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ROME, the Ides of March.—Caesar went to the Senate this morning against the pleas of his wife, his doctors and his friends, and after the seers had found every sign against him.

In the night the doors and windows of his bedroom flew open, and Calpurnia, asleep beside him, groaned and cried out. She dreamed she was holding her murdered husband in her arms and mourning him. Caesar himself dreamed he flew above the clouds and clasped the hand of Jupiter.

At dawn Calpurnia begged him not to go out, but to put off the Senate, or at least to seek other omens. His friends urged the same, and so did his doctors, troubled by his dizzy spells. The seers tried victim after victim, and each gave a bad sign. Caesar resolved to send Antony to dismiss the Senate.

Then Decimus Brutus Albinus came. The senators had gathered at Caesar’s own summons, he said, and stood ready to vote him king of the provinces outside Italy, with leave to wear a diadem on land and sea. What would his enemies say if they were sent home until Calpurnia had better dreams? If he still thought the day unlucky, let him go and adjourn it himself.

“Are you going to pay any attention to a woman’s dreams and foolish men’s omens, a man such as you?” Decimus asked him. Word came that the House was full, and Decimus took him by the hand and led him out.

ROME, the Ides of March.—On his way to the Senate this morning Caesar met the soothsayer Spurinna, who had warned him of the Ides, and greeted him with a jest.

“Well, the Ides of March are come,” Caesar said. Spurinna answered him quietly: “Aye, they are come, but they are not gone.”

Further on, Artemidorus of Cnidus, a teacher of Greek philosophy who knows men of Brutus’s circle, pressed a small roll on him. Caesar commonly hands such papers to his attendants, so Artemidorus came close and told him: “Read this, Caesar, by thyself, and speedily; for it contains matters of importance and of concern to thee.”

Caesar took the roll and tried several times to read it, but the crowd kept claiming his attention, and he went into the Senate with it still in his hand.

At the hall the senator Popilius Laenas hurried up to Caesar and talked with him a long while. The men waiting with daggers, watching, feared they had been found out and reached for their weapons. Brutus saw from Laenas’s manner that he was eagerly asking a favour, not denouncing anyone. Laenas made it plain that his business was his own, and left after kissing Caesar’s hand.

ROME, the Ides of March.—Flight spread from the Senate hall through the whole city as soon as the deed was done.

Senators who knew nothing of the plot stood struck dumb, then ran. Marcus Brutus tried to speak to them, calling for calm and declaring that a tyrant had been slain, but he could not make himself heard, and they jammed the doorway.

In the theatre, where a show of gladiators was under way, the crowd broke and ran. Gladiators armed for the games ran into the Senate’s gallery, and the markets were plundered. Rumour had it that the whole Senate was being butchered, or that Caesar’s soldiers were sacking the city.

Some senators were hurt or killed in the rush, and citizens and strangers died in the confusion.

“Run! bolt doors! bolt doors!” went the cry in the streets. Citizens shut their front doors and took to their roofs to defend them; others left their shops and ran.

ROME, the Ides of March.—The men who struck Caesar have gone up to the Capitol, and tonight they hold it.

They came through the streets with bloody hands and bare daggers, their togas wound about their left arms as shields, one of them carrying a cap of freedom on a spear. They called on the people to take back their freedom and restore the old government, naming Brutus’s ancestor and the ancient oath against kings.

The people did not rally to them. Some who had no part in the killing ran with them in hope of a share of the glory, and the leading men who came up to join them were made welcome. Their gladiators and slaves followed them up the hill, where they have posted a guard.

ROME, the Ides of March.—Caesar’s body lay where it fell while nearly all his friends fled or hid. Only Calvisius Sabinus and Censorinus stood their ground for a moment, and they too were driven off.

A man near the body cried out: “Enough of truckling to a tyrant.”

Three slaves set the body in a litter and carried it home through the Forum, one arm hanging down. People wept as it passed, and Calpurnia ran out, crying that she had warned him not to go.

Antony, the consul, slipped away from the hall in the clothes of an ordinary citizen. Fearing that he too was marked, he has fortified his house. Lepidus, master of the horse, has marched his legion onto the Campus Martius, ready to act on Antony’s orders.