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    "headline": "Caesar’s ‘Et tu, Brute?’ appears in neither ancient biography; it was printed in a London pl",
    "description": "Suetonius reports Caesar died silent or said, in Greek, \"You too, my child?\" Plutarch has him pull his toga over his head when he saw Brutus.",
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    "keywords": "Ancient Rome, Julius Caesar, Misquotes, Shakespeare",
    "articleBody": "Neither of the two ancient biographies that describe Julius Caesar’s murder in detail has him say “Et tu, Brute?” The Latin words most people know come from an English playwright working about 1,640 years after the stabbing, and the oldest surviving printing of the phrase is not even in a play about Rome. Caesar was killed on the Ides of March, March 15, 44 BC, at a meeting of the Senate in a hall attached to Pompey’s theater. Caesar was then Rome’s dictator, and Marcus Brutus, one of the men who stabbed him, owed him a great deal: Caesar had spared his life after the battle of Pharsalus and handed him the most prestigious of that year’s praetorships. What Suetonius wrote Suetonius, writing his life of Caesar roughly a century and a half after the killing, is the source of the story, and he presents it as a minority report. In the 1913 Loeb Classical Library translation, online at the University of Chicago, he says Caesar took 23 wounds while “uttering not a word, but merely a groan at the first stroke, though some have written that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him, he said in Greek, ‘You too, my child?'” So the earliest version of the line is Greek, not Latin, and it is hearsay even in the source that keeps it. Suetonius’s own Latin sentence switches alphabets for the quotation: kai su, teknon. The one remark he does give Caesar in his own voice comes earlier, when Tillius Cimber grabs his toga: “Why, this is violence!” What Plutarch wrote Plutarch, the Greek biographer, gives a fuller account in chapter 66 of his Life of Caesar and records no words to Brutus at all. In the 1919 Loeb translation, Casca strikes first, at the neck, and Caesar shouts at him in Latin, “Accursed Casca, what does thou?” Brutus lands one blow, in the groin. Then comes the gesture Plutarch attaches to Brutus: “when he saw that Brutus had drawn his dagger, he pulled his toga down over his head and sank” Plutarch puts the body at the foot of Pompey’s statue, the pedestal soaked in blood, and gives the same total of 23 wounds as Suetonius. In his telling the betrayal registers as silence. How the Latin line reached the stage The Latin form is an Elizabethan invention. Laid out in order, the trail looks like this: 44 BC: Caesar is killed in Rome; neither ancient biographer reports Latin words to Brutus. 1582: Edmond Malone later claimed the phrase was used in Caesar Interfectus, a Latin play by Richard Edes that has not survived. 1595: a printer in London issues The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, the earliest printed version of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3. Edward of York, watching his brother George of Clarence march in apparently for the rival side, says: “Et tu Brute, wilt thou stab Caesar too?” 1599: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1. 1623: the First Folio prints the line as “Et Tu Brutè?” The 1595 joke works only if the audience already knew the phrase as shorthand for treachery by a friend, which suggests it was circulating before Shakespeare used it for Caesar himself. In that scene the treachery is a feint: Clarence pulls the red rose of Lancaster from his hat and throws it at the Earl of Warwick, rejoining his brothers. The arithmetic of the gap is simple. Counting from 44 BC to AD 1595, with no year zero, gives 44 + 1,595 – 1 = 1,638 years between the murder and the first surviving printed “Et tu Brute.” For the 1599 play it is 1,642. What Shakespeare’s Caesar says Even in the play, the phrase is not quite the last word. In the open text of Act 3, Scene 1, hosted by MIT, Casca cries “Speak, hands for me!”, the conspirators stab, and Caesar answers in a half-line of Latin followed by English: “Et tu, Brute! Then fall, Caesar.” The question mark most people add follows the 1623 Folio, not the exclamation in the open text. The reference record of the phrase notes there is no evidence the historical Caesar ever said it, and some readers of Suetonius take the Greek even further: a footnote to the Chicago text points out that “my child” could be literal, given gossip that Brutus was Caesar’s son. The Greek kai su, teknon is in section 82 of Suetonius’s Life of Julius Caesar, and the Latin “Et tu, Brute!” comes one line after Casca’s “Speak, hands for me!” in Act 3, Scene 1. The next Ides of March falls on Monday, March 15, 2027. Further reading Wikipedia: Et tu, Brute? Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar (Loeb 1913) Plutarch, Life of Caesar (Loeb 1919) Image: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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