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At the very bottom of Hell, Dante represents Satan with three mouths, each of which endlessly devours a figure personifying treachery and rebellion against God. One of these, predictably enough, is Judas. What may be surprising to the modern reader is that the other two are Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Julius Caesar. In the medieval vision of the universe and of human history, however, there was a direct equivalence between these individuals: one betrayed the Son of God, the other two attempted to frustrate His plan for the institution destined to govern the temporal life of humanity, namely the Roman Empire.
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