LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - According to a new Spanish National Research Council report, a monumental complex in Torre Argentina in Rome is the place where Caesar was stabbed.

The head of the Roman Republic was stabbed to death by a group of rival Roman senators on March 15, 44 B.C., the Ides of March. While the assassination is duly covered in classical texts, researchers previously had no archaeological evidence of the place where it happened.

Archaeologists have now unearthed a concrete structure nearly 10 feet wide and 6.5 feet tall that may have been erected by Augustus, Julius Caesar's successor, to mark the assassination.

The structure is found at the base of the Curia, or Theater, of Pompey. Classical writers had reported that this was the location where the stabbing took place.

Antonio Monterroso, a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council, said in a statement that "We always knew that Julius Caesar was killed in the Curia of Pompey on March 15th 44 B.C. because the classical texts pass on so, but so far no material evidence of this fact, so often depicted in historicist painting and cinema, had been recovered."

Classical texts also say years after the assassination, the Curia was closed and turned into a memorial chapel for Caesar. The researchers are studying this building along with another monument in the same complex, the Portico of the Hundred Columns, or Hecatostylon; they are looking for links between the archaeology of the assassination and what has been portrayed in art.

"It is very attractive, in a civic and citizen sense, that thousands of people today take the bus and the tram right next to the place where Julius Caesar was stabbed 2,056 years ago," Monterroso said.

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