How Many Cups #4: When Julius Caesar Was Rumored To Be Gay
and some talk about the Laysan albatross
No more than half a cup.
I spent the better half of last week cruising through Justin Gregg’s latest work, If Nietzsche Were A Narwhal. Despite having the same attention span as one of the many creatures he discusses, I was turning pages at damn near papercut speed.
His most captivating chapter, “The Wisdom of Gay Albatrosses,” deploys homophobia as a tool to explain how humanity’s unique moral consciousness does more to limit our species’ success than guarantee it. After all, Gregg relays, there are “more than 300 different animal species that engage in a diverse array of behaviors that fall under the umbrella of homosexuality” yet “while same-sex attraction is not unique to humans, homophobia is.”
What the hell does this have to do with Julius Caesar? Stop yelling, I’ll get there. But not after a day trip to Hawaii. There lives the Laysan albatross and more importantly, Gregg’s claim for human morality being such a freaking drag.
“Some of these lifelong pair bonds are between same-sex couples. In one study of Laysan albatrosses living on Oahu, one-third of the lifelong pairs were female same-sex couples. In many of these cases, however, one or both females would mate with a male at some point, resulting in fertilized eggs that the female pairs raised together. Many of the cases of homosexuality in the animal kingdom work like this, where same-sex behaviors are just part of an individual’s typical behavioral repertoire, and reproduction still occurs to ensure species survival.”
How is it that birds - giant ones, I’ll give them that - can exist for thousands of years without uttering a mere peep about their lesbianess, but I can’t go two days without hearing some firebrand dramatist squawk about how AP Psych needs to be dropped from curriculum because it’s grooming children?
This isn’t a new phenomenon, mind you. Which brings us to not only to our brief history of Caesar, but the very point of this blog post. Despite all people worshipping an inner conviction that we are distinctive, special individuals, so many of us ostracize those that show even the slightest sign of being different. When it is ours, we parade uniqueness, but all of that changes once uniqueness is literally in a parade. Julius Caesar fell victim as well.
Dr. Nakamura, You Dog, You
Remember that Ancient Rome, 2nd Edition primary source book you assigned for our course, the one I had to sell my blood for just to buy? It finally came in handy. Somewhere about halfway through the behemoth, near page 334, I was delighted to rediscover one of my favorite anecdotes.
Roman historian Suetonius surely had his flaws. He thought ghosts were real and that Rome was the center of the universe. To be fair, so do I. His greatest flaw, however, is publishing gossipy hearsay for posterity to collect. He could have simply chose not to write down these rumor mill echoes. Instead, Suetonius pulled the classic “Hey I’m not saying this is true, but a lot of other people are saying it” move now popularized by Trump.
It’s how we ended up with multiple reports on Roman dignitaries implying Caesar had a homosexual affair with King Nicomedes. The backstory:
A young Julius marries Cinna’s daughter, a sign of his support for the father
Turns out, Julius backs to wrong dude in the Cinna-Sulla showdown
Sulla wins a civil war, becomes dictator and has it out for Julius
Happy to get the heck out of dodge, Julius goes to Bithynia - modern day Turkey, near the Black Sea - on a mission to grab some boats from King Nicomedes IV
Statue of Julius Caesar by French sculptor Nicolas Coustou
Let The Rumors Begin
In his The Twelve Caesars, Suetonius wasted no time digging into Julius, in the second paragraph noting that:
“He made his first campaigns in Asia with the company of Marcus Thermius, the praetor; from whom, having sent a fleet to Bithynia, he abode at Nicomedes, not without a rumor of the prostrated king's chastity; which rumor he increased within a few days, when Bithynia, on the pretext of exacting the money due to a certain libertine client of his, repeated again.”
I sure as shit can’t read it, but I still know when Latin is being used for a cheeky cheapshot. It Latin, the sentence reads “Desedit apud Nicomeden, non sine rumore prostratae regi pudicitiae” which somehow just hits harder. But to be clear, Suetonius is suggesting that Caesar was prostrated i.e “bent over” in front of the king.
As Suetonius expounded further upon Caesar’s life, he dropped the “rumor” allegations altogether and wrote pretty matter-of-factly about the famed Roman’s relationship with King Nicomedes. By paragraph 49 he explained that:
“There was no stain on his reputation for chastity except his intimacy with King Nicomedes, but that was a deep and lasting reproach, which laid him open to insults from every quarter.”
Suetonius is sure to give himself some scholarly cover. In the same stanza, he quoted Caesar’s rivals, some of whom have projected a particular nasty nickname onto him":
“I pass over, too, the invectives of Dolabella and the elder Curio, in which Dolabella calls him ‘the queen's rival, the inner partner of the royal couch,’ and Curio, ‘the brothel of Nicomedes and the stew of Bithynia.’ I take no account of the edicts of Bibulus, in which he posted his colleague as ‘the queen of Bithynia,’ saying that ‘of yore he was enamoured of a king, but now of a king's estate.’ At this same time, so Marcus Brutus declares, one Octavius, a man whose disordered mind made him somewhat free with his tongue, after saluting Pompey as ‘king’ in a crowded assembly, greeted Caesar as ‘queen.’
And once we hit paragraph 52 the gloves have been fully dropped:
“But in order that there should be no doubt at all that he was infamous for indecency and adultery, Father Curius, in a certain speech, calls him the man of all women and the woman of all men.”
But This Is How We Know Suetonius Was Purposefully Being A Jerk
In Ancient Rome, it was tradition for those who led significant victories to be honored in a Triumph. The leader of the campaign would be paraded around Rome in a religious process, being seen as a momentous figure who helped the homeland retain its prestige. Indeed, it was such a glorifying event that a slave would be enlisted to stand next to the honoree, whispering in his ear “Remember, you are mortal.”
After Caesar whooped on the Gauls, he too was rewarded with a Triumph. Suetonius noted that Caesar was met with snide jeers about his sexual history from his own soldiers.
“All the Gauls did Caesar vanquish, Nicomedes vanquished him;
Lo! now Caesar rides in triumph, victor over all the Gauls
Nicomedes does not triumph, who subdued the conqueror.”
Here, the soldiers are blatantly chanting about Caesar being “conquered” by King Nicomedes in a sexual manner. But they aren’t doing so because they abhor the very notion that a Roman leader could be gay. Trust me, there are more than enough sources which depict how sexually liberal Romans were. So then, why did they chant such nonsense?
Dr. Mary Beard has been on the Mount Rushmore of Roman historians for quite some time now. Her analysis of the Triumph tell us that soldiers often protested during these parades. Beard explained:
“There was a lurking question of who was really responsible for the victory being celebrated. The man in the chariot, or one of those who were merely walking or riding in the procession?”
Roman history is littered with examples of soldiers doing everything from turning the crowd against the honoree to engaging in mutiny until they were paid their fair share of the spoils. This includes spewing homophobic rants towards their general. It also must be noted that Romans were more concerned with Caesar being the “conquered” one in this relationship than they were with his sexuality. Suetonius knew this, making his misleadings as childish as they are incorrect.
Allow Me One More Paragraph
So I can rant about how stupid this all is.
Sure, this blog might have been interesting, though it’s true utility lies somewhere else. Millenia and the empires therein, no matter their impact or legacy, will all crumble. Even their history will crumble. Yes, there will one day be a shift in academia that deems Roman History not important enough to be taught. What perseveres, however, will always be the intricacies of the human species. I promise you, the Colosseum will decay into a dusty playground before humans stop being gay or lesbian or whatever else comes naturally to them. To belittle the most enduring part of mankind is to disrespect ourselves, and that, my friends, is what I call “bad history.”
Sources:
On the Life of the Caesars, Suetonius