Image Conscious
Just how sensitive was Julius Caesar about his looks?
The work of Suetonius, Divus Julius or Lives
Of The Twelve Caesars, gives us an insight into the physical hang-ups that Julius Caesar may have experienced. Here’s an excerpt from the 1913 Loeb edition of the work:
‘His baldness was a disfigurement which troubled him greatly, since he found that it was often the subject of the gibes of his detractors. Because of it he used to comb forward his scanty locks from the crown of his head… They say, too, that he was ostentatious in his dress; that he wore a senator’s tunic with fringed sleeves reaching to the wrist, and always had a girdle over it, though rather a loose one; and this, they say, was the occasion of Sulla’s jibe, when he often warned the nobles to keep an eye on the ill-girt boy… I won’t mention either, the invectives of Dolabella and the elder Curio, in which Dolabella calls him
“the queen’s rival, the inner partner of the royal couch,” and Curio, “the brothel of Nicomedes and the stew of Bithynia.” Cicero, indeed, is not content with having written in sundry letters that Caesar was led by the king’s attendants to the royal apartments, that he lay on a golden couch arrayed in purple, and that the virginity of this son of Venus was lost in Bithynia.’
Even when he was granted the provinces of
Gaul and Illyria by the senate, his exultant boast that he would be
‘mounting on their heads’, that is committing oral rape on the enemy, was met with the quip that that would be rather difficult for a woman to do.