On the morning of March 15, 44 BC, the day Romans called the Ides of March, a man named Artemidorus pressed a handwritten note into Julius Caesar's hand. It listed every senator planning to kill him that day. Caesar tucked it under his arm, intending to read it later, and walked into the Curia of Pompey, a meeting hall built by the general he had just defeated in civil war.
He was stabbed 23 times. A Roman physician named Antistius examined the body in the first recorded forensic autopsy in history (a formal medical examination of a corpse). His finding: only one of the 23 wounds was fatal, a single thrust beneath the left shoulder blade.
More than 60 senators were in on the plot. They called themselves the Liberatores, the liberators, and their entire goal was to save the Roman Republic from a man they thought wanted to be king. Caesar had publicly refused the crown. The most visible refusal came a month before his death, at the Lupercalia festival (a Roman public holiday), when Mark Antony offered it in front of the whole city and Caesar pushed it away.
When the conspirators ran into the streets afterward expecting celebration, they found fear and confusion instead. Caesar's will, read publicly days later, gave every Roman citizen 300 sesterces, several months of a laborer's wages, and donated his private gardens to the city as a public park. Mark Antony's funeral speech turned the crowd against the conspirators almost overnight.
"Et tu, Brute?" never happened. Shakespeare wrote that line in 1599. Suetonius, writing about 150 years after Caesar's death, recorded that Caesar covered his face with his toga and said nothing, but also noted that some witnesses claimed his final words were the Greek phrase "kai su teknon," meaning roughly "You too, child?" Whether that was real or invented long after the fact, historians still disagree.
The Liberatores fled Rome. Thirteen more years of civil war followed. Cicero, who praised the assassination publicly without being part of the plot, was hunted down and killed in 43 BC. Brutus and Cassius both died at Philippi in 42 BC. Caesar's adopted son Octavian declared himself Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, in 27 BC, just 17 years after the assassination.
The men who killed Caesar to save the Republic ended the Republic. The title they feared he would take, "king," was never used again by Rome's rulers. The emperors who followed, governing for another 500 years in the west and 1,500 years in the east, called themselves Caesar instead.
July is named after him. Kaiser and Czar, both corruptions of his name in different languages, were titles European rulers used for nearly 1,900 years after his death. The calendar the Western world replaced in 1582 was his design. He never got to read that note.
Julius Caesar knife block.