The evening before the assassination, Caesar was among the guests at supper at the house of Marcus Lepidus, his magister equitum, and the discussion turned to the question: what kind of death would be best? While the rather strange conversation lingered on this question – a cryptic warning? – Caesar, when his turn came to speak, said that he would by far prefer a sudden and unexpected death. He had expressed the same preference (‘subitam et celerem’) before, in the context of another philosophical dialogue, in the margin of a passage on the death of Cyrus in Xenophon's Cyropaedia. In Cicero's Cato the Elder, written shortly before the murder of Caesar, that passage is translated into Latin with a commentary. It is not at all improbable that, during a reading of Cato the Elder in which Caesar was taking part, the dictator had made that note about his preference for a ‘sudden and unexpected’ death. Obviously this cannot be proven. But the conversation on the eve of the assassination is somewhat enigmatic. There is nothing unusual, given the situation, about conversations consisting of allusive questions or innuendo, designed to pass a veiled message. We should recall the procedure followed by Brutus when he was recruiting followers for the conspiracy.