You probably think of Julius Caesar as the guy in the toga who conquered a bunch of people, had an affair with Cleopatra, and got stabbed. That's the gist of the story, but it turns out there was a lot that your high school teacher neglected to mention. It's often said that the caesarean section was named after Julius Caesar, who was said to have come into the world via this now common medical procedure. But there's several small problems with that legend, starting with the fact that in ancient Rome, women who underwent caesarean sections were either already dead or about to become dead, because the procedure didn't usually involve sewing the unfortunate mom up again afterward.
Considering Caesar's mom became one of his political advisers, she probably wasn't dead.
The practice of removing a baby from a dying mother's abdomen existed long before Caesar's birth, and when Roman historian Pliny the Elder wrote about a certain Caesar who was born by, quote, "an incision in his mother's womb," it wasn't the Caesar you're thinking of. It was his distant ancestor and likely the first in his line to bear that name, as "Caesar" may have been derived from the Latin word which means to "chop, hew, or cut out." Yikes.
Watch the video for more Things Your History Teacher Never Told You About Julius Caesar!
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Born the old-fashioned way | 0:13
About that kidnapping... | 1:09
Latin is old news, anyway | 1:58
Beware the ides of bad poetry | 3:03
Senators make terrible assassins | 3:52
No, you're not related to him | 4:45
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