The Garden of Eaden: ROME: Julius Caesar

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By featured author Phil Mason

Historians have long puzzled over the series of curious lapses in security and judgement that surrounded the events leading up to Caesar’s stabbing in the Roman Senate on the 15th March 44BC.

He famously ignored the warnings of the soothsayer when told to beware the Ides of March. Furthermore, the night before his assassination - while he passing the evening having dinner with friends – he engaged in a morbid conversation on the subject of ‘…what is the best death…?’

His own answer to this rather inappropriate topic was to have a sudden one.

On the day of his death his wife urged him not to go out as she had dreamed of him lying dead in her arms. He ignored her plea and even dismissed his bodyguards for the walk to the senate.

He even refused to read a note that was thrust into his hand by a friend as he arrived which outlined the whole plot. Furthermore, the apparent scale of the conspiracy – up to 60 were believed to have been involved – has always left a question mark over how Caesar, who by all accounts was the sharpest politician of his time, could have remained unaware of such an extensive move against him.

The work of a modern Italian forensic policeman suggests that perhaps Caesar knew very well what was about to befall him, but that it actually suited him for it to unfold as it did. The assassination was far from being a shock; it was the last, best opportunity for Caesar to gain a perpetual legacy in history!

In March 2003, Colonel Luciano Garagano, a carabinieri forensic investigator, claimed that evidence assessed by him and by one of the world’s leading forensic psychologists from the Harvard medical School, pointed to a scenario that allowed these apparently odd circumstances to all make sense. He claimed that the pieces added up to a contrived suicide which enabled Caesar to achieve his ultimate ambition – an immortal and unstained image.

The motivation that Garafando gives is Caesar’s declining health. At 56, he was already long in the tooth for a Roman. There is evidence from contemporary accounts, particularly from the historians Suetonius and Plutarch, that Caesar had developed a form of epilepsy – judges by Harvard experts to be temporal-lobe epilepsy – that involves sufferers losing bodily control, especially the bowels and to suffer from diarrhoea. The other side-effect is a psychological tendency towards rashness and grandiose thoughts.

In a politician who was supremely concerned about how history would view him, Garafano suggests that this was enough to prompt Caesar into making a decision. He faced either a prospect of years of decline, dominated by the likelihood of increasing episodes of losing self-control, or he could choose to go out in a blaze of glory and cement his reputation forever.

Garafano maintains that Caesar allowed events to take their course and did nothing to disrupt the plot. He even suggests that there was political calculation too. By perpetrating the killing in the Senate, the conspirators had broken Roman law by taking weapons into the meeting house. This swept away any chance for them claiming legitimacy afterwards, and thus denied the plotters the grounds to assume power themselves. In their place, the only viable successor was now Caesars 19 year old nephew Octavian who he had nominated only a few months earlier when he had tellingly changed his will. By this change, and his death at this time, Caesar magisterially achieved his ambition to create a personal dynasty against the increasing demands for a republic that were coming from the plotters. In an ultimate irony, an assassination that was ostensibly carried out precisely because of fears that Caesar was planning to create a personal fiefdom, ended up securing for Caesar exactly that.