According to Strauss:
“Myth 3: Brutus was the assassins’ ringleader and Caesar’s best buddy.
As far as epic betrayals go, we tend to imagine Brutus in the same league as Judas. In reality, that infamy should be reserved for someone called Decimus.
Caesar trusted Decimus much more than he trusted Brutus — and that made his betrayal more shocking. Misspelled in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as “Decimus,” Decimus was much more important than most of us realize. “There were three leaders of the assassins’ conspiracy,” Strauss says. “Brutus, Cassius, and Decimus....”
But what I don’t understand is in Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars (translated by Robert Graves) it says”
“More than sixty conspirators banded together against him, led by Gaius Cassius and Marcus and DECIMUS BRUTUS.”
In other words, Brutus was DECIMUS.
Also, he goes on to say, “Twenty-three daggers thrusts went home as he stood there. Caesar did not utter a sound after Casca’s blow had drawn a groan from him; though some say that when he saw Marcus Brutus about to deliver the second blow, he reproached him in Greek with: ‘You too, my child?’
Lastly, Strauss here says, “Decimus dined with Caesar the night before his assassination and convinced Caesar to leave his house the next morning.”
But in Suetonius’b Twelve Caesars he writes, “And on the day before his murder he had dined at Marcus Lepidus’s house, where the topic discussed happened to be t’the best sort of death’ - and ‘Let it come swifty and unexpectedly, cried Caesar.”
How is it that Strauss claims Brutus is a different man from Decimus? It seems they are the same man, ‘Decimus Brutus’.? Is this an attempt at revisionism? Seems unlikely, with so many scholars about to correct him and so much history already in books already all over the world attesting to these things. I don’t understand.
Can someone pull out of that paragraph what the correct spelling of “Decimus,” is?