The assassination of Julius Caesar is known best for the fictional elements that Shakespeare and others invented. Caesar never actually said “Et tu, Brute?,” and Brutus never said “Sic semper tyrannis.” The historical record suggests the dictator remained silent and covered his head while the conspirators rained daggers upon him. The whole scene actually sounds quite grubby. No one even bothered to collect Caesar’s body until slaves got around to it on their own initiative.

The truly amazing fact is that Brutus and Cassius had no real follow-up plan. They lived in a bubble of their own conspiratorial making, and imagined that the great mass of ordinary Roman citizens would laud them as heroes. When this didn’t happen, they simply fled the city as power coalesced around Mark Antony. In the civil war that followed, two sides emerged—those who cast Brutus and Cassius as noble Liberators (as the conspirators called themselves), and those who demanded they be hunted down as enemies of the state.

The stabbing of Caesar was one of history’s most famous homicides—which is why I lead with it. But the binary response to the killing is something you see repeated throughout the centuries. Deadly violence has a polarizing effect on societies. With few exceptions—such as when bloodshed is hermetically contained among criminals or the lower classes more generally—murder demands a morally urgent response. When there’s a political aspect, the killer must be either punished by the old order, or lionized by its replacement. Either way, the rupture in the social fabric has to be sutured up quickly, lest society go to shambles, which is why ancient trials were so quick and ruthless.