Appian, Civil Wars  2.114-118  (ca. A.D. 145-165): 114.  When the conspirators thought there were enough of them, and judged it unnecessary to share their project further, they made a compact with each other, without taking oaths or making sacrifices.  None of them backed out or betrayed the plot, and they looked for an occasion and a place to carry it out.  Time was pressing, because Caesar was within four days of departing for his campaigns and immediately acquiring a military guard.  They had the senate-house in mind as a suitable spot, because they believed that the senators, even if they had not been forewarned, would eagerly associate themselves with the deed, as is said to have happened in the case of Romulus when he began to behave more like a despot than a king.  They also thought that the deed, done like that earlier one in the senate-house, would appear to have been carried out, not as a piece of treachery, but on behalf of the community, and since it was an act performed in the common interest there would be no danger from Caesar's soldiers.  Also the credit would remain with them, for it would be well known that they had initiated it.  These were the considerations which made them fix unanimously on the senate-house, but they were divided over how to proceed.  Some thought they should also make away with Antonius, Caesar's fellow-consul, who was the most powerful of his associates and enjoyed the highest esteem among the soldiers, but Brutus said that if they killed only Caesar they would win glory as tyrannicides for removing a king, but if they killed his associates they would be thought to have acted out of personal enmity as partisans of Pompeius.  The conspirators found this point particularly persuasive, and waited for the impending meeting of the senate.  115.  The day before the meeting, Caesar went to dinner with Lepidus, his Master of Horse.  He brought Decimus Brutus Albinus to join in the drinking, and as they passed the cup round he put the question, "What is the best sort of death for a human being?" Various views were expressed, but he himself thought a sudden death best of all.  In this way he forecast his own fate and the subject of his conversation was what was to happen the next day.  In the night, he lay in a heavy sleep as a result of the drink, and his wife Calpurnia, who had a dream in which she saw his body streaming with blood, tried to stop him leaving the house.  When he offered sacrifice, the signs repeatedly proved ominous.  He was actually on the point of sending Antonius to dismiss the senate, but Decimus, who was there, persuaded him to lay himself open to the charge of disrespect but to go himself and dismiss it, and he was carried in a litter to do so.  There was a performance taking place in Pompeius' theater, and the senate was to meet in one of the rooms beside the theater, as was the usual custom when the shows were on.  From early in the morning Brutus and his associates had been in the colonnades in front of the theater transacting business with any who needed them in their capacity as praetors, but when they heard about the results of Caesar's sacrifices and the postponement of the meeting of the senate they were completely at a loss.  At this point, someone grasped Casca by the hand and said, "You kept it from me, although I am your friend, but Brutus has told me." Casca was conscience-stricken and thrown into sudden confusion, but the man smiled at him and said, "Wherever will you get the money to stand for the aedileship?" whereupon Casca recovered.  Brutus himself and Cassius were deep in thought talking to each other when a senator, Popillius Laenas, drew them towards him and said that he joined with them in praying for success for what they had in mind and encouraged them to make haste.  They were disconcerted, but in their panic said nothing.  116.  When Caesar was already being carried on his way, a member of his household who had learnt about the plot came running to reveal such information as he had acquired.  He went to Calpurnia, and saying only that he needed Caesar on urgent business, waited for him to return from the senate, because he did not possess full information about the affair.  Artemidorus, who had been Caesar's host on Cnidus, ran into the senate, but found him killed moments before.  Someone else give him a note about the conspiracy as he was sacrificing outside immediately before entering the hall where the senate was meeting, and this was found in his hand after his death.  After he stepped out of the litter Laenas, the man who had shortly before prayed for success with Cassius and his companions, went up to him and talked privately with him in an animated fashion.  At once some of the conspirators were perturbed by the sight and duration of the exchange, and they made signs to each other to commit suicide before being arrested; but as the conversation continued and they saw that Laenas was behaving like someone who was not revealing information so much as insistently requesting a favour, they breathed again, and when in addition they saw him embrace Caesar at the end, they recovered their courage.  It is the custom for the magistrates to take the omens before entering the senate, and again Caesar's first sacrificial victim was without a heart, or according to others, without a head to the intestines.  When the soothsayer said that this was a portent of death, Caesar laughed and said that much the same had happened to him in Spain when he was fighting Pompeius.  The soothsayer replied that on that occasion also he had been in extreme danger, but now the portent was even more deadly.  Caesar then told him to repeat the sacrifice, but even so none of the victims yielded good omens.  Ashamed about wasting the time of the senate, and pressed by his enemies in their guise of friends, he spurned the sacred ritual and made his entrance: for Caesar had to suffer Caesar's fate.  117.  The conspirators left Trebonius behind to detain Antonius in conversation outside the doors, and when Caesar had taken his ceremonial seat they crowded round him like friends, their daggers hidden.  One of them, Tillius Cimber, approached him from the front and begged for his exiled brother's return.  Caesar would not agree at all and wished to defer a decision.  Cimber then took hold of Caesar's purple toga as though he was still pleading with him, and ripping the garment away pulled it from his neck, shouting, "What are you waiting for, friends?" Casca, who was standing behind Caesar's head, aimed the first blow at his throat, but missed and wounded him in the chest.  Caesar wrenched the toga out of Cimber's grasp, gripped Casca's hand, and as he sprang off his seat whirled round and pulled Casca after him with enormous force.  While he was in this position, one of the others drove a dagger into his side, stretched as it was in the action of twisting.  Cassius also struck him in the face, Brutus in the thigh, and Bucilianus in the back, so that for a few moments Caesar kept turning from one to another of them with furious cries like a wild beast; but after Brutus's blow, [whether . . .] or giving up hope now, he wound himself in his toga and fell neatly at the foot of Pompeius' statue.  Even then, after he had fallen, they went on savaging him until he had twenty-three wounds, and in the scuffle many of them struck each other with their daggers.  118.  When the murderers had completed their foul deed, perpetrated in a sacred place against a man who was sacred and inviolate, people not only in the senate but all across Rome made an immediate rush to escape.  Some senators were wounded and others lost their lives in the pandemonium.  Many foreigners and ordinary inhabitants of Rome were also killed, the slaughter being unpremeditated and arising naturally from the breakdown of public order and from the ignorance of their attackers.  The reason was that the gladiators, who had been armed from early in the morning in expectation of putting on a show, ran out of the theater towards the screens of the senate-chamber, and out of terror the theater emptied in a panic-stricken surge, and the goods displayed for sale were looted.  Everybody barred their doors and prepared to defend themselves from their roofs.  Antonius concluded that the plot was against himself as well as Caesar, and prepared his house for a siege.  Lepidus, the Master of the Horse, who was in the forum when he heard what had happened, dashed across to the island in the Tiber where he had a legion and took them over to the Campus Martius to hold them in greater readiness for Antonius' orders, deferring to Antonius because the latter was closer to Caesar and also consul.  When they considered what to do, their impulse was to take revenge for what Caesar had suffered, but they feared that the senate would be on the side of the assassins and decided to await further developments.  Caesar himself had no soldiers with him, because he did not keep bodyguards, and his escort from his house to the senate had consisted simply of his lictors, most of the magistrates, and a further large throng made of inhabitants of the capital, foreigners, and numerous slaves and ex-slaves.  They had all fled at once, except for three slaves who stayed beside him and put his body into the litter, to carry home awkwardly (as three men would) the man who not long before had ruled both land and sea.  (H.  White, trans.)