Thirty-Eight Days — Caesar I: Fifty Talents

Remember the fifty talents. The price is set, and someone has to raise it. Caesar’s men scatter to collect the money. He stays on a rocky island with a few of his closest companions: according to Plutarch, one friend and two servants; according to Suetonius, a doctor and two valets. Around him prowl pirates whom Plutarch calls the most bloodthirsty men in the world. Ahead of him lie thirty-eight days, by Plutarch’s count; almost forty, according to Suetonius.

How do you behave when everything depends on people who kill for fun? See what you would do in his place, and then see what, according to Plutarch, Caesar did.

Why did the pirates put up with it? Plutarch writes that they took his behavior for a joke and youthful defiance. He was also simply too valuable: a healthy captive meant ransom, an offended or dead one meant nothing. The self-confidence that elsewhere would have cost him his life was here his best insurance.

Where did the ransom money come from? Caesar did not have it. Velleius Paterculus states plainly that the cities of Asia paid the ransom, and that Caesar even managed to extract hostages from the pirates for those cities. Plutarch adds that the money came from Miletus. After the victory, as Plutarch records, Caesar recovered the money from the plunder.

Did he have the right? None whatsoever. The captives’ fate was in the hands of the governor of Asia, Marcus Junius, and Caesar held no office at the time. The sources suggest that the governor cared more about the plunder than about justice, and so he dragged his feet over the sentence.

Suetonius adds a detail meant to show Caesar’s mercy: before the crucifixion, he had the captives’ throats cut, so that they would not suffer on the crosses (74). To the Romans, this was proof of clemency. To us, it is rather proof of how differently cruelty was measured then. Crucifixion in Rome was a punishment for slaves, rebels and brigands, and a Roman citizen could not be crucified: Cicero would later call that the most terrible lawlessness.

Cicero would later write that a pirate is not an ordinary enemy but the enemy of all, so no word or oath given to him is binding. This way of thinking explains why, as far as we know, no one held Caesar to account for acting on his own authority.

Piracy does not vanish after one act of revenge. Eight years later, in 67 BC, the popular assembly grants Pompey extraordinary power over the entire sea. Pompey receives five hundred ships and more than a hundred thousand infantry, and according to Plutarch he clears the sea in three months. Caesar had dealt with a single gang, and without anyone’s orders. Pompey settles thousands of surrendered pirates as farmers inland. Two methods: the cross and the land. These two men will meet again.

Only now does Caesar reach Rhodes. At that time Rhodes is something like the university of the Greek world. Caesar studies under Apollonius Molon, the rhetorician with whom Cicero had polished his style a few years earlier. Quintilian wrote that had Caesar devoted himself to the courts alone, he would have been Cicero’s only rival. Plutarch adds that he could have become the first orator of Rome but chose instead to be first in might and power. According to Suetonius, he spoke with vigor, in a powerful voice and with expressive gestures.

Things are heating up in the East again. In 74 BC Nicomedes IV, king of Bithynia, the same man whose court gave Caesar his bad reputation, dies and bequeaths his kingdom to Rome. Mithridates, king of Pontus and Rome’s perennial enemy, will not stand for it and renews the war. Caesar crosses to the mainland and, on his own initiative and holding no office, raises auxiliary troops. He drives the king’s men out of the province and shores up the cities that were wavering. No one ordered him to. He is around twenty-six and has just understood that initiative is a currency.

Around 73 BC he gets word: the college of pontiffs has admitted him in place of the late Cotta, a relative of his mother. Its fifteen priests oversee the calendar, the rites and sacred law, so this is not only an honor but a place among the men who know every important family. It is a ticket back to Rome. He crosses the Adriatic in a small boat, with two friends and ten slaves. According to Velleius Paterculus, at the sight of ships he takes for pirates, he strips off his clothes and straps a dagger to his thigh. He will not be taken alive a second time. In Rome, though, something more dangerous than pirates awaits: bills he cannot pay.

Before you move on, put it all in order in your head: from his birth in the Subura to the college of pontiffs.

In 73 BC Caesar is twenty-seven, a priest, and he has led his own expedition against the pirates, but he has not yet won a single battle. Ahead of him lies a Rome where popularity costs more than a ransom. In the next episode, “Caesar II: Rome on Credit,” you will see how to buy an entire city with other people’s money.