structural:scholar_edition
Aftermath of the assassination

The assassins seized the Capitoline hill after killing the dictator. They then summoned a public meeting in the Forum where they were coldly received by the population. They were also unable to fully secure the city, as Lepidus – Caesar's lieutenant in the dictatorship – moved troops from the Tiber Island into the city proper. Antony, the consul who escaped the assassination, urged an illogical compromise position in the Senate: Caesar was not declared a tyrant and the conspirators were not punished. Caesar's funeral was then approved. At the funeral, Antony inflamed the public against the assassins, which triggered mob violence that lasted for some months before the assassins were forced to flee the capital and Antony then finally acted to suppress it by force.

In 44 BC, there was a seven-day cometary outburst that the Romans believe to represent the deification of Caeser, giving it the name Caesar's Comet. On the site of his cremation, the Temple of Caesar was begun by the triumvirs in 42 BC at the east side of the main square of the Roman Forum. Only its altar now remains. The terms of the will were also read to the public: it gave a generous donative to the plebs at large and left as principal heir one Gaius Octavius, Caesar's great-nephew then at Apollonia, and adopted him in the will.

Resumption of the pre-existing republic proved impossible as various actors appealed in the aftermath of Caesar's death to liberty or to vengeance to mobilise huge armies that led to a series of civil wars. The first war was between Antony in 43 BC and the Senate (including senators of both Caesarian and Pompeian persuasion) which resulted in Octavian – Caesar's heir – exploiting the chaos to seize the consulship and join with Antony and Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate. After purging their political enemies in a series of proscriptions, the triumvirs secured the deification of Caesar – the Senate declared on 1 January 42 BC that Caesar would be placed among the Roman gods – and marched on the east where a second war saw the triumvirs defeat the tyrannicides in battle, resulting in a final death of the republican cause and a three-way division of much of the Roman world. By 31 BC, Caesar's heir had taken sole control of the empire, ejecting his triumviral rivals after two decades of civil war. Pretending to restore the republic, his masked autocracy was acceptable to the war-weary Romans and marked the establishment of a new Roman monarchy.