Et tu, Julius?
March 09, 2003
Compliments of The London Sunday
Times
A new investigation has yielded a startling verdict on history's most
infamous murder. It states that Julius Caesar staged his own death.
But why would he have wanted to die? Richard Girling investigates.
Colonel Luciano Garofano, commander of the carabinieri's forensic investigation
centre in Parma, stands below a seething roundabout in Rome. Even
in uniform, he comes across as an improbable policeman - whippet-thin,
bespectacled, with the soft-spoken, understated manner of an expensive
obstetrician or philosophy don rather than a case-hardened mafia-hunter.
The donnishness at least is not illusory: he lectures in forensic
medicine at the University of Turin. But his curriculum vitae includes
a portfolio of cases - Novi Ligure, Biagi, Cogne - that testify to
a core of steel and put him in the premier league of European criminal
investigators. Typical of his kind, he is persistent, almost manically
thorough, and possessed of a cultivated instinct that always tells
him when something is wrong.
Prowling now around the throbbing traffic junction and bus terminus at
Largo Argentina, he knows that something is very wrong indeed. On
the face of it, no crime was ever more open and shut. On the ides
of March, 44BC, the demigod Caesar arrives at the Senate in Rome
and is hacked to death by a mob of senators. The conspirators, all
prominent members of noble families, make no attempt to disguise
themselves or to hide their guilt. On the contrary, after the deed
is done they spill into the street, boasting of their achievement
and crying freedom. Even without Shakespeare's help, the names of
Gaius Cassius Longinus and Marcus Junius Brutus would have been marked
down for the history books.
To a modern policeman, however, and particularly to one weaned on mafia
slayings, the catalogue of unanswered questions remains far too long
to justify a "case closed" sticker. Why did Caesar, the
greatest soldier and political genius of his age, offer deliberate
provocation to his most powerful enemies? Why, having done so, did
he sack the bodyguards who might have saved him? Why did he ignore
explicit warnings that he was walking, unprotected, into mortal danger?
More bizarre, but possibly just as important, was the condition of Caesar's
bowels. Could it have been diarrhoea that made him insult the Senate
and so fuel the hatred that drove his killers? Many people seemed
to think it could. All this, and the dozen other questions nagging
in his mind, are what persuades Garofano to accept the invitation
of the award-winning London-based film maker Atlantic Productions
to conduct the first police investigation of history's most famous
murder. He begins, as all investigators must, at the scene of the
crime. This is not, as most people still believe, the Forum, but
rather Pompey's Portico, a kind of Roman entertainment complex of
theatre, park and meeting house built in a low-rent, swampy area
north of the Tiber, where the senators congregated after the Senate
itself burnt down. The remains of it under the Via di Torre Argentina
are meagre, unvisited by tourists and in continuous use as a cat
sanctuary. Animal-lovers, oblivious to irony, pour dried cat food
next to the place where the greatest soldier-politician in human
history spilt his blood. Even the neighbours seem not to know what
happened here. Seen from above, the ground swarms and ripples with
fur. At street level there is a cafe in an ancient vault; a motorcycle
repair shop under an arch. So hard is it to make any sense of what
he sees that Garofano has to engage the help of Warwick university
to reconstruct it on a computer.
Next, he considers the body. Caesar's bloodied corpse was left where
it fell for two or three hours before being retrieved by servants
and carried to his house. Here, to Garofano's considerable satisfaction,
a physician named Antistius conducted the world's first recorded
autopsy. Despite their military experience, the conspirators are
not exactly natural born killers. They are literal backstabbers,
their nerves strung out by a five-hour wait and far too afraid of
their victim to attack him immediately from the front. In raining
blows on Caesar they cause almost as much damage to each other as
they do to him, and - though they try soldierly tricks such as stabbing
at the groin - their success is only narrowly achieved. Of the 23
stab wounds recorded by Antistius, only one could have been fatal.
To make the most of Antistius's observations, Garofano plots the
wounds on a computer and repeats the autopsy with a forensic pathologist.
What he wants to know is how many senators were involved, and which
of them delivered the blow that made history.
He also needs an accurate profile of Caesar himself, a detailed account
of his mental and physical health, and an introduction to the social
and political mores of ancient Rome. This is where a solid background
in serial killings comes in handy. The comparison between the aristocratic
families of Caesar's Rome and the mafia clans of modern Italy is
not as fanciful as it sounds. In both cases there is an expectation
of unquestioning loyalty to the family heads, or godfathers. There
is a ruthless pursuit of financial and political advantage, little
respect for the weakness of others, and an acceptance of violence
as a valid instrument of persuasion. There is little regard for the
abstract "state", and personal relationships are paramount.
In this context, Caesar himself is the very capo di capo - a hero
among heroes, if only by the peculiar values of the society that
created him. Nowadays such a man would be bound for the Hague as
a war criminal. His lauded victories involved not just consummate
generalship in the field but also the purposeful massacre of women
and children. Plutarch reckons that in less than 10 years in Gaul
his armies fought a total of 3m men, of whom they killed a million
and took another million prisoner.
The multiple stabbings, too, are another parallel with the modern mafia
- a ritualistic, all-for-one pooling of guilt. And another: once
Caesar has fallen, someone slashes his face. "That's a favourite
Sicilian trick," Garofano says, "disfiguring a man's looks." Twenty-three
wounds are nothing special, though; Garofano is used to seeing anything
up to 60 from a single assailant. "Psychologically," he
says,
"it's important for all the conspirators to bloody their hands." This
does not mean that the number of wounds will match the number of assailants
- mafiosi don't queue up to take turns, and neither did the families
of ancient Rome. Exactly how many pierced Caesar's skin is a question
that Garofano can settle only by experiment. Back in Parma, in what looks
oddly like a Shakespearian theatre workshop, he instructs police laboratory
technicians to re-enact the killing. They do it three times - once with
23 attackers, once with 11 and once with only five. With 23 it is a shambles.
Given a skilled fight-arranger and the willing co-operation of the victim,
it might be possible for that number of people to simultaneously attack
the same person. In an uncoordinated melee, however, it is impossible.
With 11 attackers the task is still difficult but, just, possible. With
five it is easy. Garofano's conclusion is that the assassins numbered
between five and 10 and that the fatal blow, a stab in the back, was
the second in the sequence of 23, possibly delivered by Brutus himself.
Shakespeare alone attributes to Caesar the famous protestation in Latin,
Et tu, Brute? The words recorded by Roman historians, in Greek rather
than Latin, are even more poignant: Kai su, technon?
"You too, my child?" Poignant because the promiscuous, oversexed
Caesar's many mistresses have included Brutus's mother, Servilia, and
- rightly or not - it has been commonly put about that Brutus was Caesar's
bastard. The poignancy is not obvious to all, however. In the mind of
one of the world's leading experts on the period, Professor Barry Strauss
of Cornell University, Kai su, technon is less the lament of a cruelly
disappointed father than the parting insult of a calculating brute. "First
of all, he's saying, 'How can you betray me after all I've done for you?'
And secondly, he's saying, 'By the way, you're my illegitimate son. I'm
your father, and you have just committed parricide. Have a nice day.'" There
is even a suspicion that the bon mot, being delivered rather pretentiously
in Greek, may have been rehearsed. Having uttered it, Caesar pulls his
toga over his head and waits for the mob to do its worst.
Brutus himself foreshadows the mafia in yet another way, for this pillar
of old Roman rectitude is a shameless loan shark. In the days before
banking, borrowers had to throw themselves on the mercy of the godfathers.
Among these, Brutus was both famous for his readiness to lend, and
notorious for his pound-of-flesh interest rate of nearly 50%.
Violence, too, was in the bloodline. Five hundred years earlier, his
ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus had driven out the tyrannical king
Tarquin and so launched the Roman republic.
The senators' grievance against Caesar is well understood. His genocidal
military campaigns, his bribery and vast sexual incontinence they
could accept (for what was wrong with any of that?). Kingship, however,
was the enemy of the republic and, by extension, a threat to the
families' power. Caesar's genius and restless energy were both strengths
and weaknesses: in making himself the most powerful man in the world,
he had grown too big for his sandals. He had accepted for himself
the unprecedented title of "dictator", had renamed after
himself the month formerly known as Quintilis, had taken to wearing
imperial purple and had brazenly set up the queen of Egypt as his
mistress. To cap it all, when members of the Senate come to offer
him the ultimate accolade of deification he responds with an insult.
Instead of rising to receive the gift, as the senators expect, he
stays obstinately in his throne as if their good opinion is of no
account to him. Like Garofano, Professor Strauss is much exercised
by this shocking breach of etiquette. "It's like not kissing
the mafia don's ring," he says, "and it's taken extremely
poorly by the Senate."
Caesar's contempt is manifest even in the way he dies. His spies cannot
have failed to warn him of the impending plot - there have been persistent
rumours of it throughout the city. And yet he dismisses his bodyguard
and walks alone. Weeks ago the soothsayer Spurinna warned him unequivocally
to beware the ides of March. The portents of doom are powerful enough
for his wife, Calpurnia, only the night before, to dream that he
will be killed at the Senate meeting and to beg him not to go. For
five hours in the morning he hesitates, but then sets out unprotected
on the last walk of his life. Even as he goes, someone in the crowd
pushes a written warning into his hand: he is going to be murdered.
The paper is still there, clamped in his stiffening fingers, as the
physician Antistius begins to examine the cold, bloodstained body
many hours later.
Is Caesar mad? Or so blinded by his own godliness that he believes himself
inviolable? What can have got into him? When Garofano crosses the
Atlantic to consult Dr Harold Bursztajn of Harvard Medical School,
one of the world's leading forensic psychiatrists and criminal profilers,
he finds him wrestling with a puzzle. "Here's Julius Caesar,
who by all accounts is the best-informed, the shrewdest politician
with the highest intelligence and the greatest power of anyone in
the world. As a general he was always prepared for every battle.
He left very little to chance, always used intelligence and always
took the trouble to know his enemies. The same was true politically
in Rome. He always got what he wanted because he had good intelligence
about his enemies.
"And yet when it comes to his murder, he seems to be entirely helpless,
defenceless and vulnerable. How could he not know that there would be
some attempt on his life? And why wouldn't he take steps to protect himself?"
Bursztajn's conclusion is startling. The godfather who directs and controls
the events of March 15, 44BC, is not hot-headed Cassius or scheming
Brutus. They are, as they always have been, far out of their depth,
minnows in a political ocean patrolled by sharks. No: the man pulling
the strings, the orchestrator of his own death, is none other than
Julius Caesar himself. The outcome is exactly as he had planned it.
In every particular, he gets what he wants. The naive and foolish
conspirators, on the other hand, go away empty-handed, beaten by
superior tradecraft and the poverty of their own imagination. In
defending the republic they ensured its demise. In fighting dictatorship
they have guaranteed its victory. By killing Caesar they have made
him immortal.
For a criminal investigator every suspicious death calls for an understanding
of what, in police jargon, is known as MOM - motive, opportunity
and means. From the conspirators' perspective this all looks clear
enough. Their motives are straightforward (to protect the republic
from dictatorship). The opportunity (ambush at the Senate) and method
(stabbing by committee) are equally obvious. But how does it look
from Caesar's point of view? He is known to desire three things:
for his death, when it comes, to be swift; for a good and lasting
reputation; and for the continuance of his bloodline.
On March 15 he achieves all three, so Garofano doesn't have to look far
for a motive. Opportunity is no problem either - a demigod can choose
his own time and place. And the means are an early version of what
American policemen like to call "suicide by cop" - ie,
by behaving in such a way that he provokes someone else to kill him,
the "victim" brings about his own violent death. By this
reckoning, Brutus, Cassius and the others are merely a cleverly chosen,
and much more profitable, alternative to the upturned sword.
Yet why would Caesar want to kill himself? He is the most glorious personage
on Earth, able freely to help himself to anything he fancies, from
a peeled grape to an entire country. Who in his right mind would
put an end to such a life? In searching for the answer we need to
consider both Caesar's age (at 56 he is, by contemporary standards,
an old man) and his state of health. Ancient texts make it clear
that Caesar is by now suffering grievously from epilepsy - a discovery
that, to Garofano and Bursztajn, supplies a crucial link in the evidential
chain. "There is a particular form of epilepsy," says
Bursztajn, "called temporal-lobe epilepsy, which can involve
people spacing out, losing consciousness for moments at a time, especially
under stress. It can also cause them to lose control of their sphincters,
of their urinary sphincter or their bowels, to have diarrhoea. At
the same time it can make them become more rash, and more extreme
in their reactions."
This might explain a lot. It might tell us, for example, why Caesar fails
to rise when the Senate comes to deify him. His purpose in remaining
seated is not so much to humiliate the senators as to avoid humiliating
himself. Cornell University's Professor Strauss chooses his words
with care: "Well, Caesar said - or his handler said - that he
couldn't do it [stand up] because part of his illness was
that he suffered from terrible diarrhoea. Had he gotten up there
would have been a scene whose ugliness can only be imagined."
Caesar's vanity, which Bursztajn compares to that of John F Kennedy,
is best described by the Roman biographer and historian Suetonius,
who writes in the 1st century AD: "He is said to have been tall
of stature, with a fair complexion, shapely limbs, a somewhat full
face, and keen black eyes. He was somewhat over-nice in the care
of his person, being not only carefully trimmed and shaved, but even
having superfluous hair plucked out, as some have charged; while
his baldness was a disfigurement which troubled him greatly, since
he found that it was often the subject of the gibes of his detractors.
Because of it he used to comb forward his scanty locks from the crown
of his head, and of all the honours voted him by the senate and people
there was none which he received or made use of more gladly than
the privilege of wearing a laurel wreath at all times."
Caesar is comparable to Kennedy also in his insatiable appetite for women,
and - as his obsession with baldness shows - he is far from sanguine
about anything likely to render him loathsome. "Towards the
end," says Suetonius, "he was subject to sudden fainting
fits and to nightmares as well." Twice he was stricken by bouts
of "falling sickness", which, for as long as they lasted,
would have made it impossible for him to participate in government
business. This alone might have been enough to put ideas of suicide
into a proud man's mind. Add to it the psychological effects of the
illness - rashness and a tendency to grandiosity - and you have a
lethal combination of depression and emotional instability to add
to the existing burden of genius. It was death that provides Caesar
with the last, triumphant opportunity to outwit, defeat and humiliate
the idiots who stand against him.
Suetonius himself sees wilfulness in the great man's failure to protect
himself.
"Caesar left in the minds of some of his friends the suspicion that
he did not wish to live longer and had taken no precautions because of
his failing health." Bursztajn goes much further. For him, death
was only part of what Caesar has in mind.
"Is this a man who on his last walk is fulfilling an unconscious
death wish? Or is it all too conscious, and part of his plan to defeat
death and defeat the conspirators all in one fell swoop?"
Having considered all other possibilities, "What we are left with
is that the conspirators terribly underestimated Julius Caesar and that
they terribly underestimated the idea that he might know what they were
up to. The reason why they were getting as far as they had gotten was
because it served Caesar's own political and personal agenda to allow
them to proceed."
The first thing they lost was their reputation for probity. If failure
to stand up for deification was a social and political faux pas,
then carrying knives into a Senate meeting is even worse. "It
was akin to mafiosi bringing guns to a family meeting," says
Bursztajn. In this way, as Caesar well knew, they fatally undermine
their own legitimacy. "It's one thing for a mafia don to kill
another outside of a peaceful meeting. It's another thing to kill
him at that meeting place. It's a good way to make sure that all
the other families turn against you. In essence they signed their
own death warrant by choosing the Senate meeting as the place for
killing Caesar. They did the very thing they accused Caesar of doing:
they broke Roman law."
They lose on a second front, too. Only six months ago Caesar changed
his will, naming as his heir and successor not the aristocratic Mark
Antony but his own nephew, the puny, 19-year-old Octavian - a move
that Strauss describes as "shrewd and even vicious".
"Antony represents the old elite, the old aristocracy of Rome. He's
someone who would be acceptable to the other oligarchs. But Octavian
comes from an Italian municipal aristocracy, not from a great house of
Rome. Caesar's looking towards his base, as we'd say in American politics." This
is the point at which, you might say, new money finally takes over from
the old. By giving the nod to a patrician, says Strauss, Caesar is telling
the rich provincials who have supported him: "Hey, I know how much
I owe to you, and I'm saying to the old aristocrats of Rome, here's another
nail in your coffin."
The political agenda in Caesar's assisted suicide therefore is to ensure
that his will is honoured, and that Octavian will succeed him. By
tricking the conspirators onto the wrong side of the law, Caesar
ensures that they cannot themselves seize power and that his dynasty
will survive. The pact, between the people and their late, beloved
leader, is cemented days later when Antony (who may have reasons
of his own for courting popularity) reads aloud the will: to every
Roman family, Caesar has bequeathed enough money for them to live
for up to three months at his expense. The crowd at the funeral breaks
into a frenzy of posthumous adulation. A torch is thrown onto the
pyre. Then people start to throw chairs, benches, clothing, anything
that will burn. Women even fling their jewels. "The enormous
adulation was way out of proportion with what anyone expected,"
says Strauss. "If I may make a British comparison, it is a bit like
what happened after the death of Princess Di."
Whatever faith Brutus and Cassius held in the future of the republic
goes up in smoke with their enemy's corpse. Days later they are forced
to flee Rome, pursued by Antony's army, and two years later they
both commit suicide after being beaten in battle by Octavian and
Antony at Philippi. In a moment of pure Shakespearian tragedy, Cassius
is said to have killed himself with the same dagger that he had used
against Caesar. Antony himself then makes the mistake of throwing
in his lot with Cleopatra and falls on his sword after defeat by
Octavian at the battle of Actium. For Caesar's ghost it is game,
set and match. The republic is dead. The once-weedy Octavian, every
bit as shrewd as his late uncle, metamorphoses into Emperor Caesar
Augustus (who does for the month of Sextilis what his predecessor
did for Quintilis), and the title of Caesar is retained by every
Roman emperor until Hadrian. The potency of the title will survive
even later attempts by lesser monarchs, the kaisers and the tsars,
to translate it for their own greater glory.
The flashing blades on the ides of March delivered to Julius Caesar exactly
what he had planned that they should: immortality. For Colonel Garofano,
whose investigation began among the stray cats of the Via Torre Argentina
and ended inside a dead man's head, the verdict is unconventional
but unavoidable. Suicide by conspirator.
Sunday London Times preview of "Who
Killed Julius Caesar?" premiering on the Discovery Channel,
Sunday evening April 27th @ 8:00 and 11:00 P.M. EST.
The Daily Telegraph Preview of "Who Killed Julius Caesar?" Et
Tu, Brute?
