239: HAIR TODAY...
“Horrible disaster in the time of Julius Caesar; remains from it not reaching this earth till the time of the Bishop of Cloyne” – Fort, Books, p66.
Julius got short shrift in my previous surveys (FT231:21, 232:21) of Roman emperors, mainly because in titular terms he wasn’t one.
These amends are based mainly on his biographies by Plutarch and Suetonius. Caesar’s own Commentaries on his Civil and Gallic Wars, save on military matters, are personally reticent, being written in the third person (‘Caesar’, not ‘I’).
Literary oddity: both biographies have their opening chapters missing, hence the uncertainty over his precise year of birth (c. 100 BC).
Of course, great things were expected of one whose birth was heralded by a polydactyl horse, which he long treasured, though unlike Caligula never planned to appoint his favourite steed consul.
‘Caesar’ was a nickname. Pliny
(Natural History, bk7 ch9 para47) says he was cut from his mother Aurelia’s womb – hence our ‘Caesarian section’. Here, though, time to Call the Midwife. This procedure was confined to dead mothers; Aurelia survived the birth for many years.
The Augustan History (Life of Aelius, ch2 para3) offers a gallimaufrey of other explanations: he killed an elephant (caesai, in Moorish) in battle; he had bright grey eyes; he was preternaturally vigorous; he had a thick head of hair at birth.
Apropos this last, in adulthood he was quite bald, an embarrassment he tried to conceal with comb-overs and triumphal laurels – naturally, with my moniker, I have to say “Bald-wins” – to deflect his rivals’ jokes.
He was also mocked for bodily depilation, including what is known as ‘a shaven asshole’, this last connected with the lasting charge that he had effected a pact with the King of Bithynia by allowing the latter to bugger him.
Now you’ll understand my title.
At his Roman triumph, he was ridiculed for this in one of his soldiers’ ribald marching songs. Another counterpointed this with jokes on his womanising in Gaul – a third ditty taunted him for making them live on wild cabbages during these campaigns – Caesar himself was famously indifferent to fancy food and abstemious with booze. Hence, an enemy’s comment that he was “the only sober man to wreck the constitution”.
Likewise, his contrasting sexual images – he had several wives and shagged various other Eastern queens before Cleopatra – were unimprovably summed up by another Roman wag: “Caesar is every wife’s husband, every husband’s wife.”
If this sounds like tabloid fare, that suits the man who gave Rome its first newspaper (Acta Diurna = ‘Daily Doings; cf. FT293:23).
Having as a youth dodged liquidation by earlier dictator Sulla, he fled to the East, being captured by pirates whom he awed by threatening them with death rather than begging for mercy – once ransomed, he hunted them down and crucified the lot – you didn’t mess with Caesar.
“But Brutus says he was ambitious” (Julius Caesar, Act 3 Scene 2). Bill S. got that right – the play’s not one of his best and, anyway, should really be called Brutus. Caesar famously wept before a statue of Alexander the Great: “At this age, he’d conquered the world; I’ve done nothing!” When a colleague laughingly wondered if a Gallic hamlet they were passing had its political battles, Caesar replied, “I’d rather be Number One there than Number Two in Rome.”
One of his many regrettably lost books was a poem, The Journey, composed and dictated to an amanuensis during a four-day ride on horseback – could Carol Ann Duffy do this? – Ted Hughes, maybe.
Caesar opened his Gallic Wars with the plain “All Gaul is divided into three parts” – like Plato’s soul or the male genitalia. Bernard Shaw remarked of this, “Neither true nor interesting but at least intelligible.” When filing his final report to the Senate (Pliny, NH, bk. ch25 para96) Caesar claimed he had killed 1,192,000 men, women, and children – how did he manage so precise a tally?
That fateful March game of Ides and Seek was predictably heralded with ultra-spectacular portents: celestial warriors, comets, lightning from clear skies, talking cattle, volcanic eruptions – you name it. Plus workmen demolishing old tombs found an inscription predicting his assassination.
No surprise, then, that the number of stab-wounds should be that evermysterious 23, a frequent FT topic.
‘Caesar’s Comet’, described in its Wikipedia entry as the brightest one in recorded history, was not (as sometimes said) Halley’s – the latter appeared in 12 BC (connected by some with the Christian Star of Bethlehem) and during Nero’s reign in AD 66.
Et tu, Brute? must be history’s most famous dying words. But, did Caesar actually utter them? Other versions have him Greekly groan “And you, my son?” – perhaps inspired by the rumour that Brutus was actually his son sired in an intrigue with the latter’s mother Servile – unlikely, Caesar being only 15 at the time – he was no stranger to paternity suits: a friend, Oppius, rushed out a pamphlet denying that Cleopatra’s baby boy Caesarion was his. A third has him only producing “certain sounds” – doubtless the Latin equivalent of “Aaaaaargh!”
None of these hold a candle to the Kenneth Williams Caesar (Carry On, Cleo) lament, often described as the funniest film one-liner: “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!”