M. Brutus, Caesar's murderer? There was never a time in Brutus' life when he wasn't involved in politics. Members of the senatorial class were, by their very nature, inextricably tied to the political machinations taking place within the city--they were politics, and their very existence thrust them into the political arena, long before they had necessarily held any magistracy. In Brutus' case an active political career long predated the civil war. Brutus held the quaestorship in 53, serving under P. Clodius' brother Appius Claudius (Brutus' father-in-law) in Cilicia. He returned to Rome in 52 and was active in the senate (which, by virtue of his quaestorship, he had formally entered) and simultaneously supported Milo while opposing Pompey, a rather contradictory stance. In 51 he accompanied Cicero as a legate in Cilicia and was still in the provinces when he sided with Pompey in 49. But even before holding the quaestorship Brutus had been in the thick of the political arena. His legal guardian following his father's death in 78 (when Brutus was around seven) was M. Cato, whom he accompanied from 58-56 in Cato's charge to annex and organize the administration of Cyprus as a province. While in Cyprus Brutus took the opportunity, as many young members of the senatorial class did, to establish himself as a local patron, giving out personal loans to Cypriot cities. In 59 he was involved in the Vettius Affair, but his connection and personal friendship with Caesar was already then established, and Caesar freed him from suspicion.

Brutus was a member of the senatorial class. His life, from his earliest education, was the politics of the city. Brutus was quite young--only 36 when the civil war began--and he could not have held most magistracies until around the time that the civil war was being fought. But he was closely involved in the society of the senatorial class, and that in and of itself was a major part of Republican political activity