The Boy from the Subura — Caesar I: Fifty Talents

Rome, July 100 BC. A boy is born. Suetonius records that Caesar lived in the Subura, in a modest house, until he was elected pontifex maximus. It is a district in the valley between the hills: cramped tenements, the stink of tanneries, the shouts of peddlers, taverns and fires every few years. This is not where the men who rule Rome live.

And yet the boy’s family considers itself better than everyone else. The Julii are patricians, one of the oldest houses in the city. They claim descent from Iulus, the son of Aeneas, and through him from the goddess Venus herself. The trouble is that the Caesar branch has neither money nor influence. Relatives of his father had been consuls, but his father got no further than praetor and a governorship in Asia. The boy inherits a name that opens doors and pockets that keep them shut.

When he is fifteen, his father dies suddenly in Pisa. Pliny the Elder records that it happened in the morning, while he was putting on his shoes. At fifteen, the boy becomes head of the family. He is raised by his mother, Aurelia, of the Cotta family: intelligent, strict and superbly well connected. Her brothers, the Cottae, will become consuls in 75, 74 and 65 BC. Tacitus sets her beside the mother of the Gracchi as a model of a woman who shapes her sons herself. For the rest of her life she will be his closest adviser.

We know little about Caesar’s childhood. In his book on the grammarians, Suetonius mentions one of his teachers: Marcus Antonius Gnipho, a freedman born in Gaul. The boy who will one day conquer Gaul learns his first letters from a Gaul.

The boy has one more asset: an aunt. Julia, his father’s sister, is the wife of Gaius Marius, seven times consul, who crushed the Cimbri a year before his wife’s nephew was born. To ordinary Romans, Marius is an idol, a provincial who rose to the very top. To the old senatorial families he is an upstart and a dangerous populist. This connection will open doors for the boy. And nearly kill him.

The Rome of these years is a republic rotting from within. Formally, the Senate and two consuls elected every year are in charge. In practice, whoever has money, the mob and an army wins, and commanders discover that their soldiers are loyal to them, not to the state.

To a large extent Marius did this himself. Almost twenty years earlier he let landless citizens into the legions, men for whom the army was the only trade and, after service, the only hope of a farm. Such a soldier is loyal not to the state but to the commander who will win him land.

Everything is decided in 88 BC, when the boy is twelve. According to Appian, almost all of Sulla’s officers refuse to take part in a march against their own city, so only the soldiers go, the ones promised plunder from the East. The heads of the slain are then displayed on the Rostra in the Forum, and among the victims are two Julii Caesares from another branch of the family. See what this web looks like from the boy’s point of view.

Two of young Caesar’s choices did not make it into the film. The first concerns money: he breaks off his engagement to Cossutia, a rich girl from an equestrian family, arranged for him in childhood. The second concerns power: he chooses the house that rules Rome. The sources give no exact date for the wedding, so we hedge: around 84 BC.

There is one more thread, perhaps the thickest. As a boy, Caesar was designated flamen of Jupiter, priest of the highest of the gods. It was an honor, but also a cage. According to Roman scholars such as Aulus Gellius, a flamen was not allowed to mount a horse, to swear an oath, or even to see an army drawn up in battle order outside the city walls. Nor could he divorce: his marriage was made in the oldest of rites and only death could end it.

For anyone who might one day dream of commanding legions, that is a life sentence. Caesar does not yet know what dreams he will have. But he does know which side he is on: he is the husband of Cinna’s daughter, a relative of Marius and a priest designated by Marius’s men. Before he has done anything, he is already on the wrong list.

Sulla is already on his way, and his list of enemies grows with every city that surrenders to him.