Rise of Julius Caesar

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He's one of the most recognizable figures from ancient history.

Gaius Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome.

who was assassinated on the 15th of March, the Ides of March, in 44 BC.

Now the later story of Julius Caesar and his grand military campaigns against barbarians and fellow Romans alike, well it's a popular one today.

But what do we know about his earlier life?

Before he went to Gaul and waged brutal warfare against various tribes for years on end, before he crossed the Rubicon and defeated the likes of Pompey the Great, ultimately becoming dictator of Rome.

Before he met his legendary lover, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra.

Well, that is what we're exploring today.

It's the ancients on history hit.

I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

Over the next hour, we're going to talk through the rise of Julius Caesar, from his early years growing up in a prestigious yet rather backstage Roman family, to his capture by pirates in his early 20s, to how he started climbing up the greasy political ladder of the Roman Republic that was the cursus honorum.

This is a story that features a lot of events and a lot of big names from this era of Roman history.

The bitter rivaled Roman statesmen Marius and Sulla first of all.

Then leading lights such as the stellar general Pompey the Great and Crassus wealthiest man in Rome.

There's also the great orators Cicero and Cato the Younger, all feature in the story of Caesar's rise to prominence in the space of some 40 years.

Now our guest today is Professor Catherine Steele from the University of Glasgow, an expert on politics in the late Roman Republic and key figures of the time like Cicero, Pompey and of course Julius Caesar.

Buckle up, lots of interesting information coming your way as we explore the rise of Julius Caesar.

Catherine, it is a pleasure to have you back on the podcast.

It's been a few years.

Welcome back.

Well, thank you for having me again.

Always reassuring to get a second invitation.

Oh, you're more than welcome.

And of course, to talk about this period of late Republican Roman history that I know you've done so much work around.

The rise of Julius Caesar, I was originally going to say it's quite an extraordinary story, isn't it?

But is it extraordinary at the time, at least, I guess, in the early years compared to other big figures at that time?

It's not.

It's not.

We mustn't forget that brilliant anecdote that Plutarch tells us about Caesar weeping.

because at the age of 33, I think, when he's comparing himself with Alexander and basically saying, I've accomplished nothing

and part of the context for that i'm sure is he was looking at pompey the great

his slightly older contemporary who had achieved massive completely unprecedented things by the time that pompey was that age so Caesar's career, his early career, arguably there's nothing particularly remarkable about it, or at least nothing particularly remarkable given that it was a pretty turbulent time at Rome.

And I think I probably want to suggest that the first time that Caesar really begins to look as if he might be something

a bit different

is the year 63, right?

When he's elected Pontifex Maximus and when he contributes so remarkably to the

debate on the Catinarian conspirators.

So that year 63 BC, it almost feels like Catherine, that would be a bit later on in our chat because if he's born in around 100 BC, so actually that time when it kind of almost feels like a bit of a switch, he's nearly 40 at that time.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

And I think that up until that point, you can tell a story that fits him much more happily within a pretty conventional narrative about building a career as a politician at Rome.

Not without some oddities, sure, but

a much more conventional story.

We will explore those oddities too.

And you also mentioned Alexander in passing, and I'm presuming then you mean Alexander the Great.

Of course.

Who in the historiography of Caesar becomes an important point of comparison?

It's Caesar with whom Alexander is paired in Plutarch's parallel lives, for example.

That becomes a fairly standard comparison, yes.

Well, Catherine, for the story of Julius Caesar as he's rising through the ranks, say even pre-63 BC, the earlier part of Julius Caesar's story, I mean, do we have a rich source record surviving for learning more about it and what were the oddities and what was the regular for the time?

Is it quite a rich period for source material?

It is compared with the rest of antiquity, which doesn't of course mean that it's rich by the standards that a historian of the modern world would recognise as such.

And it's worth saying that kind of at the outset, although we know a lot about Caesar in comparison with other figures from antiquity, we know virtually nothing about his childhood because ancient biographies aren't really interested in childhood as a period.

They might record some anecdotes if those are predictive.

in some way.

But as it happens, not for Caesar.

So

how do we know about Caesar?

Well, we have two ancient biographies of him because he's included both in Plutarch's parallel lives,

but also he's the first of the 12 biographies in Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars.

So we've got two biographies, both of which

do what ancient biography has done, which is that they combine narrative with an interest in the smaller details of an individual which may be morally revealing.

So we do have quite a lot of anecdotal material about Caesar.

The End of the Republic is itself pretty well documented.

We've got all of Cicero's surviving material, speeches, letters.

We've got the historian Cassius Dio, who's obviously writing in Greek rather later, but has access to a lot of good source material.

We've got Appian.

And of course, we've got Caesar's own writings, his campaigns in Gaul that he wrote, and then his account of the civil war.

Neither of which is going to be of particular interest for us though, of course, because both of those were written after his consulship, as was his work on the Latin language De Analogia, which survives only in the most modest fragments.

But it's an important reminder.

You know, we think of Caesar as a great military leader or a great political leader, or at least a transformative political leader, but he was also one of the leading intellectuals in the late Republic.

So not that much material for his very, very early years.

But do we know much of the state of the Roman Republic around the turn of the first century BC?

Do we know the state of the world that he's born into and that he's growing up in in those very early years?

We can talk in general terms in some detail about that.

And we do know a bit, in fact, about Caesar's family, which is also not irrelevant, I think, to what we're thinking about.

So he is born into a patrician family.

Now, patrician has a very distinct technical meaning when we're talking about Republican Rome.

It's a status that adheres to a small number of families who were the families who were politically important

before the end of the monarchy and the foundation of the Republic and therefore at the start of the Republic formed the membership of the Senate.

right and therefore produced the annual consuls.

So the patrician class had a monopoly on political power at the start of the Republic.

That's the stories the Romans tell us about themselves.

And in terms of the internal history of the Roman Republic in its first couple of centuries, one of the most important stories is the so-called struggle of the orders, which is the fight by everybody who's not a patrician.

And if you're not a patrician, you're a plebeian, and that's everybody else.

The fight by the plebeians for political equality, which is successful.

Okay, so the patrician monopoly on political power is ended over the course of the fourth century.

And by the third century, century it seems to be largely forgotten or at least that's the story and so what emerges in place of the patricians is the nobilitas a mixed patrician plebeian group of families who dominate politically wealthy interconnected despite the distinction between patrician and plebeian and who

accept new members gradually and reluctantly.

So men from outside the nobility do join the political class and sometimes they get to the consulship in a single generation.

More often it takes a bit longer.

Right.

But the standard view, I guess, of the end of the Republic is this distinction no longer matters.

But I don't think that can quite work.

There is still a cachet in being a patrician, in belonging to one of these very ancient families.

And the point is, of course, that Caesar, the Juli Caesares, were one of these ancient families.

And it seems to get a bit more prominent with Sulla, who we'll come on to in a moment, who is a patrician himself and seems to value that status.

So Caesar's born into a family that can trace its origins back to before the establishment of the Republic, but one that has not been hugely successful over the last century or so.

It's had members who have reached the consulship.

I mean, one can overestimate the kind of decay of the Iulii Caesarees.

A cousin is consul in 91, for example.

But Caesar's own immediate family are not politically active, politically successful, and his father dies relatively young when Caesar is a teenager.

So he doesn't have quite the heft of some of the really big political families in terms of immediate access.

On the other hand, his mother Aurelia, who comes from a plebeian gens, but one that has been politically successful, is looking quite promising.

And in fact, three men who may be his uncles, well, they may be cousins of his mother, hold the consulship in the 70s BC.

So it's not a negligible force.

He's born within the political aristocracy.

He's born from an ancient family.

And at the time at which he's born, of course, the dominant figure on the political landscape is Gaius Marius, who so happens to be married to Julius Caesar's aunt.

Oh, that's good.

That's a good connection to have.

One of the interesting things is the existence of that marriage, because Marius himself is a new man, and it's an interesting indication that Caesar's grandfather clearly spotted talent and ability in this new man and decided he would be a good match for his daughter.

And that connection with Marius is quite important to Caesar, and Caesar makes quite a lot of this as he begins to develop his political career.

If Caesar's father dies when Caesar is very, very young, I mean, how does that affect when he is in his teenages and he's got Marius close by him as, you know, kind of linked to his own family?

With all of that going on,

is Julius Caesar now having to step up very, very early with his father's passing and almost...

go quickly into an alliance with Marius in that very turbulent early first century BCE or BCE world?

Probably not.

I mean, early mortality is such a ubiquitous feature of the ancient world that Roman law was pretty well able to deal with these kinds of things.

I mean in legal terms it meant that Caesar was not under his paternal authority but you know mechanisms would be in place to manage his property and law of property and inheritance is pretty keen on agnatic relationships, relationships in the male line.

And I suspect that insofar as Caesar, as a

14-year-old, 15-year-old, was beginning to think about his political career, the death of his father was a blow because it removed a supporter, somebody who could advocate for him, who might himself hold high office, that could promote him.

But the wider network of friends and relations and property was still intact.

And any decisions that Caesar might have taken himself were rather taken out of his hands by a strange episode, really the first kind of, as it were, official moment we see Caesar, when he's nominated for the position of Flamendialis.

Now the Flamen is a word for priest, and there are three particularly important priesthoods, one of which is the flamen of Jupiter, Dialis, an old form, so flamen dialis.

And the weird thing about this office is it's regarded as very important, but it was surrounded by a whole set of taboos and restrictions that we know about from the later writer Aulus Gellius, who has a chapter on the Flaminaic, which meant that it was practically impossible to combine being Flamindialis with a political career because you couldn't ride a horse, for example, though military activity is kind of out of it.

And there are various other restrictions about travel and activity and so on.

So unlike most priesthoods in the Roman Republic, including being a pontifex, which Caesar does become, or Pontifex Maximus, the Flamindialis really was a religious office that you were kind of, that kept you occupied with being a religious figure.

So Caesar's nominated for this when the previous holder dies by suicide as part of the disturbances of the early 80s.

And when the time comes to fill the office, Marius is now dead.

Marius kind of takes power again in Rome in 87 and then enters his seventh consulship and shortly afterwards dies.

Cinna, who is Marius's ally and is in effective control of Rome in the mid-80s while Sulla is absent, we'll know about maybe unpack those kind of complex situations in a moment.

Cinna nominates the young Caesar for this position and also because the flyman has to be married and he has to be married to another patrician, marries Caesar to his own daughter Cornelia.

And it's not entirely clear whether he was actually inaugurated or whether he was just kind of proposed and the inauguration didn't happen because Sulla got back and Cinna is killed in a uprising and new various stuff happens.

And Tatum, I mean, Tatum, who discusses this in his biography of Caesar, suggests that actually maybe Caesar's mother, who is likely likely to have been quite important in kind of these discussions and thinking about it, thought that maybe that was the best thing.

And he makes the point, which hadn't occurred to me and I think it's quite interesting.

We know Caesar was epileptic, or at least we know quite good evidence that he suffered from epilepsy in some form.

We know also that epilepsy was regarded as a very unfortunate portent, as well as a kind of medical condition in antiquity.

And it might have been the kind of thing that his mother thought is this boy is never going to have a serious political career.

Make him flamendialis.

That is an entirely appropriate position for one of his family and status.

Maybe that's the best outcome.

I think that's much more plausible than the retrojected arguments that say, oh, people could see Caesar was a threat already.

Let's put him in the flamenate to keep him on the ground.

I mean, that's nonsense.

Or it might just have been that they're looking around for a flamen and kind of there aren't that many patricians left.

Because, I mean, the problem with a hereditary status that descends through the male line is if you haven't got another way of making new patricians, and there wasn't a way of making new patricians joining the Republic, they eventually all die out.

So there aren't that many patricians left.

And maybe, you know, Sina was thinking, well, we need to fill this office.

And so what happens next so he's the young julius caesar has been given this office by the the ally of marius marius who's now dead sinner but it doesn't feel like julius caesar he's in that office for long because you mentioned sulla there didn't you catherine yeah i mean he may never in fact have held the office for whatever reason this appointment as flamin doesn't go through it doesn't take and the reason it doesn't take is partly that sinner is killed.

The politics of the 80s are dominated by Sulla, even though Sulla is in the the eastern Mediterranean, because Sulla, you know, there was a round of internal disturbance, which was a failed attempt to stop Sulla from taking control of the campaign against Mithridates.

And he's an enemy in the East.

He's king of Pontus, isn't he, though?

Mithridates, exactly.

He's king of Pontus.

He's been a problem for Rome for two, three decades by this point.

Sulla is going to deal with Mithridates.

And he goes off and he's engaged in campaigning against Mithridates throughout the mid-80s, during which period his political opponents in Rome take control once more.

But everybody knows that Sulla will come back with a well-trained army, and at that point, there will need to be some resolution to the gulf between him and the Marians, and that's unlikely to be resolved by peaceful negotiation.

And that happens, and Sulla returns, and Sulla is victorious in his campaign to seize control of Rome and Italy.

And it seems to be the case that he is unwilling to confirm the position of Caesar as flamendialis, a small element in Sulla's much larger plans to reform the Roman state.

Yes, just at that time, if Caesar's still quite a young person, does he have many interactions with Sulla?

Do we know much about that relationship, given that Sulla at that time, he's dictator of Rome, isn't he?

So he's the leading figure now.

Yes, after he has taken control militarily, he gets himself installed as dictator, which is an office within the Roman Respublica, though it hasn't actually been used for about 120 years.

The Romans come up with other crisis mechanisms in the course of the second century.

But Sulla decides that the dictator will be a good position because the great thing about the dictatorship, unlike other offices at Rome, is you don't have a colleague.

There's very little limit on what you can do.

And it's an emergency office, so you have emergency powers.

So Sulla makes himself dictator, and you're allowed to, I mean, you're allowed to be dictator for a particular purpose.

He says he's dictator to re-establish the Res Publica, which is a carte blanche for a major programme of reform and also the elimination of of his enemies because one of the things that Sulla does well I mean initially he starts by killing prisoners of war he famously holds a meeting of the senate within earshot of where prisoners of war are being massacred so that the senate is under no illusion as to what they are required to do but then he moves to the bureaucratization of mass murder so he comes up with prescription lists so he publishes lists of names and the point is if somebody's name is on that list there will be no legal penalties if they're killed and there will be a a reward, and their property is confiscated.

Now, there is an argument that Sulla kind of institutes prescriptions under pressure from people who said, you have to put some limits on the slaughter.

So, you know, there is an argument that says this is better than what was happening immediately after his conquest of Rome.

But it's hundreds of names.

It's the elimination of his political enemies.

Now,

Caesar comes under suspicion.

He's the son-in-law of Cinna.

He has married Cornelia.

And Sulla wants him to divorce Cornelia, which I think actually would have kind of put the kibosh on his being Flarmin anyway, because the Flarmin has to give up his office under certain circumstances, including death or divorce of spouse.

And Caesar refuses to do that.

What I think is less clear is how confident Caesar was about the penalty he's likely to face for this act of defiance.

And in fact, his mother and his other female relatives, we are told, keep Caesar off the prescription list.

And I mean, I think at this point, the patrician status is quite interesting because there's another good example of Sulla's apparent making an exception for people of patrician status.

One of the consuls of the year 83 is a man called Scipio Aziagames, who's a patrician and is defeated by Sulla in battle.

But whereas in general, those who fought against Sulla are prescribed and hunted down, he treats Scipio with...

great deal of lenience and respect and even when Scipio then kind of doesn't abide by the terms of agreement the worst that he faces is exile.

But he isn't hunted down, he isn't killed.

And that's often used as an example to say that Sulla had some sort of respect for the patrician status that he had.

One of the interesting things about the politics at the very end of the Republic is after a period in which patricians don't seem to be disproportionately successful, if you look at who gets to the consulship in the 30 years between Sulla and the end of the Republic, there are a lot of men of patrician status.

So something about the way that the Sullon Respublica felt and operated seems to have favoured this particular ancient status.

Anyway, there we have Caesar no longer Flamindialis, having had a row with Sulla, so we're told, but actually not basically alienated from it.

Because what does he do now that he's free of the obligation of being Flamin?

He goes off and he does some military service.

And the commanders he's serving under are all Sullens, because by this point, everybody is.

But this is the next part of his story, isn't it?

So he's not in Rome at this time.

He's in the Eastern Mediterranean and he does a variety of different things whilst he is in the eastern mediterranean and there are a few stories that become repeated and repeated and repeated again about caesar at this time aren't there yes military heroism he gets a military decoration for rescuing a fellow citizen's life during the assault on mitellini which is part of the hangover of the campaigns against mithridates and it's at this point isn't it that he's captured by pirates and so the story goes he gets on terribly well with them and he's eventually ransomed and then he does what he says he was going to do which is he comes back and and he extirpates them.

But as an act of charity, he has their throats slit before they are crucified.

Now, this is a good story.

It does various things about the Caesar myth, about the single-mindedness, the military ruthlessness, but also some strange sense that he's not actually a bloodthirsty man.

Because later on, when we get to the Civil War period between him and Pompey, one of the great kind of aspects of Caesar's self-presentation is precisely his clementia, his mercy.

Because when civil war breaks out in 49, there is a real fear that the victory of either side will be accompanied by the kind of violence that accompanied Sulla's victory.

And in particular, there's real fear that if Pompey wins, who's the main military commander on the other side, he'll be a second Sulla, because of course Pompey really is a Sulla and adherent through and through.

And so Caesar definitely capitalizes on that in 49 by saying, well, I shall be merciful.

My victory will not be accompanied by massive bloodshed.

And so we can see how that kind of aspect of Caesar can lead to the generation of stories about his mild, non-bloodthirsty temper earlier on.

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Kevin, it's an interesting story, this kind of first 30 years of Caesar's story.

You've talked about that relationship with Marius and then Cinna and then Sulla, then leaving Rome.

And he had his various ventures, as you say, in the Eastern Mediterranean, Siege of Mytilene, captured by pirates.

When exactly that happens, I think there's some debate.

But when he goes back to Rome, let's say around 70 BC, so he's 30 years old by this time.

He's seen quite a lot.

He's done quite a lot.

What position is he in at that time as we get into the beginning of the 60s and he's seen all this in his life?

Is it now kind of climbing the greasy pole, the political ladder?

What's his situation, let's say, 70 BC?

It is.

I mean, so in 70, probably in 70, there's a little bit of debate about the dating.

He stands for the cuiseship,

which is the most junior of the offices in the cursus honorum.

That is the sequence of offices that you hold at Rome, which leads to membership of the Senate.

There are other more junior elected offices, but the Cuesta ship is the one that makes you automatically by this point after Sulla a senator.

And Sulla's gone by this point, hasn't he?

He's out of the picture.

Oh, yeah.

Sulla actually, he resigns and goes back to private life.

Dies fairly soon afterwards, but of natural causes.

Whereas, of course, when Caesar becomes dictator, he's never going to give it up, which itself becomes a problem.

Yes, so Sulla is out of the way.

And the Respublica has re-established itself, at least to obvious sight.

We are back with elected office.

We have two consuls every year.

The last remaining bits of the civil wars are being dealt with.

It takes quite a long time, not within Italy itself, but one, I think I mentioned Sertorius, he's one of the men who held office in the mid-80s, one of Sulla's opponents.

And he leaves Italy for Spain, well, Hispania, the Iberian Peninsula, where he sets up an alternative state, which lasts the best part of a decade.

So he gathers to himself men who have been prescribed and have got out of Italy.

He has, I mean, his own army, he's taken over, so there are Roman citizens there.

There are quite a lot of Roman citizens based in Hispania by now.

And he basically establishes an alternative locus of power and negotiates with Nithodratus, who, despite Sulla's claims to have won a great victory, is still, surprisingly, yes, king of Pomptus.

And the dealing with Sertorius actually takes quite a long time.

He's a very effective military commander.

He defeats various Romans who are sent to him.

And this is...

one of the places where Pompey becomes such a great figure.

Okay, so we do need to just talk about Pompey, if only to remind ourselves how conventional Caesar's career is.

So Pompey is an adherent of Sulla.

He's the son of a man who reaches the consulship in 89 BC.

And in fact, Pompey faces some legal challenges after that.

But the important thing about Pompey is when Sulla returns to Rome, Pompey, although at that point in his early 20s, raises an army and takes it to Sulla.

Okay, so complete illegality.

But he turns up and Sulla is so grateful for the military forces that he kind of, with a bit of a fudge, he authorizes Pompey's power.

And he then uses Pompey as an important part of the team that he uses to seize control of the Roman world to the extent that Pompey triumphs as his first triumph even though he has never held elected office and the basis of which he could have imperium is slightly dodgy probably as early as 81.

And then Pompey what's Pompey going to do this man in his early 20s too young really to hold any new serious elected office at Rome.

Well What the Senate eventually does is they send Pompey pro-consulate in the place of a consul, even though he's never held his office, to help deal with Sertorius.

So he spends much of the 70s campaigning eventually successfully against Sertorius, though it doesn't harm his activity or that of Metellus Pius, the other Roman general, that

one of Sertorius' followers actually stabs him at a banquet.

And then the mopping up is quite straightforward.

And that's how Pompey kind of is spending his 20s.

And then he gets back to Italy and there's something for him to do because there's the Spartacus revolt, which the Romans have been making a total mess of in terms of suppressing.

So he turns up just in time to claim all the credit for wrapping it up, which is maybe one of the reasons why he and Crassus disliked each other so much.

And then after a bit of tooing and throwing, does agree to dismiss his army.

But surprise, surprise, he's allowed to stand for the consulship, considerably ahead of the legal age and not having held any earlier officers.

So that's what a really spectacular career looks like, okay?

Yes, exactly.

So, I mean, Julius sees up to that time then, Cafunes, although, yes, he's been in the Eastern Mediterranean, he's sorted a stronghold and been captured by pirates in these stories, compared to these other figures at the time, Crassus and Pompey, you know, it's nothing near the same level.

And he sees that, yeah.

Yeah, so Pompey and Crassus are consuls in 70.

They are probably consuls at the time at which Caesar has to stand for the cuistership.

The bottom, right, the lowest rung.

And okay, he's elected, but there are 20 cuisters every year, so it's hardly that big a deal.

I'm loving this.

I'm loving this, Catherine.

Actually, just before we go go on to that and how it kind of progresses, I mean, this political ladder, you mentioned how Crassus and Pompey, so they're the consuls, and Caesar's looking up almost from several rungs down as the cuista.

This whole process, it's called the cursus honorum, isn't it?

So, I mean, could you explain just very briefly what we mean by the cursus honorum?

So, it emerges over the course of the Reus Publica, but it's very clearly standardised.

And it's one of the things that Sulla does is he reaffirms what happens.

So, you can stand for the cuista ship when you're 30, and that's kind of pretty much an essential office now because that's the office that also gets you into the Senate.

At 39 you can stand for the praetorship

and at 42 you can stand for the consulship and you can't be praetor if you haven't been praised and you can't be consul if you haven't been praetor.

There's an additional office called the aedileship which you can hold in the mid-30s and Caesar actually does hold that because one of the things that makes the aedileship quite attractive is it's a magistrate that's based in Rome.

So it's not a military office, it's about kind of organization of the city of Rome.

And it has some quite significant religious duties to organise festivals.

And the details of those festivals are very much up to the aediles to decide, the pair of them.

So if they decide to spend a lot of money, they can put on fantastic displays, which are generally regarded as adding to their popularity, right?

Because these are free public shows, which people love.

So invest heavily in the theatrical shows or the gladiatorial games or the beast hunts or whatever.

This is all great.

So we've got letters in the 50s BC from Caelius, who's a protégé of Cicero, to Cicero in Silicia saying, please send me some panthers.

Standard, yeah, yep.

Okay, fair enough.

They make for a good show, right?

And as I say, Caesar will subsequently be aedile in the mid-60s.

He holds the office with a man called Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, who will be Caesar's colleague as consul in 59.

And one of the really interesting things I think about Roman political life is if you come from a political, if you're a boy in a political family, you're going to know kind of very early on who your likely rivals are because of the way that eligibility for office is dependent on age and there's considerable cachet in holding the office as early as you possibly can.

So you're kind of looking around the schoolroom and thinking.

Who's going to be my rival?

Wukuba, my friend.

Yeah, I'm going to be sounding the same year.

Anyway, although they are ostensibly colleagues of Zedile, and we're jumping ahead a bit, but it may be worth tossing in, and therefore collaborate on everything they do.

Nobody pays any attention to Bibulus.

It's all about Caesar.

To the extent that they, I think the story is that they're like Castro and the Temple of Castro and Pollux, which everybody just calls the Temple of Castral.

So they're a pair, but Caesar just mops up all the credit and popularity.

So he's inquista before that, the rank below in 70 BC.

And is it that time when he's in that position or just after that story you mentioned right at the start, seeing the statue of Alexander the Great?

Caesar's in his early 30s.

Alexander died at 32.

And if Caesar thinks he's a similar age and he's got nothing similar to that of standing.

But then coming back and getting the aedile, the next rank in 65, as you mentioned there i mean does he outdo bibulus just because he he spends more money i mean it feels like money must be such a big thing for these patricians if they're trying to climb the greasy pole especially if you're holding public events yeah we're not quite sure how caesar manages to scoop up all the credit i mean i think it must partly be to do with charisma and his ability to present himself as a politician to create that kind of appearance of rapport with the roman people but money is really important and some of it will have been bibulous's very little of it actually is likely to be Caesar's.

It's going to be the men who were lending money to Caesar.

Because one of the things that we are consistently told about Caesar is that he's heavily in debt.

So he's borrowing money in order to finance his career.

Now,

we need to contextualize this partly because people don't tend to go around lending money without security in Rome.

So we're probably talking about liquidity issues rather than actual impoverishment.

But Cicero certainly owes a lot of money, which is borrowed against property that may not be very liquid.

We just don't, I think, have good evidence about how the Yuli Kaisares family wealth matched up against other families.

What we do, I think, know fairly confidently is from the second century BC onwards, senatorial wealth is not only increasing as a class as a result of conquests of the Eastern Mediterranean, but also diverging within that class.

And, you know, it is true that the Yuli Kaisares have not produced any of the great generals who have been conquering the Eastern Mediterranean.

And so some of the more spectacular wealth may not have been part of that family.

Equally, I'm ever so slightly hesitant about kind of taking all the stories on face value.

I mean, the most famous one is about the election to the Pontifex Maximus in 63, where Caesar is supposed to have said to his mother Aurelia, I'll come back Pontifex Maximus or I won't come back.

The point being that he had bribed so heavily to win that election, he was therefore so heavily in debt, that if he didn't manage to secure election, you know, disaster.

And again, these stories stories about Caesar as a man who is prepared to take enormous risks, you know, that kind of bold visionary, I mean, yeah, great stories.

Does it also then emphasise, and I feel this kind of also goes back to our story when it talks about the rise of Cicero, I think earlier on in Julius Caesar, he goes back to Rome for a bit, either just after or before he's taken by pirates when he goes back to Eastern Mediterranean, that he's a lawyer for a bit.

And maybe on his way back to Eastern Mediterranean earlier, he's going to the island of Rhodes, where there's a big rhetoric school, if I'm correct.

Is that the other thing that is very, very important and we should also be consider when Caesar's rising and he's getting these different positions like the aedealship and others at that time would also need that skill, which is the skill of kind of giving speeches of rhetoric.

Is that right at the center of it?

Well Caesar is clearly a very effective orator.

It's part of his multifaceted, you only have to read the Gallic Wars.

to see that this is somebody who is a genius with language.

It's a different kind of a genius from Cicero, but it's doing something equally extraordinary with Latin that is completely, completely novel, right?

I mean, we tend to regard Caesar as a model of how you write Latin.

He created that model, right?

It's all new and it's bizarre.

There's a lot about Caesar's Latinity that is absolutely extraordinary.

I mean, totally wonderful.

I remember just being bowled over by Caesar when I started to read a bit when I was at school.

I mean, extraordinary stuff.

But we shouldn't make too much of Caesar as an orator, or at least as a lawyer.

I mean, you're absolutely right that one one of the things he does early on in his career is he brings some prosecutions, a couple of prosecutions, which is interesting because actually, I mean, there's no crown prosecution service or anything.

Every prosecution at Rome, in the so-called Eudicia Publica, the big jury courts, for charges which we would generally call criminal, though that, as you know, that criminal civil distinction in Roman law is a bit problematic.

So, being a prosecutor is one of the relatively few ways in which a young man in his 20s can make an opportunity for himself on the public stage.

I mean there can be competition about who can bring charges against somebody but if you win out and are identified as the prosecutor then you have an opportunity to speak in a legal context but on matters of the various charges that are heard in front of these courts tend often to be of public significance.

You have an opportunity to make your mark in that way.

And there's clearly a phenomenon of the early career prosecutor where young men choose this way of advertising their existence to the Roman people.

I suspect that a lot of it is based on ghostwriters, but that may be a bit unfair on Caesar himself.

And that's great.

And he does actually publish the speeches that he delivered, but they're not successful.

The men he prosecuted were both acquitted, which doesn't necessarily imply that he's incompetent, just that kind of decisions around jury activity are quite complex in Rome, and that they're both very early on in the Sullon period, and that maybe he'd chosen figures rather too well embedded in the establishment to be successful.

Interesting debate to be had about what's going on.

So you're right, oratory matters to politics and Caesar was good at it.

It's more difficult to say that he builds his career on being a really effective public speaker in the way, say, that Cicero 2 did.

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So we've covered kind of quaestorship and aedealship.

So we get down to around 63 BC, Catherine.

Now, why is this year so important in the story of Caesar's rise, kind of getting more to the fore?

Okay, three reasons.

First of all, he stands for and is elected praetor.

Not probably hugely surprising that he's successful, but this is the next stage of his career, and we'll want to talk in a moment about what he does as praetor.

Secondly, he's elected as Pontifex Maximus, right?

And thirdly, he participates in the debate on the Catalinarian conspirators.

So Pontifex Maximus, right.

So the fact that he had been kind of abortively Flamondialis doesn't seem to have stood in his way.

Though interestingly, the position of Flamin Dialis is not itself filled until Augustus.

I suspect that the problem is nobody quite knew what to do.

If Caesar had kind of been Flamin, can you replace it while he's still alive?

Maybe just too difficult to go there.

So he's co-opted as a pontiff quite young.

So that is a mark, right?

That is a mark of distinction relatively early in his career.

Probably his major achievement, actually, up until that point.

And that will be a reflection of family and background and the fact that, you know, whatever his originally rocky start was, he does have connections within the Roman governing class.

Remember, I talked about those relatives of his mother, the Aurelii Cottai, produced three consuls in the course of the 70s BC, which is pretty good going, three brothers.

And he gets into the College of Pontiffs, which is fine because Roman austrats, particularly patricians, do often get co-opted quite young into these positions.

What is much more surprising is his decision to stand for the position of Pontifex Maximus, because he's standing against two other much more senior men, much more eminent.

He is still relatively junior.

He hasn't held the consulship.

I mean, we do have examples of earlier Pontifices Maximi, who haven't yet got to the consulship, who are elected a bit young.

So it's not unprecedented, but it's a bold move to stand for election.

And it is an elected position.

So you have to be a pontiff in order to stand, but it's then election.

And he is accused of heavy bribery to secure the position.

And he's successful.

So there he is, head of the state religion.

And he clearly, over the coming decades, makes use of that in his public profile, but probably not a huge amount yet, because of course, between 62 and 45, he spends almost all of his time outside Rome.

He's in Rome for his consulship, but that aside, he's mostly away.

And unlike the Flamindialis, which has to be in Rome, it seems actually relatively easy for the Pontifex Maximus to be absent.

So he not only has quite a high role now in the cursusonorum with the praetorship, but he's also, he said, head of the religious sphere as well as Pontifex Maximus.

So he's holding both those positions at the same time.

That's quite something.

It's only unusual in the sense that the Pontifex Maximus...

more normally, at least in recent years, has been somebody who has already held the consulship and therefore is not going to be holding office.

But the juxtaposition of offices isn't, I think, in itself a problem.

But what is striking is that he's successful in that election.

And then the third thing in 63 is his involvement or not with the Catalinarian conspiracy.

So to recap, Lucius Sergius Catalina, another patrician, in fact, from a family even more decayed and unsuccessful in recent decades than the Julii Caesarees, another sullen protégé, tries and fails for, I think, the third time to be elected to the consulship in the summer of 63.

And he's been been making various inflammatory statements up to this point, but this seems to be the moment at which Catiline tips over into more direct action in order to secure his position.

The whole thing is quite murky.

There is an armed uprising.

What exactly Catiline was planning in the city of Rome and at what point he chooses to join forces with the armed uprising in Etruria is less clear.

But certainly he ends the year in a position of open revolt against Rome.

Now, some people thought that Caesar was part of this conspiracy.

Some people didn't think Caesar was part of the conspiracy, but tried to make it seem as though he was in order to blacken his name.

There are plans to name him as a Catilinarian adherent in the great debates in December, which fail.

And actually, Cicero does not leave open the door for that.

But the really striking thing is the debate on December the 5th.

63 BC.

Because what has happened at that point?

Cataline has left the city of Rome and is at the head of the armed forces in Etruria.

There is considerable alarm about that in Rome at the time, though in practice, the military mopping up in January will be relatively straightforward.

And Etruria is just north of Rome, isn't it?

It's just north of Rome, yes, Tuscany.

What is more alarming is that there were envoys, ambassadors in Rome for one of the tribes in Gaul, the Alabroges, who were based in southern Gaul.

and who had come to Rome to complain about kind of rapacious behaviour by Roman administrators and traders and so on.

And the Catalinarian conspirators in the city of Rome attempted to suborn these men to join with them and therefore to instigate an uprising in southern Gaul to be simultaneous with the military activity in Etroria and it is alleged elsewhere in Italy.

And the Alabroges decide this isn't actually a particularly good offer and they tell Cicero about it.

And Cicero says, okay.

What I think you should do is get some letters from the men you're talking to in which they set out and guarantee their support and then I think you ought to set off back for Gaul and I will arrange for you to be captured as you're leaving Rome and your possessions searched and we will find those letters.

And Cicero sets this up and it happens and therefore he is in a position, Cicero is in a position to bring to the Senate, which he does on December the 3rd, five letters in which various Romans kind of reveal their treacherous plotting.

And what is particularly horrifying about this is some of these Romans are quite senior.

So there's an ex-consul who was holding a praetorship that year and I think a couple of other senators.

So this is kind of the heart of the establishment are apparently in league with foreign enemies.

So this is a big deal.

The men involved are arrested and then there's a big debate on December the 5th as to what to do with them.

And from Cicero's point of view, this is where his public career goes starts to collapse.

It doesn't look like at the time, but it does, because the result of that debate is a vote for execution, which Cicero oversees on the evening of December the 5th.

And that's very,

very problematic legally.

He has no legal authority whatsoever to execute citizens without trial.

Now, we know a lot about this debate because Sallust, who wrote a monograph on the Catalinarian conspiracy, includes towards the end of it an enormous account of the debate in the Senate.

We also have Cicero's speech, which he publishes himself as the fourth Catalinarian.

Interestingly, Salast gives Cicero virtually no part in the debate.

He concentrates instead on the argument against capital punishment and the restatement of the argument for capital punishment.

And the argument for capital punishment, which wins the day, is restated by Cato, who will become known as Cato Utikensis, the Cato who fights against Caesar during the civil war and dies by suicide after his defeat at Utica, that great stoic sage of the late Republic.

And the case against capital punishment is put by Caesar.

And this is really interesting in terms of the dynamics of senatorial debate, because what seems to have happened is that Cicero kind of opened the debate and then one of the consuls elect, who is going to take office in a few weeks' time, Silenus, puts the motion of death, and everybody agrees with him because you're called to express your opinion in a senatorial debate in order of seniority.

And it is not until we get to the praetor's elect,

and Caesar, who's called among the praetors' elect, elect, that Caesar, rather than just saying, I agree with so-and-so, if you're a senator and you're called in the debate, you have to say something, but it doesn't need to be anything more than I agree with X, right?

You don't have to make a speech.

But Caesar stands up and he gives what Sallust at least records as a very long speech in which he argues against capital punishment on grounds partly of illegality, but partly on efficacy and partly on humanity.

And it's incredibly influential.

Everybody afterwards sort of says, oh, no, I didn't really mean death.

No, no, I didn't think we should do that.

And Silenus stands up and changes his mind and it's all a total mess until the younger Cato stands up and says, no, come on, guys.

This is a crisis, decisive action.

And Cato's measure is the one that's actually put to the vote and it's passed.

And then Cicero takes the senatorial decree and he goes off and he executes it within about an hour.

So although Caesar is on the side of the debate that loses, is he in a stronger position because of what he's done regardless?

I think so.

I think so.

I mean, it's quite a high-risk strategy for Caesar, given that there have been rumours that he's involved with Catiline, okay, because he's apparently defending them.

So he takes a risk, but it allows himself to

locate himself on the side of popular rights.

And interestingly,

earlier in 63, there's a legal case that Caesar, I don't think himself talks to, but somebody who's very much known as one of his allies is heavily involved in a man called Labianus, who if you've read the Gallic Wars, you will see that Labianus is there as second in command constantly.

And early in 63, there's a really interesting case, and we know quite a lot about it because Cicero offers the defence.

And it relates to events from 37 years earlier, in 100 BCE,

when there had been

civil disturbance in Rome.

There'd been an attempt to stand illegally for office.

There had been the assassination of a candidate, much of it led by the tribune of the plebs, Saturninus.

And Saturninus and his followers, things get completely out of hand.

Marius is consul and Saturninus and his followers take refuge in the Senate house.

Prior, they must have assumed to some sort of negotiation, or they must have hoped prior to some sort of negotiation to resolve the crisis.

What actually happens

is that a band of citizens race up and climb onto the roof of the Senate house and stone them to death using the roof tiles.

And it's kind of all hushed up.

Marius kind kind of loses a lot of reputational kind of oomph from this whole fracker and catastrophe and it's a disaster.

But the whole thing is basically hushed up.

But 37 years later it's revived by the prosecution of a man who's accused of having been involved, who I think is chosen just because there aren't that many people who were thought to have been part of the mob who are still alive.

And it's a show trial in the sense that it is an opportunity to talk through issues of senatorial authority and the right to trial and popular rights.

And it's pretty clear where Caesar is placing himself in that trial of Riberius earlier in 63.

It's very prescient in some ways because of what happens later in 63, but it kind of is developing a consistent story for Caesar as somebody who, despite his patrician background, and despite the fact that because he's a patrician, he hasn't been tribune of the plebs, he's not eligible to hold that office, nonetheless does seem to be alert to the will of the people.

And that's where his emphasis on his links with Marius become relevant, which he does do.

So he talks about Marius when he gives funeral speeches for some of his female relatives where he talks about Marius.

And one of the things we're told he does as Aedile is restore some of Marius' statues and other memorials, which of course Sulla had very much tried to eliminate from Rome.

So he's developing a complex public profile as he moves up the cursors on all.

Catherine, I wish I had time to ask so many more questions about this, but as we've got to kind of 62, 61, I'm almost going to wrap it up because it feels like the consulship, I guess at the time, feels like he's risen to the highest position, doesn't he?

So if we finish the rise of Julius Caesar with him attaining the consulship, what are his next moves to get to there in 62 BC?

Is it quite quick for him to get to the highest position in the land?

Yes.

I mean, his praetorship gets off to a bit of a stuttering start because there's some immediate anti-Cicero feeling that is stirred up by one of the tribunes of 62.

And initially, Caesar seems to be quite sympathetic to that.

He backs off very quickly, though, when the Senate make it clear that there is no sympathy for this.

And the rest of his praetorship passes off smoothly.

And he then does what praetors normally do at this period, which is he takes military command.

So he goes back to Hispania, where he holds military command, reasonably successfully.

In fact, quite successfully, because when he returns to Rome in order to stand for the consulship, there is an attempt to prevent him from doing that by holding up the debate on his triumph.

Because one of the kind of weird technicalities of Roman religious and political practice is that the man who holds a triumph must hold imperium.

He must hold the right to command that he has held during the campaign that has led to the triumph.

And you surrender imperium at the moment at which you cross the city walls.

And you can only stand for election if you make your profession of candidacy in person.

So there's an attempt to prevent Caesar from standing for the Constitution 59 by delaying his triumph.

And what Caesar does, and again it becomes part of the Caesar myth because it's this kind of ruthlessness and dynamism and decisive action, is he says, fine, forget my triumph.

And he crosses the city walls and he makes his professio and he stands for election and is elected.

So he doesn't get a triumph out of Hispanio.

And arguably he makes up for that much later on, but that's another story.

Catherine, it's been a fantastic chat.

I mean, so many details.

And also, you've highlighted how, yes, although there are oddities in his earlier life, in his earlier rise, it's only actually quite later on in the story before he becomes consulship that he almost rises to the fore or becomes a bit more extraordinary.

I didn't realize that as much as I do now, that actually sometimes Julius Caesar's early, early, early story, those oddities are put to the fore in contrast, actually, to the majority of it, which is very similar to any other patrician at the time.

And remember, too, that the survival of the biographies means that we do have more anecdotes about Caesar than we do about other people.

I mean, most Roman politicians, you know, we notice they exist when they hold the consulship.

Catherine, this has been fantastic.

Such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast.

And it just goes for me to say thank you for coming back on today.

Well, thank you.

Well, there you go.

There was Professor Catherine Steele talking through the rise of Julius Caesar and his many stories until he attained the consulship in 59 BC.

In the meantime, if you'd like more from Catherine, well, Catherine has featured on the podcast once before where she talked through the rise of Cicero.

You can find that episode in our ancients archive.

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