Ancients Behaving Badly (2009–…): Season 1, Episode 3 - Julius Caesar - full transcript
The ruler whose ego was as big as his empire declares himself dictator of Rome for life--turning his allies to enemies in the process.
NARRATOR: Julius Caesar: military
genius, empire builder, conquering hero.
He's antiquity's Mr. Big, the
guy with his head on the coin.
But the coin has two sides.
There's also Julius Caesar,
sexy beast and ruthless killer.
When he isn't in bed with other
people's wives, he's always up
for some genocide.
In the league table of
history's mass murderers, Caesar
is up there with Hitler and Stalin.
So what's behind the bad behavior?
I think we can ask: is he
sick, or just obsessively driven?
Investigators will explore
ancient writings, including
Caesar's own memoirs to uncover the truth.
They'll put events in his life
to the test, and reveal new
medical evidence about the
illness that caused his rapid
deterioration.
A forensic psychiatrist will
dissect Caesar's personality to
flush out the demons and see
how he stacks up against other
Ancients Behaving Badly.
Julius Caesar has an empire and an ego
to match. He declares himself dictator of
Rome for life, and his allies
become his enemies.
It doesn't help that he's been
sleeping with their wives,
prancing around in a laurel
wreath and purple toga, even
changing the calendar to have a
new month, July, named after himself.
Everybody has had enough.
They crowd around him in the
Senate chamber, and the daggers come out.
Even his pal Brutus is in on
it, muttering, it is said,
these words as his long knife
plunges home, "Sic semper
tyrannis ":" This is what
happens to tyrants."
To understand Caesar better, psychiatrist
David Mallott will examine his behavior and
position him on a unique
Behaving Badly Psychograph
revealing how he compares to
tyrants like Genghis Khan and Caligula.
I'm going to look at the life
of Julius Caesar to see if he's
a charismatic leader, to see if
he's insane or to see if he's a psychopath.
At first glance, it's not looking good
for Caesar. He watches 20,000 helpless
women and children starve to death.
DARIUS ARYA: These aren't warriors.
These are women and children.
But Caesar shows no mercy, no compassion.
He lets his soldiers
slaughter 40,000 Gauls after
beating them in battle.
In his war of conquest, he
killed or enslaved a third of
the population.
That's an act of genocide.
He orders the hands of
2,000 Gauls chopped off...
and has a band of pirates crucified.
Caesar is sending out a
signal. He's letting people know he is
somebody to be reckoned with.
Do not cross him.
Nobody says no to Caesar,
least of all in bed.
When it comes to sex, he's
predatory and insatiable.
How do we know all this?
Caesar tells us himself in his
memoirs.
Others pick up the story.
They include Roman historians
Suetonius and Plutarch, who
lived 100 years or so after Caesar's death.
They depict a man who is
ruthless and supremely ambitious.
To get a sense of what formed Caesar's
character, we must go back to his childhood.
He grows up in Rome, the heart
of the Roman Empire,
not in the aristocratic
grandeur of the Palatine Hill,
but here in the seedy,
brothel-lined alleyways of Subura.
Caesar's family were
aristocrats, but it's been
generations they haven't tasted
wealth or power.
Now, the high and mighty of Rome
and the senators are over on the
Palatine Hill.
That's like Park Avenue.
This is like the Bronx.
Growing up on these mean
streets is a fall from grace
that has an impact on the young Caesar.
Julius Caesar is well aware
of the glorious past of his family.
And he feels very deeply
the disconnect of his present
circumstances to that past.
He could have become very
bitter, very angry, but instead,
he decides to climb that social
and political ladder to where he
should, in his mind, be.
With a goal like that, you can never climb
high enough. >> How is he going to climb his
way, literally, back up the hill?
The Roman army is the perfect
place to start.
He's had a fascination with the army since
childhood. One of his heroes is the Consul
Sulla, who uses his military
might to seize control of Rome
during a civil war, power at
the point of a spear.
He joins the army at the age of
20 and distinguishes himself
for battlefield bravery in Greece.
But that's not what everybody's
talking about.
MARIA WYKE: There is a
story, that appears in some of the
sources, that Caesar had a
sexual relationship with the
king of Bithynia, which is in
Northern Turkey.
It's supposed to be a business
trip. Caesar's in Turkey to negotiate
with King Nicomedes for
warships to aid the Roman cause.
The talks drag on and on, and
some say turn from ships to
other matters, and possibly
take place in the royal bedchamber.
Smirking gossips call Caesar
"the Queen of Bithynia."
Within the Roman world,
relations between men are much
more accepted than they were in
later societies.
What the damaging thing to say
is that he was passive in a
sexual relationship with the
king, a role that is, in their
view, too much like being a woman.
The story haunts Caesar.
(Shouting indistinctly)
His response is pure alpha male.
He'll prove his manhood by
seducing every woman in sight.
Single, married, it doesn't matter.
As to whether he ever had an
encounter with King Nicomedes,
there's no proof either way.
And the crafty Caesar uses the
gossip to his advantage.
This is a person of power.
The king of Bithynia is a king.
And that automatically lifts up
the reputation and the prestige
of Julius Caesar.
He's above his fellow senators.
He's now with royalty.
And you can take the rest of the
story for what you will.
Caesar's vigorous and
frequent sexual exploits, with
both women and men, inspire the poets.
But it's not all romance.
The scribe Catullus, writing
during Caesar's lifetime, takes
a more clinical approach,
suggesting in verse that Caesar
has come down with a dose of something bad.
Is Catullus saying Caesar was
so promiscuous that he
contracted a sexually
transmitted disease, or is this
just artistic license?
The four common venereal
diseases to think about is
chlamydia, there's syphilis,
there's herpes and, of course,
there's gonorrhea.
And it's pretty clear from the
evidence that syphilis was not
around in Roman times.
Syphilis came to Europe from
North America with the conquistadors.
So rule out syphilis. What
about herpes and gonorrhea?
They would have left physical
marks on Caesar.
Someone would have mentioned it.
They can also be eliminated.
That leaves one possibility.
Chlamydia, though, for women
is bad, but for men it doesn't have...
Unless you're one of the
unfortunate people that develops
prostatitis, which again,
there's no record of Caesar
having such a problem,
it's not going to affect his
ability to rule the
republic/empire one bit.
It's a problem for the
women Caesar has sex with, but
for him, no big deal.
This promiscuous young man
leads a charmed life.
Caesar moves from the army into politics
and the law. He's a powerful and persuasive
speaker.
His court cases draw great crowds.
Romans buzz about the brilliant
young man in their midst.
Caesar, still in his 20s, is
well on his way to greatness.
On a trip to Greece, he shows how calculating
and fearless he can be when he's captured by
pirates.
At the time, pirates have become a
major, major problem for the Romans.
They have infested the Mediterranean.
And Caesar is yet another person
to be captured by pirates.
They realize, looking at him,
this is a person of high status.
This is a person that's going to
fetch a lot of money.
They demand a big ransom: 20
silver talents.
In today's money, that's
around $130,000, a lifetime's
wages for one of Caesar's soldiers.
Caesar laughs at them.
He says he's worth way more than
that, 50 talents at least.
It's a daring gambit that
increases Caesar's chances
of staying alive and gives him
a measure of control over his situation.
MALLOTT: Caesar demonstrates
that he's cool in the face of great danger.
In fact, he comes up with a
brash and clever plan to secure
his release.
It's almost like he's James
Bond, laughing in the face of
his arch enemy.
Caesar also goes on the
offensive, turning into the
guest from hell.
He orders the pirates around,
demands they be quiet when he
wants to sleep, recites his own
poetry and berates them for not
appreciating it.
The pirates have had enough.
They want their money.
If they don't get it, they'll kill Caesar.
But Caesar raises the stakes
and issues a dire threat of his own.
If they release him, he
promises to return and kill them.
One way or another, somebody dies.
NARRATOR: Julius Caesar, still in his 20s,
is already a carpe-diem, seize-the-day, kind
of guy.
When Greek pirates hold him for ransom, he
makes a promise. He'll get out of this, then
come back and crucify them all.
The pirates just laugh.
When the ransom is eventually
paid, Caesar is released.
He then raises a small naval
force and makes good his threat.
He crucifies the pirates, a
most painful and lingering death.
But first, he orders their throats cut.
All of Rome was talking about it.
It was like a major news item.
He was simultaneously decisive,
brutal and in control, but with
a touch of humanity.
He slit the throat of his
captors to put them out of their misery.
Did it happen like this?
Is he just making it up?
It's great PR.
But what we know about Caesar in
his later life is he's in control.
It has the ring of truth to it.
Julius Caesar: dashing young pirate
slayer. Women swoon, and he moves in
for a different kind of kill.
He is said to have slept with
almost all of the wives of
Rome's aristocrats.
He works his way through four
wives of his own.
So what's he really up to?
Lots of politicians and
powerful men sleep with women.
They enjoy the thrill of the secret sex.
However, Caesar, in addition,
uses his sexual behavior to
dominate women, and by
extension, to show his dominance
over their husbands.
He's sculpted, he's
chisel-jawed, he's Mr. Irresistible.
That at least is how artists
and sculptors have depicted
Caesar over the centuries.
No wonder the girls fall for him.
But Caesar takes care of his
appearance, getting his toga to
fit just so, combing his hair
to cover his bald patch.
So is Caesar really the matinee idol?
ARYA: When we thing about
what Julius Caesar looked like,
we have some portraits that we
can examine, and we have
likenesses of him on his coins.
But for a person as famous as
Julius Caesar, we just don't
have that much evidence.
A remarkable discovery, pulled
from a French river in 2008 can help.
A marble Caesar head over 2,000
years old. It's believed to be one of only
a handful ever found that were
carved during his lifetime.
Is it a true likeness?
Forensic artist Victoria
Lywood believes it's the face
of a real person.
The facial lines of a
50-year-old man were in his
forehead, crossing his nose.
There's vertical glabellar lines
through the top of his head.
This looked to me like this was...
An artist had possibly done the
sculpture during the time of Caesar's life.
Using face-mapping technology, Lywood
sets out to reproduce the real face of
Caesar, starting with his missing nose.
We're very lucky in this
reconstruction, in that he has
two pieces that I don't usually
have to work with in skeletal
remains, and that is the bridge
of the nose and the columella,
the little piece under your
nose that holds up the tip.
Now, it's the soft tissue and
tip that's missing here.
Sixty percent of the vertical
length of your nose is how far
your nose will project if you
have a nose that's esthetically correct.
So we now have a general shape
of Caesar's nose, and how far it
should project from his face.
Now Lywood adds elements to
the face to generate a
photo-realistic image.
Then the years are rolled back.
And this comes to computerized
life. The face of the ambitious young
Caesar, the face that wooed the women.
Over the next few years, Caesar aims high,
nothing less than the top job, consul, the head
of government for Republican Rome.
But just as today's political
parties rack up debt on the
campaign trail, so did Caesar.
This debt could kill his career stone-dead.
So he's on the lookout for
allies and money, and suggests
an alliance with the wealthy
Crassus and the military hero Pompey.
They agree.
It doesn't seem to matter that
he's had affairs with both their wives.
You don't say no to a man on the make.
Forget the fancy titles,
consul, high priest and so on.
What this is about is a city
being divided up between the
equivalent of three powerful mafia bosses.
It's about patronage and power.
It's about deciding who gets
the fat contracts like in a
modern city, who clears the
garbage, who controls the teamsters.
Ancient Rome is just the same.
These are the three most
powerful players in the Roman
Empire, and they're deciding how
they're going to divide up the spoils.
Caesar's share of the spoils includes Roman
Gaul, made up of what is now Northern Italy and
parts of modern-day France.
He becomes governor, and that
gives him absolute power.
But he's a governor with a
problem. He's still in debt.
He decides to go to war.
In Roman times, it's good business.
There's money to be made in
pillaged treasure and slaves.
His target?
The unconquered parts of Gaul.
We need to completely revise
the way we think about warfare.
Nowadays, we worry about how
many tax dollars it's going to cost.
In Caesar's day, what he's
thinking about is how much
profit can be made out of
conquest, because Rome was
essentially a system of robbery
with violence.
We know what happens next,
thanks to vividly described
frontline dispatches from Caesar himself.
"I came, I saw, I conquered,"
he boasts.
It's all image-building fodder
for the folks back home.
Caesar knew exactly how his
victories would play in Rome.
That was one of the reasons he
was fighting in the first place.
And if you think about what
happens in the Second World War,
generals like MacArthur, Patton,
the British field marshal
Montgomery, they cultivated
relationships with their own
favorite reporters, because
they wanted to get the best
publicity they could.
Well, in Caesar's case, it's the
same, and he's his own reporter.
This obsessive attention to
detail reveals a crucial
element of Caesar's personality.
Psychologically, he needs to
be in control of his image.
He's not going to leave it to other people.
He is going to be the one to
decide who Julius Caesar is.
Caesar takes his big ego to
the battlefield, and the Gauls quake.
Sixty miles west of Dijon lies
Bibracte, one of the most
important hill forts in Gaul,
scene of a bloody battle with
the Gallic Helvetii tribe.
Where I'm standing I'm 2,500' up.
It's the highest place for 150
miles, and it completely
dominates this landscape.
So it was absolutely crucial for
the Gauls to hold it, but it was
equally crucial for Caesar to
try and take it.
So there was a major clash here,
a huge battle between the two sides.
Evidence has been found that
shows just how ruthless the
fighting was here, skulls
pitted with sword marks.
Caesar, writing about the
battle that took place here,
states the Helvetii were the
bravest of all Gallic tribes.
And archeologists have
uncovered evidence that reveals
how Caesar deploys the most
terrifying weapons in the vast
Roman armory, aiming to inflict
maximum death and destruction.
This is an extraordinary
discovery. It's one of Julius Caesar's
high-tech weapons, an incendiary
bomb, effectively, from 2,000 years ago.
This is the head of an arrow
that would have been shot out of
a Roman catapult.
I've never seen anything quite like it.
The point at this end,
this wire cage here designed,
one assumes, to contain some
sticky substance that would
have been on fire as it flew
through the air.
And it would have been designed
to set a Gallic settlement on fire.
This is an example of the kind
of high-tech warfare the Gauls
were up against, fighting Julius Caesar.
(Soldiers shouting)
Caesar also arms his legions
with the pilum, a javelin-like weapon.
Caesar's gloating frontline
dispatches record their
terrible effect, the spears
tearing through shields and
skewering the Gallic warriors.
It could be Caesar's
self-promoting hype, or it
could be deadly accurate.
A pilum is a uniquely
Roman weapon, all right?
It's specifically designed for
the army, and it's specifically
designed to kill your opponent.
It's designed to throw at very
short distances towards a mass
rank of enemies.
John Serrati is going to test Caesar's
claims, to see how effective it is against the
Gallic shield.
So this is our mockup of a
Gallic shield.
It's not an exact replica of a shield.
We've eliminated the boss.
It's not necessarily the exact
shape of a shield.
But we know they used heavy
wood, so we have three planks.
This is ½" oak wood here and
covered with tan treated leather.
What we're going to do is have
our pilum thrower launch the
weapon at the shield just to
test its penetrative power.
And in the role of Roman
legionary for the day is Mike
Harber, international javelin competitor.
Well, we've got a penetration.
It went through a good 6", and
the weight which is now on
the shield is tremendous.
So even if it's not going
through to kill the enemy, it's
rendered his shield useless.
So he would have had to drop his
shield and expose his entire
left side to the Roman swordsman
in front of him.
The verdict against a weapon like
this? The Gauls never stood a chance.
Well, Julius Caesar was a
master of self-promotion and propaganda.
A lot of what he said would have
been exaggerated.
Here, he was not lying.
There's no doubt that the poor
Gaul who was behind this shield
would be long since dead.
So Caesar was right.
The pilum shatters Gallic front lines.
But the Gauls have hundreds of
thousands more soldiers than Caesar.
If Caesar is to win, he will
have to kill on a monumental scale.
NARRATOR: Julius Caesar is on a mission to
make himself a hero in Rome by conquering
Gaul.
One by one, he sacks and
pillages Gallic towns and
villages, each victory adding
to his wealth.
Now he approaches Avaricum, 150
miles south of modern-day
Paris, where the Gallic
defenders wait behind fortified walls.
Caesar lays siege to the town for 25 days.
When he finally storms the
walls, he overruns the weakened defenders.
Now the serious killing begins.
Caesar's legions slaughter
39,000 men, women and children.
Eight hundred are left alive to carry a stark
message to other Gauls: resistance is futile.
With the laying-waste and pillage part
out of the way, it's time for some R and R,
Roman style.
Caesar has a standing order:
after a victory, the soldiers
are to be turned loose to do as
they please.
He brags that his men fight
just as well when they're
stinking of perfume.
WYKE: Having sex with
captives, with women,
prostitutes who follow the Roman
army, this is just par for the course.
Everyone... You know, Roman does this.
But there's worse to come. Caesar finally
reveals the true extent of his cruelty at
the climax of war in Gaul, on a
battleground 125 miles east of Avaricum.
This huge mound was Alesia, a hill fort.
Here Caesar faces an army of
80,000 lead by Gaul's most
successful commander, Vercingetorix.
Vercingetorix retreated
with his 80,000 men onto an
immensely strong natural
fortification, a little bit like
this rock, if you can imagine it
a mile across, but with sheer
cliff faces like this, making it
the kind of fortification which,
really, Caesar couldn't
contemplate taking by storm.
So what does he do?
He builds a great wall around
the outside 10 miles long,
heavily fortified to keep these
80,000 Gauls penned up inside
until they're starved into submission.
It's a killer siege. Vercingetorix had
inflicted heavy casualties on Caesar's
army earlier that year.
Now it's payback time. But Gallic
riders break through the fortification.
Reinforcements are now inevitable.
So Caesar creates another
barricade, this time around his own men.
It's finished just in time.
A quarter of a million Gallic
reinforcements turn up.
As the weeks pass, the
penned-in Gauls in the fort starve.
In desperation, Vercingetorix
lets 20,000 women and children
leave the fort, believing
Caesar will let them pass.
He doesn't.
Thousands of people, old
people, women, children,
useless mouths in terms of war,
cast out into this no man's land
and then denied any escape by Caesar.
So they simply die of starvation.
As far as Caesar is concerned,
he doesn't even count the numbers.
They're just collateral damage.
The Gallic fighters watch
helplessly as their wives and
children slowly perish.
Is this the action of a psychopath?
Or does it make good strategic sense?
This is certainly a
tremendously ruthless act.
However, at this point, Caesar
has calculated that the ends
justify the means.
The siege of Alesia ends with a final
pitched battle. Vercingetorix and 60,000
Gauls break out of the fort and
storm a weak point in the Roman lines.
The pitched battle has lasted all day, tens of
thousands of men, and the Gauls are mentally
and physically exhausted.
And then Caesar commits the last reserve.
He tells us that he leads that
last reserve into action in
person, wearing a scarlet cloak,
so he can be recognized.
And the Gallic army shatters
like pane of glass, and the battle is over.
Caesar writes that had his
men not been so exhausted from
battle, not a Gaul would have
been left alive.
Caesar fights on, but the
battle at Alesia is the last
real organized resistance by
the Gallic armies.
Vercingetorix is held captive
for five years, then taken to Rome.
He's paraded through the streets in chains.
At the climax of the parade,
he's strangled.
No one could deny that Caesar was a military
genius. The conquest of Gaul was one of
the greatest military campaigns
in history, but it came at an
enormous cost in human suffering.
It takes Caesar nine years
to subjugate the Gauls.
But he wants to make sure
that they know they're beaten.
Two thousand captured rebel
hold-outs will carry the message.
Caesar ordered that both
hands of every man should be cut off.
And these mutilated men were then sent back
to their villages to act as a warning, the
systematic use here of
terror as a way of intimidating
people into not fighting back
against the Romans.
Caesar makes a fortune conquering Gaul.
Finally free of debt, he
pursues his real goal, Rome.
But his alliance has broken
down. The wealthy Crassus is dead,
and the warrior Pompey, now in
charge, is having second
thoughts about Caesar.
His political opponents accuse
him of war crimes.
If Caesar sets a sandal in
Rome, he'll be prosecuted.
Worse, the conqueror will soon
be feeling a little conquered
himself, having blackouts and seizures.
Now investigators can finally
identify the mysterious illness
that would cripple the most
powerful man on the planet.
NARRATOR: 49 B.C. The
river Rubicon, the border to Italy.
On its banks stand Caesar and his army.
The Rubicon has become a
byword for passing the point of
no return.
It's often used about military operations.
The Americans talked about
crossing the Rubicon when they
first went into Iraq.
Caesar is about to make the most
important decision of his political life.
As governor of Gaul, he can't
be prosecuted for riding
roughshod over the Senate's laws.
As soon as Caesar crosses the
Rubicon, he enters Roman territory.
He loses immunity, and his
enemies can pounce.
His only protection is to take
his army with him.
But that would be a declaration of war.
FAULKNER: Caesar knows that
if he crosses the river, he
breaks one the fundamental laws
of the Roman state: he's
launching a military coup.
It's the biggest decision of his life.
And we get a real insight into
his mind when we learn that, at
that moment, what he says,
making the decision, in Latin,
is, "Let's roll the dice."
Does Caesar really have the
mind of a gambler?
Caesar really doesn't believe
that this is a 50-50 proposition.
He knows that the odds are in
his favor, though there is a major risk.
Psychologically, crossing the
Rubicon means that he's thrown
out the rulebook completely.
It's a whole new ball game.
He is in charge.
The 50-year old Caesar crosses the
Rubicon with his army and marches on Rome.
His former ally Pompey is all
that stands between Caesar and
absolute power.
Remember that life
expectancy in Roman times was
much lower than it is today.
So a man in his 50s was
considered to be very old indeed.
Caesar probably thought that he
was on borrowed time, and he
seems to have made a decision
from that point on that he was
going to force the pace of events.
He chases Pompey and his
armies around Southern Europe,
and after four years of bloody
civil war, defeats him.
Now Caesar is the absolute
leader of the Roman Empire.
He's a living legend.
But Pompey isn't his only
victory on campaign.
His sexual conquests include the
queen of Egypt, the fabled Cleopatra.
She's just 22, and he's 50, an
old man by the standards of the day.
And when he meets the wife of
another high-ranker, the king
of the North African state of
Mauritania, he beds her as well.
Caesar is getting older, and
Suetonius and Plutarch report
that he isn't quite the man he was.
ARYA: Julius Caesar becomes
increasingly ill, blackouts,
fainting spells, fits.
What was the cause of all of this?
Was it malaria or was it some other cause?
Clearly, he needs to see a doctor.
Neurosurgeon Richard McLachlan
thinks Caesar's fits were
caused a worm he caught on
conquest in Egypt.
Caesar, about a year before
he had his first seizure, had
spent a considerable amount of
time in North Africa,
specifically in Egypt.
And we know that cysticercosis,
which is basically a condition
related to the pig tapeworm,
was endemic in Egypt at that
time, because we've seen
evidence of it in Egyptian mummies.
Worms: the effects are
horrific. >> I would liken it to the
script of a bad horror movie.
A person has a giant worm inside
their belly.
That worm produces eggs, which
result in small worms, which
migrate to the brain, where they
produce cysts.
They sit in these cysts as a
little worm, creating seizures.
Worms eating away at the brain, causing
fits: in Roman times, there's no pill
for this.
Caesar is, for the first time,
truly helpless.
It's devastating.
Psychologically, the effect of Caesar's epilepsy
is to show him he's no longer in control;
he's no longer invincible; he
is in fact quite mortal, like
everyone else.
With time running out, Caesar moves
to cement his position, calling himself
dictator for life.
But even this isn't enough.
He wants to be king.
A key moment that takes place right in
the heart of Rome is Julius Caesar standing
on the Rostra.
The crowd is in the piazza in
front of him, and Marc Antony
approaches the Rostra, comes
over to Julius Caesar and offers
him a crown.
People are wondering what's
going to happen.
Caesar refuses it.
There is some cheering.
Marc Antony again insists and
gives him the crown.
Caesar refuses it again.
Now the crowd erupts.
They're ecstatic.
This seems to be a PR stunt gone
wrong, because there is no way
that Marc Antony would have been
acting on his own.
This has to be because Caesar is
allowing him to do so.
Caesar is testing the waters.
And the people do respond.
They love Caesar, but they do
not want a king.
Caesar won't be a king.
He'll just act like one.
It's a decision he'll pay for
with his life.
NARRATOR: Caesar is 56 years
old. He's made himself dictator for
life, but he behaves more like a king.
The decrees fly fast and furious.
He orders that his statue is
placed alongside those of the
old kings of Rome, that a new
calendar is created, one that
includes a month named after
himself, July, and that a coin
is struck, bearing his
laurel-wreathed image.
This guy is getting too big for his toga.
For us, seeing a ruler
on a coin is no big deal.
But for an ancient Roman, it was
astounding.
This is breaking all the rules,
because in and throughout Roman
history, you never depicted a
person living on a coin.
Now Julius Caesar is doing it.
So what he's saying is very, very powerful.
He's telling the people "I'm
not just your leader.
I am your ruler."
He's very, very close to saying
"I am like a king."
The Romans don't like kings, don't trust
them and don't want anything to do with them.
It's been that way for 400 years.
That's why they're a republic.
But Caesar takes no notice.
He's out of control.
ARYA: Caesar is tightening
his grip on Rome.
He's pushed through a whole
series of reforms through until
44 B.C., and now there's a
growing, discontented body of senators.
At the head, there's one
senator, Cassius, a long-time
rival of Caesar, and also Junius
Brutus, someone that Caesar
considers his friend.
The sexual exploits that got Caesar
to the top would come back to haunt him.
It's bad enough that he slept
with Cassius' wife, but worse,
he did the same with Brutus'
mother.
He figures the universal rule,
don't sleep with your friend's
mother, doesn't apply to him.
Any good will Caesar had with
the senators is long gone.
They decide there's only one
solution, assassination.
March 15, 44 B.C., the Ides of
March. Caesar never sees it coming.
Twenty-three dagger blows bring him down.
The last face he sees may well have been that
of his one-time friend and ally Brutus as he
utters the words "This is what
happens to tyrants."
Caesar, the aristocrat born in the mean streets
of Rome clawed his way out of the slums to
become the most powerful leader
in the known world.
His military campaigns had an
appallingly high body count,
almost 20% of the entire
population of Gaul, the
equivalent of 50 million U.S.
citizens today.
Where does the behavior of
this ancient behaving badly put
Caesar on the Psychopathic
Scale of Tyrants?
Caesar does not have a bloodlust.
He doesn't kill for killing's sake.
The violence is directed towards
building an empire with himself
in the center.
So he's not a kill-for-kicks
psychotic like, for example, Caligula.
Caesar's at the other end of
the scale, a ruthless,
eye-on-the-ball, goal-driven killer.
That's one aspect of his personality.
There's another to consider.
A second dimension of
Caesar's personality is what one
would call sexual dominance.
Sex is not only for pleasure,
but to dominate the world around him.
It's about power and control.
On the scale of sexual
dominance, Caesar rates very highly.
This is the psychological
profile of Julius Caesar.
So who in history has similar traits?
MALLOTT: I think Julius
Caesar is most like Genghis Khan.
They both came from noble
lineage that had fallen on hard
times, they both developed a
vision of empire with the
necessary armies and physical
violence to back it up and,
along the way, they both bedded
every woman they could.
But the assassins had
misjudged the mood of the
people.
The victories on the
battlefield brought glory to
Rome, and the people loved him for this.
They didn't believe him a tyrant.
To honor him, they built a
funeral pyre and burned his body.
Then they turned their wrath on
the conspirators who killed
their conquering hero.
The murderers flee the city to
save themselves.
Caesar wanted to be king.
Now the Senate makes him more
than that, much more.
A statue of Caesar is put
in the Pantheon, a building
dedicated to the gods of Rome.
And in death, he's made a god,
the first person to receive
that honor since Romulus, the
founder of Rome, 700 years before.
CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY
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genius, empire builder, conquering hero.
He's antiquity's Mr. Big, the
guy with his head on the coin.
But the coin has two sides.
There's also Julius Caesar,
sexy beast and ruthless killer.
When he isn't in bed with other
people's wives, he's always up
for some genocide.
In the league table of
history's mass murderers, Caesar
is up there with Hitler and Stalin.
So what's behind the bad behavior?
I think we can ask: is he
sick, or just obsessively driven?
Investigators will explore
ancient writings, including
Caesar's own memoirs to uncover the truth.
They'll put events in his life
to the test, and reveal new
medical evidence about the
illness that caused his rapid
deterioration.
A forensic psychiatrist will
dissect Caesar's personality to
flush out the demons and see
how he stacks up against other
Ancients Behaving Badly.
Julius Caesar has an empire and an ego
to match. He declares himself dictator of
Rome for life, and his allies
become his enemies.
It doesn't help that he's been
sleeping with their wives,
prancing around in a laurel
wreath and purple toga, even
changing the calendar to have a
new month, July, named after himself.
Everybody has had enough.
They crowd around him in the
Senate chamber, and the daggers come out.
Even his pal Brutus is in on
it, muttering, it is said,
these words as his long knife
plunges home, "Sic semper
tyrannis ":" This is what
happens to tyrants."
To understand Caesar better, psychiatrist
David Mallott will examine his behavior and
position him on a unique
Behaving Badly Psychograph
revealing how he compares to
tyrants like Genghis Khan and Caligula.
I'm going to look at the life
of Julius Caesar to see if he's
a charismatic leader, to see if
he's insane or to see if he's a psychopath.
At first glance, it's not looking good
for Caesar. He watches 20,000 helpless
women and children starve to death.
DARIUS ARYA: These aren't warriors.
These are women and children.
But Caesar shows no mercy, no compassion.
He lets his soldiers
slaughter 40,000 Gauls after
beating them in battle.
In his war of conquest, he
killed or enslaved a third of
the population.
That's an act of genocide.
He orders the hands of
2,000 Gauls chopped off...
and has a band of pirates crucified.
Caesar is sending out a
signal. He's letting people know he is
somebody to be reckoned with.
Do not cross him.
Nobody says no to Caesar,
least of all in bed.
When it comes to sex, he's
predatory and insatiable.
How do we know all this?
Caesar tells us himself in his
memoirs.
Others pick up the story.
They include Roman historians
Suetonius and Plutarch, who
lived 100 years or so after Caesar's death.
They depict a man who is
ruthless and supremely ambitious.
To get a sense of what formed Caesar's
character, we must go back to his childhood.
He grows up in Rome, the heart
of the Roman Empire,
not in the aristocratic
grandeur of the Palatine Hill,
but here in the seedy,
brothel-lined alleyways of Subura.
Caesar's family were
aristocrats, but it's been
generations they haven't tasted
wealth or power.
Now, the high and mighty of Rome
and the senators are over on the
Palatine Hill.
That's like Park Avenue.
This is like the Bronx.
Growing up on these mean
streets is a fall from grace
that has an impact on the young Caesar.
Julius Caesar is well aware
of the glorious past of his family.
And he feels very deeply
the disconnect of his present
circumstances to that past.
He could have become very
bitter, very angry, but instead,
he decides to climb that social
and political ladder to where he
should, in his mind, be.
With a goal like that, you can never climb
high enough. >> How is he going to climb his
way, literally, back up the hill?
The Roman army is the perfect
place to start.
He's had a fascination with the army since
childhood. One of his heroes is the Consul
Sulla, who uses his military
might to seize control of Rome
during a civil war, power at
the point of a spear.
He joins the army at the age of
20 and distinguishes himself
for battlefield bravery in Greece.
But that's not what everybody's
talking about.
MARIA WYKE: There is a
story, that appears in some of the
sources, that Caesar had a
sexual relationship with the
king of Bithynia, which is in
Northern Turkey.
It's supposed to be a business
trip. Caesar's in Turkey to negotiate
with King Nicomedes for
warships to aid the Roman cause.
The talks drag on and on, and
some say turn from ships to
other matters, and possibly
take place in the royal bedchamber.
Smirking gossips call Caesar
"the Queen of Bithynia."
Within the Roman world,
relations between men are much
more accepted than they were in
later societies.
What the damaging thing to say
is that he was passive in a
sexual relationship with the
king, a role that is, in their
view, too much like being a woman.
The story haunts Caesar.
(Shouting indistinctly)
His response is pure alpha male.
He'll prove his manhood by
seducing every woman in sight.
Single, married, it doesn't matter.
As to whether he ever had an
encounter with King Nicomedes,
there's no proof either way.
And the crafty Caesar uses the
gossip to his advantage.
This is a person of power.
The king of Bithynia is a king.
And that automatically lifts up
the reputation and the prestige
of Julius Caesar.
He's above his fellow senators.
He's now with royalty.
And you can take the rest of the
story for what you will.
Caesar's vigorous and
frequent sexual exploits, with
both women and men, inspire the poets.
But it's not all romance.
The scribe Catullus, writing
during Caesar's lifetime, takes
a more clinical approach,
suggesting in verse that Caesar
has come down with a dose of something bad.
Is Catullus saying Caesar was
so promiscuous that he
contracted a sexually
transmitted disease, or is this
just artistic license?
The four common venereal
diseases to think about is
chlamydia, there's syphilis,
there's herpes and, of course,
there's gonorrhea.
And it's pretty clear from the
evidence that syphilis was not
around in Roman times.
Syphilis came to Europe from
North America with the conquistadors.
So rule out syphilis. What
about herpes and gonorrhea?
They would have left physical
marks on Caesar.
Someone would have mentioned it.
They can also be eliminated.
That leaves one possibility.
Chlamydia, though, for women
is bad, but for men it doesn't have...
Unless you're one of the
unfortunate people that develops
prostatitis, which again,
there's no record of Caesar
having such a problem,
it's not going to affect his
ability to rule the
republic/empire one bit.
It's a problem for the
women Caesar has sex with, but
for him, no big deal.
This promiscuous young man
leads a charmed life.
Caesar moves from the army into politics
and the law. He's a powerful and persuasive
speaker.
His court cases draw great crowds.
Romans buzz about the brilliant
young man in their midst.
Caesar, still in his 20s, is
well on his way to greatness.
On a trip to Greece, he shows how calculating
and fearless he can be when he's captured by
pirates.
At the time, pirates have become a
major, major problem for the Romans.
They have infested the Mediterranean.
And Caesar is yet another person
to be captured by pirates.
They realize, looking at him,
this is a person of high status.
This is a person that's going to
fetch a lot of money.
They demand a big ransom: 20
silver talents.
In today's money, that's
around $130,000, a lifetime's
wages for one of Caesar's soldiers.
Caesar laughs at them.
He says he's worth way more than
that, 50 talents at least.
It's a daring gambit that
increases Caesar's chances
of staying alive and gives him
a measure of control over his situation.
MALLOTT: Caesar demonstrates
that he's cool in the face of great danger.
In fact, he comes up with a
brash and clever plan to secure
his release.
It's almost like he's James
Bond, laughing in the face of
his arch enemy.
Caesar also goes on the
offensive, turning into the
guest from hell.
He orders the pirates around,
demands they be quiet when he
wants to sleep, recites his own
poetry and berates them for not
appreciating it.
The pirates have had enough.
They want their money.
If they don't get it, they'll kill Caesar.
But Caesar raises the stakes
and issues a dire threat of his own.
If they release him, he
promises to return and kill them.
One way or another, somebody dies.
NARRATOR: Julius Caesar, still in his 20s,
is already a carpe-diem, seize-the-day, kind
of guy.
When Greek pirates hold him for ransom, he
makes a promise. He'll get out of this, then
come back and crucify them all.
The pirates just laugh.
When the ransom is eventually
paid, Caesar is released.
He then raises a small naval
force and makes good his threat.
He crucifies the pirates, a
most painful and lingering death.
But first, he orders their throats cut.
All of Rome was talking about it.
It was like a major news item.
He was simultaneously decisive,
brutal and in control, but with
a touch of humanity.
He slit the throat of his
captors to put them out of their misery.
Did it happen like this?
Is he just making it up?
It's great PR.
But what we know about Caesar in
his later life is he's in control.
It has the ring of truth to it.
Julius Caesar: dashing young pirate
slayer. Women swoon, and he moves in
for a different kind of kill.
He is said to have slept with
almost all of the wives of
Rome's aristocrats.
He works his way through four
wives of his own.
So what's he really up to?
Lots of politicians and
powerful men sleep with women.
They enjoy the thrill of the secret sex.
However, Caesar, in addition,
uses his sexual behavior to
dominate women, and by
extension, to show his dominance
over their husbands.
He's sculpted, he's
chisel-jawed, he's Mr. Irresistible.
That at least is how artists
and sculptors have depicted
Caesar over the centuries.
No wonder the girls fall for him.
But Caesar takes care of his
appearance, getting his toga to
fit just so, combing his hair
to cover his bald patch.
So is Caesar really the matinee idol?
ARYA: When we thing about
what Julius Caesar looked like,
we have some portraits that we
can examine, and we have
likenesses of him on his coins.
But for a person as famous as
Julius Caesar, we just don't
have that much evidence.
A remarkable discovery, pulled
from a French river in 2008 can help.
A marble Caesar head over 2,000
years old. It's believed to be one of only
a handful ever found that were
carved during his lifetime.
Is it a true likeness?
Forensic artist Victoria
Lywood believes it's the face
of a real person.
The facial lines of a
50-year-old man were in his
forehead, crossing his nose.
There's vertical glabellar lines
through the top of his head.
This looked to me like this was...
An artist had possibly done the
sculpture during the time of Caesar's life.
Using face-mapping technology, Lywood
sets out to reproduce the real face of
Caesar, starting with his missing nose.
We're very lucky in this
reconstruction, in that he has
two pieces that I don't usually
have to work with in skeletal
remains, and that is the bridge
of the nose and the columella,
the little piece under your
nose that holds up the tip.
Now, it's the soft tissue and
tip that's missing here.
Sixty percent of the vertical
length of your nose is how far
your nose will project if you
have a nose that's esthetically correct.
So we now have a general shape
of Caesar's nose, and how far it
should project from his face.
Now Lywood adds elements to
the face to generate a
photo-realistic image.
Then the years are rolled back.
And this comes to computerized
life. The face of the ambitious young
Caesar, the face that wooed the women.
Over the next few years, Caesar aims high,
nothing less than the top job, consul, the head
of government for Republican Rome.
But just as today's political
parties rack up debt on the
campaign trail, so did Caesar.
This debt could kill his career stone-dead.
So he's on the lookout for
allies and money, and suggests
an alliance with the wealthy
Crassus and the military hero Pompey.
They agree.
It doesn't seem to matter that
he's had affairs with both their wives.
You don't say no to a man on the make.
Forget the fancy titles,
consul, high priest and so on.
What this is about is a city
being divided up between the
equivalent of three powerful mafia bosses.
It's about patronage and power.
It's about deciding who gets
the fat contracts like in a
modern city, who clears the
garbage, who controls the teamsters.
Ancient Rome is just the same.
These are the three most
powerful players in the Roman
Empire, and they're deciding how
they're going to divide up the spoils.
Caesar's share of the spoils includes Roman
Gaul, made up of what is now Northern Italy and
parts of modern-day France.
He becomes governor, and that
gives him absolute power.
But he's a governor with a
problem. He's still in debt.
He decides to go to war.
In Roman times, it's good business.
There's money to be made in
pillaged treasure and slaves.
His target?
The unconquered parts of Gaul.
We need to completely revise
the way we think about warfare.
Nowadays, we worry about how
many tax dollars it's going to cost.
In Caesar's day, what he's
thinking about is how much
profit can be made out of
conquest, because Rome was
essentially a system of robbery
with violence.
We know what happens next,
thanks to vividly described
frontline dispatches from Caesar himself.
"I came, I saw, I conquered,"
he boasts.
It's all image-building fodder
for the folks back home.
Caesar knew exactly how his
victories would play in Rome.
That was one of the reasons he
was fighting in the first place.
And if you think about what
happens in the Second World War,
generals like MacArthur, Patton,
the British field marshal
Montgomery, they cultivated
relationships with their own
favorite reporters, because
they wanted to get the best
publicity they could.
Well, in Caesar's case, it's the
same, and he's his own reporter.
This obsessive attention to
detail reveals a crucial
element of Caesar's personality.
Psychologically, he needs to
be in control of his image.
He's not going to leave it to other people.
He is going to be the one to
decide who Julius Caesar is.
Caesar takes his big ego to
the battlefield, and the Gauls quake.
Sixty miles west of Dijon lies
Bibracte, one of the most
important hill forts in Gaul,
scene of a bloody battle with
the Gallic Helvetii tribe.
Where I'm standing I'm 2,500' up.
It's the highest place for 150
miles, and it completely
dominates this landscape.
So it was absolutely crucial for
the Gauls to hold it, but it was
equally crucial for Caesar to
try and take it.
So there was a major clash here,
a huge battle between the two sides.
Evidence has been found that
shows just how ruthless the
fighting was here, skulls
pitted with sword marks.
Caesar, writing about the
battle that took place here,
states the Helvetii were the
bravest of all Gallic tribes.
And archeologists have
uncovered evidence that reveals
how Caesar deploys the most
terrifying weapons in the vast
Roman armory, aiming to inflict
maximum death and destruction.
This is an extraordinary
discovery. It's one of Julius Caesar's
high-tech weapons, an incendiary
bomb, effectively, from 2,000 years ago.
This is the head of an arrow
that would have been shot out of
a Roman catapult.
I've never seen anything quite like it.
The point at this end,
this wire cage here designed,
one assumes, to contain some
sticky substance that would
have been on fire as it flew
through the air.
And it would have been designed
to set a Gallic settlement on fire.
This is an example of the kind
of high-tech warfare the Gauls
were up against, fighting Julius Caesar.
(Soldiers shouting)
Caesar also arms his legions
with the pilum, a javelin-like weapon.
Caesar's gloating frontline
dispatches record their
terrible effect, the spears
tearing through shields and
skewering the Gallic warriors.
It could be Caesar's
self-promoting hype, or it
could be deadly accurate.
A pilum is a uniquely
Roman weapon, all right?
It's specifically designed for
the army, and it's specifically
designed to kill your opponent.
It's designed to throw at very
short distances towards a mass
rank of enemies.
John Serrati is going to test Caesar's
claims, to see how effective it is against the
Gallic shield.
So this is our mockup of a
Gallic shield.
It's not an exact replica of a shield.
We've eliminated the boss.
It's not necessarily the exact
shape of a shield.
But we know they used heavy
wood, so we have three planks.
This is ½" oak wood here and
covered with tan treated leather.
What we're going to do is have
our pilum thrower launch the
weapon at the shield just to
test its penetrative power.
And in the role of Roman
legionary for the day is Mike
Harber, international javelin competitor.
Well, we've got a penetration.
It went through a good 6", and
the weight which is now on
the shield is tremendous.
So even if it's not going
through to kill the enemy, it's
rendered his shield useless.
So he would have had to drop his
shield and expose his entire
left side to the Roman swordsman
in front of him.
The verdict against a weapon like
this? The Gauls never stood a chance.
Well, Julius Caesar was a
master of self-promotion and propaganda.
A lot of what he said would have
been exaggerated.
Here, he was not lying.
There's no doubt that the poor
Gaul who was behind this shield
would be long since dead.
So Caesar was right.
The pilum shatters Gallic front lines.
But the Gauls have hundreds of
thousands more soldiers than Caesar.
If Caesar is to win, he will
have to kill on a monumental scale.
NARRATOR: Julius Caesar is on a mission to
make himself a hero in Rome by conquering
Gaul.
One by one, he sacks and
pillages Gallic towns and
villages, each victory adding
to his wealth.
Now he approaches Avaricum, 150
miles south of modern-day
Paris, where the Gallic
defenders wait behind fortified walls.
Caesar lays siege to the town for 25 days.
When he finally storms the
walls, he overruns the weakened defenders.
Now the serious killing begins.
Caesar's legions slaughter
39,000 men, women and children.
Eight hundred are left alive to carry a stark
message to other Gauls: resistance is futile.
With the laying-waste and pillage part
out of the way, it's time for some R and R,
Roman style.
Caesar has a standing order:
after a victory, the soldiers
are to be turned loose to do as
they please.
He brags that his men fight
just as well when they're
stinking of perfume.
WYKE: Having sex with
captives, with women,
prostitutes who follow the Roman
army, this is just par for the course.
Everyone... You know, Roman does this.
But there's worse to come. Caesar finally
reveals the true extent of his cruelty at
the climax of war in Gaul, on a
battleground 125 miles east of Avaricum.
This huge mound was Alesia, a hill fort.
Here Caesar faces an army of
80,000 lead by Gaul's most
successful commander, Vercingetorix.
Vercingetorix retreated
with his 80,000 men onto an
immensely strong natural
fortification, a little bit like
this rock, if you can imagine it
a mile across, but with sheer
cliff faces like this, making it
the kind of fortification which,
really, Caesar couldn't
contemplate taking by storm.
So what does he do?
He builds a great wall around
the outside 10 miles long,
heavily fortified to keep these
80,000 Gauls penned up inside
until they're starved into submission.
It's a killer siege. Vercingetorix had
inflicted heavy casualties on Caesar's
army earlier that year.
Now it's payback time. But Gallic
riders break through the fortification.
Reinforcements are now inevitable.
So Caesar creates another
barricade, this time around his own men.
It's finished just in time.
A quarter of a million Gallic
reinforcements turn up.
As the weeks pass, the
penned-in Gauls in the fort starve.
In desperation, Vercingetorix
lets 20,000 women and children
leave the fort, believing
Caesar will let them pass.
He doesn't.
Thousands of people, old
people, women, children,
useless mouths in terms of war,
cast out into this no man's land
and then denied any escape by Caesar.
So they simply die of starvation.
As far as Caesar is concerned,
he doesn't even count the numbers.
They're just collateral damage.
The Gallic fighters watch
helplessly as their wives and
children slowly perish.
Is this the action of a psychopath?
Or does it make good strategic sense?
This is certainly a
tremendously ruthless act.
However, at this point, Caesar
has calculated that the ends
justify the means.
The siege of Alesia ends with a final
pitched battle. Vercingetorix and 60,000
Gauls break out of the fort and
storm a weak point in the Roman lines.
The pitched battle has lasted all day, tens of
thousands of men, and the Gauls are mentally
and physically exhausted.
And then Caesar commits the last reserve.
He tells us that he leads that
last reserve into action in
person, wearing a scarlet cloak,
so he can be recognized.
And the Gallic army shatters
like pane of glass, and the battle is over.
Caesar writes that had his
men not been so exhausted from
battle, not a Gaul would have
been left alive.
Caesar fights on, but the
battle at Alesia is the last
real organized resistance by
the Gallic armies.
Vercingetorix is held captive
for five years, then taken to Rome.
He's paraded through the streets in chains.
At the climax of the parade,
he's strangled.
No one could deny that Caesar was a military
genius. The conquest of Gaul was one of
the greatest military campaigns
in history, but it came at an
enormous cost in human suffering.
It takes Caesar nine years
to subjugate the Gauls.
But he wants to make sure
that they know they're beaten.
Two thousand captured rebel
hold-outs will carry the message.
Caesar ordered that both
hands of every man should be cut off.
And these mutilated men were then sent back
to their villages to act as a warning, the
systematic use here of
terror as a way of intimidating
people into not fighting back
against the Romans.
Caesar makes a fortune conquering Gaul.
Finally free of debt, he
pursues his real goal, Rome.
But his alliance has broken
down. The wealthy Crassus is dead,
and the warrior Pompey, now in
charge, is having second
thoughts about Caesar.
His political opponents accuse
him of war crimes.
If Caesar sets a sandal in
Rome, he'll be prosecuted.
Worse, the conqueror will soon
be feeling a little conquered
himself, having blackouts and seizures.
Now investigators can finally
identify the mysterious illness
that would cripple the most
powerful man on the planet.
NARRATOR: 49 B.C. The
river Rubicon, the border to Italy.
On its banks stand Caesar and his army.
The Rubicon has become a
byword for passing the point of
no return.
It's often used about military operations.
The Americans talked about
crossing the Rubicon when they
first went into Iraq.
Caesar is about to make the most
important decision of his political life.
As governor of Gaul, he can't
be prosecuted for riding
roughshod over the Senate's laws.
As soon as Caesar crosses the
Rubicon, he enters Roman territory.
He loses immunity, and his
enemies can pounce.
His only protection is to take
his army with him.
But that would be a declaration of war.
FAULKNER: Caesar knows that
if he crosses the river, he
breaks one the fundamental laws
of the Roman state: he's
launching a military coup.
It's the biggest decision of his life.
And we get a real insight into
his mind when we learn that, at
that moment, what he says,
making the decision, in Latin,
is, "Let's roll the dice."
Does Caesar really have the
mind of a gambler?
Caesar really doesn't believe
that this is a 50-50 proposition.
He knows that the odds are in
his favor, though there is a major risk.
Psychologically, crossing the
Rubicon means that he's thrown
out the rulebook completely.
It's a whole new ball game.
He is in charge.
The 50-year old Caesar crosses the
Rubicon with his army and marches on Rome.
His former ally Pompey is all
that stands between Caesar and
absolute power.
Remember that life
expectancy in Roman times was
much lower than it is today.
So a man in his 50s was
considered to be very old indeed.
Caesar probably thought that he
was on borrowed time, and he
seems to have made a decision
from that point on that he was
going to force the pace of events.
He chases Pompey and his
armies around Southern Europe,
and after four years of bloody
civil war, defeats him.
Now Caesar is the absolute
leader of the Roman Empire.
He's a living legend.
But Pompey isn't his only
victory on campaign.
His sexual conquests include the
queen of Egypt, the fabled Cleopatra.
She's just 22, and he's 50, an
old man by the standards of the day.
And when he meets the wife of
another high-ranker, the king
of the North African state of
Mauritania, he beds her as well.
Caesar is getting older, and
Suetonius and Plutarch report
that he isn't quite the man he was.
ARYA: Julius Caesar becomes
increasingly ill, blackouts,
fainting spells, fits.
What was the cause of all of this?
Was it malaria or was it some other cause?
Clearly, he needs to see a doctor.
Neurosurgeon Richard McLachlan
thinks Caesar's fits were
caused a worm he caught on
conquest in Egypt.
Caesar, about a year before
he had his first seizure, had
spent a considerable amount of
time in North Africa,
specifically in Egypt.
And we know that cysticercosis,
which is basically a condition
related to the pig tapeworm,
was endemic in Egypt at that
time, because we've seen
evidence of it in Egyptian mummies.
Worms: the effects are
horrific. >> I would liken it to the
script of a bad horror movie.
A person has a giant worm inside
their belly.
That worm produces eggs, which
result in small worms, which
migrate to the brain, where they
produce cysts.
They sit in these cysts as a
little worm, creating seizures.
Worms eating away at the brain, causing
fits: in Roman times, there's no pill
for this.
Caesar is, for the first time,
truly helpless.
It's devastating.
Psychologically, the effect of Caesar's epilepsy
is to show him he's no longer in control;
he's no longer invincible; he
is in fact quite mortal, like
everyone else.
With time running out, Caesar moves
to cement his position, calling himself
dictator for life.
But even this isn't enough.
He wants to be king.
A key moment that takes place right in
the heart of Rome is Julius Caesar standing
on the Rostra.
The crowd is in the piazza in
front of him, and Marc Antony
approaches the Rostra, comes
over to Julius Caesar and offers
him a crown.
People are wondering what's
going to happen.
Caesar refuses it.
There is some cheering.
Marc Antony again insists and
gives him the crown.
Caesar refuses it again.
Now the crowd erupts.
They're ecstatic.
This seems to be a PR stunt gone
wrong, because there is no way
that Marc Antony would have been
acting on his own.
This has to be because Caesar is
allowing him to do so.
Caesar is testing the waters.
And the people do respond.
They love Caesar, but they do
not want a king.
Caesar won't be a king.
He'll just act like one.
It's a decision he'll pay for
with his life.
NARRATOR: Caesar is 56 years
old. He's made himself dictator for
life, but he behaves more like a king.
The decrees fly fast and furious.
He orders that his statue is
placed alongside those of the
old kings of Rome, that a new
calendar is created, one that
includes a month named after
himself, July, and that a coin
is struck, bearing his
laurel-wreathed image.
This guy is getting too big for his toga.
For us, seeing a ruler
on a coin is no big deal.
But for an ancient Roman, it was
astounding.
This is breaking all the rules,
because in and throughout Roman
history, you never depicted a
person living on a coin.
Now Julius Caesar is doing it.
So what he's saying is very, very powerful.
He's telling the people "I'm
not just your leader.
I am your ruler."
He's very, very close to saying
"I am like a king."
The Romans don't like kings, don't trust
them and don't want anything to do with them.
It's been that way for 400 years.
That's why they're a republic.
But Caesar takes no notice.
He's out of control.
ARYA: Caesar is tightening
his grip on Rome.
He's pushed through a whole
series of reforms through until
44 B.C., and now there's a
growing, discontented body of senators.
At the head, there's one
senator, Cassius, a long-time
rival of Caesar, and also Junius
Brutus, someone that Caesar
considers his friend.
The sexual exploits that got Caesar
to the top would come back to haunt him.
It's bad enough that he slept
with Cassius' wife, but worse,
he did the same with Brutus'
mother.
He figures the universal rule,
don't sleep with your friend's
mother, doesn't apply to him.
Any good will Caesar had with
the senators is long gone.
They decide there's only one
solution, assassination.
March 15, 44 B.C., the Ides of
March. Caesar never sees it coming.
Twenty-three dagger blows bring him down.
The last face he sees may well have been that
of his one-time friend and ally Brutus as he
utters the words "This is what
happens to tyrants."
Caesar, the aristocrat born in the mean streets
of Rome clawed his way out of the slums to
become the most powerful leader
in the known world.
His military campaigns had an
appallingly high body count,
almost 20% of the entire
population of Gaul, the
equivalent of 50 million U.S.
citizens today.
Where does the behavior of
this ancient behaving badly put
Caesar on the Psychopathic
Scale of Tyrants?
Caesar does not have a bloodlust.
He doesn't kill for killing's sake.
The violence is directed towards
building an empire with himself
in the center.
So he's not a kill-for-kicks
psychotic like, for example, Caligula.
Caesar's at the other end of
the scale, a ruthless,
eye-on-the-ball, goal-driven killer.
That's one aspect of his personality.
There's another to consider.
A second dimension of
Caesar's personality is what one
would call sexual dominance.
Sex is not only for pleasure,
but to dominate the world around him.
It's about power and control.
On the scale of sexual
dominance, Caesar rates very highly.
This is the psychological
profile of Julius Caesar.
So who in history has similar traits?
MALLOTT: I think Julius
Caesar is most like Genghis Khan.
They both came from noble
lineage that had fallen on hard
times, they both developed a
vision of empire with the
necessary armies and physical
violence to back it up and,
along the way, they both bedded
every woman they could.
But the assassins had
misjudged the mood of the
people.
The victories on the
battlefield brought glory to
Rome, and the people loved him for this.
They didn't believe him a tyrant.
To honor him, they built a
funeral pyre and burned his body.
Then they turned their wrath on
the conspirators who killed
their conquering hero.
The murderers flee the city to
save themselves.
Caesar wanted to be king.
Now the Senate makes him more
than that, much more.
A statue of Caesar is put
in the Pantheon, a building
dedicated to the gods of Rome.
And in death, he's made a god,
the first person to receive
that honor since Romulus, the
founder of Rome, 700 years before.
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