Julius Caesar was almost certainly not born by caesarean section.

100 BC · 44 BC · apart: 56 years

In Rome the operation was performed only on dead or dying mothers, and his mother Aurelia lived some 46 more years after his birth.

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The event

• Assassination of Julius Caesar44 BC · Rome. On the Ides of March, senators led by Brutus and Cassius stabbed the dictator Julius Caesar to death at a Senate meeting in the Curia of Pompey. Instead of saving the Republic, the murder unleashed new civil wars that brought Octavian to power.

1st century BC

More amazing facts

• 146 BC The Romans did not sow Carthage with salt.
• 146 BC After destroying Carthage, the Roman Senate paid to translate one Punic book: Mago's 28 volumes on farming.
• 100 BC The word “salary” is often said to come from Roman soldiers being paid in salt.
• 100 BC · 1901 The oldest known analogue computer is over 2,000 years old. The bronze gears of the Antikythera mechanism predicted eclipses, and nothing as intricate was built again for more than a thousand years, until medieval astronomical clocks.
• 51 BC · 30 BC Cleopatra was not Egyptian: her Ptolemaic dynasty was Macedonian Greek.
• 50 BC Roman soldiers were not paid in salt.

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