As to why he would betray the man he spent the majority of his life serving, the jury is still out on that one. If any of the three conspirators deserve the title Judas, it’s Decimus. The Senate has been in session waiting for you since early this morning.’ Nicolaus of Damascus writes: ‘But Decimus, one of the conspirators who was then thought of as a firm friend, came up and said, ‘What is this, Caesar? Are you a man to pay attention to a woman’s dreams and the idle gossip of stupid men, and to insult the Senate by not going out, although it has honoured you and has been specially summoned by you? But listen to me, cast aside the forebodings of all these people, and come. So if anyone wanted to kill Caesar it had to happen before he left, which again shows that Spurinna’s warning was based more in fact than legend would have us believe. It was known that on the 18th of March Caesar was to embark on a military campaign that would have him out of Rome for many years. Therefore the Ides just marked the end period of this warning and was not the entirety of it. After another sacrifice produced equally bad omens, Spurinna warned Caesar that his life would be in danger for the next 30 days, the threat expiring on the 15th of March. The story goes that on February 15 44 BC, after Caesar had sacrificed a bull, Spurinna discovered it to have no heart, which was a bad sign. Therefore, when he did warn Caesar it was more a calculated judgement than a mystical prophecy that Shakespeare had made it out to be. With his access to the elites of Rome, Spurinna would have been able to gauge the anti-Caesar sentiment at the time. They're people who know what's going on.’Īt that time, Caesar had effectively turned the Roman Republic into a dictatorship and there were many from the elite ruling class who resented this. We gather from the writings of Cicero, Plutarch and Suetonius that Spurinna was a man of high status who came from Etruria, a place known to specialise in divination.Īccording to Barry Strauss, an American historian and author of The Death of Caesar, Spurinna and his fellow Etruscan soothsayers would have had ‘a lot of contacts. A haruspex was a person trained to inspect the entrails of sacrificed animals and read any omens from them. Caesar was warned that his life was in danger by a haruspex called Spurinna.
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