Gaius Cassius
- Byname:
- Parmensis (Latin: “of Parma”)
- Died:
- after 31, bc
Gaius Cassius (born, Parma [Italy]—died after 31, bc) was one of the assassins of Julius Caesar. After the death of Caesar he joined the party of Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus (the more famous Cassius and prime mover of the assassination).
After Caesar’s assassination, Cassius was in command of the fleet that engaged Publius Cornelius Dolabella off the coast of Asia, but after the Battle of Philippi he joined Sextus Pompeius in Sicily. When Sextus Pompeius was defeated at Naulochus by Agrippa and fled to Asia, Cassius went over to Mark Antony and was present at the Battle of Actium (31), where Antony was defeated by Octavian (the future emperor Augustus). Cassius afterward fled to Athens, where he was put to death by Octavian.
Cassius is credited with satires, elegies, epigrams, and tragedies; and Horace, to judge from a remark in the Epistles, thought well of his poetry. Nothing of his work survives: the hexameters with the title Cassii Orpheus are the work of a 16th-century humanist. The story that Lucius Varius Rufus took his tragedy Thyestes from a manuscript found among the papers of Cassius is due to a confusion.
