A cabal of some sixty senators, fearing Caesar's accumulating power and rumored kingly ambitions, surrounded him during a Senate session and stabbed him to death. Caesar reportedly fell near a statue of his old rival Pompey. The assassins believed they were saving the Republic; instead they triggered thirteen years of civil war that ended with Rome ruled by emperors.
Caesar had been warned. A soothsayer named Spurinna had told him to beware the Ides of March, and on his way to the Senate that morning he supposedly passed the seer and joked that the Ides had come. Spurinna reportedly replied that they had come, but not yet gone.
The attack was chaotic and amateurish — many of the sixty-odd conspirators wounded each other in the crush to strike Caesar, and he suffered 23 stab wounds, only one of which, a physician later determined, was fatal. He is said to have pulled his toga over his head and stopped resisting once he saw his friend Brutus among the attackers, murmuring some version of 'et tu, Brute' in later legend, though the historical record of his actual last words is far murkier.
The conspirators, calling themselves the Liberatores, expected the Senate and public to celebrate the restoration of republican liberty. Instead, Caesar's funeral turned into a riot, Mark Antony read his will publicly, and the ensuing power struggle between Antony, Octavian, and the assassins plunged Rome into renewed civil war. Within seventeen years, Octavian would rule alone as Augustus, Rome's first emperor — the very outcome the assassins had killed to prevent.