Assuming it was a crucifixion similar to popular iconography, with the arms outstretched and nails in the hands and feet, we see that Plutarchus used stauros as root for his verb anestaurôsen, ‘he speared’. Stauros means primarily ‘stake’, in this case in the sense of a ‘martyr’s stake’ and is used as the translation for crux. Thus, here we would have, independent of Christian literature, an equation stauros = crux, ‘martyr’s stake’ = ‘cross’, and in fact one referring to Caesar, not to Jesus. The other verb that Plutarchus uses, however—kremô, ‘hang by the neck’, ‘hang’, ‘string up’—is so very similar to the Latin cremo, ‘burn, cremate’, that the cremated Caesar could become the ‘crucified one’.
Be that as it may, one must assume that at Caesar’s funeral the tropaeum that Antonius raised with Caesar’s simulacrum hanging on it was seen by people who remembered his pirate-crucifixion, and regarded this as a crucifixion committed by robbers on a Roman. Thus the assassins of Caesar must have been regarded as common criminals: an unbearable exchange of roles crying out for revenge.
It is therefore understandable why, when the tropaeum with Caesar’s wax effigy nailed to it was displayed, the people seized the first Cinna that they met, tore him apart, stuck his head on a pole and carried it around: occidit caputque eius praefixum hastae circumtulit, says Suetonius. We see here how this praefixum hastae, which is normally translated with ‘fixed on a lance’, but could as well be rendered as ‘hefted to a stake’—the original meaning of hasta is ‘pole’, thin ‘stake’, only later via ‘shaft’ did it come to mean ‘lance’—joins that suffixum cruci, ‘nailed to a martyr’s stake’
