Fifty Talents — Caesar I: Fifty Talents

For an ordinary legionary, that is more than two thousand years of pay. The pirates stare at their young captive as if he were mad, because no one has ever haggled with them for a higher price. And then he adds something they take for a joke: once he is free, he will come back, catch them and have them crucified. Every one of them. They burst out laughing. They think they have a spoiled young man on their hands who does not understand his situation.

They are wrong on both counts. This man keeps his promises, and he is not rich. His name is Gaius Julius Caesar. In thirty years the whole Roman world will fear him, and his name will become the word for a ruler: Kaiser in German, tsar in Russian, cesarz in Polish. He himself will never become emperor. Only his successors will take the title.

In winter, around 75 BC, he sails to Rhodes, to the most famous teacher of oratory in the world. He is twenty-five, with a few servants, a doctor and a very high opinion of himself.

Who are his captors? They are pirates from Cilicia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor, and in these years they are the most dangerous force in the Mediterranean. They kidnap merchants and sometimes even Roman officials, because people fetch more than cargo.

Rome has long turned a blind eye. The pirates supply the slave market on Delos, where, according to Strabo, ten thousand people could be landed and shipped onward in a single day, and senators need slaves. Things get worse when senators start being kidnapped. A few years later, as Plutarch writes, the pirates will have a thousand ships and four hundred captured cities.

How do we know this? From writings composed long after the events. Caesar himself left no account of it: his own works cover the war in Gaul and the civil war, and nothing of his youth. One of the earliest mentions comes from Velleius Paterculus, roughly a hundred years after the fact. The full story, with the ransom, the jokes and the crosses, is set down only by Plutarch and Suetonius, almost two centuries later.

Should we believe them? Historians do not doubt the kidnapping itself, the ransom and the revenge on the pirates, because several authors report them. The conversations and the jokes belong to storytelling and may have been embellished. Even the date is uncertain: the kidnapping is placed in 75 or in 74 BC, because the authors date it differently. Suetonius places it on the voyage to Rhodes after the trial of Dolabella, Plutarch on the journey back from Bithynia.

How should we read sources like these? Ancient biographers loved scenes that reveal a hero’s character at a stroke. A story about pirates who take a threat for a joke and then die on crosses is made for exactly that. So we accept it with gratitude and suspicion at the same time. We will come back to this caution more than once in this episode.

But where does a twenty-five-year-old with nothing but a name get so much nerve? Let us go back twenty-five years, to the cramped neighborhood where this life began.