Marcus Junius Brutus is often identified as the leader of the conspiracy that killed Julius Caesar.
Brutus was a Roman senator and prominent aristocrat who had once supported Pompey during Caesar’s civil war. Caesar later pardoned him and treated him favorably, even appointing him praetor. That personal history made Brutus’s participation especially dramatic and politically significant.
The plot was not the work of Brutus alone. Gaius Cassius Longinus was a key instigator, while Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus helped organize the attack. Ancient and modern accounts therefore sometimes describe Brutus and Cassius together as the conspiracy’s leading figures. Still, Brutus became its most famous public symbol because conspirators presented the assassination as a defense of the Roman Republic rather than a private act of revenge.
The assassins struck Caesar on 15 March 44 BC, at the Curia of Pompey. Their plan failed to restore the Republic: civil war followed, and Caesar’s adopted heir Octavian eventually became Augustus, Rome’s first emperor.