Rearrange the following into a well-known phrase or saying, 'tu Brute et'.
Let's assume you were spot on and put in the proper order know it broadly translates to 'oh not you as well Brutus?'(2), as alleged to have been gasped by Julius Caesar on the Ides of March(3), just as his mate Brutus and others thrust their daggers into his unprotected body.
If you're new to this don't worry because Julius doesn't particuarly feature in our novel. But we reference him because whenever anyone thinks of ancient Rome they usually think of this guy and his brutal assassination by lesser but still power-hungry rivals(4). This is partly because Julius was a genocidal megalomaniac in the final days of the Republic, partly because he set the trend for calling subsequent emperors Caesar(5), and also because Shakespeare described his death in a dramatic, bloody, scheming sort of way.
But on the Roman richter scale of the mad and the bad, Julius was more a moderate-to-strong rumble, rather than a San Andreas Fault. Although Julius was clearly power hungry, later Emperor's Caligula and Nero were the ones who demanded absolute power to allow them to do pretty much do anything they wanted, particularly if it involved extremes of debauchery and murder.
So, clever-clogs, how much do you know then about Caligula and Nero, sitting chronologically on either side of a much less interesting Claudius(7)? The best most usually come up with is one or possibly both were mad and Nero enjoyed a good fiddle while Rome burned to the ground. Ergo, most minds usually draw a bit of a blank. Which is a shame if you like tales of madness, debauchery, family feuds, plots, assassinations, intrigue and murder. It's all pretty weird stuff and frankly puts Julius in the shade.
And since we like pretty weird tales, we thought why not bring these two into our story?
So we are.
Notes:
1 It's only right to credit Carry on Cleo for "Infamy, infamy, they've all for it in for me!"
2 'Et tu Brute' ('And you, Brutus?'), according to Shakespeare at least. The line has become an iconic representation of betrayal in both Shakespeare's play and subsequent adaptations, including the 1953 film Julius Caesar and the (literally) more colourful 1963 film Cleopatra, staring Elizabeth Taylor. The later film tends to condemn the earlier one to cinematic obscurity.
3 Technically, the Ides is pretty boring and just means 'mid-month'. But "Beware March's mid-month" lacks dramatic effect. Still, let's see if we can borrow this Ides idea for our book.
4 Happily, modern politicians prefer Twitter to daggers.
5 ...and Kaiser and Tsar.
6 History, like music, can be subjective.
7 To be fair, Claudius invaded Britain, which will be important to our story (and was probably pretty interesting to most Britons at the time as well).
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