Caesar vs Pirates

When pirates capture a hostage to demand ransom, they don’t count on a 26-year-old making their lives hell. The young man unleashes his ingenuity, his sword, his sexuality, and his cult of personality to transform the world around him. This is how Julius Caesar became Julius Caesar.

The mushroom-colored mainsail flapped in the light breeze as the Roman merchant ship sailed down the rugged Anatolia coast. The ship’s top speed was about five knots. The peace of the ocean belied the reality that could be waiting beyond the horizon. The 10-man crew onboard the merchant ship had been wary since leaving the Roman port of Ostia a week earlier. Attacks on Roman vessels were on the rise ever since the pirates made common cause with Mithridates of Pontus, whose cold war with the Romans had begun to heat up. In Rome there was concern about wheat shortages as the pirates tightened their stranglehold on shipping routes.

The fears on this day were not misplaced. From a lookout on the small island of Pharmacusa, were Cilician pirates, the scourge of the Mediterranean. They watched a ship’s sails heave into view. It was a Roman merchant ship. That was a valuable prize — not just for cargoes of olive oil, wine or grain, but also for the passengers the profits could convert into profit by ransom or other means. Waiting for just the right moment, the time came. The pirates could make 14 knots under sail, but in their lighter ships they had the option of rowing when the wind was light. The pirates intercepted their quarry and took control. The ship was theirs.

Below deck, in a cabin of the Roman merchant ship, an aristocratic passenger heard the disturbance above. The young man, 26, was on his way from Rome to the Greek island of Rhodes to continue studies that would advance his political career and was accompanied by several attendants.

Dressed in his toga and leather boots, he climbed the ladder and emerged under the curving sternpost of the ship, which was carved in the shape of a swan. The white swan, sacred to his divine ancestor, the goddess Venus, smiled down as he stepped onto the deck and found himself surrounded by rough-looking pirates with daggers drawn.

One of the other passengers, a man in a short tunic, protested to the pirates that he was a Roman citizen and claimed protection under Roman law. The pirates bowed to the man and gave him a toga and a pair of Roman hobnail boots (leather boots with studded soles) to mock his status. Then they escorted him to the ladder over the side of the ship. He was free to walk back to Rome, they said. When he stepped back from the rail, a pair of burly pirates lifted him up and threw him overboard. He thrashed and called out for help, but the weight of the hobnail boots and waterlogged toga soon pulled him down.

The pirates turned their attention to the others. Most would be shipped off to the slave market at Delos, where each one might fetch a few hundred silver coins. Much more lucrative was the aristocratic 26-year-old who had emerged from the cabin. The pirates sized him up to settle on a ransom.

He was tall with fair skin, dark eyes and hair already thinning away from his forehead. His spotless toga was tied loosely around his waist. The other passengers were shaken but not this man. He remained calm. There was a quality about him that made the pirates confident he would fetch a substantial sum.

They decided to transfer him to a pirate ship where he would be taken to a secure location and held for a ransom of 20 talents, or roughly a thousand pounds of silver.

The young man was insulted. He knew he was worth more than 20 talents, so he negotiated his own ransom. They settled on 50 talents — as much as two million U.S. dollars today.

This may well have been the first time in history that a kidnapping victim had brokered a higher ransom. It was no ordinary turn of events, but this was no ordinary man. He was Gaius Julius Caesar.

As the pirate-controlled vessel continued to sail, Caesar whispered instructions to one of his attendants. Later, the pirates would deliver that man to the city of Miletus, 20 miles up the Anatolia coast, believing his only instructions had been to raise the 50 talents for Caesar’s ransom. But Julius Caesar had other plans.

This was not Julius Caesar as we know him on Shakespeare’s stage. At this point of his life, Caesar’s future dominance as an emperor and world power was entirely unknown, and the idea of it would have been laughable. He was born to an undistinguished family with little influence in highly political Rome. He had begun to make a modest name for himself but his ambitions were far greater than his accomplishments. He had itched for adventure, wishing for a chance to prove himself. He had unexpectedly gotten his wish at the hands of pirates.

After Caesar was moved to one of the pirates’ ships, the merchant ship sailed on for Delos to offload the passengers to be sold into slavery.

Slavery at this time, and in this region, was not based upon race. Many slaves were prisoners of war from Rome’s conquered territories. The largest slave market in the Mediterranean was located on Delos, the birthplace of the gods Apollo and Artemis, where the Romans had established a duty-free port. As many as 10,000 enslaved people could pass through Delos every day. Human cargo was offloaded from ships and into a large warehouse with a courtyard where individuals were auctioned.

This was never part of the pirates’ plan for Julius Caesar. For the pirates, Caesar represented a spectacular windfall.

As part of the pirate crew continued on to Delos, the rest brought Caesar and his attendants back to the island of Pharmacusa.

Pharmacusa (later known as Farmakonisi) was a mere speck of an island, two miles from end to end, in the Dodecanese, a group of islands off the southwestern coast of Anatolia. An ancient watchtower stood on the highest point, surrounded by the medicinal herbs that gave the island its name. Aside from a small bay on the eastern side of the island, facing the Anatolia coast, the waters around the island are treacherous and prone to shipwrecks. The peaks of the mainland, shrouded in haze, were visible eight miles to the east. It was the perfect pirate hideaway.

The island’s two watchtowers, constructed of island stone, had been built centuries earlier to guard against pirate attacks. Now they had become lodgings for the pirates themselves and for their noble captive and his attendants. In the years before the pirates took control of the island, it had been largely uninhabited.

That evening, the pirates sat around a fire getting drunk on wine taken from the merchant ship. There were songs and laughter, and nothing got more laughs than the story of the young man who insisted on doubling his own ransom. The story grew in the telling, as stories often do.

These pirates were the “most murderous of men,” in the words of the Greek historian Plutarch. They were a motley collection of military veterans, refugees and young men who sought the thrills of engaging in piracy. Their home base was in Cilicia, along the rugged southern coast of Anatolia. They were a paramilitary organization with a command structure and a fleet of stolen ships that thrived on theft and terrorism.

At the time of his capture, Caesar was a legal advocate in Rome specializing in the prosecution of corrupt public officials. He had prosecuted Gnaeus Cornelius Dolabella in 74 BCE for extortion alleged to have occurred during Dolabella’s term as governor of Macedonia. In the trial, Caesar faced a more experienced team of lawyers for the defense, including the formidable Dolabella himself. Caesar’s voice was somewhat high-pitched, but he used it to the best effect.

Caesar lost the case. But his skill as a speaker attracted the attention of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the most successful orator of his generation. It was the example of Cicero that sent Caesar off to Rhodes, where he planned to study with Cicero’s old teacher of rhetoric. That voyage to Rhodes put Julius Caesar on a collision course with the pirates.

As night fell over Pharmacusa, the pirates continued to mock Caesar’s brazenness regarding the ransom. The more the pirates drank, the louder their voices became. But the laughter suddenly died out as the pirates became aware that one of the young aristocrat’s attendants stood at the edge of their circle.

“Caesar demands that you lower your voices so he can sleep,” the attendant announced.

A s he waited for a ransom to arrive, Caesar was in real danger of dropping dead — without the pirates lifting a finger.

He was prone to serious epileptic seizures, probably foreshadowed by childhood absence seizures, or petit mal seizures. Epilepsy may even have been an inherited condition in the Julian family. Caesar’s grandfather and father both died at a young age. His father was 55 when he died, suddenly, one morning as he was putting on his shoes.

The pirates allowed Caesar to keep his personal physician, Antistius, with him who had already begun to explore the interior of the island. The air smelled of herbs and sea salt. There’s a tradition that Hippocrates, the father of Greek medicine, visited the island to collect medicinal herbs. The name Pharmacusa, in Greek, means “drugged.” It’s possible Antistius might have found feverfew, a medicinal herb similar to chamomile, to soothe Caesar’s headaches, or rue to prevent potentially fatal seizures.

The waiting provided time for reflection, perhaps too much time. At Caesar’s age, Alexander the Great had already conquered the world. What had he done? If he died now, would people remember him?

Unlike Alexander the Great, Caesar came from a relatively undistinguished patrician family. The death of his father left 16-year-old Caesar as the head of the family. He had been nominated for an important priesthood, but a brutal dictator had just seized control of Rome. Caesar’s connection to the opposing party had cost him not only the priesthood, but also his inheritance and his wife’s dowry. The dowry had been confiscated when Caesar defied the dictator’s orders to divorce his wife, who was the daughter of a prominent opposing politician. After this setback, Caesar spent a few months in hiding while his friends negotiated a pardon from the dictator to then set out and join the military governor’s staff in Asia. He hadn’t even started his political career.

On the pirate island, Caesar kept busy. He played knucklebones, a Roman game similar to dice, with the pirates. He treated them as his “royal bodyguards,” according to Plutarch. It was said that Caesar’s mannerisms inspired “both fear and respect.” He never removed his shoes, even at night, which reinforced his higher status.

It took two hours to walk around the island. In the heat of the afternoon, he’d find a shady spot to write poetry. In the evening, he sat at the fire and recited his verses for the pirates.

We anoint our bodies with sweet telinum.

The pirates exchanged blank looks.

Telinum?

Telinum is a perfume made with olive oil, fenugreek, and sweet marjoram.

One of the pirates picked out a tune on his lyre and started to sing. We anoint our bodies with sweet telinum. The other pirates joined in, laughing, taking a swallow of wine at the end of each verse.

Then Caesar laughingly announced that once he was free, he would hunt down and crucify every last one of them.

As with Caesar’s insistence on doubling the ransom, it was hard to believe. Had their boyish, unarmed prisoner threatened to kill all of them?

The pirates howled with laughter. Plutarch wrote that the murderous figures were “delighted” by him. To his captors, he was a harmless boy who didn’t have much experience of the world. He was apheles — a Greek word that has two somewhat different meanings: “naïve” but also “brash.”

He came back the next day with another poem. As the pirates became drunk, Caesar observed them closely. He did not drink. People would say that Caesar was the only man who set out to conquer Rome while sober.

When the pirates displeased him, Caesar called them “illiterate barbarians” to their faces. But it’s not impossible Caesar formed genuine, even intimate, relationships with the pirates. Stories about Caesar already had pointed to his bonds with other powerful men.

A few years before, Caesar had been sent to the kingdom of Bithynia, in northern Anatolia, to requisition ships from their ally King Nicomedes to assist in a naval blockade. Caesar spent so much time at the King’s court in Bithynia that a rumor began to circulate that they became lovers, with Caesar “a fixture of the king of Bithynia’s bed,” as his courtroom rival Dolabella called him. Even years later, his own soldiers would march behind him, reportedly singing in loud voices, Caesar conquered the Gauls, but Nicomedes conquered Caesar. Nicomedes would ultimately leave his entire kingdom to Rome in his will.

Caesar’s alleged affair with Nicomedes and his well-documented affair with Cleopatra suggest a willingness to link himself romantically with powerful non-Romans outside the social constraints of Rome itself. For a Roman aristocrat, sex was a demonstration of power. Regardless of the gender of his partner, it was important for the Roman male to exhibit his dominance. We know that Caesar’s sexual appetite was large and omnivorous. According to one contemporary of Caesar, he was “every woman’s man and every man’s woman.”

It’s evident that Caesar was drawn to the pirates in other ways. Caesar was a patrician, but also a man of the people, a populist who believed he could one day assume leadership of the disaffected masses. Popular uprisings were erupting all across the Roman world, and the pirates were part of those uprisings — including on the other side of the Mediterranean where a Thracian slave named Spartacus was part of a web of anti-Roman alliances.

The Cilician pirates controlled the greatest fleet of warships in the Mediterranean and created conditions of almost constant total warfare. Raiding parties sailed up and down the coasts and among the Greek islands disrupting trade, pillaging cities and taking captives. Some cities were forced to pay the pirates to prevent repeated raids.

For Caesar, to spend time with the pirates was to attend a master class in military leadership. According to some, the pirates began to look up to young Caesar as he began to be a kind of archpirate, or pirate commander. He even acquired enough sway over the pirates to secure the release of some of the other hostages taken to the island after raids. As the days passed, it was becoming harder to know who was in charge.

Caesar’s attendant arrived in Miletus, following the instructions his master had whispered to him after the pirates agreed on a ransom. His first task was to raise 50 talents. In this, Caesar’s immediate family would be of little use. Instead, Caesar’s attendant was to seek out some of the family’s political and commercial allies.

Whether or not the stories were true that Caesar spent time in Bithynia in King Nicomedes’ bed, the young politico had certainly spent time and energy networking. He had a portfolio of local connections from his father’s time as governor of Asia two decades earlier, and in Bithynia he was able to renew those connections and make connections of his own. Merchants and local leaders from across Anatolia converged on Bithynia to make deals with each other and with the Romans, who were the power behind the throne.

The time in Bithynia gave Caesar an ideal opportunity to strike up a friendship with a man called Epicrates. Now Caesar’s surrogates needed to draw on that friendship to get out of the clutches of the pirates. For Epicrates’ part, helping Caesar could ultimately gain him more influence in Rome.

The 50 talents needed to pay off the pirates was a small fortune. Epicrates would not have access to that much silver himself, so he would have to activate his own networks, call in favors to raise the sum. At the same time, he could begin to recruit men and hire light ships to match the speed of the pirate vessels. The brewing plan involved far more than paying ransom.

It would take weeks to pull all the pieces together. In the meantime, they had to hope Caesar could survive long enough to taste freedom again.

Dangers to Caesar intensified. Days that turned to weeks now turned to over a month for Caesar on the island. The pirates grew restless.

Occasionally a small crew would set out from the island to go on a quick raiding party to the mainland, to collect protection money or to gather information. The pirates did most of their raiding on the mainland at night. During the day, their ships remained concealed in small coves or inlets along the coast. The pirates waited until late at night to launch their surprise raids, descending on the coastal villages and carrying off captives too heavy with sleep to offer much resistance. Those who resisted could be dispatched quickly with the pirates’ weapon of choice: a dagger with a long curved blade known as a sica. Any pursuit was foiled by darkness and the pirates’ ability to vanish into well-concealed hiding places. On some clear mornings, smoke could be seen rising from the coast where a village or a ship was burning.

Pirates were a law unto themselves and had no respect for the authority of Rome. They brought death wherever they went. Some years earlier, the Roman Senate had sent special envoys to Teuta, the pirate queen of Illyria, to negotiate an end to attacks on Roman shipping. Queen Teuta found the Romans’ behavior toward her insulting, and had one of the ambassadors held hostage and the other one killed. Like Caesar, the murdered ambassador was young and had threatened to bring the pirates to justice. If Caesar’s act wore thin, if his humorous bravado began to be taken as genuine insult, the pirates could turn on him.

In one raid around this time, pirates snatched a pair of Roman officials with their bodyguards off the Appian Way, Rome’s main highway. In another raid, the daughter of a Roman general was abducted from the port of Misenum and held for an exorbitant ransom that nearly bankrupted her brother, Caesar’s friend Mark Antony. Nobody was safe, and the situation was spinning out of control. It would not be so long after this same period that pirates raided the port of Ostia and burned the Roman fleet. Rome long ago had passed a law against piracy, but little had been done to contain the threat, in part because the pirates kept the Romans supplied with inexpensive enslaved workers.

In the Roman Senate, Cicero, whose political star was rising, thundered rhetorically: “In all these years, what province has been free from pirates? What revenue has been safe? What ally have you been able to protect? To whom have your fleets been any defense? How many islands do you suppose have been deserted? How many cities of the allies do you think have been either abandoned out of fear of the pirates, or have been taken by them?”

Even Cicero was terrified, and Caesar should have been, too. He was at the mercy of the rogues and at any moment he could be murdered for sport if the pirates grew tired of waiting for his ransom to arrive.

The days passed, slow and hot. The rain could be sudden and torrential, filling the large ceramic water jugs that provide the pirates with their only source of freshwater. When the sun came out again, the island steamed.

Caesar waited. In many ways, he’d been waiting his whole life. He had to wait nearly four more years until he reached the minimum age to serve as quaestor, the lowest-ranking public official in Rome. Then, Jupiter willing, he’d move up the cursus honorum, the steps of political rank, until he was elected consul, before being sent out as a proconsul to the provinces. But Caesar wouldn’t be content even with that. He’d conquer new territories for the Romans. There was still Armenia and Parthia and whatever lay beyond them.

He would finally chase Alexander the Great.

But first he had to escape death at the end of a pirate’s sword.

On the shore, one of the pirates stripped down and dove into the deep blue. The waves erased any sign of his presence. He remained underwater longer than it seemed possible for him to survive. When he finally resurfaced, he had an octopus wrapped around his hand like a boxer’s glove. The pirate retrieved a knife from the beach and plunged it between the creature’s eyes. The pirate began to beat the dead octopus against a rock to tenderize the meat. His actions were quick, brutal and effective — a sign of what could happen to Caesar, whose promise of such a high ransom had stretched into a thirty-eighth day.

The pirate stopped beating the octopus and looked out across the bay. A ship approached. Caesar’s ransom.

Caesar watched silver being unloaded from the ship. He exchanged a glance with his savior Epicrates. Fifty talents delivered as promised. At the edge of the beach, where the ground began to rise toward the interior of the island, a row of octopuses were strung up to dry in the sun. The pirates were in high spirits. They had grown fond of the young man after all. Even his awful poetry. They might have agreed with the critic who said that Caesar was a more successful poet than Cicero because fewer people had read Caesar’s poetry.

As he prepared to board the ship back to Miletus, Caesar paused to address the pirates. He had no choice, he said, but to bring them to justice. Although they had failed to appreciate his poetry, they had in general treated him well, and individually he bore them no ill will. But they were, after all, pirates. And pirates must be hunted down and executed.

The pirates laughed. They whistled and cheered. He really was a fine speaker.

They were still laughing as the ship sailed away, and they returned to their drinking.

Now free, Caesar could have been content to return to his wife, Cornelia. They had remained loyal to each other even when faced with adversity. Their daughter Julia was still a baby but Caesar had a plan and nothing was going to slow him down. Back in Miletus, Epicrates had arranged everything by following Caesar’s whispered instructions. There were warships and men ready for battle. Though he would be described as “a private citizen without authority,” Caesar transformed before the eyes of his peers into a fully-fledged military leader.

Caesar’s success as a general was due to a combination of decisiveness, careful planning and luck. “Fortune favors the bold,” a Roman proverb, and for years Caesar was fortune’s favorite. But he seldom left anything to pure chance. Over the course of his 38 days on the island, he had ample opportunity to take the measure of the pirates, observe their strengths and weaknesses, and formulate the best plan of attack. When the time came for battle, Caesar wanted to be in the thick of the action and his presence on the battlefield galvanized his men. He shared his men’s risks and privations, and his men shared in the profits of his success. The men who followed him back to Pharmacusa must have known they had backed a winner. If anyone could out-pirate the pirates, it was Caesar.

By one account, Caesar mobilized the navy put together by Epicrates with “unbelievable speed.” Turning the tables on the pirates, Caesar relied on the element of surprise to attack the pirates at night. The Romans employed various tactics in battles at sea. If the object was to sink the enemy vessel, the Roman ship could use a bronze-plated battering ram on its prow to ram the enemy’s hull. According to the Roman historian Velleius Paterculus, Caesar did sink several of the pirates’ ships. But he wanted to take as many alive as possible in order to subject them to a public punishment. This would have meant overtaking the pirate vessels boarding them, and engaging in hand-to-hand combat to subdue and take the pirates prisoner.

The surest way to disable the pirate vessels was to outflank them at close quarters and break the oars the pirates used to propel their ships. A grappling hook would then secure the enemy vessel for boarding. With his knowledge of the pirates’ numbers — both their manpower and the number of ships at their command — Caesar would have come prepared with overwhelming force.

According to another account, at least some of the pirates were still on the island of Pharmacusa when Caesar arrived in force. This group of the pirates was too stunned and drunk to put up any effective resistance. The 50 talents paid for Caesar were untouched, so Caesar reclaimed it.

In Miletus, Caesar chained the pirates to the benches of a swift bireme ship under heavy guard and forced them to row north along the coast to the port of Elaia. From there, he marched them overland to the great city of Pergamon, where he had them chained and locked in a dark prison.

The Romans themselves had no facilities for long-term incarceration. Even the most famous prison, the Mamertine in Rome, was a complex of holding cells, dank and foul-smelling cellars where the imprisoned were chained together to await execution or a sentence of hard labor. It was just half a century earlier that the last king of Pergamon was defeated and paraded through the streets of Rome on his way to the Mamertine prison, where he was unceremoniously strangled to death. If you entered a Roman prison, the odds were that you left as a corpse or a dead man walking.

The pirates were sober now, their muscles sore from rowing more than three hundred miles up the coast, their wrists and ankles rubbed raw from the shackles.

Caesar wasted no time in finding the Roman governor of the province, Marcus Junius Juncus, who had the responsibility of executing the pirates. Juncus in Latin means “rush” so the name fit. He was a light, bendable character, easily swayed by a sense of his own advantage. He would keep the prisoners locked up in Pergamon.

Caesar made a strong case for crucifying the pirates without delay. Crucifixion was the accepted punishment for pirates. It would send a message that Rome was serious about dealing with piracy on the Mediterranean. Caesar was no longer a simple boy entertaining his captors with bad poetry. He was a skilled orator making his case. But Juncus had reasons to hem and haw. He “cast longing eyes” on the pirates’ money. Each one of those pirates could fetch a good price on the slave market. He might even keep one for himself. According to some, Juncus also burned with jealousy over Caesar’s success in capturing the men.

The governor told Caesar he would take the matter under advisement. He could have expected that would be the end of it. Caesar could go off to Rhodes and forget about the whole thing.

But Caesar did not forget. If Juncus refused to act, Caesar would deal with the pirates himself, and he would not be swayed by greed or fear. In Rome, a young man had two paths to greatness. He could become a great orator like Cicero, or he could become a great general like Pompey. Caesar was determined to be both.

Pergamon, the Roman provincial capital, was one of the greatest cities of the ancient world. It stood high on a hill of solid rock, the acropolis, surrounded by a great wall. Within the walls were a sprawling palace complex, a cluster of temples, a massive library and a theater that seated 10,000 spectators. On the highest point of the acropolis stood the altar of Zeus with its magnificent carved frieze of the battle between the Giants and the Olympian gods. Here, bound together in a dark cell cut into the rock, the pirates awaited their fate.

They must have thought of escape. Unlike Spartacus, who had escaped from gladiator school armed with kitchen utensils, the pirates had nothing to hand that could serve as a weapon. The pirates may have known the famous story of Aristomenes, a prisoner of war in Sparta, who woke one morning to find a fox feasting on the corpses of fellow prisoners who had been executed and left to rot at the bottom of the hole. Aristomenes managed to follow the fox to a small hole in the rock that led to freedom. But for the pirates, there was no such miraculous deliverance at hand.

Caesar, meanwhile, faced a different challenge. Instead of breaking out of the prison, he had to break in to retrieve the pirates and carry out their punishment.

Caesar was himself something of an escape artist. At 18, when his political enemies had put a price on his head, he managed to slip out of Rome in disguise and disappear. On another occasion, in Gaul, he found himself hemmed in between the fortress his troops were besieging and the enemy reinforcements pouring in from the countryside. With his trademark combination of careful planning, decisiveness and luck, he still managed to break through and score a decisive victory. He could read a situation and turn it to his advantage. In this case, the pirates were in the custody of Juncus, the provincial governor, but Juncus was corrupt, weak and indecisive. Caesar was none of these things. He had a band of loyal and well-armed men at his back, and a network of connections throughout the city.

Caesar acted “with incredible speed” to carry out his break-in before Juncus could counter him. Potential strategies had to be narrowed down in real time. To tunnel through the solid rock would have been impossible, but Caesar was a keen student of military technology and may have run through other possibilities in his mind. Some of his greatest successes in battle were made possible through siege engines and other works of engineering. He might have envisioned the use of an aries, or battering ram, to force open the door of the prison. Another possibility might have been the ballista, the Roman equivalent of a cannon — part crossbow and part slingshot — that were capable of launching stone artillery balls with great force and deadly accuracy. Better still: a scorpio, or bolt-shooter, which Caesar would later employ with great success in his Gallic wars.

But these methods would have to wait. Caesar wanted to get the pirates out alive, and in the end he tackled the problem head-on, with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. He returned to the prison and compelled the guards to release the pirates into his custody. He may have distributed some of the captured pirate booty as an incentive to cooperate. He also knew that public opinion supported the execution of pirates: once the public got wind of an impending execution, Juncus wouldn’t be able to reclaim the pirates without admitting his corrupt intentions. Nothing would stand between Caesar and his revenge.

With the pirates back in his custody, Caesar and his men stripped and beat them with lashes, then forced them to carry their own crosses. For the crucifixions, Caesar chose a prominent headland where the bodies could be seen from the sea. A crowd followed the pirates, their backs covered in bloody stripes. Suspended around the neck of each man was a placard with the word pirate printed in Greek. The crowd spit and jeered as the men dragged themselves on.

This scene was not the only fallout from Caesar’s saga with the pirates. Caesar would soon reward Epicrates with a grant of Roman citizenship. He became Gaius Julius Epicrates, the patriarch of a prominent Milesian family who boasted of his connections with the Emperor Augustus. And when Marcus Junius Juncus’s term as governor was over and he returned to Rome, Caesar would prosecute him for corruption. Unlike his failed attempt to prosecute Gnaeus Cornelius Dolabella, he would not lose his case. On the other hand, Caesar would take to carrying a concealed dagger whenever he travelled by sea, just in case he crossed paths with pirates bent on revenge.

At the macabre scene of the crucifixion, one of the pirates still had a little spirit left, and sang Caesar’s whimsical poem: We anoint our bodies with sweet telinum. To have memorized Caesar’s poetry, this pirate may have been one of those who had the closest relationship with and affection for the former hostage.

A salt breeze blew in from the sea. Following instructions, the pirates lay down their crosses. Each man’s arms were strapped to the horizontal plank of his cross. Their legs straddled the vertical plank and each foot was nailed separately to the sides of the plank. The crosses were raised and fixed into the ground.

The weight of a body nailed to the cross made breathing difficult, eventually resulting in death by asphyxiation. But a strong man could suffer for up to a day before his organs fail and his body gives out. The bodies would be left to decompose. Birds would pick at the flesh.

The singing pirate faltered as his arms were strapped to the cross. Before the nails were pounded into the pirate’s feet, Caesar took out a knife and slit the man’s throat. It spared the man the agony of a slow death. Let it not be said that Caesar was not merciful.

A whisper passed through the crowd as the crosses were raised. Caesar. Caesar.

A name that would not be forgotten.

***

ROB HARDY is a Research Associate in Classics at Carleton College and the Poet Laureate of Northfield, Minnesota. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from Brown University.

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