Caesar's early Life Check w/ Alex Petkas: The J. Burden Show Ep. 446

least most people are vaguely familiar. But let's just jump into it, right, let's jump into the life of Caesar. So, just to sort of frame this discussion, most of what you hear about Caesar is from the conquest of gaul On, right, that this great military victory, returning to Rome, the birth of the empire, right, his dramatic assassination. The stuff that you know, obviously is sort of the crescendo of his life. But his early life before that is in my mind

equally fascinating and under discussed. So I guess as a way to begin this conversation, Alex, there's a lot of Roman politics in the generation immediately before Caesar, including you know, his own family that's relevant to this discussion, that is relevant to the end of the republic. And I realized, asking where do we need to just to start in a conversation about history. It's like you can keep pulling the thread forever.

men before him was really helpful for me. Marius and Salah, notorious and pompy. But so I think that the best way to frame it is probably like looking at Caesar's immediate childhood and the environment he grows up in. So he's born in one hundred BC, and that year there was some tumults in Rome in the forum. There were some populists who tried to push through some controversial laws and they got lynched basically by the optimates, by the

conservative or the oligarchy. Let's say Saturn Ninus was one of the ringleaders. He was I believe he was a tribune at the time, but he was like a kind of protege or or at least associate, not a protege an associate of this this famous populist general Gaius Marius, who was holding his sixth consulship at the time, and they arrested him and they locked him in the Senate house overnight, and some people snuck in, ripped off the roof and threw tiles down, you know, these terra cotta tiles,

and basically murdered him from above in that year. So Rome has been going through civic violence since the days of the Grachy, which was about thirty years earlier. Really shocked people when the Grachy were both in sequence between, you know, separated by eight or so years, murdered in in the effectively in the city with limits of Rome. And you know, there are lots of reasons why the populace and the optimates quarreled. But in Caesar's day, like when he's growing up, he grows up in a sort

of populist family. He is from a very noble line that does actually trace its lineage back to Aeneas, the mythic founder of Troy, which becomes important. On his father's side, the Julians are descendant of the son of Aeneas Eulus, and his mom's side is the Marquius Rex family, and they're descendant from one of the ancient kings of Rome, Ancus Marqius, very blue blood. However, you know he's not

from his family, isn't like in the power elite. The power elite would consist of people like the Cornelius clan, the Mettelli, the Scipio's or branch of the Cornelius klan, and you know, you could keep naming names, but the Caesars are not or the Julius Caesars are not really in that. But his father does seem to be a

promising politician, dies when Caesar was a teenager. But before that, Caesar's aunt Mary's the guy just mentioned Gaius Marius, who is this outsider from our penum, which is, you know, a city that enjoys Roman citizenship, but it's like halfway to Naples, and Cicero's actually from there, and he was the first new man in the Senate, or yeah, like the first at least the first person become a consul who wasn't from a consular family. Who didn't have console

descendants in I think decades. I mean, it's very rare by this time for newman.

and as a further testament to his populist credentials. When he's a teenager, he this is very young for Romany. He's married like at age sixteen, very precocious, and he gets married to the daughter of Guius Marius is like right hand man or his closest associate in politics, Sinna, who is a consul at the time. And this is in the period of where well probably need to back

up a little bit to explain who Senna is. But so Caesar grows up in this sort of rundown neighborhood the Suburah, and there's brothels and kind of c D nightlife in the Suburah. It's not a nice place to be. It's an old neighborhood. And so he kind of grows up with this deeper familiarity with the fringes and the underbelly of Roman society than you normally would get in a noble household. And I think that probably goes into

his consciousness some degree. But you know, when the populists and the optimates first clashed, we could just keep going back and back and back, but it was around eighty eight BC.

short war breaks out. Solah marches on Rome and expels Marius as an enemy of the state, has a dozen or so of his associates executed, and kind of patches things up and then goes off east to fight Mithridates, and you know thinks that it's the situation settled, but it's only just begin begun and and and it's it's when Marius gets exiled or in eighty eight that Senna takes over as consul.

And then Slah comes and marches into Rome after his victory, and he starts the proscriptions, you know, the famous campaign of listing your enemies on a placard in the forum and you know, putting a bounty on their heads and having their properties confiscated, and he's also calling other shots. He gets elected dictator, revives this old office very importantly that was defunct since the Punic Wars about one hundred and twenty years earlier to legal Roman office, but he

also starts ordering people to do other stuff. Like Pompey, for example, is five years or so older than Caesar seven years and Pompy is a young, precocious son of a consul who brought Salah about a legion's worth of soldiers during the Civil War. Early on it was like kind of important to Sulla's victory, five thousand men or so. And after the victory, Salah says, Pompey, you need to change wives. I've got a better woman for you. You're

married to the wrong woman. And Pompey says, yes, sir, And then he does this with a couple of other promising young men. Caesar, lucky for him, was too young to have fought on the side that he would have chosen in the Civil War, which you know, if you were like five years older, he probably would have been either killed or exiled or proscribed. And he Slah goes to Caesar and says, Caesar, you're married to the wrong woman. You're married to the daughter of my greatest enemy, the

man that I blame for the whole civil war breaking out. Sinna, you know, in conjunction with Marius, was responsible. And Caesar says basically, screw you, and he quits town, goes into that the mountains. He's running away from Salah's henchman. Eventually gets dysentery, caught, bribes the guard who who caught him. They bring him back to his family, and his family tries to intercede for Caesar. Salah, you know, I know that you ordered Julius Caesar to divorce his wife and marry another woman.

kind of tragically. I think he was tying his shoe and so he dies before this all breaks out. If he had been alive, he would have been either killed or proscribed by Sulah, and the sons of proscribed men were barred from politics for the rest of their lives under Sullah's new regime. So Caesar would have been basically that would have been the end of his story if his father had actually been alive. Kind of like cruel

but benevolent twist of fortune maybe in his favor. And so he knows if he stands up to Sullah, he's going to if he survives, which is very much not guaranteed, he's going to be the talk of the town. This is the kid that stood up to Salah. This is They're going to be talking about this for the rest of his life. And sure enough, you know, we know the story. Still it worked. But and so I think he already kind of has that taste for how to

get people talking about him. But I think he also probably just liked the girl, and he was faithful to that wife, I mean, didn't divorce her, at least until

she died many years later. He has his first and only daughter with her, Cornelia, And I think he just didn't like taking orders from people, you know, But he's kind of already picked his side very importantly in that in that story, and and sla ends up essentially rewriting the Constitution to resemble something like what he thought it had been, or what he he believed it should have

been in the generations before. He takes the powers away from the Tribune of the Plubs, which was an important instrument in the hands of a populist that he kind of blamed for sparking off the war. And most importantly, you know, he's either murdered or made permanently or exiled or made permanently irrelevant in politics. All of his enemies and everybody kind of left in place are his loyalists.

They're the kind of posts sola oligarchy, mostly old families who sided with him, the conservatives, some new people that kind of you know, become pillars of the establishments. And so that's kind of the regime that Caesar grows up under, this like cracked down a reactionary optimate oligarchy, and it's also the regime that he dedicates the rest of his life to overturning, and he eventually does.

So one of the things that I'm interested in, and I realized this is speculative. But to what degree do you think that that attitude was a reaction to the character of Celah And also to what degree did the prescriptions are seizing property sort of reinforce the pre existing oligarch right if you have gotten rich by taking other people's stuff, that creates a vested interest at least I would imagine in keeping that system around.

call injustice. And uh, you know Crassus, the richest man in Rome in Caesar's youth, that's how he made a lot of his fortune. He's buying up these estates of proscribed men pennies on the dollar or asses on the talent maybe in Roman terms, and then reselling them at a huge profit. And he just he's flipping houses. Basically, he's a house flipper, and he makes it, makes a

big nest egg that way. Catiline was also implicated crass has got the worst of it reputation wise, but you know it did, it did definitely, Like there were lots

of people who who had profited from the system. And actually Caesar later is in is I think this is in the early sixties, he collaborated with Cato funny Enough, his Future and Nemesis on digging up crimes from the times of the proscriptions and prosecuting men for say, informing against an innocent man who had then got executed, and then they profited from their estate, and there was a lot of band aid ripping off, and you know, injustice to hunt out two decades later. But it worked for

a while at least. And I think that Caesar's incredible daring, which you see again and again from his youth up to his well, his very last day on earth, I think has a lot to do with that sense of he was spared by fortune, you know, like he had already tested himself young, he had taken like the ultimate risk, like he was very close to being executed, and so everything else was just like he had destiny on side, like he had already kind of put the ultimate short

term gain up for sacrifice to get the long term gain. And it's you know, it's a pattern that started very young for him.

He's he's going against the sla establishment in his political career and in his actions in the Civil War. He is very ostentatiously sparing people, you know, every now and then to his to his great detriments in the in the very end, but I think that's what he felt like he had to do, and for the most part, it set him apart. And it was definitely not what his enemies were doing in the Civil War either. You know, Pompey and his friends are talking about Saula did it,

why can't we? And they're talking about, you know, rounding up the not even just their enemies, but even the lukewarm and the Civil War cause. And this this actually works very strongly against them. Like lots of people go over to Caesar because they know that he's gonna he's going to be easy on people who change sides. And it allows him to have enough credibility to like refound the state or put some stable things in place before he's assassinated.

golden cage. It's the flomendialis is what it's called. So he's like a prelative Jupiter, and.

they're underestimating his ability. He's basically going to be, you know, a priestly type, and Rome is not the kind of place where every priesthood is like this, Right, he ends up being the pontiffects Maximus and Pompy's an augur CISOs and augur. So this is a very special, restrictive priesthood, the flammin dalis. It's very prestigious, but completely politically powerless and irrelevant.

of pirates in sixty seven. That Caesar is out in in this kind of wilder circumstance in the Eastern Mediterranean. He's he's kind of in and out of He goes to study at Rhodes with the famous rhetorician who Apollonius Molon, who's also this guy that Caesar that Cicero studied with, and so he's kind of a student student.

lot of normal respectable people are turning to piracy. It's a rampant problem and plenty of not so respectable people too. So that's kind of the time that Caesar is is about in the eastern Mediterranean, and he at one point gets captured by these pirates. He's probably twenty three twenty five. And the famous story goes that Plutarch tells the pirates were looking for just easy ransoms and they they had

I forget, I forget. If it's like ten talents that they were going to charge was a huge sum of money to ransom Julius Caesar, and Caesars says that's too low. You should double it, and so he kind of taunts the pirates and raises his price, which is kind of funny, but it's also like it's it's real, and that the more you get ransomed for, the more you're valuable, the

more valuable you are. This is how the ancient Greeks defined honor, like in the Homeric period, in the poems of Homer, your team a your honor is literally it literally means price in Greek, and it's it's a metaphor drawn from drawn from commerce. And if like you can actually quantify how much honor you have, it's literally how much you get ransom for so Caesar knows this, you know, and and he uses it and and the pirates up their price. Caesar eventually gets ransom, but before that he

is kind of chumming up with them sort of. He writes these compositions while he's you know, under the deck in his quarters, and he comes up and he recites his poems and his speeches to the pirates, and you know, they laugh and he says, you all have terrible taste. Someday I'm going to execute every single one of you. And they say, ah, Caesar, we love this kid. So he kind of has this rapport with him, and of course he you know, when Caesar makes a promise, he

intends to actually make good on it. And when he got ransomed, he hired a boat, got some guys together, found the pirates where he knew they would be in their little cove, arrests them, and he takes them back to the governor of Bethynia, who kind of drags his feet, and Caesar just kind of unilaterally takes them out of prison and has them all crucified.

that he was He was youth to be feared. And of course he mercifully slit their throats before he actually crucified them, so they actually got a quick death, but the symbolic crucifixion was was gruesome and reserved for slaves in the Roman period. So I think it gives you a little flash of a lot of aspects of Julius Caesar.

being what it is, there are certain constants. But you know, it is sort of interesting right that from our perspective, is moderns crucifying a corpse is sort of like well, what's the point, right, Okay, I guess it's sort of disrespectful, but we don't have the same kind of emotional attachment in that way, right, it doesn't. Obviously it's it's grizzly,

but it's nowhere near as significant. And also sidebar, I do think it is kind of funny that Caesar's great Mercy is like, oh, well, I am still going to kill you, but you know, at least I'll slit your throat. You know I'm no monster, right, I will still be crucifying your corpse, but you know, I'm a magnetimous man.

sort of wrestle with. So if you could, could you speak about, you know, as you mentioned earlier, how the seas are made safe and how the oligarchy sort of sought to keep that from happening.

He's always trying to get himself these great, glorious commands. And so in sixty seven they're friends, Caesar and Pompey, or at least on the same side against the establishment. And the way that Pompey does the Pirate war is he has to get himself voted this extraordinary bundle of

powers by a tribunary vote. And actually Pompey and Crassus and the consulship of seventy renewed the office and the powers of the tribunet which had been you know, hamstrung by Sola, and exactly to open up the opportunity for this kind of thing to happen again. And it was, you could say, it was that they wanted some tool

by which they could aggrandize themselves. But clearly the republican system was not working because essentially the pirates are all over the Mediterranean, and any given Roman magistrate has only a province, a provincia, like a sphere of duty that is defined by a geographical unit, like you know, Italy

or Northern Italyst. Cisalpine, Gaul or Greece or Tunisia. And they could the pirates who just like go to a different place if a consul is sailing ships around the coastline, and and so what Pompey has to do, or his his plan at least was to get himself voted first of all, massive financial powers. You know, he just has

like unlimited money to do whatever he needs. And he has a remit of the entire sea and the coastline up to I think fifty miles inland, which is you know, most of the Roman Empire, most of the territory, because all the interesting cities and all the wealthy places and the civilized places are close enough to the coast. And so nobody had ever had that much power in the Republic before, even though it was there was a term limit on it.

merciful to a lot of the pirates. He resettles them because he realized a lot of these people are sort of respectable people who had nothing better, no better option. But it goes to show that, I mean, the level of intransigence from the optimim establishment resisting this kind of thing, which was kind of kind of obviously what needed to

be done, I think was staggering. And there was a like a riot breaks out in the Senate House when they're proposing this policy, and somebody almost gets killed in the Senate House because everybody's like, oh, this is going to make Pompy a monarch, this is too much power. No, this is against tradition, and you know, they're jealous among other things. Maybe there's some legitimate concerns, but there's also this powerful force of envy.

high to kind of rule over them. And so that spirit is definitely at play, you know, throughout the period of Caesar's life, and especially like in this particular incident, and Caesar is one of the few voices that speaks up in favor in the Senate of Pompey's policy. It's it's actually quite unpopular and they have to ram it through the Popular Assembly and basically ignore the Senate, which

is legal, but you know, politically dangerous. The Senate can't actually it's limited in its ability to actually veto policies. But but Caesar is like one of the Loan supporters, you know, early on allying with Pompey in a very strong way because he wants he wants to kind of break up this this stranglehold on politics that the that the oligarchs have.

Mitch McConnell. But the whole thing you know that this, you know, this this character is is fighting for is the dream of Rome, right, and the dream of Rome is basically kind of like the European Union, you know, this sort of like vaguely defined supernatural super national excuse me,

although that's probably a better term for it. Democracy. And so I'm curious, right, to what degree do the sort of closing years of the republic, to what degree is it recognizable to us as a republic as some form of representative democracy quote unquote, because you know, maybe in a slightly more academic than you you will oftentimes see sort of attacks on Caesar from sort of like the Catonian perspective, right, the idea that you know, this, this brute came in and and you know, blew up our

perfect democracy, blew up this system that was you know, full of unique civic virtues. And in my mind, whatever virtues that the Republic may have had at a previous era were largely absent by this time. It had become, as you know, most systems tend to effectively an out and out oligarchy. So not to poison the well, Alex, but I'm curious to get your thoughts.

and Cicero. Cicero was Consulate sixty three and he only got it because there was a kind of crisis of the state and the Optimists saw him as the better candidate than than Catalan.

political system by you know, selling their votes essentially. And so a guy like Cato, who is a Republican stalwart, and it's kind of a rare case of the moral compass figure among the oligarchy at that time, he's always railing against some of these problems, you know, bribery and in elections, he's always trying to go on anti bribery crusades with limited success, and eventually he caves, which we can talk about in a moment for on behalf of

somebody else. But like the reason that what makes the bribery system work, Like why are they paying so much for these offices? What's the ROI? Is it just prestige? Sadly no, you are, especially as praetor and consul the higher office holders. After your term as a city magistrate, you were sent out to the provinces to be a governor and a pro consul or appropriator and those are where those opportunities one, two, three years is where you're supposed to make all of your money back, and then

some by you know milking, bilking. You know, the provincials take bribes to rule on cases in a certain direction. Maybe there are some local discontents that you can you know, smash and plunder or claim that there are local discontents so you can just march your troops in and take all their stuff, and these all kinds of ways that

you can make money. There's a few legal ways, but it's mostly just you know, exploitation, and this is how so much of the wealth of Empire comes into Rome itself from these provincial governors making back their money, often taking out gigantic loans from the money lenders that they

need to pay back. So, you know, that's great for the city of Rome and its inhabitants, but they've got tens of millions of people that are their subjects that they've claimed that they're going to be benevolent justice, bringing rulers, they are going to bring security and Roman law and stuff.

But it's a thin fig lea for what's really going on in the eyes of many provincials, and certainly many Romans themselves, and certainly it's not for the most part the populace, the poor or they're middle class benefiting from these provincial exploitations. It's just rich guys getting richer and building bigger villas and having fish ponds and moving mountains so they can have a little waterfall and their property in Naples. And so these are, you know, the Republican system.

There's not even the pretense that it represents the provincials. There is the pretense that it represents the Roman citizens, you know, and that these people have voted for these these figures. But it's mainly, you know, they're going to do what they want to do, and they'll they'll serve your interest in so far as they need to lock you in for a vote, but Briber usually handles that,

and so it's it's not a very meritorious place. That's one of the things that Caesar eventually becomes very recognized for promoting talented outsiders. Look at his officer corps and gaul. Look at the men that were his right hand people when he returned from the Civil War. A lot of them are not from great families. Maybe they're damaged goods. There was some scandal in their youth, and they fell

from grace from the aristocracy. But for the most part, Caesar was indifferent to your family name and your background and how many consuls and praetors you have in your ancestry. And this speaks really powerfully to a lot of people that feel like a republican system should be one in which the best men rise to the top and rule of state, the most patriotic and so forth, rather than just the richest and most opportunistic. And because of the I think it's also a feature that we can relate

to today. Because so much of the attention of the oligarchs is based on this year long cycle of elections, it's not really easy to have long term vision in solving these difficult problems like provincial exploitation or you know, electoral reform. I mean, there's not really a stable class. The Senate is supposed to be the balance against that that that the Senate has some kind of like permanence. If you if you could become a quester in Rome, you you enter the Senate for the rest of your life.

But they don't have They have a lot of influence, like soft influence, but not a lot of like real constitutional power. And anyway, if you if you get into the Senate, I mean, it's just like our Senate today, Like there are senators and then there are senators, Like some senators are more equal than others, and the power brokers are going to make sure that the system stays in place.

Maybe they burn a little incense to Hercules. But then he's with his buddies and they move on and Caesar kind of gets stuck in front of the statue of Alexander the Great, which is, there's a statue of Alexander the Great in there, who knows and his friends look back and they say, Caesar, what are you crying? And he says, do you think it's not a matter for crying that? When Alexander was the king of so many people's at my age, I yet have done no brilliant deed.

And Caesar, this is only one of two instances we know that he cried. The other was when he was presented with the head of Pompey after the Battle of Farcelus in Egypt. But you know, a god, I don't think that he's crying there because he's like jealous or something. It's often taken in that direction, like it's a revelation

of his towering ambition. Maybe, But I think actually he's probably having a moment where he realizes what he has to do, like what he's supposed to do that even though all of his career up to that point has been very promising, Metal of honor, the Pirate incident, He's prosecuted a lot of corrupt people in Rome. Already in his twenties, he's made a name for himself. He has just been screwing around his whole life. You know, it's like, what have I even done? I gotta get serious, And

so I see that as a kind of realization. He comes back early from from his tour of duty as a quester to run for another office, and basically to kind of fast forward how he really gets in a position where it starts to work for him is he gets elected to the preadership as early as he can, which is thirty six, thirty eight, it's sixty three, and he's kind of coming out into politics in a really really public way, kind of putting his flag in the dirt.

Is in the Catalinarian conspiracy, this is you know, I did a whole series on this, but you know.

Cicero again he's console. He manages to round up the conspirators, present them too with damning evidence, and they confess to their crimes in the Senate, and the decision is now put before the Senate should the consul execute these men without trial? The case that Cato makes is who who's quester?

Granted they could confessed, but the better thing to do, and maybe even the worst punishment, would be to imprison them in because Romes don't do like long lifetime incarceration, and you know, send them off to various cities around Italy. And and Cato eventually wins that argument and they execute the conspirators are executed. But Caesar has sort of taken a stand because a lot of the people that a

lot of the Roman people sympathized with the conspirators. Basically, they were populists who wanted to cancel debts, who wanted to break up the oligarchy. But Cataline was not a visionary. He was an opportunist, and he he didn't really have what it took to make this a good thing instead of a violent, opportunistic bad thing.

Caesar is he's working with them. You know, He's not able to really come out and say it because the evidence isn't quite there, and he doesn't want to expose himself, but everybody kind of thinks that Caesar's got something to do with this whole revolutionary thing, but he always has deniability. But then on Cato kind of marks Caesar as a tyrant on the make, as somebody who wants to destroy the republic, and Caesar just starts pushing harder, and he

goes off to his pleadership in Spain. And we could get to the triumvir in the SEC. But I think it's worth contemplating that example. I think it's not a very well appreciated moment in Caesar's career that he really was friendly with some some dangerous men already.

we believe. You know, if you could just you know, remake one of those and sell it, it just says like Kato is a nerd. You know, you can kind of go from there. I would buy it.

that's all on like Spotify or Apple podcasts. But I have started doing videos and kind of getting through the backlog of the recent episodes so you can find up to this time of recording.

That's all available on Spotify, but it goes up to part two of the Civil War right now on YouTube with some maps and some you know, famous paintings and statues and some some b roll. But yeah, you can also find me at Cost.

recommend that you should check it out. As far as my stuff, The Jay Burton Show available on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, anywhere you listen to podcasts. This is what I do now, and if you want to support me, you can throw me a few bucks a month on Patreon, Substack or gum road. The advantage there is no ads, right, you get the episodes early and ad free. The most consistent feedback I get on this show is wow, those ads are annoying. Yeah, I know, I get it fair enough,

but I got to pay my mortgage somehow. Alternately, you can check out our sponsor, Foxinton's Coffee, who makes very good coffee. I had it this morning and if you use code Jay Burden, I think it's fifty or no burden. No Jay on that it is fifteen percent off, so not a bad deal. You drink coffee anyway, Alex, Again, this was a ton of fun, man. I'm looking forward to that next conversation.