An analytic narrative of Caesar’s death: Suicide or not? That is the question

Abstract

On the Ides of March, 44 BC, in the Senate House of Pompey in Rome, Julius Caesar was assassinated by conspirators, the most famous of those being Brutus. Are there objectively valid reasons to confirm the possibility of a suicidal wish on the part of Caesar raised by Suetonius? By building and solving a two-player non-cooperative game that models the historical strategic aspects of the relationship between Caesar and Brutus, our article shows that there is no need to subscribe to the suicide thesis to explain Caesar’s death. We formulate our conclusion via the solution concept of mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium.