VIRGIL: Caesar: forensics at last

[M W Hughes]

A programme was shown on television the other night in the UK (Channel 5)
reporting on the investigation by a Rome police officer into Caesar's
death and on the forensic evidence which he sough to supply.  He has
learned over the years that one should always investigate the victim.
Perhaps the programme has been shown or will be shown in other countries.

The thesis was the C deliberately laid himself open to assassination,
motivated by a mixture of ill-health and plans for the future of Rome.
The evidence is his claim to illness in the face of a Senate delegation,
remarks of the 'I have lived long enough for nature and for reputation'
style (I'm not sure that that was actually quoted) and his refusal to be
surrounded with bodyguards.  His plan was to show the Romans that if they
rejected him as king they would find themselves forced to accept his
nominated heir, so he would be a real king even in death.  All this was
fitted, with scientific flourish, into the pattern of symptoms and
thoughts characteristic of frontal lobe epilepsy.

I mention this mainly because I admire popularisation.  On the other
hand, it shows that science can be very like fantasy - V might have
agreed here.  Foresight on C's part clear enough to envisage the thrills
and spills of the Triumviral period and their final outcome would have
been enough to make his deification a serious proposition.

Quite a few public figures take inadequate security precautions, for
various reasons.  In C's case, I thought that the programme
showed no recognition of the fact that bodyguards were notoriously part
of the apparatus of Greek tyrants, exactly the model that C would not
have wanted to follow.


Of all the things which could not have been predicted at the time C's
death, one of the most significant, I'd suppose, would be the kind of
intellectual support that C's heir, the Augustus of the future, would win
- surely a very important element in his success.  The dying C could
hardly have foreseen V, yet without V and other thinkers who rallied to
the cause the future of C's family would have been very different. -
Martin Hughes

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