CAIUS JULIUS CAESAR traced his pedigree to lulus Ascanius, son of Aeneas, son of Venus, daughter of Jupiter: he began and ended as a god. The Julian gens, though impoverished, was one of the oldest and noblest in Italy. A Caius Julius had been consul in 489, another in 482, a Vopiscus Julius in 473, a Sextus Julius in 157, another in 91.1 From his uncle-in-law Marius he derived by a kind of avuncular heredity an inclination toward radical politics. His mother Aurelia was a matron of dignity and wisdom, frugally managing her small home in the unfashionable Subura—a district of shops, taverns, and brothels. There Caesar was born 100 B.C.., allegedly by the operation that bears his name.I
“Now was this Caesar,” says Holland’s Suetonius, “wondrous docible and apt to learn.” His tutor in Latin, Greek, and rhetoric was a Gaul; with him Caesar unconsciously began to prepare himself for his greatest conquest. The youth took readily to oratory and almost lost himself in juvenile authorship. He was saved by being made military aide to Marcus Thermus in Asia. Nicomedes, ruler of Bithynia, took such a fancy to him that Cicero and other gossips later taunted him with having “lost his virginity to a king.”2 Returning to Rome in 84, he married Cossutia to please his father; when, soon afterward, his father died, he divorced her and married Cornelia, daughter of that Cinna who had taken over the revolution from Marius. When Sulla came to power he ordered Caesar to divorce Cornelia; when Caesar refused, Sulla confiscated his patrimony and Cornelia’s dowry, and listed him for death.
Caesar fled from Italy and joined the army in Cilicia. On Sulla’s death he returned to Rome (78), but finding his enemies in power he left again for Asia. Pirates captured him on the way, took him to one of their Cilician lairs, and offered to free him for twenty talents ($72,000); he reproached them for underestimating his value, and volunteered to give them fifty. Having sent his servants to raise the money, he amused himself by writing poems and reading them to his captors. They did not like them. He called them dull barbarians and promised to hang them at the earliest opportunity. When the ransom came he hurried to Miletus, engaged vessels and crews, chased and caught the pirates, recovered the ransom, and crucified them; but being a man of great clemency, he had their throats cut first.3 Then he went to Rhodes to study rhetoric and philosophy.
Back again in Rome, he divided his energies between politics and love. He was handsome, though already worried about his thinning hair. When Cornelia died (68) he married Pompeia, granddaughter of Sulla. As this was a purely political marriage, he did not scruple to carry on liaisons in the fashion of his time; but in such number and with such ambigendered diversity that Curio (father of his later general) called him omnium mulierum vir et omnium virorum mulier—“the husband of every woman and the wife of every man.”4 He would continue these habits in his campaigns, dallying with Cleopatra in Egypt, with Queen Eunoe in Numidia, and with so many ladies in Gaul that his soldiers in fond jest called him moechus calvus, the “bald adulterer”; in his triumph after conquering Gaul they sang a couplet warning all husbands to keep their wives under lock and key as long as Caesar was in town. The aristocracy hated him doubly—for undermining their privileges and seducing their wives. Pompey divorced his wife for her intimacy with Caesar. Cato’s passionate hostility was not all philosophical: his half sister Servilia was the most devoted of Caesar’s mistresses. When Cato, suspecting Caesar’s complicity with Catiline, challenged him in the Senate to read aloud a note just brought to him, Caesar passed it to Cato without comment; it was a love letter from Servilia.5 Her passion for him continued throughout his life, and merciless gossip, in her later years, charged her with surrendering her daughter Tertia to Caesar’s lust. During the Civil War, at a public auction, Caesar “knocked down” some confiscated estates of irreconcilable aristocrats to Servilia at a nominal price; when some expressed surprise at the low figure, Cicero remarked, in a pithy pun that might have cost him his life, Tertia deducta, which could either mean “a third off,” or refer to the rumor that Servilia had brought her daughter to Caesar. Tertia became the wife of Caesar’s prime assassin, Cassius. So the amours of men mingle with the commotions of states.
Probably these diversified investments helped Caesar’s rise as well as his fall. Every woman he won was an influential friend, usually in the enemy’s camp; and most of them remained his devotees even when his passion had cooled to courtesy. Crassus, though his wife Tertulla was reported to be Caesar’s mistress, lent him vast sums to finance his candidacies with bribes and games; at one time Caesar owed him 800 talents ($2,880,000). Such loans were not acts of generosity or friendship; they were campaign contributions, to be repaid with political favors or military spoils. Crassus, like Atticus, needed protection and opportunities for his millions. Most Roman politicians of the time incurred similar “debts”: Mark Antony owed 40,000,000 sesterces, Cicero 60,000,000, Milo 70,000,000—though these figures may be conservative slanders. We must think of Caesar as at first an unscrupulous politician and a reckless rake, slowly transformed by growth and responsibility into one of history’s most profound and conscientious statesmen. We must not forget, as we rejoice at his faults, that he was a great man notwithstanding. We cannot equate ourselves with Caesar by proving that he seduced women, bribed ward leaders, and wrote books.