The Twelve Caesars Read Online Free

the case, he won friends and reputation. He also made
powerful enemies. Fleeing voluntarily on this occasion, he headed for Rhodes and lessons in rhetoric from a leading teacher of oratory, Apollonius Molo. But he was stopped halfway. The hiatus was
caused not by politics but money. Pirates took Caesar prisoner. For their bumptious cargo they demanded the large ransom of twenty talents of silver. Caesar set his own value at more than double
that amount, the enormous sum of fifty talents.
    In total, Caesar spent thirty-eight days as the pirates’ prisoner. In Plutarch’s version, the experience singularly failed to unnerve him. Rather, he treated the men, whom he openly
dismissed as barbarians, as shipmates-cum-bodyguards, a captive audience for the speeches and poems with which he diverted the tedium. The fifty-talent ransom was probably provided by the city of
Miletus, to which Caesar hastened once the pirates had set him free. There he commandeered a clutch of vessels and returned to the pirates’ ship, where former captive turned captor. He took
the same pirates prisoner and requested the governor of Asia to order their execution at Pergamum. That last functionary delaying, Caesar himself organized their death by crucifixion. It was no
more than the promise he had made the pirates when first they captured him. Their mistake had been to ‘[attribute] his boldness of speech to a certain simplicity and boyish mirth’. 13 Suetonius reports the same incident to illustrate Caesar’s ‘mercy’: ‘When he had got hold of the pirates who had captured him, he had them crucified since he had sworn
beforehand that he would do so, but ordered that their throats be cut first.’ In itsway it was a variant on Caesar’s theme of veni, vidi, vici , ‘I
came, I saw, I conquered.’ Dispassionately he had fulfilled his threats; justice (as Caesar saw it) had been done and seen to be done, even if numerous legal irregularities were suggested by
the rapid process of its accomplishment – a man with no official standing demanding the payment of his ransom by a provincial city, then bypassing the procedures for justice ordinarily
administered by the governor. For the next four decades, Caesar would pursue just such a course. He himself supplied courage, bravado, energy, an inflated sense of personal worth, and impatience
with the minutiae that clogged the political process. In return, resistant to scrutiny, he expected compliance and enhancement of his dignitas .

    Caesar was elected to a vacancy in the College of Pontiffs in 73 BC ; three years later, he served as military tribune, an undertaking in his life of
which virtually nothing is known. After adventures, acclaim and a degree of notoriety, it represented a point of embarkation, first steps on that ladder of magistracies which constituted the
senatorial career of many of Rome’s aristocratic young men, the cursus honorum , or course of honours. These first appointments reveal neither novelty nor distinction: the path was
preordained. Earlier, probably in 76 BC , Cornelia had given birth to the couple’s only child, a daughter called Julia. Cornelia herself died around 69 BC . Her death, like her life, aside from cementing first loyalties to the Popularist cause, apparently made only limited impact on the direction of Caesar’s fate. His decision to
hold a large public funeral for Cornelia, the first of its sort in Rome for such a young woman, increased his popularity with the mob, who interpreted the gesture sentimentally asproof of affection between husband and wife (Nicomedes and numerous affairs on Caesar’s part notwithstanding). Later he would hold a similar funeral for Cornelia’s
daughter.
    In the wake of bereavement came a departure. In this instance, Caesar’s destination was Further Spain, at that stage a province of limited attractiveness to a sophisticated, cosmopolitan
Roman still not thirty. He could not have chosen to serve out his