I am going to Rome soon, however everywhere I look the exact location and details of hes death is tweaked slightly, sometimes its right at the foot of a tree, sometimes near a specific brick, and other times its said to be still buried under the city. The same goes for how it happened, same story, just little tweaks.
What is the officially agree'd upon account of where and how it went down? is there an exact spot that is known? how can we be sure that the account is accurate and not embellished for the reader?
As many historians have stated, it is difficult to "know for sure" about most events in ancient history. However it most likely happened close to the way the major ancient historians described the events.
I have never heard of the traditions you refer to: him dying at the foot of a tree, by a specific brick or being buried under the city. May I ask where you have heard of those?
In this answer u/KiwiHellenist lists the textual sources we have. The letters of Cicero is the earliest written source, but he does not describe the event in great detail since he was writing letters to acquaintances, not a work of history (for non-textual evidence there are the "Ides of March coins" minted under Brutus to commemorate the event, this one for instance).For details about Caesar's death, we have to go to longer narrative sources from the Imperial period, of which as KiwiHellenist notes the major ones are Suetonius, Plutarch and Appian. They are relatively unanimous concerning the place and manner of this death: that he was stabbed by conspiring politicians while sitting in the Curia of Pompey when a Senate meeting was about to begin. As for the exact spot, Now these are all accounts writen over a hundred years later, and are certainly embellished, so it is good to be somewhat sceptical. They all contain various omens of his death, which seem rather implausible. In this thread u/XenophonTheAthenian has discussed how the events leading up to his death in these sources were written with "weird teleological stuff" as he calls it, and u/Alkibiades415 mentions here some of the problems with Appian as a source. But since no source disagrees with the basic narrative of his death (as far as I know), and it is logical (the Curia was the temporary senate-house), so there seem to be little reason to doubt it. We know they based it on earlier sources, which is also mentioned by our good XenophonTheAthenian here.
So the spot was the Curia of Pompey, the ruins of which are now called Largo di Torre Argentina (a nice place for a tourist in Rome as as far as I remember, with lots of cats). Both Plutarch and Appian claim that he fell specifically by a statue of Pompey, but this seems to be for symbolic reasons, as Plutarch writes of it as having a connection with Caesar's and Pompey's old enmity. I hope this was a good enough answer to your question!
