Lucius Caesetius Flavius

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lucius Caesetius Flavius (fl. 1st century BC) was a Roman politician and tribune of the people (tribunus plebis). He is best known for his involvement in the diadem incident just before the assassination of Julius Caesar.

As Caesar's power grew, someone placed a diadem on the statue of Caesar on the Rostra, implying he was now King. Two of the tribunes, Flavius and Gaius Epidius Marcellus, removed it. Soon afterward, Flavius and Marcellus had citizens arrested after they called out the title Rex to Caesar as he passed by on the streets of Rome. Now seeing his supporters threatened, Caesar acted harshly. He ordered those arrested to be released, and instead took the tribunes before the Senate and had them stripped of their positions as tribunes and senators.^[1]

Plutarch told that as the tribunes arrested people for saluting Caesar as King, crowds applauded, calling them Brutuses -- not after Marcus Junius Brutus, not yet the assassin of Caesar, but after Lucius Junius Brutus, a possibly apocryphal figure who had led a coup against the despotic last king, Tarquin the Proud, thereby founding the Roman Republic. He also notes that Caesar insulted the tribunes in a speech as he removed them from office, "and in speaking against them he insulted the people at the same time".^[2]

He appears in the William Shakespeare biographical play Julius Caesar as simply "Flavius". As in history, Flavius and his fellow tribune (here named "Marullus" or "Murellus") are punished for removing decorations from statues of Caesar during a parade.^[3]