I think your title is well deserved there, John Corrado. Caesar may have spoken Greek, but the words “Et tu, Brute?” are most emphatically not Greek. They are LATIN.
Cave Diem! Carpe Canem!
Oh, hell, back to the OP. John Wilkes Booth was a fairly prominent actor from a very prominent acting family and a damn good-looking guy, too. Sort of like a “Streets of San Francisco”-era Michael Douglas of the time. Every account I’ve read of the Lincoln assassination has Booth shouting “Sic semper tyrannis!” (Thus always to tyrants!) after firing the shot and before jumping to the stage and breaking his leg and then escaping with the help of a few guys who soon found themselves on the end of a rope or in a very nasty Federal prison. This line doesn’t appear in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar but is supposedly what Brutus shouted when he stabbed Caesar in real life…and Shakespeare more or less translates it as “Death to tyrants!”, which one must admit sounds a lot cooler in English. Then again, you wonder how many of the attendees at that evening’s performance at Ford’s Theater understood spoken Latin. Probably more than at any recent gathering at Lincoln Center, but there may well have been a lot of confusion about what Booth yelled, especially since it’s hard to understand ANYTHING shouted at you when you’re surprised, as I imagine the audience was. Hell, Brutus’s line when he stabbed Caesar might very well have been made up after the fact, too.
Though obviously the USA wasn’t as mediatized, if that’s a word, in 1865 as it is today, imagine the media feeding frenzy if someone like, say, Drew Barrymore murdered the President. I bet that Booth’s celebrity made it difficult to hide out, even in the battle-scarred area of Virginia where he fled to, full of stragglers of every sort in the days after the end of the Civil War. They got him pretty quickly, anyway.
OK, I finally took the trouble to dig out my Suetonius, Loeb Classical Library edition. (For those of you unfamiliar with the Loeb Classical Library, they publish the classics with Latin on one page and translation on the facing page.)
Here’s what “The Lives of the Caesars” has to say about the death of Julius:
Atque ita tribus et viginti plagis confossus est uno modo ad primum ictum gemitu sine voce edito, etsi tradiderunt quidam Marco Bruto irruenti dixisse: <font face=“Symbol”>kai su teknon</font>
Translation (by J. C. Rolfe)
And in this wise he was stabbed with three and twenty wounds, uttering not a word, but merely a groan at the first stroke, though some have written that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him, he said in Greek, “You too, my child?”
So, notice that, according to Suetonius, John Corrado was correct about the Greek, and another poster (your humble narrator) was correct about the quote being “You too, my child” instead of “You too, Brutus.” Of course, there are probably other authorities that have a different version of the events, but, in the meantime, I’ll stick with Suetonius.