Our History
From the Ides of March to the present day.
44 BCE — The Founding Incident
On the fifteenth of March, 44 BCE — the Ides of March — Gaius Julius Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times on the steps of the Theatre of Pompey by a group of senators who called themselves the Liberatores. They believed they were restoring the Republic. They had prepared extensively. They had recruited carefully. They had timed the act with precision.
What they had not done was any of the following: a proportionality review, a bystander impact assessment, a post-execution transition plan, or a closure framework. They had no Certified Origin Statement. They had no documentation protocol. They had no standard for distinguishing between the principal grievance and the accumulated resentments of twenty-three separate individuals, each with different motivations and different thresholds.
The consequences were not what they intended. Caesar's heir, Octavian, used the assassination to consolidate exactly the kind of power the Liberatores had sought to prevent. Several conspirators were dead within three years. The Republic, which they had meant to restore, was effectively finished.
Ethically Sourced Vengeance was founded in the aftermath of that event by a group of observers who understood what had gone wrong. The act was not without basis. The grievance was real. The problem was methodology. We have been refining that methodology for over two thousand years. We believe we have it now, more or less.
The Standards — An Evolving Framework
The first version of what would become our Internal Standards Document was written in Latin on papyrus and did not survive. We know its contents from secondary sources, which describe it as "a framework for the proper conduct of grievance, proportionate in measure and clean in execution." We consider this a fair summary of what we still do.
Over the following centuries, the framework was adapted for new legal systems, new cultures, and new categories of grievance that the Roman authors had not anticipated. The core principles — proportionality, bystander protection, documentation, and closure — have remained constant. The applications have expanded.
Revision 4 of the current Internal Standards Document, published 2026, is the most refined version in our history. It is available in full on this site. We publish it because we believe in transparency about how this work is done. The Liberatores had no published standards. We consider that part of the problem.
Notable Historical Engagements
We do not discuss client engagements. We make an exception for those that entered the historical record before our confidentiality policies were formalized.
The Count of Monte Cristo — c. 1838 (fictional, but instructive)
Edmond Dantès engaged in what was, by any measure, a Proportional Response to an extraordinary grievance. He also spent fourteen years in prison as a result. We note that had he used our services, we would have advised against the execution methodology. The grievance score was justified. The method was not ours.
The Ides of March, 44 BCE — the founding case
We do not claim we could have prevented it. We claim we could have helped it go better. The named product, The Ides Protocol, exists as a reminder that institutional grievances require institutional rigor. This one did not have it.
Various, 1st century BCE through present
Over two thousand years of practice. We have seen most categories of grievance. We remain, after all this time, capable of being surprised by new ones. This is, we believe, a sign of health.
"Et tu, Brute?"
— Julius Caesar, March 15, 44 BCE. The last words of the man whose death taught us that even the most justified grievance requires a framework. We have been building one ever since.