Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: First in Recorded History - The Autopsy of Julius Caesar

Episode Date: March 19, 2023

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.  Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart 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 -  OutroSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I think a lot of us have heard that phrase, et tu, Brute? That term is actually a phrase that Shakespeare penned when he 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 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 Body Bags. Great Caesar's ghost, Dave Mack. I want to 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? 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? 1599, 1600, 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 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 that this autopsy, I thought you were making it up. 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. 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, it'd be rock and roll. This had everything. 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 it was the first autopsy. People have been examining human remains for hundreds and hundreds of years. Isn't that how we've learned biology? There have been times where it was forbidden by law to actually dissect or what's referred to as a prosection of human remains. It was forbidden. That's where grave robbing 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 physician and not understanding how we function? 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. 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. 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 15th 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 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 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. 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 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 death, he's going to leave us money. He had a real common touch, apparently.

So when they did this autopsy, the 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 of how horrendous this attack was when he was set upon by these people that were occupying the space in the Senate that day. 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. 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 out with his armies and defeating what they refer to as barbarians and keeping the hordes at bay, if you will. That was part of his entry into the panthenon. 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 people that were conspiring to do this. You have these 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 15th of March. He was told that great harm was going to come to him. 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 to some lengths 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? 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 a nest of vipers by the time he walks into that room. 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 conspirators, I'm putting them in air quotes, each one of these 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 show the people he was a common man. he already relieved his bodyguards of duty, right? 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 that's the ultimate in arrogance. Who knows? But I do know that when he was meant to rise from his throne in the Senate, there was a

group of these senators that descended upon him and put hands on him. And as the 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 where you have this dynamic movement that's going on, particularly when you're talking about edged 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 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. 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 60 to 70 senators. Each one of them had a different agenda. Some were kind of playing lookout to make sure that 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 23 times. The autopsy. Was this a normal process when there was a criminal act, Joe? That's the vague 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 believed this gentleman was his attending physician, Antisias. They had physicians, and the physicians back then had a true understanding of human anatomy. You move forward in history, though, 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 move 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 you kick it up another level to where they're studying fatal trauma. It wasn't like this, but it was a physician. And Desaius 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, Dave. That means that you would have had a lot of postmortem changes that were taking place. He would have not been in full rogner mortis, but he would have been stiff. Post-mortem lividity, which we've talked about extensively on body bags, settling of 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 them. They did have undergarments that they would wear. All the clothing would have probably still remained intact. It is told that senators actually fled. There's 200 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, you had secretaries, you had aides. We don't know how many of those were there. They fled out and the conspirators allegedly, with him lying there, were going to try to explain themselves. And suddenly, the whole thing went sideways. You mentioned that he expanded it. There were over 600 senators at the time this happened, only two to three hundred actually there. When I was looking at this, Joe, they were talking about 60 to 70 involved in the actual

conspiracy and they all had different roles. And that actually makes a good point. If there were, say, 200 active senators that you would have to have a number of other senators involved in the conspiracy that were able to hold them back until the deed was done. When somebody is 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 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 viscosity 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 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, yeah, 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 seepage from those immediate areas where the stab wounds took place. But after a period of time, it would have ceased. And so 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 Antisias went in 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 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 this thing, people that are not part of the conspiracy. And if he can establish a sequence, he 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. It's not uncommon for people to walk around with a dagger in their belt. 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 open 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 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, 23, there was only one of these, Dave, that was actually fatal. If you think about your left shoulder 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 posterior 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.

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 aorta may have been clipped. And the aorta 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 got penetrative events, whether it's a gunshot wound or a stab wound, those are going to come in from the front or anteriorly. Here, this is coming from the back, which is fascinating to me. But you mentioned the blood loss. Does that mean that the doctor could have ruled his death due to blood loss? I'm so glad you asked this. This is a fancy word that doctors use. It's called exsanguination, and it merely means to bleed out. When Antisias 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 postmortem exam. If he did open the chest cavity, what he would have been greeted by, Caesar's lungs would have been literally floating in blood.

And we refer to this as pleural effusion. When you bleed out internally in your chest in particular, the lungs are going to be awash in blood because there's not enough holes, if you will, defects for the blood to pour out. So it's contained in that environment. It would have been literally floating. He would have understood 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 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 the wherewithal. At that moment in time, they left his body there. He apparently died pretty quickly. There was no signs of life by their estimation. His 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 awash in blood where it pours out dependent 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. And that's what actually led to his death. Thinking about these 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 23. I've had a hard time trying to make my way through this logically, Dave. It's because it's not logical. You would think that as a conspiracy unfolds, that each person has a designed part of the plan. I'm going to 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, last stab, fatal stab. Surely they had to have done more than just stick him. Weren't they beating him? I mean, what did he look like when this was done? There would have been some blunt force trauma. I can only imagine. That's not really part of the record. But you have to understand that they're going to be applying direct force in addition to stab wounds.

But here's something curious. There is a gentleman that was a death investigator and a criminalist, an Italian gentleman named Commander Garofano. He went to great lengths to try to reconstruct the crime scene. This location actually still stands. You can see it. It's called the 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 assess, he also consulted with a forensic psychiatrist. His conclusion was, based upon the record that they have and the report that he had kind of gone through with this, that there was an attempt, Dave, to disfigure Caesar

because the wound that we had talked about that's 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. So many times we talk 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 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, and demonstrate to everybody in the Senate. 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 did they actually do the autopsy we're left with him laid out on the floor blood has coagulated it's a couple hours

later what do they do now they've 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. And Josias 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 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 physician's language now because they 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 Antiochus there would have been barehanded.

He's got blood all over him, the blood of Caesar. And he's 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 3D modeling. Remember how I was saying that they wanted to demonstrate that this event actually took place? They created a wax effigy of Caesar. And Antisias indicated on the wax effigy of Caesar where his injuries were. Now, that's something that we do with computers now,

Dave. This was over 2,000 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 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 at that moment in time that something happened. Because it's from that moment, Tom, when this physician over 2,000 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. 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. This is amazing.

Yeah, it is. We've got these kinds of threads through time that lead all the way back to the death of Caesar. I would need a wax model because you describe things or I read them. And I'm not a doctor. I'm just 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 the stab wounds were and what other damage was done.

Now I have a good understanding 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 have a good understanding 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. It is quite amazing. And it's not like the ancients were ignorant people. And it's arrogance on our part 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 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 Antisias to thank for this, to be able to take an event that was so tragic in Roman history and their 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 those that can no longer speak for themselves. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.