Posted on 03/24/2003 8:14:37 PM PST by Maedhros
Et tu, Brute? Julius Caesar was rather less surprised to find his great friend plunging a knife into his body than has always been assumed, according to experts who subjected history's most notorious political assassination to a modern police investigation.
A team of forensic pathologists, psychiatrists and profilers, whose analysis of the 2,000-year-old killing is revealed in a television documentary tonight, have challenged the traditional belief that Caesar was unaware of the plot by senators to kill him. They have argued that, in fact, he engineered and welcomed his death.
The investigation was led by Col Luciano Garafano, commander of the Italian Carabinieri's northern forensic investigation unit, and assisted by a leading criminal psychologist at Harvard.
Visiting the murder scene and analysing Caesar's autopsy report, conducted by a physician named Antistius and the first recorded autopsy in history, Col Garafano conducted experimental simulations to assess the dynamics of the assassination.
Drawing also on his experience of gangland killings, he concluded that only between five and 10 conspirators could have stabbed him, not the greater number recorded in many texts. Moving on to the final 24 hours of Caesar's life, Col Garafano queried his behaviour on the morning before the murder.
Caesar ignored his wife's pleas that he not attend the Senate and the warnings of a soothsayer to "beware the Ides of March". He dismissed his bodyguard for his fateful walk to the Senate and a warning note was found in Caesar's hand after his death which he had not bothered to open.
Col Garafano took the evidence to Prof Harold Bursztajn of Harvard Medical School in America, one of the world's leading forensive psychologists and criminal profilers. He shared Col Garafano's scepticism as to why a general who was famously well prepared and informed of his enemies' every intention could not have been aware of the murder plot.
It is often assumed that the crucial moment that convinced the conspirators that Caesar's power threatened their republic came when he refused to rise from his seat after the Senate elected to deify him.
Col Garafano was confused by two conflicting accounts - one, put forward by Plutarch, blamed the incident on Caesar's epilepsy. The other put it down to diarrhoea.
Prof Bursztajn diagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy, an affliction which can cause temporary loss of consciousness, extreme behaviour and diarrhoea.
The investigators concluded that if that were the case, a man obsessed with his own image and dignity would not countenance losing control in public. The choice faced by Caesar, who at the age of 56 was already ancient by Roman standards, would have been old age and increasing fits or a dramatic exit.
Both Col Garafano and Prof Bursztajn believe he chose the latter. "Is it so out of the question to suppose that Caesar might wish to use the conspirators' agenda to serve his own?" the professor asks in the programme.
"He needed to find an executioner and the conspirators were his perfect tool. We call it 'suicide by cop' and it serves a very specific personal and political agenda."
That agenda included guaranteeing a lasting reputation and ensuring his dynasty would not be thwarted by the pro-republican senators, they maintained. They claimed that the fact that Caesar changed his will shortly before he was assassinated supports their theory.
By naming his nephew, Octavian, as his successor, Caesar ensured his dynasty continued. "This is a man seeking to accomplish in death what he wanted to accomplish in life," says Prof Bursztajn.
Ah, well, Cum catapultae proscriptae erat, tum soli proscript catapultas habeunt. That actually means "when catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will have catapults" but it's the closest thing I can come to scholarly profundity tonight.
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