer of Jesus.

Cassius also plays a major role in Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar (I. ii. 190–195) as the leader of the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar. Caesar distrusts him, and states, "Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.", but is still killed, as in reality. In one of the final acts of the play, Cassius mentions to one of his subordinates that the day, October 3, is his birthday, which he died shortly afterwards in the scenes following.

See also


  1. Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1939, reprinted 2002), p. 57 online; Elizabeth Rawson, "Caesar: Civil War and Dictatorship," in The Cambridge Ancient History: The Last Age of the Roman Republic 146–43 BC (Cambridge University Press, 1994), vol. 9, p. 465.
  2. Plutarch, Brutus, 9.1-4
  3. Appian, Civil Wars, 4.67.
  4. Plutarch, Brutus, 14.4
  5. Caesar, Civil War, iii.101.
  6. However, Suetonius (Caesar, 63) says that it was Lucius Cassius who surrendered to Caesar at the Hellespont.
  7. In a letter written in 45 BC, Cassius says to Cicero, "There is nothing that gives me more pleasure to do than to write to you; for I seem to be talking and joking with you face to face" (Ad Fam., xv.19).
  8. T.R.S. Broughton, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic (American Philological Association, 1952), vol. 2, p. 320, citing Plutarch, Brutus 7.1–3 and Caesar 62.2; and Appian, Bellum Civile 4.57.
  9. For instance, Cicero, Ad Fam., xii.3.1.
  10. Velleius Paterculus, 2.58.5; Plutarch, Brutus, 18.2-6.
  11. PLutarch, Fall of the Roman Republic, sec. 69.
  12. Adkins, Roy A.; Adkins, Lesley (1998). "Republic and Empire". Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome. Oxford University Press US. p. 14. ISBN 978-0-19-512332-6. Retrieved August 7, 2009.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  13. Plutarch, Life of Brutus, 44.2.
  14. David Sedley, "The Ethics of Brutus and Cassius," Journal of Roman Studies 87 (1997) 41–53.
  15. Cicero, Ad familiares xv.16.3.
  16. As cited by Miriam Griffin, "Philosophy, Politics, and Politicians at Rome," in Philosophia togata: Essays on Philosophy and Roman Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
  17. For a survey of Roman Epicureans active in politics, see Arnaldo Momigliano, review of Science and Politics in the Ancient World by Benjamin Farrington (London 1939), in Journal of Roman Studies 31 (1941), pp. 151–157.
  18. Momigliano, Journal of Roman Studies 31 (1941), p. 151.
  19. Miriam Griffin, "The Intellectual Developments of the Ciceronian Age," in The Cambridge Ancient History (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 726 online.
  20. Spe pacis et odio civilis sanguinis ("with a hope of peace and a hatred of shedding blood in civil war"), Cicero, Ad fam. xv.15.1; Miriam Griffin, "Philosophy, Politics, and Politicians at Rome," in Philosophia togata (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
  21. For a quotation of the Epicurean passage in this letter, see article on the philosopher Catius.
  22. D.R. Shackleton Bailey, Cicero Epistulae ad familiares, vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 378 online, in a note to one of Cicero's letters to Cassius (Ad fam. xv.17.4), pointing to evidence he believed Momigliano had overlooked.
  23. Miriam Griffin, "Philosophy, Politics, and Politicians at Rome," in Philosophia togata (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), particularly citing Plutarch, Caesar 66.2 on a lack of philosophical justification for killing Caesar: Cassius is said to commit the act despite his devotion to Epicurus.
  24. Arnaldo Momigliano, Journal of Roman Studies 31 (1941), pp. 151–157. Summary of Cassius's Epicureanism also in David Sedley, "The Ethics of Brutus and Cassius," Journal of Roman Studies 87 (1997), p. 41.
  25. 25.0 25.1 Momigliano, Journal of Roman Studies 31 (1941), p. 157.
  26. Catius and Amafinius were Epicurean philosophers known for their popularizing approach and criticized by Cicero for their dumbed-down prose style.
  27. Ad familiares xv.19; Shackleton Bailey's Latin text of this letter is available online.
  28. Cicero, De republica 1.10.
  29. David Sedley, "The Ethics of Brutus and Cassius," Journal of Roman Studies 87 (1997), pp. 41 and 46–47.


  •  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domainChisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Cassius". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>

Further reading

  • Cassius Dio Cocceianus (1987). The Roman History: The Reign of Augustus. Ian Scott-Kilvert, trans. London: Penguin Books,.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Cicero, Marcus Tullius (1986). Selected Letters. D. R. H. Shackleton Bailey, trans. London: Penguin Books.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Plutarch (1972). Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives. Rex Warner, trans. New York: Penguin Books.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Plutarch (1965). Maker's of Rome: Nine Lives by Plutarch. Ian Scott-Kilvert, trans. London: Penguin Books.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>

External links