The relative " lateness " of specifying the tomb of Catulus as the site also depends on the dating of one of the other sources on the killing , the '' Commentariolum petitionis '' , an epistolary pamphlet traditionally attributed to Cicero 's brother , Quintus , but suspected of being an exercise in prosopopoeia by another writer in Imperial times . The epistle presents itself as having been written in 64 BC by Quintus for his brother during his candidacy for the consulship ; if authentically the work of Quintus , it would be contemporary with Cicero 's own account of Gratidianus ' death , and provide a kind of " missing link " in the narrative tradition . The '' Commentariolum '' says that Catiline The tomb is not specified as that of the Lutatii , but the '' Commentariolum '' places an emphasis on the Roman people as witness that is present also in Cicero 's speech and Asconius ' notes , as well as Sallust 's " Speech of Lepidus . " Seneca , though closely echoing Sallust 's wording , names Catiline , adds to the list of mutilations the cutting out of Gratidianus ' tongue , and places the killing at the tomb of Catulus , explicitly linking the favor of the people to the extreme measures taken at his death : Lucan , Seneca 's nephew and like him writing under the Imperial terror of Nero , who drove them both to suicide , has the most extensive list of tortures in his epic poem on the civil war of the 40s . The historicity of Lucan 's epic should be treated with care ; its aims are more like those of Shakespeare 's history plays or the modern historical novel , in that factuality is subordinate to character and theme . Lucan places his account in the mouth of an old man who had lived through Sulla 's civil war four decades before the time narrated in the poem , and like the earlier sources emphasizes that the Roman people were witnesses to the act . " We saw , " the anonymous old man asserts , stepping out of the crowd to speak like the leader of a tragic chorus in cataloguing the dismemberment . The killing is presented unambiguously as a human sacrifice : " What should I report about the blood that appeased the spirits of Catulus ' dead ancestors ( '' manes ... Catuli '' ) ? We watched when Marius was strung up as a victim for the dreadful underworld rites , though the shades themselves may not have wanted it , a pious deed that should not be spoken of for a tomb that could not be filled . " Lucan , however , diverts guilt from any individual by distributing specific mutilations among nameless multiple assailants : " This man slices off the ears , another the nostrils of the hooked nose ; that man popped the eyeballs from their sockets — he dug out the eyes last , after they bore witness for the other body parts . " Rawson pointed out that the piling up of atrocities in accounts of the Roman civil wars should not be discounted too quickly as literary invention : " Sceptical modern historians sometimes suffer from a happy failure of imagination in refusing to envisage the horrors which we all ought to know occur too often in civil war . " Such gruesome catalogues are characteristic of Roman historians rather than their Greek models , she noted , and Sallust was the first to provide lists of concrete and " horrific '' exempla '' . " Though documented , human sacrifice was rare in Rome during the historical period . Livy and Plutarch both considered it alien to Roman tradition . This aversion is asserted also in an aetiological myth about sacrifice in which Numa , second king of Rome , negotiates with Jupiter to replace the requested human victims with vegetables . In the first century BC , human sacrifice survived perhaps only as travesty or accusation . Julius Caesar was accused — rather vaguely — of sacrificing two mutinous soldiers in the Campus Martius . On the anniversary of Caesar 's death in 40 BC , after achieving a victory at the siege of Perugia , the future Augustus executed 300 senators and knights who had fought against him under Lucius Antonius . Lucius was spared . Perceptions of the clemency of Augustus on this occasion vary wildly . Both Suetonius and Cassius Dio characterize the slaughter as a sacrifice , noting that it occurred on the Ides of March at the altar to the '' divus Julius '' , the victor 's newly deified adoptive father . It can be difficult to discern whether such an act was intended to be a genuine sacrifice , or only to evoke a sacral aura of dread in the minds of observers and those to whom it would be reported . Moreover , these two incidents took place within parameters of victory and punishment in a military setting , outside the civil and religious realm of Rome
anniversary of Caesar 's death
Assassination of Julius Caesar
Marcus Marius Gratidianus