Nearly everything most people picture about the Ides of March comes from a play written sixteen centuries later. Caesar was not killed in the Senate House, nor on the Capitol. The Senate was sitting on 15 March 44 BC in the Curia of Pompey, a hall inside the theatre complex Pompey had built, and Caesar fell near a statue of Pompey himself — the rival he had beaten and outlived by four years. Nor did he say "Et tu, Brute": that line is Shakespeare's, written in 1599. Suetonius and Cassius Dio record that he said nothing at all, while noting a report that he spoke to Brutus in Greek, kai su, teknon — "You too, child?" Plutarch has him silent, drawing his toga over his head at the moment he saw who was standing there. What is certain came afterwards, from the physician Antistius, whose examination of the body is the first autopsy on record: twenty-three wounds, of which only one, below the ribs, was fatal.

King & Country stage the moment as four figures rather than a crowd — Caesar at the centre with his toga gathered, three conspirators closing from three directions with daggers drawn, the whole thing readable from any angle. The togas do the work that armour does elsewhere in this range: these are politicians, and the violence is being done in ordinary clothes. It belongs beside Gaius Julius Caesar in his cuirass, as the same man eleven years and one civil war apart, and beside Pompey the Great, whose statue is the only fitting backdrop the scene could have. Add The Emperor Augustus and the diorama becomes an argument rather than a tableau — the conspirators believed they were restoring the Republic, and what they actually produced was standing quietly in the wings, aged eighteen.

Model: ROM083 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 4 piece set