How Assassinations Lit Rome’s Civil Wars: What Can Roman History Teach Us
Political murder rarely restores an old order; in Rome it rewired incentives, putting armies, money and short-term bargains above process. From Caesar’s Ides to the auction of 193, assassinations taught Romans to price power—and to expect violence to decide it.
After September 10, 2025, American headlines have grappled with the political shock of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the polarized aftermath. The facts are still settling, but mainstream outlets sketch a common frame: a public killing during an event, a swift hunt for the young assassin, and an immediate fight to control the meaning of the act.
The Guardian called it “a perilous moment that may lead to more,” while The Economist warned that political murder can become routine. NBC reports detail the investigation’s early steps, and Politico tracks how allies are already shaping the legacy.
The particulars are modern; the pattern is not. In Rome, high-profile killings repeatedly triggered factional surges that outran the original grievance and reconfigured the state. The Roman experience does not offer neat analogies or easy slogans—only hard lessons about what violence at the top does to a republic, a monarchy, or any polity in between.
From Murder to Mobilization: Caesar’s Death and the Unraveling of the Republic
When Julius Caesar fell to a ring of senators on the Ides of March, the conspirators pitched their act as a constitutional restoration. They were not alone in thinking that targeted violence at the top might “reset” the system. Yet the immediate aftermath undercut that hope.
Christina Athanasiou
In the Forum and the streets, grief, fear, and opportunism spread more quickly than any plan for lawful succession. Mark Antony rode the shock into leverage; Octavian transformed it into legality. The lesson was not that assassination “worked,” but that death at the apex can convert private resentment into public mobilization—often against the assassins themselves.
Brutus and Cassius drew on a Roman tradition that saw tyrannicide as a defense of the commonwealth. But the Republic they sought to save depended on habits and expectations that violence erodes.
Appian frames the century’s story as a drift from factional strife to one-man rule, punctuated not by settlements but by escalations. The conspirators created a vacancy without a mechanism to fill it, then watched as rhetorical claims—liberty, law, tradition—were rapidly subordinated to the logic of armies and money.
In the months that followed, the funeral, Antony’s maneuvers, and Octavian’s legal daring mattered more than the daggers in the Curia. The young Caesar (Octavian) turned mourning into mandate and aligned legality with force. The “Republic” soon meant what the winners said it meant. Appian’s analysis stresses the sequence: murder, contestation, factional bids, then a new settlement under a single princeps. The assassination was the spark, not the engine; the engine was mobilization.
Even ancient observers who granted moral seriousness to the conspirators admitted the structural problem: a killing could stop a man, not a momentum. By the time of Philippi, slogans about the res publica were fused to marching orders; after Actium, those slogans were repurposed to explain a durable monarchy. Assassination, in short, rearranged who controlled coercion; it did not restore limits on it.
“The Year of the Four Emperors”: Galba to Vespasian and the Price of Precedent
A century later, Rome learned again that elite killings do more than eliminate rulers; they rewrite rules. Nero’s suicide in 68 set off a chain of claims grounded in the army’s preferences and provincial weight. Galba’s elevation, Otho’s swift coup, Vitellius’s advance, and Vespasian’s consolidation produced not a constitutional debate but a test of who could align legions, urban cohorts, and supply chains fastest. The killing or deposition of each claimant didn’t end the crisis; it opened the next bid.
Christina Athanasiou
The key is precedent. Once an army in Spain or the Rhine could make an emperor, every governor could imagine it. Once praetorians could swing a decision in the capital, every contender had to price their loyalty. Violence at the top—assassination, coerced suicide, street fighting—drove home that legitimacy now meant command of force validated after the fact by the Senate. That learned behavior from 68–69 never entirely left the imperial system.
Otho’s suicide after defeat at Bedriacum is often read as a tragic, even noble exit to spare Rome further blood. But it did not spare the city a second battle or prevent Vitellius’s brutal December. What stabilized the situation was not the moral posture of a defeated emperor; it was Vespasian’s capture of the apparatus: the food routes, the Danubian legions, and eventually the capital. Violence at the summit had taught everyone to look past “right” to “capacity.”
We study 69 not to rehearse gore but to see how a system learns. Rome learned that civil order could be suspended and reassembled around military coalitions. It learned that assassination did not restore old limits but shortened time horizons: commanders hedged, courtiers gambled, and “the public good” became whatever stopped the bleeding for now. Later claimants—some competent, many not—would live inside that template. (The Cambridge Ancient History; Appian’s Civil War)
From Commodus to the “Auction of the Empire”: When Assassinations Became a Business Model
Commodus’s murder on the last day of 192 looked, at first, like a re-set. Pertinax, an experienced senator, promised thrift and reform. Within three months he was dead, cut down by guards angered at tighter discipline and smaller payouts. Then came the moment that Roman moralists never forgot.
Outside the Praetorian camp gates, the City Prefect Sulpicianus and the senator Didius Julianus bid against each other for the soldiers’ favor. Cassius Dio’s verdict remains devastating:
“just as if it had been in some market or auction-room, both the City and its entire empire were auctioned off.”
Cassius Dio, Roman History
Christina Athanasiou
Herodian’s narrative is even starker about the terms: the guards “announced that the position of emperor was up for sale.” The assassination of a bad ruler had not purified the system; it had taught its guardians that killing created a market. In the weeks that followed, Septimius Severus marched on Rome as the “corrective,” punishing the sellers and the buyer while retaining the principle that armies decide. The empire did not forget the auction. Neither did later soldiers.
The Severan settlement that emerged—Severus, then Caracalla—acknowledged the new truth: the praetorians and provincial legions were veto players. Assassination became a bargaining chip. A threatened killing could extract donatives; an actual one could justify a march. When assassination is priced in, the palace becomes a marketplace with blades. The state keeps functioning, taxes keep flowing, but the cost of everything rises.
Pertinax’s reforms failed not because austerity is wrong in principle but because assassinations reduce trust to zero. When enemies and supposed protectors alike expect quick payouts, any long-horizon policy reads like an insult. What follows is not policy debate but personnel change—at speed, often with knives. The moral is plain in the sources: once assassination is seen to “work,” it gets repeated by actors who care less about programs than positions.
Brothers, Blood, and a Mother’s Arms: Caracalla, Geta, and the Family Civil War
When Septimius Severus died in 211, he left a formula many monarchies still dream about: power shared between sons under the watch of a formidable empress mother. Within months, the arrangement failed. Caracalla lured Geta to a supposed reconciliation in their mother Julia Domna’s apartments; soldiers cut the younger brother down. Ancient writers never forgot the setting. Dio captures both the shock and the horror of the scene, with Geta dying in Julia’s embrace and Caracalla’s regime erasing the memory in proscriptions and damnatio.
Christina Athanasiou
Assassination here did not trigger a national mobilization—there was no rival army in the field for Geta—but it did inaugurate a continuous low-grade civil war of purges, fear, and flattery. Herodian’s portrait of Caracalla leans into the post-murder psychology: a ruler who sought legitimacy in soldierly theatrics and in repeated largesse to the troops. The structure is familiar: once legitimacy is secured by bayonets, it must be fed by payments; when payments slow, so does loyalty.
One reason modern readers return to this episode is that it fuses the personal and the political. Rome’s institutions were strong enough to collect taxes and fight wars; they were not strong enough to offset the effects of fratricide at the top. When succession becomes a life-and-death lottery, everyone around the throne adjusts incentives. Courtiers rush to anticipate the victor’s mood; generals trim sails; the Senate practices silence. The polity “works,” but it works fearfully.
The cycle continued through the 210s and into the 220s, through the brief, scandal-hungry reign of Elagabalus and the purge that brought Severus Alexander to power. Each act reinforced the lesson that persons mattered more than processes, and that violence could reset who governed without settling how. (The Cambridge Ancient History; Herodian, History of the Empire; Cassius Dio, Roman History)
10 Things that Roman Assassinations Teach—and What They Don’t
The long arc of Roman history makes one fact painfully clear: assassinations did not end crises, they magnified them. Each killing — whether of Caesar in the Senate chamber, Geta in his mother’s arms, or Commodus in his bath — promised resolution but delivered chaos.
Civil wars, vendettas, and instability were the natural offspring of political murder. To read Appian or Herodian is to see how swiftly a single dagger thrust could unravel the fragile fabric of imperial order. In considering these bloody precedents, we can draw lessons not only about the Roman world but about the universal dangers of believing that violence can restore stability.
- Assassination is a trigger, not a cure.
Caesar’s killers had a theory of political correction. So did the plotters against Commodus. In both cases, the act that removed a leader created a contest that ultimately empowered the best organizer, not the most “constitutional” claimant. Appian’s through-line is blunt: out of factional violence came monarchy, not restoration. Rome teaches that theorizing assassination as a reset underestimates how quickly force and finance fill a vacuum. - Killing at the top resets incentives below.
After 69 CE and again after 193, everyone with a stake in imperial succession learned to price in violence. Praetorians asked what their loyalty was worth today. Frontier legions weighed whether backing their governor now would pay better than waiting. The Senate preserved dignity by approving what armies had already decided. That is not cynicism; it is institutional adaptation after a series of shocks. - Markets emerge where mechanisms fail.
Dio’s account of March 193 is not a metaphor. “Both the City and its entire empire were auctioned off.” Herodian adds the sales pitch: “the position of emperor was up for sale.” Markets arise when formal mechanism (lawful succession) and informal norms (donatives within bounds) collapse. Once that price is discovered, later players try to improve their terms. - Family murders do not privatize the crisis; they broadcast it.
Caracalla and Geta’s case proves that even domestic assassinations rearrange public life. Purges expand; loyalists are bought; administrators self-censor. The state functions, but narrowly. In Rome, that meant a louder army and a quieter Senate. In any system, it means policy shrinkage and a politics of avoidance. - “Lessons” are structural, not partisan.
Roman sources can be unsparing about personalities—vain, timid, cruel, or rash. The risk for modern readers is to moralize the people and miss the pattern. Appian, Dio, and Herodian keep pointing to structure: once violence at the summit is “normal,” actors below rationally adapt. The point is not that motives don’t matter; it’s that motives are channeled by incentives shaped by prior killings. - What about now? Use history carefully.
The reports and commentary after Charlie Kirk’s killing already show how quickly a society scrambles to narrate an act of violence: grief statements, calls for crackdown, warnings about overreach, arguments about motive and blame. The Roman record does not tell us what to do next; it does suggest which questions matter:- Who controls the levers of coercion and procedure?
- Which institutions stand ready to channel the shock into lawful action?
- What incentives will the event create for those who hold force, funds, or followers?
Briar-patch rhetoric abounds after a killing; Rome’s chroniclers insist that structure is what keeps you out of it.
- Guardrails must be tended in advance.
One reason assassinations destabilized Rome is that guardrails—term limits with teeth, norms around military obedience to civilian command, credible fiscal promises—had frayed. Once crisis hit, it was too late to design them. The Republic’s last generation learned that charismatic appeals and emergency powers solve today’s problem while hollowing tomorrow’s order. The Principate that followed worked when it served expectations and paid its troops. When it failed either task, knives reappeared. - The rhetoric of “restoration” is tempting—and treacherous.
From the Ides onward, Roman assassins claimed to be giving the state back to itself. The trouble was that “itself” needed procedures the killing had just weakened. Augustus succeeded not because he restored the Republic but because he offered something else with the old names: predictable command, reliable pay, and legal fictions that soothed elites. If there is a usable lesson, it is this: durable settlements deliver predictability without pretending to rewind history. - Beware the downstream “pricing” of violence.
After 193, an emperor could calculate what a donative must be to avert a barracks revolt. After 69, a governor could compute how many legions plus how much grain secured Rome. Assassination taught Romans to cost politics as a series of short-term buys. Any system that lets one killing rebalance the constitution risks teaching future players to treat murder as a transaction. Roman elites paid for that lesson for centuries. - Memory matters—but it is not enough.
Roman writers curated these episodes for a reason: to shame, to warn, to explain. Their stories kept alive the idea that violence at the summit is not only immoral but wasteful. Yet the same culture also preserved the incentives that made repetition likely. If there is a Roman “ask,” it is the unglamorous one: maintain procedures, fund transitions, police the boundary between force and law, and resist turning grief into programmatic vengeance. Those are banal tasks. They are also the ones that kept Rome quiet when, on occasion, it was quiet.
At the end of the day, what History teaches us is that deeply supporting the core values of freedom and democracy need to be the means to walk us through times of crisis, not polarization, taking sides and political labeling that fuel the fire of hate even further. Bernie Sander’s video message captures the essence of all the aforementioned, beautifully.
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