On March 15th in 44 B.C. Julius Caesar, the Roman dictator, was assassinated by a group of senators who stabbed him 23 times during a Senate meeting.
The senators claimed Caesar's concentration of power threatened the Roman Republic. However, their efforts to restore the Republic failed, and the aftermath led to a civil war and the rise of the Roman Empire. His death also led to the earliest recorded autopsy in history.
In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and special guest co-host Dave Mack discuss the purpose of autopsies, Caesar's life, and leadership, the details of how he was attacked, the injuries sustained, and how this event shaped the course of history.
Show Notes:
0:00 - Intro
1:12 - Background and overview
2:35 - What’s the purpose of an autopsy?
4:05 - Caesar’s life and work as a leader
7:15 - The day of Caesar’s assassination
9:15 - How the attack happened
10:50 - Caesar’s autopsy
13:20 - After someone is stabbed multiple times does blood keep flowing or will it eventually stop after a few hours?
17:10 - Could the doctor have attributed Caesar’s death to blood loss?
20:10 - What was the assassination plan for Caesar? Were there other injuries and what was Caesar's condition afterward?
22:10 - Where was the autopsy done?
23:40 - The start of 3D modeling
25:30 - How this event shaped history
27:05 - Outro
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. I think a lot
of us have heard that phrase at two Brute. That
term is actually a phrase that Shakespeare penned when he
(00:28):
was writing one of his best known plays regarding Caesar.
It played during the Elizabethan times, and it captivated the
crowd because it was the story of a leader that
was slain by those in his inner circle. Of course,
the phrase itself points to Brutus, who was certainly in
(00:49):
Caesar's inner circle, But is it really how his death happened?
And of course we like to talk about death, and
today we're going to talk about the assassination of Julius
Caesar and his autopsy. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this
is Bodybags, Great Caesar's Ghost Dave Mack. I want to
(01:13):
have a conversation with you today about a historical figure
going back a couple of thousand years. Now, we're going
to talk about the death of Julius Caesar at the
hands of those that surrounded him in a very public
area otherwise known as the forum. You up for this,
Dave Mack.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
IDEs of March is upon us and a lot of
people like me. All we know about Julius Caesar is
what Shakespeare wrote? When did Shakespeare write Julius Caesar fifteen
ninety nine sixteen hundred somewhere in there for the opening
of the Globe Theater. You're talking about something that was
written a long time after the event took place. So
(01:51):
you've got a lot of memories, you've got a lot
of scattered stories, and you don't know the truth from
the lie. And that's why it's so fascinating. When you
told me this autopsy, I thought you were making it up.
But I thought they don't do autopsies back then. He's
making this up. What if we did an autopsy that
kind of thing. When you told me that this was
the first autopsy, I thought, Holy moly, we've got a conspiracy.
(02:15):
We've got being stabbed in the back by his best friends,
by people he trusted, by people he believed in. That's
what the setting is for all of the rigmarole that
then proceeded. Everything that took place centered around politics, power, money,
throw sex in there, and if they had rock and
roll to be rock and roll, this had everything.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
One of the interesting things here is it brings us
to this big question, what's the purpose of an autopsy.
I probably misspoke when I said that was the first autopsy.
People have been examining human remains for hundreds and hundreds
of years.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Isn't that how we've learned biology.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
There have been times where it was forbidden by law
to actually dissect or what's referred to as a pro
section of human remains. It was forbidden. That's where grave
robin came from. Many times medical students would pay grave
robbers to go out and grab bodies and disinter bodies
and bring them in so that they could look and
begin to understand human anatomy. Can you imagine being a
(03:14):
physician and not understanding how we function.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
You've got a medical practice, Okay, I get it. They're
practicing medicine, but they're not allowed to actually look at
a real body. So they're assuming and guessing at certain things.
And their best thing is get that blue jay over here,
and let's see if we can get him to peck
on that eyebrow to fix his eyesight.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Well, I haven't thought about it that way, but yeah,
you're absolutely right. There are many locations, I think now
in medical education where they're using three dimensional digital autopsies
or digital gross dissections in some instances where these are
replacing actual dissection by medical students. I have a problem
with that. I think there's a tactile nature to this.
(03:56):
There's also a bigger reason, I think in the case
of Caesar, when he was this victim of homicide, and
it was a brutal homicide. This is something that was
done on the fifteenth of March, the IDEs of March.
As you mentioned, this is something that was done in
kind of a closed area. And when I say closed,
I'm saying the general public was not allowed to be
(04:16):
within this space. You're talking senators that were in this environment.
He was seated on a gold throne. He'd made entrance
into this location called the Portico, where they had a
throne set aside for him there. People think a lot
about Caesar, a crossing the Rubicon and all those things
that he had done. He was a masterful general. He
was a beloved figure among the common people of that time,
(04:40):
and the senators were very elitist. They truly were. It's
hard to frame it any other way. This was very
threatening to them. One of the interesting parts to Caesar's
life is that he had adjusted, apparently his will just
prior to his assassination almost like a portent of what
was to come, to guarantee that all citizens within Rome
(05:04):
had three months worth of salary upon his death in
order to grieve him properly. You can imagine how that
kind of resonated with the common folk. They're looking at
senators and they're thinking, these people aren't doing anything for us.
Here we have our supreme leader that even upon his debt,
he's going to leave us money. He had a real
common touch apparently, so when they did this autopsy, the
(05:26):
purpose of this, I think, and we can explore this further,
but the purpose of this was to demonstrate first off,
that Caesar was dead. Because they didn't have mass media, obviously,
many people would not believe that he was dead. They
had to confirm that he was in fact dead, and
then to kick it up a notch. It was done
in such a manner that the public were made aware
(05:49):
of how horrendous this attack was when he was set
upon by these people that were occupying the space in
the Senate that day.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
An amazing conspiracy that went into taking out one of
the most beloved leaders at the time in the world.
It wasn't like Rome was an island off to itself.
It was a big part of what was taking place
around the world. Everybody knew Julius Caesar.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
The Roman expansion had not occurred to the point where
we finally know it at its peak, but it was
from a Western perspective. It was a world that had
people from the former Persian Empire that were part of it,
and you had people as far away as where modern
day France is. He had made his name by going
(06:37):
out with his armies and defeating what they referred to
as barbarians and keeping the hordes at bay, if you will.
That was part of his entry into the pantheonon He
achieved almost a godlike status through his actions. As a general.
He was known, and the fact that this was done
in such a public way was really bold upon the
(06:57):
people that were conspiring to do this. You have these
(07:18):
areas in your life where you don't necessarily believe any
harm can come to you. But Caesar had been warned.
He had been warned in the days leading up to
this fatal attack beware the odds of March, which is
actually the fifteenth of March. He was told that great
(07:39):
harm was going to come to me. As a matter
of fact, it is told that his wife had troubling
nightmares in the immediate nights preceding his death, and he
had gone some links to try to reassure her that
he was going to be okay. There were people that
were begging him not to go to the Senate. So
it was in the air. It was floating about how
is it possible for this many people to keep a secret.
(08:02):
Have you ever shared something with someone and you want
to keep it hush hush, and then all of a
sudden you get wind of it. How is that possible?
But he's surrounded by nest of vipers by the time
he walks into that room.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
I'm glad you said that, because the amazing thing about
the secret keeping that went on is, even now, all
these years later, we actually don't know how many people
were involved in the conspiracy. This autopsy had a purpose
beyond just cause of death each one of the conspirats
and putting them in air quotes. Each one of these
(08:34):
conspirators had to leave their mark. And I'm curious as
to how all these years later we're looking at this
and going, okay, well, wait a minute. You mentioned his
wife having dreams. She had blood dreams which were commonly
associated with death dreams. She's telling him, don't go anywhere,
just don't go to the Senate because he was lured
into an area where he would not have bodyguards to
(08:56):
show the people he was a common man. He already
relieved his by guards of duty, right.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
That had been documented that he had done that to
try to show that he had the common touch. I
don't need brutes along with me to demonstrate I'm this
powerful person. I just want to demonstrate I feel very
secure in this environment. And maybe maybe that's the ultimate
and arrogance. Who knows, but I do know that when
he was meant to rise from his throne in the Senate,
(09:24):
there was a group of these senators that descended upon
him and put hands on him. And as a story
is told, one senator actually grabbed hold of his outer
vestments as they're called his toga, and grabbed hold of
the toga that he was wearing in order to secure
him in place. Forensically, when you're looking at an environment
(09:45):
where you have this dynamic movement that's going on, particularly
when you're talking about edge weapons because he was stabbed,
you have to be able to corral this individual hold
them in place. And guarantee that they cannot escape. You
would have not just have had a group of attackers.
It is alleged that there would have been a peripheral
group that were acting almost like an outer defense ring
(10:08):
to keep him contained in that small space so that
the attackers could do their worst at that point in time.
And it all initiates with one senator grabbing hold of
his toga. He's defenseless at that point in time.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
He was also overpowered. Depending on which historical documents one
looks at, we know that there was only one Julius
Caesar and the people he trusted, the closest ones to
him were part of the conspiracy. He had maybe sixty
to seventy senators. Each one of them had a different agenda.
Some were kind of playing lookout to make sure that
(10:43):
Julius Caesar didn't get any help, and as you mentioned,
using the toga to hold him down. And my question though,
is we know that he was stabbed twenty three times
when he's dead, and you mentioned the autopsy, was this
a normal process when there was a criminal ag joke.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
That's the very part of this. We don't really know.
There's not a lot in the written record but his examination,
his post mortem examination was famously documented, and it wasn't
just documented. They believe this gentleman was his attending physician, Antisius.
They had physicians, and the physicians back then had a
true understanding of human anatomy. You move forward in history, though,
(11:20):
and some of that knowledge was lost. The ancients possessed it.
They didn't necessarily have a problem with examining bodies, I
don't think, and trying to understand form and function. As
we moved through history, suddenly it's frowned upon to dissect
human remains. But back then they would have had an understanding.
This idea of a pathologist who studies disease and then
(11:42):
you kick it up another level to where they're studying
fatal trauma. It wasn't like this, but it was a physician.
Antisias was his name, and he conducted the autopsy. An
interesting little turn here is that what we understand, Caesar
lay where he fell, they approximate for about three hours day.
That means that you would have had a lot of
post mortem changes that were taking place. He would have
(12:04):
not been in full rider mortars, but he would have
been stiff postmarmal avidity, which we've talked about extensively on
body backs, settling a blood would have occurred. We have
to understand that his toga, these sorts of things in
the undergarments, they just walk around nude with a toga
thrown on it. They did have undergarments that they would wear.
All the clothing would have probably have still remained intact.
(12:26):
It is told that senators actually fled. There's two hundred
known senators that were there. Of course, not all of
them are in on the assassination. Interestingly, Caesar had actually
expanded the size of the Senate in order to represent
more people. So you had slaves there, he had secretaries,
you had aids. We don't know how many of those
were there. They fled out, and the conspirators, allegedly with
(12:49):
him lying there, were going to try to explain themselves,
and suddenly the whole thing went sideways.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
You mentioned that he expanded it. There were over six
hundred senators at the time this happened on, only two
to three hundred actually there. When I was looking at this, Joe,
they were talking about sixty to seventy involved in the
actual conspiracy, and they all had different roles, And that
actually makes a good point. If there was a two
hundred active senators, that you would have to have a
(13:15):
number of other senators involved in conspiracy were able to
hold them back until the deed was done. When somebody
has stabbed that many times, Joe, and they're laying there,
as you said, for hours, does the blood just keep
pouring out until there is no more blood or does
it stop?
Speaker 1 (13:29):
At some point it will stop. You'll have the seepage
that takes place initially because it is a liquid. I've
alluded to this before, but this coosity goes to thickness.
So one of the reasons that blood remains a viscous
liquid or thick is because it's moving through our body.
But once that movement begins to cease and blood begins
(13:52):
to settle, it begins to separate. There's kind of a
coagulation that goes on and it becomes very thick from
those initial insults to the body. Yet he would have
been pumping out blood certainly from those while his heart
was still going, and then he would have fallen to
the floor. There would have been see bits from those
immediate areas where the stab winds took place. But after
a period of time, it would have ceased, and so
(14:15):
the slaves, I think maybe three to four actually came
into this area three hours later and gathered his remains
and took him back to his apartments. It's there that
Ansius when and conducted his examination. It's really quite fascinating.
What was the physician's purpose in this. Did he take
it upon himself to say, I'm going to do a
(14:36):
post mortem examination on Caesar's remains, and I'm going to
determine what happened. And this is what's fascinating about this.
Guess what he may have been trying to achieve a
sequencing of wounds, a sequencing of injuries. And you've got
so many eyes on the scene, people that are not
part of the conspiracy. And if he can establish a sequence,
(15:00):
it can actually establish whose hand was in the actual death,
who thrust that dagger forward. Dagger implies double edged, so
this is a very destructive instrument. You're not just cutting
on one side. You've got now two sharp edges that
are going into the body. And it was not uncommon
for people to walk around with a dagger in their belt.
(15:23):
It's not necessarily because you're afraid you're going to be robbed.
They had utility. You could peel fruit with them, or
you could chop things up, you could cut rope, you
could probably crack up in oysters. Oysters were part of
the diet back then. Dagger would have been very well
suited to that because it's got a double edge on it.
But they could be used for defense, and so you
wouldn't necessarily know that someone had a dagger, but they
(15:45):
could reach inside their cloak and pull this thing out
and deploy it. This sequencing is very key here because
what Antisias determined was this, though Caesar was stabbed so
many times, there was only one of these days that
was actually fatal. If you think about your left shoulder
(16:05):
blade and kind of move up your shoulder blade till
you're near your spine, I think people forget that we
have ribs on our poster aia as well as our anterior,
so they kind of wrap around between his first and
second rib Posteriorly the dagger entered, and this dagger probably
was in the range of about seven to eight inches.
(16:26):
It makes it concealable. It's not like a standard dagger
that like a Roman soldier would have carried. It's a
little bit shorter, but it would have been buried in
his back and it passes between that intercostal space, the
meaty muscle area between the ribs. Based upon the autopsy results,
it would seem that his A order may have been clipped,
(16:47):
and the order is the big vessel that comes off
of the heart. They think that it may have been clipped,
or his lung may have been clipped, or maybe both.
It would have been an unusual injury because most of
the time when we see insults like this, where you've
got penetrative events where there's a gunshot win or stab one,
those are going to come in from the front are anteriorly.
Here this has coming from the back, which is fascinating
(17:09):
to me.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
But you mentioned the blood loss. Does that mean that
the doctor could have ruled his death due to blood loss?
Speaker 1 (17:17):
I'm so glad you asked this. This is a fancy
word that doctors use. It's called exanguination, and it merely
means to bleed out when anticias would have opened. If
he did, in fact open, there's no guarantee that he
opened Caesar's body. The autopsy merely means that he did
a post mortem exam. If he did open the chest cavity,
(17:38):
what he would have been greeted by Caesar's lungs would
have been literally floating in blood. And we refer to
this as plural effusion. When you bleed out internally in
your chest. In particular, the lungs are going to be
a wash in blood because there's not enough holes, if
you will, defects for the blood to pour out, so
(17:58):
it's contained. In that environment, it would have been literally floating.
He would have understood enough about human physiology and certainly trauma.
I would think to understand that there's something internally going
on here. Something has been nicked, a vessel has been nicked,
and he would have bled out in this environment. Aortic
injuries are not the most survivable, but you can have
(18:20):
people that will survive chest injuries like this if you
can get them to the doctor so that they can
open up the chest cavity and drain blood out. That's
not something that would have been done here. First off,
they didn't have a wherewithal at that moment in time.
They left his body there. He apparently had died pretty quickly.
There was no signs of life. By their estimation, his
(18:41):
chest would have filled with blood. And when you open
people's chest up at autopsy like this. I have been
standing at the autopsy table and have been a wash
in blood where it pours out depended upon how the
body has been handled and this sort of thing, and
you will literally see almost like a cork in the
water when you're fishing, the lungs floating in blood like this.
(19:03):
And that's what actually led to his thinking about these
(19:25):
injuries that Caesar sustained. Either these guys were not very
handy with sharp instruments because you've got a guy that's
being held down, or maybe there was some other purpose
as to why twenty three. I've had a hard time
trying to make my way through this logically, David.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
It's because it's not logical. You would think that as
a conspiracy unfold, that each person has a designed part
of the plan. I'm gonna hold his arms back, He's
going to stab him. But the problem is when you
get into the guilt phase, if this turns south, who's
going to get blamed for this event? I'm thinking, first, stab, stab,
batl stab. Surely they had to have done more than
(20:04):
just stick him. Weren't they beating him? I mean, what
did he look like when this was done?
Speaker 1 (20:09):
There would have been some blunt force trauma. I can
only imagine that's not really part of the record, but
have to understand that they're going to be applying direct
force in addition to the stab wounds. But here's something curious.
There is a gentleman that was a death investigator and
a criminalist, an Italian gentleman named Commander Garopfno. He went
to great links to try to reconstruct the crime scene.
(20:31):
This location actually still stands. You can see it. It's
called a portico. I've never been there. I've always wanted
to go to Italy. That's going to be on the
list to get to This is very significant in forensics,
and we'll get to that in just a second. But
the commander, when he went back through to assist, he
also consulted with a forensic psychiatrists. His conclusion was based
(20:51):
upon the record that they have and the report that
he had kind of gone through with us, that there
was an attempt Dave to disfigure Caesar because the wound
that we had talked about that under the left shoulder blade.
These other wounds were apparently survivable wounds, but they were horrific.
He had wounds to his face and to his groin.
(21:13):
So many times we talked about sharp force injuries in
these cases on body bags, and when you have a
case where disfigurement is involved, that's an indication of a
lot of anger. You're trying to send a message. If
I can't have you, no one else can. All these
other things, we're going to make you look horrible, even
in death. And then you go to this great man
(21:33):
being the focus here. The commander and the psychiatrist believe
that this was an attempt to emasculate him, this attempt
to attack his manhood in a physical demonstration. That's key here,
because they wanted to demonstrate that they were going to
be the dominant force, certainly in the ruling class in Rome,
(21:53):
and demonstrate to everybody in the Senate. Now, I always
come back to this with this assassination. It's one thing
where you've got an individual that is quote unquote assassinated,
but when you do it in front of a group
of people, there's more to it than merely a homicide.
You're demonstrating something to somebody, You're sending a message to
everybody else where.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Did they actually do the autopsy? We're left with them
laid out on the floor, blood has coagulated. It's a
couple hours later. What do they do Now They've.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Taken him back to the palace and to what would
have been referred to as his apartments, and they would
have done the autopsy there. A Tosias would have spent
a considerable amount of time. I can only imagine while
he's doing this, he probably has a scribe with him,
and this is interesting going forward to modern autopsies. One
of my initial jobs in the morgue was to work
as a scribe, and they still use that term. And
(22:45):
physicians will look at you and they will say, will
you scribe for me? And what that means is that
the physician is covered in blood. Even today, you're covered
in blood, and they will have bloody surgical gloves on,
they'll have it over their arms, and many times there
will be a person seated on a chair that will
have a clipboard and a pen, and you have to
be able to speak the physicians language now, because they
(23:07):
all have different things that they like to indicate, from
measurements to organ descriptions, injury descriptions, and there's actually a
scribe that sits there and they will write this stuff down.
Some people record it by voice where they have a
mic hanging down, which is really horrible because you pick
up all the other noises in the room. I imagine
Antisius there. He would have been bare handed. He's got
blood all over him, the blood of Caesar, and he's
(23:29):
got this person that's sitting there with him, the scribe,
and he's writing all of this down as he's going
through these injuries and making note of it. And he
made such great notes by their standard. Then he actually
developed something that we use now, and that's three D modeling.
Remember how I was saying that they wanted to demonstrate
that this event actually took place. They created a wax
(23:53):
effigy of Caesar, and Antsias indicated on the wax effigy
of Caesar where his injuries were. Now that's something that
we do with computers nowa dave. This was over two
thousand years ago. They created this model in wax. After
he had set this thing up, they took it into
a public location known as the Forum and had it
(24:16):
on this wheel and turned it so that everybody in
the crowd could see it. They said that when the
people that witnessed this display this is a godlike figure
to these people. When they witnessed and he suddenly becomes mortal. Right,
they witnessed what had happened to their beloved Caesar. There
were people weeping, screaming. It infuriated the crowd. It was
(24:37):
at that moment time that something happened, because it's from
that moment tom when this physician over two thousand years
ago created this wax model, stood before a crowd in
the forum and began to describe Caesar's injuries and how
he died. This is where we get the word forensic from.
(24:57):
It's rooted in the same word as forum, and that's
what we do in forensics day. We debate science, we
debate in front of a court. Still to this day,
we talk about the science of death.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
This is amazing.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Yeah, it is that we've got these kinds of threads
through time that lead all the way back to the
death of Caesar.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
I would need a wax model because you describe things
or I read them, and I'm not a doctor. I'm
just a guy. I don't know all the terminology, and
I certainly don't know what these things mean. But you
show me a wax body that looks like mine, and
you're showing me where these stab wounds were and what
other damage was done. Now I have a good understanding
(25:40):
of what took place and what they have done, those
who did this, the conspirators. That blows me away that
even to this day I could see this exact same
thing happening right now with forensic stuff that is named
after this, which blows me away.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
It is quite amazing. And it's not like the ancients
were ignorant people, And it's arrogance on our party if
we dismiss them and their ability to understand and comprehend.
Just because we're modern in our own context doesn't mean
that we're brighter than they were. They still felt the
same things that we do. They could still understand intellectually
form and function, and this model itself and the presentation
(26:17):
of it in this court like setting really drove the
crowd and the momentum of everything that's happening in Rome
at that time to go after these people. There was
an entire war that was fought in the face of this.
The famous Mark Antony rose to power at this point
in time, and it all kind of turned on this
one event. And we have anticias to think for this
(26:41):
to be able to take an event that was so
tragic in Roman history, and they're great leader that had
fallen and almost like we do with the dead today,
conjure them, bring them back to life. And again it
holds true today just like it did all those years ago.
Where we begin and understand that we speak for these
that can no longer speak for themselves. M H. I'm
(27:06):
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags. M
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. I think a lot
of us have heard that phrase at two Brute. That
term is actually a phrase that Shakespeare penned when he
(00:28):
was writing one of his best known plays regarding Caesar.
It played during the Elizabethan times, and it captivated the
crowd because it was the story of a leader that
was slain by those in his inner circle. Of course,
the phrase itself points to Brutus, who was certainly in
(00:49):
Caesar's inner circle, But is it really how his death happened?
And of course we like to talk about death, and
today we're going to talk about the assassination of Julius
Caesar and his autopsy. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this
is Bodybags, Great Caesar's Ghost Dave Mack. I want to
(01:13):
have a conversation with you today about a historical figure
going back a couple of thousand years. Now, we're going
to talk about the death of Julius Caesar at the
hands of those that surrounded him in a very public
area otherwise known as the forum. You up for this,
Dave Mack.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
IDEs of March is upon us and a lot of
people like me. All we know about Julius Caesar is
what Shakespeare wrote? When did Shakespeare write Julius Caesar fifteen
ninety nine sixteen hundred somewhere in there for the opening
of the Globe Theater. You're talking about something that was
written a long time after the event took place. So
(01:51):
you've got a lot of memories, you've got a lot
of scattered stories, and you don't know the truth from
the lie. And that's why it's so fascinating. When you
told me this autopsy, I thought you were making it up.
But I thought they don't do autopsies back then. He's
making this up. What if we did an autopsy that
kind of thing. When you told me that this was
the first autopsy, I thought, Holy moly, we've got a conspiracy.
(02:15):
We've got being stabbed in the back by his best friends,
by people he trusted, by people he believed in. That's
what the setting is for all of the rigmarole that
then proceeded. Everything that took place centered around politics, power, money,
throw sex in there, and if they had rock and
roll to be rock and roll, this had everything.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
One of the interesting things here is it brings us
to this big question, what's the purpose of an autopsy.
I probably misspoke when I said that was the first autopsy.
People have been examining human remains for hundreds and hundreds
of years.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Isn't that how we've learned biology.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
There have been times where it was forbidden by law
to actually dissect or what's referred to as a pro
section of human remains. It was forbidden. That's where grave
robin came from. Many times medical students would pay grave
robbers to go out and grab bodies and disinter bodies
and bring them in so that they could look and
begin to understand human anatomy. Can you imagine being a
(03:14):
physician and not understanding how we function.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
You've got a medical practice, Okay, I get it. They're
practicing medicine, but they're not allowed to actually look at
a real body. So they're assuming and guessing at certain things.
And their best thing is get that blue jay over here,
and let's see if we can get him to peck
on that eyebrow to fix his eyesight.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Well, I haven't thought about it that way, but yeah,
you're absolutely right. There are many locations, I think now
in medical education where they're using three dimensional digital autopsies
or digital gross dissections in some instances where these are
replacing actual dissection by medical students. I have a problem
with that. I think there's a tactile nature to this.
(03:56):
There's also a bigger reason, I think in the case
of Caesar, when he was this victim of homicide, and
it was a brutal homicide. This is something that was
done on the fifteenth of March, the IDEs of March.
As you mentioned, this is something that was done in
kind of a closed area. And when I say closed,
I'm saying the general public was not allowed to be
(04:16):
within this space. You're talking senators that were in this environment.
He was seated on a gold throne. He'd made entrance
into this location called the Portico, where they had a
throne set aside for him there. People think a lot
about Caesar, a crossing the Rubicon and all those things
that he had done. He was a masterful general. He
was a beloved figure among the common people of that time,
(04:40):
and the senators were very elitist. They truly were. It's
hard to frame it any other way. This was very
threatening to them. One of the interesting parts to Caesar's
life is that he had adjusted, apparently his will just
prior to his assassination almost like a portent of what
was to come, to guarantee that all citizens within Rome
(05:04):
had three months worth of salary upon his death in
order to grieve him properly. You can imagine how that
kind of resonated with the common folk. They're looking at
senators and they're thinking, these people aren't doing anything for us.
Here we have our supreme leader that even upon his debt,
he's going to leave us money. He had a real
common touch apparently, so when they did this autopsy, the
(05:26):
purpose of this, I think, and we can explore this further,
but the purpose of this was to demonstrate first off,
that Caesar was dead. Because they didn't have mass media, obviously,
many people would not believe that he was dead. They
had to confirm that he was in fact dead, and
then to kick it up a notch. It was done
in such a manner that the public were made aware
(05:49):
of how horrendous this attack was when he was set
upon by these people that were occupying the space in
the Senate that day.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
An amazing conspiracy that went into taking out one of
the most beloved leaders at the time in the world.
It wasn't like Rome was an island off to itself.
It was a big part of what was taking place
around the world. Everybody knew Julius Caesar.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
The Roman expansion had not occurred to the point where
we finally know it at its peak, but it was
from a Western perspective. It was a world that had
people from the former Persian Empire that were part of it,
and you had people as far away as where modern
day France is. He had made his name by going
(06:37):
out with his armies and defeating what they referred to
as barbarians and keeping the hordes at bay, if you will.
That was part of his entry into the pantheonon He
achieved almost a godlike status through his actions. As a general.
He was known, and the fact that this was done
in such a public way was really bold upon the
(06:57):
people that were conspiring to do this. You have these
(07:18):
areas in your life where you don't necessarily believe any
harm can come to you. But Caesar had been warned.
He had been warned in the days leading up to
this fatal attack beware the odds of March, which is
actually the fifteenth of March. He was told that great
(07:39):
harm was going to come to me. As a matter
of fact, it is told that his wife had troubling
nightmares in the immediate nights preceding his death, and he
had gone some links to try to reassure her that
he was going to be okay. There were people that
were begging him not to go to the Senate. So
it was in the air. It was floating about how
is it possible for this many people to keep a secret.
(08:02):
Have you ever shared something with someone and you want
to keep it hush hush, and then all of a
sudden you get wind of it. How is that possible?
But he's surrounded by nest of vipers by the time
he walks into that room.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
I'm glad you said that, because the amazing thing about
the secret keeping that went on is, even now, all
these years later, we actually don't know how many people
were involved in the conspiracy. This autopsy had a purpose
beyond just cause of death each one of the conspirats
and putting them in air quotes. Each one of these
(08:34):
conspirators had to leave their mark. And I'm curious as
to how all these years later we're looking at this
and going, okay, well, wait a minute. You mentioned his
wife having dreams. She had blood dreams which were commonly
associated with death dreams. She's telling him, don't go anywhere,
just don't go to the Senate because he was lured
into an area where he would not have bodyguards to
(08:56):
show the people he was a common man. He already
relieved his by guards of duty, right.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
That had been documented that he had done that to
try to show that he had the common touch. I
don't need brutes along with me to demonstrate I'm this
powerful person. I just want to demonstrate I feel very
secure in this environment. And maybe maybe that's the ultimate
and arrogance. Who knows, but I do know that when
he was meant to rise from his throne in the Senate,
(09:24):
there was a group of these senators that descended upon
him and put hands on him. And as a story
is told, one senator actually grabbed hold of his outer
vestments as they're called his toga, and grabbed hold of
the toga that he was wearing in order to secure
him in place. Forensically, when you're looking at an environment
(09:45):
where you have this dynamic movement that's going on, particularly
when you're talking about edge weapons because he was stabbed,
you have to be able to corral this individual hold
them in place. And guarantee that they cannot escape. You
would have not just have had a group of attackers.
It is alleged that there would have been a peripheral
group that were acting almost like an outer defense ring
(10:08):
to keep him contained in that small space so that
the attackers could do their worst at that point in time.
And it all initiates with one senator grabbing hold of
his toga. He's defenseless at that point in time.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
He was also overpowered. Depending on which historical documents one
looks at, we know that there was only one Julius
Caesar and the people he trusted, the closest ones to
him were part of the conspiracy. He had maybe sixty
to seventy senators. Each one of them had a different agenda.
Some were kind of playing lookout to make sure that
(10:43):
Julius Caesar didn't get any help, and as you mentioned,
using the toga to hold him down. And my question though,
is we know that he was stabbed twenty three times
when he's dead, and you mentioned the autopsy, was this
a normal process when there was a criminal ag joke.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
That's the very part of this. We don't really know.
There's not a lot in the written record but his examination,
his post mortem examination was famously documented, and it wasn't
just documented. They believe this gentleman was his attending physician, Antisius.
They had physicians, and the physicians back then had a
true understanding of human anatomy. You move forward in history, though,
(11:20):
and some of that knowledge was lost. The ancients possessed it.
They didn't necessarily have a problem with examining bodies, I
don't think, and trying to understand form and function. As
we moved through history, suddenly it's frowned upon to dissect
human remains. But back then they would have had an understanding.
This idea of a pathologist who studies disease and then
(11:42):
you kick it up another level to where they're studying
fatal trauma. It wasn't like this, but it was a physician.
Antisias was his name, and he conducted the autopsy. An
interesting little turn here is that what we understand, Caesar
lay where he fell, they approximate for about three hours day.
That means that you would have had a lot of
post mortem changes that were taking place. He would have
(12:04):
not been in full rider mortars, but he would have
been stiff postmarmal avidity, which we've talked about extensively on
body backs, settling a blood would have occurred. We have
to understand that his toga, these sorts of things in
the undergarments, they just walk around nude with a toga
thrown on it. They did have undergarments that they would wear.
All the clothing would have probably have still remained intact.
(12:26):
It is told that senators actually fled. There's two hundred
known senators that were there. Of course, not all of
them are in on the assassination. Interestingly, Caesar had actually
expanded the size of the Senate in order to represent
more people. So you had slaves there, he had secretaries,
you had aids. We don't know how many of those
were there. They fled out, and the conspirators, allegedly with
(12:49):
him lying there, were going to try to explain themselves,
and suddenly the whole thing went sideways.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
You mentioned that he expanded it. There were over six
hundred senators at the time this happened on, only two
to three hundred actually there. When I was looking at this, Joe,
they were talking about sixty to seventy involved in the
actual conspiracy, and they all had different roles, And that
actually makes a good point. If there was a two
hundred active senators, that you would have to have a
(13:15):
number of other senators involved in conspiracy were able to
hold them back until the deed was done. When somebody
has stabbed that many times, Joe, and they're laying there,
as you said, for hours, does the blood just keep
pouring out until there is no more blood or does
it stop?
Speaker 1 (13:29):
At some point it will stop. You'll have the seepage
that takes place initially because it is a liquid. I've
alluded to this before, but this coosity goes to thickness.
So one of the reasons that blood remains a viscous
liquid or thick is because it's moving through our body.
But once that movement begins to cease and blood begins
(13:52):
to settle, it begins to separate. There's kind of a
coagulation that goes on and it becomes very thick from
those initial insults to the body. Yet he would have
been pumping out blood certainly from those while his heart
was still going, and then he would have fallen to
the floor. There would have been see bits from those
immediate areas where the stab winds took place. But after
a period of time, it would have ceased, and so
(14:15):
the slaves, I think maybe three to four actually came
into this area three hours later and gathered his remains
and took him back to his apartments. It's there that
Ansius when and conducted his examination. It's really quite fascinating.
What was the physician's purpose in this. Did he take
it upon himself to say, I'm going to do a
(14:36):
post mortem examination on Caesar's remains, and I'm going to
determine what happened. And this is what's fascinating about this.
Guess what he may have been trying to achieve a
sequencing of wounds, a sequencing of injuries. And you've got
so many eyes on the scene, people that are not
part of the conspiracy. And if he can establish a sequence,
(15:00):
it can actually establish whose hand was in the actual death,
who thrust that dagger forward. Dagger implies double edged, so
this is a very destructive instrument. You're not just cutting
on one side. You've got now two sharp edges that
are going into the body. And it was not uncommon
for people to walk around with a dagger in their belt.
(15:23):
It's not necessarily because you're afraid you're going to be robbed.
They had utility. You could peel fruit with them, or
you could chop things up, you could cut rope, you
could probably crack up in oysters. Oysters were part of
the diet back then. Dagger would have been very well
suited to that because it's got a double edge on it.
But they could be used for defense, and so you
wouldn't necessarily know that someone had a dagger, but they
(15:45):
could reach inside their cloak and pull this thing out
and deploy it. This sequencing is very key here because
what Antisias determined was this, though Caesar was stabbed so
many times, there was only one of these days that
was actually fatal. If you think about your left shoulder
(16:05):
blade and kind of move up your shoulder blade till
you're near your spine, I think people forget that we
have ribs on our poster aia as well as our anterior,
so they kind of wrap around between his first and
second rib Posteriorly the dagger entered, and this dagger probably
was in the range of about seven to eight inches.
(16:26):
It makes it concealable. It's not like a standard dagger
that like a Roman soldier would have carried. It's a
little bit shorter, but it would have been buried in
his back and it passes between that intercostal space, the
meaty muscle area between the ribs. Based upon the autopsy results,
it would seem that his A order may have been clipped,
(16:47):
and the order is the big vessel that comes off
of the heart. They think that it may have been clipped,
or his lung may have been clipped, or maybe both.
It would have been an unusual injury because most of
the time when we see insults like this, where you've
got penetrative events where there's a gunshot win or stab one,
those are going to come in from the front are anteriorly.
Here this has coming from the back, which is fascinating
(17:09):
to me.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
But you mentioned the blood loss. Does that mean that
the doctor could have ruled his death due to blood loss?
Speaker 1 (17:17):
I'm so glad you asked this. This is a fancy
word that doctors use. It's called exanguination, and it merely
means to bleed out when anticias would have opened. If
he did, in fact open, there's no guarantee that he
opened Caesar's body. The autopsy merely means that he did
a post mortem exam. If he did open the chest cavity,
(17:38):
what he would have been greeted by Caesar's lungs would
have been literally floating in blood. And we refer to
this as plural effusion. When you bleed out internally in
your chest. In particular, the lungs are going to be
a wash in blood because there's not enough holes, if
you will, defects for the blood to pour out, so
(17:58):
it's contained. In that environment, it would have been literally floating.
He would have understood enough about human physiology and certainly trauma.
I would think to understand that there's something internally going
on here. Something has been nicked, a vessel has been nicked,
and he would have bled out in this environment. Aortic
injuries are not the most survivable, but you can have
(18:20):
people that will survive chest injuries like this if you
can get them to the doctor so that they can
open up the chest cavity and drain blood out. That's
not something that would have been done here. First off,
they didn't have a wherewithal at that moment in time.
They left his body there. He apparently had died pretty quickly.
There was no signs of life. By their estimation, his
(18:41):
chest would have filled with blood. And when you open
people's chest up at autopsy like this. I have been
standing at the autopsy table and have been a wash
in blood where it pours out depended upon how the
body has been handled and this sort of thing, and
you will literally see almost like a cork in the
water when you're fishing, the lungs floating in blood like this.
(19:03):
And that's what actually led to his thinking about these
(19:25):
injuries that Caesar sustained. Either these guys were not very
handy with sharp instruments because you've got a guy that's
being held down, or maybe there was some other purpose
as to why twenty three. I've had a hard time
trying to make my way through this logically, David.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
It's because it's not logical. You would think that as
a conspiracy unfold, that each person has a designed part
of the plan. I'm gonna hold his arms back, He's
going to stab him. But the problem is when you
get into the guilt phase, if this turns south, who's
going to get blamed for this event? I'm thinking, first, stab, stab,
batl stab. Surely they had to have done more than
(20:04):
just stick him. Weren't they beating him? I mean, what
did he look like when this was done?
Speaker 1 (20:09):
There would have been some blunt force trauma. I can
only imagine that's not really part of the record, but
have to understand that they're going to be applying direct
force in addition to the stab wounds. But here's something curious.
There is a gentleman that was a death investigator and
a criminalist, an Italian gentleman named Commander Garopfno. He went
to great links to try to reconstruct the crime scene.
(20:31):
This location actually still stands. You can see it. It's
called a portico. I've never been there. I've always wanted
to go to Italy. That's going to be on the
list to get to This is very significant in forensics,
and we'll get to that in just a second. But
the commander, when he went back through to assist, he
also consulted with a forensic psychiatrists. His conclusion was based
(20:51):
upon the record that they have and the report that
he had kind of gone through with us, that there
was an attempt Dave to disfigure Caesar because the wound
that we had talked about that under the left shoulder blade.
These other wounds were apparently survivable wounds, but they were horrific.
He had wounds to his face and to his groin.
(21:13):
So many times we talked about sharp force injuries in
these cases on body bags, and when you have a
case where disfigurement is involved, that's an indication of a
lot of anger. You're trying to send a message. If
I can't have you, no one else can. All these
other things, we're going to make you look horrible, even
in death. And then you go to this great man
(21:33):
being the focus here. The commander and the psychiatrist believe
that this was an attempt to emasculate him, this attempt
to attack his manhood in a physical demonstration. That's key here,
because they wanted to demonstrate that they were going to
be the dominant force, certainly in the ruling class in Rome,
(21:53):
and demonstrate to everybody in the Senate. Now, I always
come back to this with this assassination. It's one thing
where you've got an individual that is quote unquote assassinated,
but when you do it in front of a group
of people, there's more to it than merely a homicide.
You're demonstrating something to somebody, You're sending a message to
everybody else where.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Did they actually do the autopsy? We're left with them
laid out on the floor, blood has coagulated. It's a
couple hours later. What do they do Now They've.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Taken him back to the palace and to what would
have been referred to as his apartments, and they would
have done the autopsy there. A Tosias would have spent
a considerable amount of time. I can only imagine while
he's doing this, he probably has a scribe with him,
and this is interesting going forward to modern autopsies. One
of my initial jobs in the morgue was to work
as a scribe, and they still use that term. And
(22:45):
physicians will look at you and they will say, will
you scribe for me? And what that means is that
the physician is covered in blood. Even today, you're covered
in blood, and they will have bloody surgical gloves on,
they'll have it over their arms, and many times there
will be a person seated on a chair that will
have a clipboard and a pen, and you have to
be able to speak the physicians language now, because they
(23:07):
all have different things that they like to indicate, from
measurements to organ descriptions, injury descriptions, and there's actually a
scribe that sits there and they will write this stuff down.
Some people record it by voice where they have a
mic hanging down, which is really horrible because you pick
up all the other noises in the room. I imagine
Antisius there. He would have been bare handed. He's got
blood all over him, the blood of Caesar, and he's
(23:29):
got this person that's sitting there with him, the scribe,
and he's writing all of this down as he's going
through these injuries and making note of it. And he
made such great notes by their standard. Then he actually
developed something that we use now, and that's three D modeling.
Remember how I was saying that they wanted to demonstrate
that this event actually took place. They created a wax
(23:53):
effigy of Caesar, and Antsias indicated on the wax effigy
of Caesar where his injuries were. Now that's something that
we do with computers nowa dave. This was over two
thousand years ago. They created this model in wax. After
he had set this thing up, they took it into
a public location known as the Forum and had it
(24:16):
on this wheel and turned it so that everybody in
the crowd could see it. They said that when the
people that witnessed this display this is a godlike figure
to these people. When they witnessed and he suddenly becomes mortal. Right,
they witnessed what had happened to their beloved Caesar. There
were people weeping, screaming. It infuriated the crowd. It was
(24:37):
at that moment time that something happened, because it's from
that moment tom when this physician over two thousand years
ago created this wax model, stood before a crowd in
the forum and began to describe Caesar's injuries and how
he died. This is where we get the word forensic from.
(24:57):
It's rooted in the same word as forum, and that's
what we do in forensics day. We debate science, we
debate in front of a court. Still to this day,
we talk about the science of death.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
This is amazing.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Yeah, it is that we've got these kinds of threads
through time that lead all the way back to the
death of Caesar.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
I would need a wax model because you describe things
or I read them, and I'm not a doctor. I'm
just a guy. I don't know all the terminology, and
I certainly don't know what these things mean. But you
show me a wax body that looks like mine, and
you're showing me where these stab wounds were and what
other damage was done. Now I have a good understanding
(25:40):
of what took place and what they have done, those
who did this, the conspirators. That blows me away that
even to this day I could see this exact same
thing happening right now with forensic stuff that is named
after this, which blows me away.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
It is quite amazing. And it's not like the ancients
were ignorant people, And it's arrogance on our party if
we dismiss them and their ability to understand and comprehend.
Just because we're modern in our own context doesn't mean
that we're brighter than they were. They still felt the
same things that we do. They could still understand intellectually
form and function, and this model itself and the presentation
(26:17):
of it in this court like setting really drove the
crowd and the momentum of everything that's happening in Rome
at that time to go after these people. There was
an entire war that was fought in the face of this.
The famous Mark Antony rose to power at this point
in time, and it all kind of turned on this
one event. And we have anticias to think for this
(26:41):
to be able to take an event that was so
tragic in Roman history, and they're great leader that had
fallen and almost like we do with the dead today,
conjure them, bring them back to life. And again it
holds true today just like it did all those years ago.
Where we begin and understand that we speak for these
that can no longer speak for themselves. M H. I'm
(27:06):
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags. M
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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