An analytic narrative of Caesar’s death: Suicide or not? That is the question

Abstract

On the Ides of March, 44 BC, in the Senate House of Pompey in Rome, Julius Caesar was assassinated by conspirators, the most famous of those being Brutus. Are there objectively valid reasons to confirm the possibility of a suicidal wish on the part of Caesar raised by Suetonius? By building and solving a two-player noncooperative game that models the historical strategic aspects of the relationship between Caesar and Brutus, our article shows that there is no need to subscribe to the suicide thesis to explain Caesar's death. We formulate our conclusion via the solution concept of mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium.

An analytical narrative of the Day of Dupes

“…Major decisions made by politicians or generals come to mind. In this respect, it may be interesting to revisit the choices made by Cesar on the Ides of March (Crettez and Deloche, 2018), or Napoleon at Waterloo (Mongin, 2018), or the sequences of events that led to the First World War (Myerson, 2023). But decisions are also made by ordinary people.…”

“…"Analytic narratives" of military campaigns 4 , such as Napoleon's Waterloo campaigns (Mongin 2008(Mongin , 2012(Mongin , 2019, and of political assassinations, such as Aldo Moro's assassination (Crettez and Deloche 2009), and Caesar's assassination (Crettez and Deloche, 2018), however, fare quite well with respect to these criticisms, because, in such cases, it is acceptable to concentrate on the study of a few decision-makers whose rationality has already been studied in historical narratives. Each of the above studies focuses on a small-scale, well-defined historical event, which is the result of interactive decisions made by designated individuals and makes a key assumption about these players: their cognitive skills are unbounded.…”

The King’s Gambit: Rationalizing the fall of the Templars

“…This paper argues in the style of an analytic narrative (Bates et al, 1998; Crettez and Deloche, 2018; Piano, 2018; Koyama, 2019). After laying out the background, we will provide a game theoretic account of the problem along with its predictions.…”

Introduction to A Research Agenda for Austrian Economics

“…This does not mean that we can abstract from the preferences people had in that period. Yet what we cannot do, obviously, is ask them.21 Thankfully, we can often reasonably infer the values or beliefs of an individual from their observable actions.22 For instance,Crettez & Deloche (2018) use game theory to try to see if there are "valid reasons to confirm the possibility of a suicidal wish on the part of [Julius] Caesar." Most of the time, applied theories of human behavior rely on reasonable guesses of individuals' motives.…”