CAESAR AND NICOMEDES
Published Dec 1, 2008 · Josiah Osgood
The Classical Quarterly
30
Citations
1
Influential Citations
Abstract
Around 80 B.C., as a young man of about twenty years, Julius Caesar left Rome to join the staff of M. Minucius Thermus in Asia for military training. Thermus was busy with the subjugation of Mytilene, the last of the cities of Asia to hold out against Rome after the recent war with Mithridates, and sent Caesar to fetch a fleet from King Nicomedes IV of Bithynia. Suetonius (Iul. 2) reports that Caesar dawdled at the royal court, so that a rumour crept up of sexual congress with the king (prostratae regi pudicitiae); and the rumour only grew when a few days after his mission was accomplished, Caesar returned to Bithynia ‘on the pretext of collecting money which was owed to a certain freedman, a client of his’ (per causam exigendae pecuniae, quae deberetur cuidam libertino clienti suo). Certainly, later in life the Roman was regularly accused of having shared the king’s bed, and in a remarkable chapter of his biography (Iul. 49) Suetonius documents a number of instances. To give just some: Licinius Calvus mocked Caesar in some notorious verses; Bibulus called his colleague ‘the queen of Bithynia’ (Bithynicam reginam) in the edicts he issued during their consulship; Memmius charged Caesar with serving as the king’s cupbearer at a large party, even in front of some merchants from the city of Rome, whose names were included in the indictment; and Cicero wrote that Caesar was led into the king’s bedroom, that he lay on a golden couch arrayed in purple, and that ‘the virginity of the one sprung from Venus was lost in Bithynia’ (florem ... aetatis a Venere orti in Bithynia contaminatum). In contrast to Suetonius, Plutarch (Caes. 2.3) refers to none of this material, and instead notes that after his departure from Rome, Caesar had only a short stay with Nicomedes.1 Modern biographers of Caesar have passed over the whole episode quickly, mainly offering some form of Suetonius’ claim that Caesar’s lingering at the king’s court straightaway gave rise to allegations of an amorous relationship. Gelzer, in his main narrative, briefly registers the visit in Bithynia, and only in a footnote observes: ‘Caesar’s participation in the life of the court gave rise to obscene jokes, later interminably repeated.’2 Meier, even closer to Suetonius, comments: ‘When he was sent to Nicomedes, the king of the Bithynians, to take over a naval squadron, he is said to have shared the king’s bed. Throughout his life this episode furnished his opponents and his soldiers with the matter for ribald jokes’.3 Most recently, Kamm writes, ‘Caesar spent enough time at court for scandalous innuendoes to be spread that he had prostituted himself to Nicomedes’, while Goldsworthy speaks of rumours that ‘spread rapidly’and repeats the contents of Memmius and Cicero’s tales.4 ‘Ultimately’, Goldsworthy says, ‘it was a very good piece of gossip, playing on well-established Roman stereotypes’.5 Easterners ands kings were disliked, royal courts held in low esteem, and thus ‘the tale of the ageing, lecherous old ruler SHORTER NOTES 687
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