Marcus Junius Brutus
It has become common to say that Caesar’s killers were Cassius and Brutus. Brutus is the nickname of the Iunii branch. Iunii were a family from which the kings of Rome came from. The son of the sister of last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus was Lucius Junius called Brutus. In Latin, “brutus” means “blunt, stupid, goofy”.
In order not to die from the hand of the bloody ruler, Lucius Junius pretended to be mentally disabled (hence the nickname of the family – Brutus). Then he banished the ruler along with the people and became the first consul of Rome.
Sources
- based on footnotes in Life of Augustus of Nicholas from Damascus to paragraph 19, according to Livy, Ab urbe..., I 56-60
