Julius Caesar

On March 15, 44 BC, a conspiracy of Roman senators led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus stabbed dictator Gaius Julius Caesar twenty-three times in the Curia of Pompey. The conspirators believed that eliminating one autocrat would instantly revive the centuries-old Roman Republic. Instead, the killing provoked immediate public fury and exposed the republic's terminal decay. The power vacuum sparked successive civil wars, first crushing the assassins' armies and then pitting Caesar's closest allies against each other. The ultimate victor, Caesar's adopted heir Octavian, replaced the broken republican institutions with autocratic dynastic rule, inaugurating the Roman Empire as its first emperor, Augustus.