According to Plutarch, Julius Caesar was once captured by pirates

https://www.britannica.com/story/the-time-julius-caesar-was-captured-by-pirates

166 149 3 years ago

jdwyah• 3 years ago

This is wild. I don't know about "great man" theory in general, but that does sound extraordinary.

bogtog2• 3 years ago

The Roman Republic was steadily dying up to Caesar's reign. He really was just the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of its death, which was surely inevitable in the coming decades. However, without Caeser, the conquest of Gual may have been pushed back drastically?

michaelt• 3 years ago

Didn't Caesar die in 44 BC, while the Roman empire peaked in size in around 98 AD? i.e. it continued growing for 140 years after his death?

lettergram• 3 years ago

That conquest was brutal btw, estimates are that Rome killed 1.5m combatants and 1m+ civilians enslaved / executed. There’s also that part where they just cut off the hands of any fighting age males they came across for a while.

Really was closer to a genocide.

1980phipsi• 3 years ago

Caesar was mostly following through with prior norm breaking.

That's why it is important to rebuke politicians in the mold of Trump. You don't know who will follow him.

rand1239• 3 years ago

So you are saying, Roman empire declining didn't require any particular man but reviving it did require one??

User233• 3 years ago

I find the denialism around the great man theory somewhat baffling. Does anyone really believe, just for one example, that Apple computer would be what it is today without Steve Jobs?

boomboomsubban2• 3 years ago

No, but I bet we would still have personal computers and smart phones without Steve Jobs.

That's the argument against the "great man" idea. Sure, specific events would not have happened without that person, but the overall state of the world would not be drastically different.

jhbadger2• 3 years ago

The issue with the "Great Man" idea of history is that it doesn't take into account that people are created by history more than they create history. the microcomputer revolution was already going before Jobs and Wozniak showed up at the Homebrew Computer Club. Somebody was going to turn this hobby into a big business. If not them, somebody else.

thsksbd3• 3 years ago

Apple wouldn't exist, but what of it? They didn't really invent very much did they? They just implemented it very well for a price point.

cykros• 3 years ago

No, only someone so narcissistic and divorced from reality could have come up with the Fisher-Price computers they make.

OkayPhysicist• 3 years ago

Great man theory describes a real phenomena, it just gets the causality backwards. With lots of people doing lots of things, some are bound to do exceptional things. People who believe they need strong leaders gravitate towards the noteworthy ones, making it more likely that someone who has done exceptional things end up with more power. The more power someone has the more noteworthy acts they are likely to engage in. Then let history forget all but the most noteworthy details, and you have a history defined by great men.

artursapek• 3 years ago

His entire biography is well worth a read.

wryun• 3 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Rome is an enjoyable fictionalised account.

atticora• 3 years ago

It's fascinating to see him through the eyes of Cicero's slave Marcus Tullius Tiro in Robert Harris's Cicero Trilogy.

cdcarter• 3 years ago

Came to the comments to make sure someone was recommending these books. An incredibly enjoyable read.

hiq• 3 years ago

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar:

While travelling, he was intercepted and ransomed by pirates in a story that was later much embellished. According to Plutarch and Suetonius, he was freed after paying a ransom of fifty talents and responded by returning with a fleet to capture and execute the pirates. The recorded sum for the ransom is literary embellishment and it is more likely that the pirates were sold into slavery per Velleius Paterculus.

gwern2• 3 years ago

Something seems wrong there. The Paterculus reference seems to specifically say that they weren't sold into slavery: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Velleius_...

Well satisfied with the success of his [Julius Caesar] night expedition he returned [p143] to his friends and, after handing his prisoners into custody, went straight to Bithynia to Juncus, the proconsul — for the same man was governor of Bithynia as well as of Asia — and demanded his sanction for the execution of his captives. When Juncus, whose former inactivity had now given way to jealousy, refused, and said that he would sell the captives as slaves, Caesar returned to the coast with incredible speed and crucified all his prisoners before anyone had had time to receive a dispatch from the consul in regard to the matter.

bilgamesh• 3 years ago

what's wrong is wiki editorship

rightbyte• 3 years ago

Are there any ... non Ceasar sources for this event?

digitcatphd• 3 years ago

This is the product of writing your own history ... The irony is this is still going on today.

DayDollar• 3 years ago

And then replaced by someone who rewrites the history of his predecessor.. result a mad reign of madmen..

Luc• 3 years ago

This account was originally written by Plutarch, who was more interested in telling a good moralistic story than sticking to the facts (of ~150 years before).

gadders3• 3 years ago

Plutarch's Parallel Lives is a great read though.

nabla9• 3 years ago

Plutarch is generally as reliable as his source material in the sense that things he wrote happened, but not necessarily in the way he tells them.

Plutarch selected the stories he told and modified them into moralistic narratives, but he didn't completely make them up. He is not reliable historian in modern sense, of course.

xg15• 3 years ago

Sounds like today's "based on a true story"...

smitty11102• 3 years ago

Still puts him ahead of Herodotus. When Aristophanes takes the time to write a whole play to mock you, you done goofed.

yawboakye2• 3 years ago

plutarch admits when he’s propagating folklore, or unconfirmed history with moral tones. see for example his narration of the encounter between solon and croesus. that said let’s not forget that history as understood by the ancients were stories told for the purposes of education, not a disinterested recording of facts.

maxverse• 3 years ago

So, are we reading The Social Network of Caesar's life?

nemo• 3 years ago

While this account comes from Plutarch, Suetonius also relates the same story. Suetonius, of course, was much more interested in a good story than any concept of truth and was writing in roughly the same period as Plutarch relating tales told and retold long after whatever original events there were transpired.

Phoenix12052023• 3 years ago

It's probable that the story had a basis in truth-otherwise, someone would have instantly used it against the young Caesar-but grew in the telling. Caesar, as his commentaries show, was no slouch at bolstering his own legend.

thisisauserid• 3 years ago

I bet it's more accurate than if Caesar wrote it. Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars is considered "prone to exaggeration" at best.

dang2• 3 years ago

Ok, let's put Plutarch up there too. Thanks!

dr_dshiv2• 3 years ago

Disagree. It impugns Plutarch for no reason. Otherwise, we should put “according to” in front of all historical events?

robviren• 3 years ago

What is history, but a fable agreed upon?

User233• 3 years ago

Just for reference a talent was worth about 20 years wages. So while comparing currency values across vast stretches of time is inaccurate, it wouldn’t be totally wrong to consider a talent about $1 million in today’s US dollars.

genman2• 3 years ago

Talent is told to be about 33 kg (or something between 20-40 kg). So indeed a talent of gold will be over $1 million today.

qwytw14• 3 years ago

It's silver though, so only about $26k (of course that's the least accurate way to compare modern and ancient prices).

Gold wasn't that commonly used in the west back then.

qwytw14• 3 years ago

On the other hand you could buy about 1200 gallons of olive oil which is less than $50,000 or 750 sheep which is might be about $300,000.

Comparing modern/ancient prices get tricky.. To be fair though a worker earning 2 drachma per day would be closer to a modern person minimum wage worker (anyone back then who didn't own land, wasn't a merchant or at least a skilled craftsmen was dirt poor anyway). So if 1 drachma = $30 to $60 a talent would be closer to around $180-360k

lelag2• 3 years ago

I think it's fair to argue than using modern value for goods that you can produce more efficiently thanks to the availability of cheap energy and phosphate is not really fair.

750 sheeps or 1200 gallons of olive oil were certainly worth a fortune at the time, and owning that much would probably have made you a very weathly person when owning 300K USD today does not.

RecycledEle• 3 years ago

A talent was a weight. Assuming it was of silver, a talent of silver would be worth about $19,500 today.

gumballindie• 3 years ago

In the 1st century BCE the Mediterranean Sea had a crime problem. Specifically, it had a pirate problem.

The only thing that changed is that instead of capturing hostages the pirates are smuggling people.

murat124• 3 years ago

In 75 BCE a band of Cilician pirates in the Aegean Sea captured a 25-year-old Roman nobleman named Julius Caesar, who had been on his way to study oratory in Rhodes.

I'm pretty sure that nobleman was named Gaius Julius and that's how he introduced himself.

throwaway13547• 3 years ago

"Roman men were usually known by their praenomina to members of their family and household, clientes and close friends; but outside of this circle, they might be called by their nomen, cognomen, or any combination of praenomen, nomen, and cognomen that was sufficient to distinguish them from other men with similar names."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_naming_conventions

thaumasiotes• 3 years ago

or any combination of praenomen, nomen, and cognomen that was sufficient to distinguish them from other men with similar names.

Even Julius Caesar's full name including all three parts would not be helpful in distinguishing him from many of the other men in his family.

qwytw14• 3 years ago

Ceasar is basically a family name though. I don't think there were that many Julii left at this point? So it might not have been that confusing. However if you were Publius/Lucius Cornelius on the other hand there were probably a dozen other Roman aristocrats with the same name at any given time.

orangepanda• 3 years ago

He wasnt even the only Julius Caesar elected as Consul in that decade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Julius_Caesar_(consul_6...

lupusreal• 3 years ago

'Caesar' was not then a title. It became a title because of him.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_(title)

davidw• 3 years ago

I can't help but think of these guys: https://americaexplained.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/asterix...

grammers• 3 years ago

This reads like a true adventure story. I'd be curious to know how much is true and how much was added to the facts.

11235813213455• 3 years ago

Expected that's he'd mercy pirates as he had a good time with them

gregw134• 3 years ago

The Historia Civilis series on Youtube has some excellent videos on Roman history:

https://www.youtube.com/@HistoriaCivilis

woudsma• 3 years ago

I wish this was an episode in the ‘Rome’ (HBO - 2005) series. It’s a great watch nonetheless.

beebeepka• 3 years ago

The intro theme was pretty good as well. One of HBO's greatest for sure.

Jeff_Brown• 3 years ago

There's something otherworldy to me about the psychology of a violent criminal. To do violent crime is to make a lot of people very angry, and yet the majority of violent criminals seem not to run very far away as soon as they've committed a violent crime.

aalimov_• 3 years ago

In some cases there has been recorded evidence of physiological differences (like a growth in the brain or a lack of development in some brain regions, reduced grey matter - as compared to non violent criminals) that have been found in some violent criminals.

rabbits_2002• 3 years ago

According to Wikipedia its more likely they were enslaved than crucified

mareko• 3 years ago

That's a lot of silver. 50 talents could be up to 1800kg in silver.

Balgair• 3 years ago

That would be ~0.17 m3 of volume, ~ 6 ft3, or about a 45 gallon drum.

A picture of such a drum: http://joslebel.com/en/catalog/plastic-drums/plastic-drums-t...

That's ... actually a lot of silver.

sebastiennight• 3 years ago

I find it fascinating that even when one manages to spend a whole day without thinking of the Roman Empire, somehow "HiroProtagonist on HN" finds a way to slip you a quick reference onto the homepage. Just to make sure.

rat87• 3 years ago

He has time to post about the Roman empire on him but not time to deliver my pizza apparently

jdthedisciple• 3 years ago

Sounds like fantasy

Khelavaster• 3 years ago

as retold in Suetonius's history of the Caesars. Pretty accurate especially when it agrees with commentary.

According to Plutarch, Julius Caesar was once captured by pirates

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