The Roman empire in 44 BC (in dark and light red and orange)
Year 44 BC was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.
[edit] Events
[edit] By place
- Consuls: Gaius Julius Caesar, Mark Antony.
- February - Rome celebrates the festival of the Lupercal. Mark Antony presents Caesar with a royal diadem, urging him to take it and declare himself king. He refuses this offer and orders the crown to be placed in de Temple of Jupiter.
- March 15 (the Ides of March)—Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome, is assassinated by a group of Roman senators, amongst them Gaius Cassius Longinus, Marcus Junius Brutus, and Caesar's Massilian naval commander, Decimus Brutus. Caesar's famous last quote—coined by William Shakespeare in his play Julius Caesar—was most likely not spoken (see: "Et tu, Brute?").
- March 20—Caesar's funeral is held. Marcus Antony gives a eulogy and in his Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears speech he makes accusations of murder and ensures a permanent breach with the conspirators against Caesar. He snatches Caesar's purple toga to show the crowd the stab wounds, the citizens tear apart the forum and cremate their Caesar on a makeshift pyre. Antony becomes the first man in Rome.
- Early April—Octavian returns from Apollonia in Dalmatia to Rome to take up Caesar's inheritance, against advice from Atia (his mother and Caesar's niece) and consular stepfather Antony.
- April 18 to April 21—Octavian engages in charm offensive with consular Cicero who is fulminating against Mark Antony.
- June—Antony is granted a five-year governorship of northern and central Transalpine Gaul (France) and Cisalpine Gaul (Northern Italy).
- September 2—Pharaoh Cleopatra VII of Egypt declares her son co-ruler as Ptolemy XV Caesarion.
- September 2—The first of Cicero's Philippics (oratorical attacks) on Antony is published. He will make 14 of them over the next several months.
- December—Antony besieges Brutus Albinus in Mutina (Modena), with Octavian, an ally of Decimus, who is one of his uncle's assassins, close by.
- A Denarius with a portrait of Julius Caesar is made. It is now kept at the American Numismatic Society in New York.
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