"Julius Caesar: Power, Desire… and the Men Who Decided He Had to Die”

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Okay, so the most powerful man in the Western world was wearing a wreath to cover his bald spot. That is where we are starting today. And I want you to hold that image for the entire episode because everything else we are going to tell you flows from it. Welcome to the Mike and Mark History Experience. Uh I am Mike, screenwriter, uh historian, man who this morning was informed by my 16-year-old son Dylan at 7.15 uh before I'd finished my first coffee that Julius Caesar was, and I am quoting a vibe, Dylan. He was not a vibe. He was a general, a consul, a dictator for life, a prose stylist of genuine distinction and a deeply complicated human being. Dylan also told me last week that the Sydney Roosers are a construct. So I am taking his Caesar analysis with the weight it deserves.

SPEAKER_02 0:57

I have been looking forward to this with what Valerie describes as unseemly enthusiasm, which from a registered nurse is a specific kind of diagnosis. Because Caesar is one of those historical figures who has been so thoroughly buried under layers, Shakespeare's poetry, the sword and sandal films, the salad, which has nothing to do with him. Roughly four centuries of Western civilization using him as a mirror for whatever they wanted to see, that the actual person has nearly disappeared. And the actual person is considerably more interesting than the myth. Because the myth is all marble and gravitas, and the man was vain about his hair, funny in company. And apparently, according to his enemies in the Roman Senate, who were not subtle people, the most athletically flexible man in Rome, we will get to that.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

We will absolutely get to that. But we start with the body. In the ancient world, and this is something modern audiences genuinely underestimate, a man's physical presence was a political argument. How you looked, how you moved, how you held yourself were not superficial. They were evidence. The Romans had an entire vocabulary for this. Dignitas covered not just dignity in our modern sense, but physical bearing, the way a man occupied space, the argument his body made for why he deserved to be listened to. And Caesar understood this completely and was obsessed with managing it in ways his contemporaries found both impressive and faintly ridiculous.

SPEAKER_02 2:22

The hair. We have to do the hair first.

SPEAKER_00 2:25

We do the hair first. Suetonius, writing roughly 150 years after Caesar's death, but drawing on sources considerably closer, says Caesar was fastidious about his body to the point that his enemies made it a character issue. He had his body hair removed, he watched his diet, he was particular about his toga, and the dictator Sulla, the most dangerous man in Rome when Caesar was young, reportedly warned his supporters to beware the loosely belted boy, because men who paid unusual attention to how their clothes drape were not to be trusted with power.

SPEAKER_02 2:55

Sulla predicted Caesar's entire career from the cut of his toga.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

He did, but the hair Caesar was going bold and he hated it in a specific, documented, almost poignant way. He combed what remained forward. We would call this a comb over. The Romans called it considerably less flattering things. And the laurel wreath that he wore constantly in the last years of his life was not purely a symbol of military triumph. Suetonius strongly implies, through the combination of documenting his vanity, his boldness, and his consistent wreath wearing, that of all the honors the Senate heaped upon him, the one Caesar valued most and used most consistently was the right to wear the laurel wreath at all times. Not because it was the most prestigious, because it covered the bold spot.

SPEAKER_02 3:39

The most powerful man in the Western world covering the bold spot. I find that genuinely moving, actually.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Right, right. You find the vanity moving.

SPEAKER_02 3:49

I find the gap moving. The gap between what he was performing and what he was privately managing. My father, the engineer from County Clare, who once left me a voicemail attempting to describe a Roman history documentary, getting almost everything wrong with tremendous enthusiasm. A voicemail I have listened to maybe 200 times, my father would have understood Caesar immediately. He also needed to be seen a specific way and worked constantly to arrange it. He used to iron his shirts with what I can only describe as ceremony before any social occasion. And then explained to my mother very seriously that he was not fussed about appearances. He was not fussed while ironing the shirt. At length, Caesar was not fussed about appearances either. He was just also having his body hair removed and designed his own comb over. I think about that a lot actually, the ironing.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Okay, so the thing is that connection is gonna stay with me longer than I want it to. A first century Roman dictator and a retired engineer from Clare, both deeply not fussed, right? The epilepsy. We need to talk about the epilepsy because it has been systematically underplayed in popular history and it matters enormously. Caesar had what the Romans called the falling sickness. We would diagnose this as epilepsy. He had episodes throughout his adult life. Plutarch records several seizures during military campaigns. There is an account of an episode in the Senate itself. And the genuinely interesting question is how a man in a culture that read physical symptoms as divine signs where a seizure could mean possession or punishment managed to maintain his authority through repeated public episodes of something he could not control.

SPEAKER_02 5:26

With extreme efforts and significant help from the people around him. His soldiers knew his close staff had protocols, but he could not always be shielded. And what he did in those moments was refuse to treat the episode as a disqualification. He would recover, straighten up, and continue. The performative recovery was itself a kind of argument. This does not stop me.

SPEAKER_00 5:50

Which is either admirable or terrifying, depending on your perspective. There is also a theory debated. I want to be precise, that some of Caesar's more erratic behavior in the final months of his life may have been related to neurological deterioration, the excessive honors, the behavior that struck even his allies as peculiar, the famous incident where he remained seated when the full Senate approached him in formal procession. Some historians argue the epilepsy was worsening. Others argue the sitting was a deliberate test of whether he could behave like a king.

SPEAKER_02 6:23

And I find the sitting incident fascinating, regardless of cause. Because whether it was neurological or deliberate, either interpretation is damning. Either he was losing control of the presentation, he had managed his entire life, which is a specific kind of tragedy, or he had moved so far into the performance of absolute power that he had forgotten the audience was still watching. I will say Mike has a particular personal history with the question of confidently misidentifying Roman things in public and then being corrected. So I will let him sit with both interpretations equally.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

We are not doing the Augustus bust again.

SPEAKER_02 7:03

The retired UCLA classics professor sided with me in front of 14 tourists.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

I bought the coffees. I have always bought the coffees. We are moving on. His advisers were alarmed, Cicero wrote about it, Mark Antony was alarmed. These were not people who were alarmed easily. On that note, we will be right back.

SPEAKER_02 7:23

This brew is delicious, mate.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

Welcome back to part two. I want to start with a sentence chanted at Julius Caesar's military triumph by his own soldiers, because it is the most remarkable piece of evidence we have about how Romans thought about their greatest general's private life. The sentence is this Caesar conquered Gaul, Nicomes conquered Caesar. The soldiers chanted this at his triumph in the street, while a road passed on a chariot, and Caesar, by all accounts, smiled. This requires context. It requires enormous context. When Caesar was in his late teens, around eighty something before the Common Era, he was sent on a diplomatic mission to the court of Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, in what is now northwestern Turkey. He stayed longer than the mission required. When he returned, there were specific rumors. The Romans had a particular set of rules about what was sexually acceptable for a male citizen, and those rules were entirely about dominance and submission rather than the gender of one's partner. A Roman man who penetrated was performing his Roman manhood. A Roman man who was penetrated especially by a foreign king was considered to have surrendered something fundamental about his fitness for Roman leadership.

SPEAKER_02 8:33

And Caesar never fully escaped this.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

Never. It followed him for decades. Gaius Scribonius Curio, the elder called Caesar, in public, every woman's husband and every man's wife. That line survived 2,000 years because it was devastating and technically unanswerable. And Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, his co-consul in 59 before the Common Era, a man who despised Caesar with remarkable consistency, posted public notices around Rome, referring to Caesar explicitly as the Queen of Bithynia. Not the king, the queen.

SPEAKER_02 9:07

His co-consul. Posted publicly in Rome.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

Yes. In Rome. And now the decision point. Caesar was 18 or 19 alone in a foreign court, and he had three options. One, conduct himself with rigid Roman propriety, complete the mission, leave on schedule, give no one anything to talk about. Two, form what the Romans would have called a friendship with Nicomedes, enormous political risk, but also the immediate practical benefit of a king's support at a moment when Caesar had just defied Sulla and lost everything. Three, find another route to the resources he needed and avoid Bithynia entirely. He chose two and paid for it in public mockery for the rest of his life.

SPEAKER_02 9:46

What I keep coming back to is the smile of the triumph. Those soldiers loved Caesar genuinely, personally. In a way Roman soldiers did not typically love their generals. And that chant was not contempt, it was intimacy. It was we know the thing you are most embarrassed about, and we are saying it to your face while you ride past in your moment of maximum triumph. And we are still here. We are still yours. That is a specific kind of loyalty that most people never receive in their lives. And I think Caesar understood exactly what it was. The smile was real.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

Right, right. That is a better reading of that moment than I had prepared. And I am going to incorporate it without acknowledging that you're incorporating it.

SPEAKER_02 10:28

I know. I'll wait.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

Moving to the marriages, three of them. The first was Cornelia, daughter of the populist leader Sinna. Caesar married her at roughly 17. When Sulla ordered Caesar to divorce her because her father was now the political enemy, Caesar refused. He was a teenager, refusing the most dangerous man in Rome in order to keep his wife, lost his priesthood, his inheritance, nearly his life, had to go into hiding. His family persuaded Sulla to spare him with the observation that there were many Mariuses in this young man, meaning Caesar had the same dangerous populist energy as Sulla's great rival.

SPEAKER_02 11:02

The courage of that refusal is almost impossible to overstate. Sulla had prescription lists, he killed people, Caesar was nobody, a young aristocrat with no record and nothing to protect him, and he said no.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

And then Cornelia died young. Caesar gave the public funeral oration himself, which was unusual orations were for men of distinction, not young wives. I, the grief appears to have been genuine alongside the politics. With Caesar, these were never mutually exclusive. He was always doing at least two things at once. Monica says this about me. She says it while looking directly at me, and she means it as a diagnosis.

SPEAKER_02 11:38

She's not wrong.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

She is not wrong. She is almost never wrong, which is its own kind of thing to live with.

SPEAKER_02 11:44

The second marriage was Pompeia. And I want to say before we get to the scandal that Pompeia is also a person who disappears, and I think the disappearing is the pattern we should track through all three marriages. But the Bonadea scandal is one of the most entertaining political disasters in Roman history, which is a high bar. The Bonadea festival was a religious ceremony held once a year, exclusively for women in the house of a senior magistrate. No men present. No men allowed anywhere near the building. The year it was held at Caesar's house, he was chief priest of Rome by this point. A man named Publius Clodius Pulcher disguised himself as a woman and got in. He was discovered. The reason everyone believed he was there was to conduct an affair with Pompeia.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

Clodius disguised himself as a woman for a religious ceremony at the chief priest's house. He nearly got away with it. Which tells you either that the disguise was very good, or that the one thing a women-only Roman religious ceremony did not involve was anyone closely looking at the other women.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

That is, yes. That is probably accurate.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

Clodius was put on trial, Caesar divorced Pompeia, and when asked why, because the affair had not been proven, Clodius was ultimately acquitted. Caesar said the line that has survived 2,000 years, Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.

SPEAKER_02 13:00

Not that she was guilty, not that he believed she had done it, simply that the wife of Caesar could not be associated with suspicion, regardless of truth. And I want to say this clearly because it gets smoothed over. That was a devastating thing to do to a person. Pompeia was divorced for something she may not have done by a man who said explicitly that her guilt or innocence was not the point. She disappears from the historical record after that. She becomes a footnote to her own scandal. Caesar's management of his image was real and disciplined, and it came out of somebody else's account on a regular basis, usually a woman's account.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

Fair. And I'll add the political layer because it is it is real. Clodius was a populist figure with enormous street level power, and Caesar was building his own populist coalition. Convicting Clodius would have been costly. Divorcing Pompeii let Caesar signal moral seriousness while keeping Clodius as a future ally. He got to look principled and keep his men both things true.

SPEAKER_02 13:59

The calculation and the cost. Always with him.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

The third wife was Calpurnia, married in 59 before the Common Era, stayed married until the Ides of March. And the night before his assassination, we have a decision point. Caesar had three options when Calpurnia begged him not to go to the Senate. One, stay home, sight illness, legitimate face saving. Several of his supporters were already planning to do exactly this on his behalf. Two, go as planned, treat the dream as superstition, maintain his posture of fearlessness. Three, send word postponing the session by time, investigate the fragments of conspiracy that had been reaching him. He chose two. Partly because Decimus Brutus, one of the actual conspirators, which Caesar did not know, came to the house that morning and persuaded him that staying home would look weak.

SPEAKER_02 14:46

Calpunia was weeping. She was holding his arm. And Caesar straightened up and told her something equivalent to a great man does not stay home because of a woman's dream. And then he walked out the door, and Calpunia's left in that house, knowing what she knew. Having said what she said, history gives her forty words and moves on. She deserved considerably more than forty words. We'll be right back.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

Welcome back to part two. I want to start with a sentence chanted at Julius Caesar's military triumph by his own soldiers, because it is the most remarkable piece of evidence we have about how Romans thought about their greatest general's private life. The sentence is this Caesar conquered Gaul. Nicomedus conquered Caesar. The soldiers chanted this at his triumph in the street, while a road passed on a chariot, and Caesar, by all accounts, smiled. This requires context. It requires enormous context. When Caesar was in his late teens, around eighty something before the Common Era, he was sent on a diplomatic mission to the court of Nicomedes, King of Bithynia, in what is now northwestern Turkey. He stayed longer than the mission required. When he returned, there were specific rumours. The Romans had a particular set of rules about what was sexually acceptable for a male citizen, and those rules were entirely about dominance and submission rather than the gender of one's partner. A Roman man who penetrated was performing his Roman manhood. A Roman man who was penetrated especially by a foreign king was considered to have surrendered something fundamental about his fitness for Roman leadership.

SPEAKER_02 16:18

And Caesar never fully escaped this?

SPEAKER_00 16:21

Never. It followed him for decades. Gaius Scribonius Curio the Elder called Caesar in public every woman's husband and every man's wife. That line survived two thousand years because it was devastating and technically unanswerable. And Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, his co-consul in 59 before the Common Era, a man who despised Caesar with a remarkable consistency, posted public notices around Rome, referring to Caesar explicitly as the Queen of Bithynia, not the king. The Queen.

SPEAKER_02 16:51

His co-consul posted publicly in Rome.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Yes, in Rome. And now the decision point. Caesar was 18 or 19, alone in a foreign court, and he had three options. One, conduct himself with rigid Roman propriety, complete the mission, leave on schedule, give no one anything to talk about. Two, form what the Romans would have called a friendship with Nicomedes enormous political risk, but also the immediate practical benefit of a king's support at a moment when Caesar just defied Sulla and lost everything. Three, find another route to the resources he needed and avoid Bithynia entirely. He chose two and paid for it in public mockery for the rest of his life.

SPEAKER_02 17:31

What I keep coming back to is the smile at the triumph. Those soldiers loved Caesar genuinely personally in a way Roman soldiers did not typically love their generals. And that chant was not contempt, it was intimacy. It was, we know the thing you are most embarrassed about, and we are saying it to your face while you ride past in your moment of maximum triumph, and we are still here, we are still yours. That is a specific kind of loyalty that most people never receive in their lives. And I think Caesar understood exactly what it was. The smile was real.

SPEAKER_00 18:05

Right, right. That is a better reading of that moment than I had prepared. And I am going to incorporate it without acknowledging that you're incorporating it.

SPEAKER_02 18:12

I know. I'll wait.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Moving to the marriages, three of them. The first was Cornelia, daughter of the populist leader Sinna. Caesar married her at roughly 17. When Sulla ordered Caesar to divorce her because her father was now the political enemy, Caesar refused. He was a teenager, refusing the most dangerous man in Rome in order to keep his wife, lost his priesthood, his inheritance, nearly his life, had to go into hiding. His family persuaded Sullah to spare him with the observation that there were many Mariuses in this young man, meaning Caesar had the same dangerous populist energy as Sulla's great rival.

SPEAKER_02 18:43

The courage of that refusal is almost impossible to overstate. Sulla had prescription lists, he killed people, Caesar was nobody a young aristocrat with no record and nothing to protect him, and he said no.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

And then Cornelia died young. Caesar gave the public funeral oration himself, which was unusual. Orations were for men of distinction, not young wives. I the grief appears to have been genuine alongside the politics. With Caesar, these were never mutually exclusive. He was always doing at least two things at once. Monica says this about me. She says it while looking directly at me, and she means it as a diagnosis. She's not wrong. She is not wrong, she is almost never wrong, which is its own kind of thing to live with.

SPEAKER_02 19:30

The second marriage was Pompeia. And I want to say before we get to the scandal that Pompeia is also a person who disappears, and I think the disappearing is the pattern we should track through all three marriages. But the Bonada scandal is one of the most entertaining political disasters in Roman history, which is a high bar. The Bonadea festival was a religious ceremony held once a year exclusively for women in the house of a senior magistrate. No men present. No men allowed anywhere near the building. The year it was held at Caesar's house, he was chief priest of Rome by this point. A man named Publius Clodius Pulcher disguised himself as a woman and got in. He was discovered. The reason everyone believed he was there was to conduct an affair with Pompeia.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

Clodius disguised himself as a woman for a religious ceremony at the chief priest's house. He nearly got away with it. Which tells you either that the disguise was very good, or that the one thing a woman-only Roman religious ceremony did not involve was anyone closely looking at the other women.

SPEAKER_02 20:30

That is, yes. That is probably accurate.

SPEAKER_00 20:33

Clodius was put on trial, Caesar divorced Pompeia, and when asked why, because the affair had not been proven, Clodius was ultimately acquitted. Caesar said the line that has survived 2,000 years, Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.

SPEAKER_02 20:48

Not that she was guilty, not that he believed she had done it, simply that the wife of Caesar could not be associated with suspicion, regardless of truth. And I want to say this clearly because it gets smoothed over. That was a devastating thing to do to a person. Pompeia was divorced for something she may not have done by a man who said explicitly that her guilt or innocence was not the point. She disappears from the historical record after that. She becomes a footnote to her own scandal. Caesar's management of his image was real and disciplined, and it came out of somebody else's account on a regular basis, usually a woman's account.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

Fair. And I'll add the political layer because it is real. Clodius was a populist figure with enormous street level power, and Caesar was building his own populist coalition. Convicting Clodius would have been costly. Divorcing Pompeia let Caesar signal moral seriousness while keeping Clodius as a future ally. He got to look principled and keep his man both things true.

SPEAKER_02 21:43

The calculation and the cost. Always with him.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

The third wife was Calpurnia, married in fifty nine before the Common Era. Stayed married until the Ides of March. And the night before his assassination, we have a decision point. Caesar had three options when Calpurnia begged him not to go to the Senate. One, stay home, sight illness, legitimate, face saving. Several of his supporters were already planning to do exactly this on his behalf. Two, go as planned, treat the dream as superstition, maintain his posture of fearlessness. Three, send word, postponing the session, buy time, investigate the fragments of conspiracy that had been reaching him. He chose two, partly because Decimus Brutus, one of the actual conspirators, which Caesar did not know, came to the house that morning and persuaded him that staying home would look weak.

SPEAKER_02 22:31

Calpurnia was weeping, she was holding his arm, and Caesar straightened up and told her something equivalent to a great man does not stay home because of a woman's dream. And then he walked out the door, and Calpurnia's left in that house, knowing what she knew. Having said what she said, history gives her forty words and moves on. She deserved considerably more than forty words. We'll be right back.

SPEAKER_00 22:53

Welcome to part three. And I want to start with an argument because Mark and I genuinely have one. Which relationship in Caesar's private life was the most significant? And I am going to argue it was not the marriages, and it was not Cleopatra. It was Civilia. Sevilia Capionis, half sister of Cato, mother of Marcus Junius Brutus. And by every account, we have the most consistent intimate relationship of Caesar's adult life. Their affair appears to have lasted off and on, from sometime in the seventies before the Common Era until Caesar's death, roughly thirty years.

SPEAKER_02 23:27

I don't disagree that Sevilia was significant. I disagree that she was more significant than Cleopatra. But first tell them about the Pearl, because Cicero's commentary on the Pearl is one of the great pieces of ancient gossip, and I need it to be in this episode.

SPEAKER_00 23:40

During the Senate debates over the Catiline conspiracy in 63, before the Common Era, while Cato was delivering what was considered one of the great speeches of Roman Republican history, Caesar was passed a note. Cato saw this, assumed conspiracy, demanded to read it, Caesar handed it over without hesitation. It was a love letter from Sevilia to Caesar in the Senate while her own half-brother was speaking. Cato read it, threw it back at Caesar, and called him drunk.

SPEAKER_02 24:09

The letter was real in the Senate during the Catiline debate. I want everyone to understand what this room was. Cato was making what Roman consensus considered one of the greatest speeches in the history of their republic. The fate of the Catalinarian conspirators, possibly the fate of the Republic itself, was being decided. And um Caesar was reading, he was sitting there reading a love letter from Cato's sister in front of Cato. I have had some genuinely bad moments in meetings. I once had a very senior executive at the streaming company discover a text I sent that was meant for someone else, and it was it was not about him, but it was also not entirely not about him. That was bad. That meeting was bad. But Cato reading that letter out loud in the Senate, I would rather have my meeting. I would take my meeting every time.

SPEAKER_00 25:00

And later Caesar gave Sevilia a pearl, a specific, exceptionally valuable pearl. Cicero, in one of his surviving letters, which are the finest gossip in ancient literature, noted it cost Caesar six million sisterces. His comment was essentially, some women are very expensive, which is Cicero being precisely Cicero. But the pearl matters because it was not strategic. Caesar could calculate the political return on almost any action with impressive precision, and a six million cestus pearl given in private had no political return at all. It was a gesture of enormous scale with no audience except her.

SPEAKER_02 25:35

Cicero noticed and recorded the cost of the pearl, which means it was the talk of a certain circle, which means Caesar didn't particularly mind it being known. In the only language available to a Roman man of his position, he was declaring something. And then the Brutus question.

SPEAKER_00 25:57

We cannot discuss Sevilia without it. Marcus Junius Brutus, the man who would stab Caesar on the Ides of March, was Sevilia's son. The affair began when Brutus would have been conceived or shortly before. Caesar was twenty years older than Brutus. And when Caesar was dying, this is Suetonius, not all sources agree. He reportedly saw Brutus among the conspirators and said in Greek chi sue technon, which translates roughly as you also, child. The Greek word technon was used for actual children, not Shakespeare's Latin etubrut, which is theatrical. The Greek Technon, if Suetonius has it right, had no political content.

SPEAKER_02 26:34

The paternity question is genuinely unresolved. Most historians think biological paternity unlikely, the timing is possible, but only just, and no contemporary source makes the claim directly. What is documented is that Caesar treated Brutus with unusual and consistent generosity throughout his life, defended him politically, favored him for appointments, hoped right up until March of 44, before the Common Era, that Brutus would be an ally. Whether that was paternal feeling or Caesar's way of honoring his longest relationship, we cannot settle it. But the word Technon suggests Caesar himself had not settled it either.

SPEAKER_00 27:12

The structural argument for Sevilia's significance. Thirty years, consistent, private, maintained through marriages and wars and the full arc of his public career. No other relationship comes close in duration. The pearl had no political return. The letter in the Senate was a risk he accepted. By every measurable standard, she was the primary private relationship of his adult life.

SPEAKER_02 27:34

She could see him.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 27:36

Okay, so that is the argument. Not the duration, not the pearl, not the thirty years. She was one of the most politically sophisticated women in Rome. And she kept coming back to him, not because he was powerful, but because she could see what he actually was, the man underneath the marble, and he kept coming back because she was the only person who could. That is not strategy. Now Cleopatra.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

I was gonna say exactly that, and I want to make the structural case for Cleopatra before Mark does, which is that she was also that person, and that is why they are not in competition. Cleopatra Theophilipater was the ruler of Egypt, the wealthiest territory in the Mediterranean world. Twenty-one when she met Caesar, who was fifty-two, smuggled into his quarters in Alexandria in a laundry bag, or rolled in a carpet, the sources vary on the packaging, and within the year she gave birth to a son she named Caesarean. Little Caesar. All true. And Cleopatra spoke nine languages. She was the first Ptolemaic ruler, and there had been a great many of them to bother learning Egyptian, a published scholar on medicine and pharmacology, trained for rulership in the most sophisticated intellectual environment in the ancient world. And what Caesar and Cleopatra talked about included the calendar question Caesar had been working on. The Julian calendar, which we still essentially use, was developed in part through conversations in Alexandria with her court astronomers in discussions she participated in directly. Caesar did not just take her to bed, he took her seriously as a thinker. And for a man who valued intelligence above almost everything else, that matters.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

He brought her to Rome, installed her in a villa on the Geniculum Hill just across the Tiber, where she stayed two years, put a golden statue of her in the Temple of Venus Genetrix, his own family temple, linking her directly to his divine lineage. His Roman allies were genuinely alarmed. It looked like a man preparing to become a different kind of ruler entirely.

SPEAKER_00 29:41

Because it was. The statue was not only about her, it was about what he was imagining for himself. And the Romans had not spent five centuries as a republic to end up with a foreign queen. But I want to say one more thing. The boy was known, acknowledged, present in Rome. That was a choice with no political justification whatsoever.

SPEAKER_02 30:03

She was carrying or had recently given birth to Caesarean when Caesar was killed. She left Rome immediately. Eighteen years later, after Cleopatra's death, Octavian had the boy executed. Caesarean was 17 years old. Cleopatra negotiated for his life, offered everything. Octavian agreed to everything and then killed him anyway, because a living son of Caesar, even a disputed one, was a permanent problem with only one solution: the private legacy, the child. The things that were not calculations, erased by the calculations of the man who replaced him.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

Seventeen years old. We'll be right back.

SPEAKER_02 30:37

Yep. See you soon.

SPEAKER_00 30:38

Welcome to part four. I want to start with the legions. Because if you want to understand Julius Caesar as a private person, the most revealing evidence is not the marriages or the affairs or the vanity. It is his relationship with his soldiers. Specifically the men of the 10th Legion, the Legio Decima, the unit most identified with him, the unit that marched with him through nearly a decade in goal. Because that relationship at its most unguarded is the clearest window we have into who Caesar actually was when the performance was at its minimum.

SPEAKER_02 31:09

Tell them what he calls them.

SPEAKER_00 31:10

He called his soldiers' comrades camiletones rather than soldiers or men, which was standard. Unusual enough that contemporaries remarked on it. It implied a shared enterprise rather than a command hierarchy. And it was not merely rhetorical. He ate with his men in the field. He knew their names, specific soldiers, their histories, their families. There are accounts of him recognizing individual veterans after years had passed and asking about their children by name. This was either a prodigious memory or a deliberate long-term investment in personal loyalty. And with Caesar, it was always both.

SPEAKER_02 31:46

There is a moment I want to describe because I think it tells you more about him as a human being than almost anything else in the record. Near the end of the civil wars, his soldiers mutinied. Men who had followed him through Gaul, across the Rubicon, through campaigns across the Mediterranean, they had genuine grievances. They were exhausted, and Caesar walked out to address them alone. No bodyguard, no staff, and they call him imperator, the title of command. And his response was to call them citizens, not soldiers, citizens, a removal of the shared identity they had built over a decade. He told them they were dismissed, that he would march on with other troops, and the men Appian records this broke down. They begged to be taken back. They could not bear to be released by him.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

The word citizens was devastating precisely because it was accurate. They were citizens. He was returning them to their legal rights, and they experienced this as the worst thing he could do to them. What that tells you is that the identity Caesar had built for those men being his soldiers, specifically his the tenth, his camiletones, was more valuable to them than their Roman citizenship. He had made himself the centre of their self-understanding. My cat Ivan destroyed my copy of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume two. Not chewed, dismantled, page by page, arranged across the living room floor. Monica says he was making a point about the text. I think he was making a point about me. Caesar's soldiers would have understood Ivan completely. And using that bond to discipline them was it is admirable, and it is also something more troubling. And I do not think those two things cancel each other out.

SPEAKER_02 33:27

I want to say something about that to the audience directly because I think it connects to something Mike and I actually disagree about. That is not the same as the feeling and the calculation being identical. That is a man who could not stop watching himself even when he was suffering.

SPEAKER_00 34:23

Right. And I am going to push back on the framing there because I think, okay, so Mark and I both work in industries where the most effective people are the ones who are genuinely passionate and completely strategic simultaneously. I am in film. Mark is in streaming. The people who only feel it and never calculate are ineffective. The people who only calculate and never actually feel anything are hollow. And audiences can tell within 30 seconds. Caesar was neither. He was both at once. And I think the fusion is not a tragedy. It is the skill. The thing that made him Caesar rather than one of the 30 other ambitious Roman aristocrats of his generation who are now footnotes.

SPEAKER_02 35:04

I have sat across from executives who are exactly what you are describing for 20 years. Genuinely passionate, completely strategic, both things true simultaneously. And what I have watched happen to them over time is that the watching never stops. The calculation never sleeps. And I keep asking the same question about Caesar that I ask about those people. Was there ever a moment when he was just a person and not also performing being a person? The soldiers loved him. Did he ever just let himself be loved without the part of his brain that immediately knows what to do with it? I think the answer is probably no. And I think I don't think sad is quite the word. I think the word is lonely.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

Okay. I alright, lonely is that is a better word than I had for it. And I am going to sit with that rather than immediately arguing with it, which is right, the grief, Julia. His daughter by Cornelia, married to Pompeii in a political arrangement that was by all accounts genuinely loving. She died in 54 before the common era in childbirth. The child did not survive. Caesar was in Gaul, he received the news by messenger, and Plutarch records that he wept.

SPEAKER_02 36:15

And then the public funeral in the Roman Forum reserved for men of political distinction, not for a general's daughter. A deliberate departure from convention. And yes, a political calculation cementing his bond with Pompey, with the Roman people who had loved Julia, but he was weeping in his tent in Gaulfirst. The politics came after. With Caesar, it was never one or the other. It was always both, in that order.

SPEAKER_00 36:42

His mother Aurelia deserves proper space because she shaped everything. Extraordinary by any standard. She managed the family's finances in the Cibora, the working class neighborhood where Caesar grew up while his father was often absent. She personally oversaw Caesar's education, taught him Greek. And here is the detail that reveals her most. Plutarch records that Aurelia used the women of the Cibora as models for Caesar's Latin pronunciation, not the affected diction of the aristocracy, which she considered ornamental and imprecise, the speech of working Roman women, which she considered cleaner and more direct. She was telling her son, speak like someone who has something real to say, not like someone performing that they went to the right schools.

SPEAKER_02 37:33

The commentari, his account of the Gallic Wars, is written in absolute clarity. No ornament, no performance of learning. And here is the thing I think is the most revealing Caesar ever did as a writer. He wrote it in the third person. Throughout, he calls himself Caesar. Not I, Caesar. As if the man writing and the man being written about were two different people who happen to share a name. That is not a stylistic choice. That is a man who had been watching himself from the outside his entire life, arranging what you're allowed to see, and who could not stop doing it even when he was the author. The commentary is Caesar writing his own marble before anyone else could.

SPEAKER_00 38:14

He also wrote a two-volume work on Latin grammar, De Analogia, on campaign in Gaul, not during rest, during the campaign, On the Road, dedicated to Cicero. He wrote poetry, his enemies acknowledged was good, though none of it survived. He wrote a tragedy in his youth about Oedipus, a man who destroys his own family through ambition and blindness to what is directly in front of him, which Augustus later suppressed, almost certainly because the parallel was too precise. And he had a wit, his contemporaries described as the sharpest in Rome.

SPEAKER_02 38:44

Venny, Vidi, Vichy, I came, I saw, I conquered, reportedly said about a campaign that took five days. The compression is the joke. He knew it was a joke, he made it on purpose, it has survived two thousand years, which suggests he understood something about what language can do that most people in any era do not.

SPEAKER_00 39:04

And now the question of what he actually wanted, which is where Mark and I land in different places, and I want to be honest about that. There is a moment Suetonius describes Caesar in the temple at Gardes in his early 30s, seeing a statue of Alexander the Great and weeping. Because Alexander had conquered the known world by 32. Caesar at the same age had, in his own assessment, accomplished nothing of permanent significance. That weeping is the specific pain of measuring yourself against the most extreme possible standard and finding the gap unbridgeable. I think the private man was always running that race. And the calendar reform and the grammar treatise and the Gallic wars and the civil war and the Plan Parthian campaign at the moment of his death, all of it was Caesar trying to close a gap. He had decided at 32 could never quite be closed.

SPEAKER_02 39:54

And I want to offer the other reading. Not a contradiction, the room the architecture forgot to build. I listened to my father's voicemail again last night before we recorded this. He is describing a Roman history documentary. He has the wrong emperor. He has the wrong century. He has the wrong everything actually, but he is so genuinely excited about what he thinks he has just learned that I cannot tell him. I have never told him. And what I hear every time is a man who just wants to be taken seriously about something he loves. That is it. He wants to be seen trying. And when I think about all the things Mike has just described, the conquest and the calendar and the grammar on campaign and the pearl for Sevilia and the Greek word technon in his last moment, I think what those add up to is exactly that. A man who wanted to be known, not just powerful, known. He wanted people to see what he actually was. Not only the general and the dictator, but the man who wept and worried about his hairline and stayed awake, writing grammar in a tent in Gaul and said, You also, child, to the man who was killing him. The marble would bury him, and some part of him knew it would. And the commentary written in the third person, watching himself from the outside one last time. That was his attempt to be visible before the marble arrived. He wanted us to find him under the monument he became. I think we should try.

SPEAKER_00 41:16

Read Suetonius The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, read the parallel lives by Plutarch, read Adrian Goldsworthy's modern biography, which takes the private life as seriously as the public record. And read the Gallic Wars, the Commentario de Bello Gallico, in Caesar's own voice in the third person, watching himself across the distance he built between himself and his own life. That distance is the man.

SPEAKER_02 41:40

And I am Mark Donnelly. Tell one person about this show. Tell them that Julius Caesar was vain and brilliant and complicated and occasionally cruel and capable of extraordinary tenderness, and that he wrote grammar on campaign in Gaul because he could not stop needing the world to see that he was not only the things they could see from the outside, that is what history is. People trying to be seen across time. We are trying to see him. That is us. Chow, he