Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles
available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Lucius Caesetius
Flavus (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, Flavus and
Gaius Epidius Marcellus, removed it. Soon afterward, Flavius and
Marullus 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. 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.
