I’ve been meaning to comment on this for a while now, but I’ve been so swamped with work that in my few free waking moments my brain has been jelly.

Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, Caesar’s murder was the first act of violence actually in the Senate. There had been incitements to extreme violence (the murder of at least one of the Gracchi, for instance) and threats of murder and mayhem (Sulla’s butchery of prisoners where the senators could hear, and those gladiators stationed next door during the post-Cataline mess), but no outright violence.

The reason for this is very simple: a Senate meeting was a sacred space. It was a religious occasion. The Romans tended to very pragmatic concerning religion, but even they would have been hesitant at outright and open sacrilege.

But then I got to thinking. Did Caesar’s murder actually occur in the Senate, or did the conspirators wiggle through a legal/religious loophole? The Curia itself was a sacred space, regardless of whether the Senate was meeting or not. Furthermore, it was within another sacred space, the pomerium. (Mind you, the ban on weapons inside the pomerium may have been the most violated law of all time until the introduction of the 55 mph speed limit.) But the Senate wasn’t meeting in the Curia that day. It was undergoing renovation or something; instead, the meeting was being held in some building of Pompey’s on the Field of Mars.

Still, any meeting of the Senate was sacred, regardless of where it was held. When the conscript fathers convened, a sacrifice was held for omens and the gods were invoked. The question is had the Senate actually convened? They had been waiting for hours for Caesar to arrive. Presumably, as dictator, he would have been expected to make the sacrifice, possibly interpreting the omens himself as pontifex. If they had not yet convened, then the Senate was not yet meeting, no sacred space had yet been created. And Caesar was not really murdered in the Senate.