Assassination of Julius Caesar
Tempio B lies within Largo di Torre Argentina in Rome, part of the ruined complex that once held the Curia of Pompey, where senators stabbed Julius Caesar to death on 15 March 44 BCE. The sunken square preserves four Republican-era temples and the paving of the hall where the killing happened.
Senators stabbed Caesar roughly twenty-three times in this hall
Largo di Torre Argentina marks the assassination of Julius Caesar, now a sunken square of Roman ruins called Largo di Torre Argentina. Four temples and a stretch of ancient paving sit below modern street level, visible from a walkway above. The site once held the Theatre of Pompey, built by Pompey the Great and finished in 55 BCE. It included a curia, a hall where the Roman Senate sometimes met.
In 52 BCE, the Senate's own building had burned down. Senators started using Pompey's curia as a temporary meeting place instead. That decision put Julius Caesar in this exact hall on March 15, 44 BCE.
Caesar walked in as dictator for life, a title that frightened men who still believed in the old Republic. A senator named Lucius Tillius Cimber stepped close, holding out a petition. He grabbed Caesar's toga and yanked it down. That was the signal. Servilius Casca struck first, stabbing Caesar from behind. Around sixty senators joined in, led by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, and Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus. The senators stabbed Caesar roughly twenty-three times, in the head, chest, legs, and groin.
Ancient writers disagree about his last words, and Suetonius says he only groaned. Later writers claim he said, "You too, my child?
Tradition holds that Caesar fell at the foot of a statue of Pompey, his old rival. The symbolism was hard to miss: killed in a hall built by the man he had once defeated in civil war.
The killing did not save the Republic. It triggered more war, and within years, Caesar's adopted heir Augustus held power alone. Augustus later had Pompey's statue removed from the hall. Ancient sources say the building was sealed, then eventually converted into a public toilet.
Old republican temples surrounded the hall where Caesar fell
No eyewitness wrote down what happened in the hall that day. The earliest surviving account came almost sixty years later, from a writer named Nicolaus of Damascus, around 14 CE. Historians say he interviewed people who had been there, but he wrote for Augustus, Caesar's heir, so his version may favor Caesar's side of the story.
The temples standing in the pit beside this spot were already old when Caesar died here. One of them, built in the 290s or 280s BCE, had stood for over two centuries. Another, raised around 101 BCE by a general fulfilling a battlefield vow, had six columns still visible today. Caesar's assassins met in a hall surrounded by monuments to Rome's republican past, a past they believed he was ending.
Construction crews uncovered the buried Curia of Pompey
The ruins stayed hidden under the city for centuries, built over and forgotten. In the 1920s, construction crews clearing the area for a new building uncovered the temples and the paving of the ancient square. Workers found the foundations of the Curia of Pompey itself, the very hall where Caesar fell. The discovery was significant enough that officials stopped the planned construction and preserved the site instead, leaving it sunken below the modern street.
A concrete structure may mark where Caesar died
Archaeologists went further decades later. In 2012, a team identified a concrete structure within the ruins, about ten feet by six feet, set into the floor of the hall. They proposed that Augustus had it built, either to mark the spot where Caesar died or to block it off and condemn what happened there. The structure sits close to where tradition says Caesar fell at the foot of Pompey's statue, cut down in a building raised by his old rival.
A nearby tower, not Caesar, gave the square its name
The square today takes its name not from Caesar but from a different story entirely. It is called Largo di Torre Argentina after a nearby tower, built by a papal official from Strasbourg, whose Latin name was Argentoratum. The connection to Caesar's death only came back to light with the 1920s excavation, long after the square had already taken its name.
The ruins sit below the level of the surrounding streets, visible from a walkway that circles the edge. Visitors can look down at the temple foundations and the paved square where the Senate once met. The site has also become known for its cat colony, which has lived among the ruins since at least the 1920s and is cared for by a volunteer-run shelter today.
The Teatro Argentina, an 18th-century opera house just steps from the ruins, was built directly over part of the old theater complex. Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville premiered there in 1816, staged almost on top of the ground where Caesar was killed nearly two thousand years earlier.
The foundations of the hall where Caesar died sit in a sunken pit, open to view from the street above.
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