Julius Caesar was, by reputation, the greatest womaniser of his age: he seduced half the Roman aristocracy, foreign queens (Cleopatra included) and more men's wives than anyone could count. And yet, over that unstoppable stallion there hung all his life a single, indelible sexual rumour, only one, but so sticky that not even the master of the world ever managed to shake it off: the rumour that, as a penniless young man, he had been the lover (and, scandalous for a Roman, the passive party) of an Eastern king dripping with gold. Come with me, dear readers, to the most famous, most sung and most corrosive piece of gossip in all of antiquity. And at the end I'll give you my own malicious theory on the matter.
The one blemish on Rome's stallion
It's worth starting by making Caesar's sexual reputation clear, because it makes the gossip even juicier. Caesar was famous for the opposite of what the rumour insinuated: he was a compulsive womaniser, a tireless seducer of married ladies. His own soldiers, in their barracks ditties, joked that the wives had to be hidden away whenever he rode into town. So as for being «not much with the women», not in the slightest: the man was a hurricane.
And precisely for that reason it is so striking that, in the midst of such a heterosexual track record, there should have been ONE story, and only one, pointing in another direction. The historian Suetonius, who collected all the dirty laundry of the emperors, branded it the one stain that tarnished Caesar's virile reputation. A single stain in a whole life of bedroom conquests. But what a stain, dear readers. What a stain.
The mission to Bithynia (and the suspicious fondness for it)
Let us go back to about the year 80 BC. Caesar was then a young man of around twenty, a patrician of good family but with hardly any money (remember this detail, we'll need it later), and he was taking his first steps in the military and political career. A superior sent him on a diplomatic mission to the court of Nicomedes IV, king of Bithynia, a prosperous kingdom in the north-west of Asia Minor, in present-day Turkey, looking out over the Black Sea. The errand: to arrange the dispatch of a fleet.
So far, all normal. The problem is what came afterwards. Because young Caesar stayed at Nicomedes' court for an extraordinarily long time, far longer than any business about ships could justify. And, as if that were not enough, shortly after he contrived to RETURN to Bithynia on a far-fetched excuse (collecting some money supposedly owed to a client of his). Two prolonged stays at a king's court, being a handsome and penniless twenty-something. The wagging tongues of Rome, which never rested, went into overdrive. And they never stopped again.
The gossip that never wore off
The rumour spread like wildfire: that young Caesar had been the lover of King Nicomedes. And, once it caught, that label pursued him for the rest of his life with astonishing tenacity. It was no one-day piece of gossip: it was a forty-year stigma, which his political enemies rubbed in his face again and again at every convenient opportunity.
Suetonius gathers a veritable anthology of taunts. His rivals called him «the queen of Bithynia». The politician Bibulus, his great enemy, christened him so in official edicts. Another contemporary, Curio, let fly at him one of the most devastating lines in the history of insults: he said Caesar was «every woman's husband and every husband's wife». Take that. There were satirical poems, jokes in the Senate, biting remarks from Cicero himself. Caesar always denied it, indignant, swearing up and down that it was false. But the more he denied it, the more everyone laughed. In Rome, as you know, the slander that raises a laugh is immortal.
The ditty his own soldiers sang him
And here comes the star moment, the detail that turns this gossip into legend. Because the ribbing did not come only from his enemies: it came even from his own men. There existed in Rome a most curious tradition: on the day a general celebrated a triumph (the great victory parade through the streets of Rome), his own soldiers had licence to sing mocking, bawdy ditties at their commander, by way of taunt and, superstitiously, to ward off the bad luck of so much glory.
Well then, when Caesar celebrated his triumph after conquering Gaul, his legionaries, marching behind him, sang at the top of their lungs and to his face a little ditty that has gone down in history. It said, in Latin:
«Gallias Caesar subegit, Nicomedes Caesarem.»
Which translates as: «Caesar subdued the Gauls; Nicomedes subdued Caesar». And here lies the filthy genius of the thing, untranslatable in full: the Latin verb «subigere» means at once «to subdue, to conquer» (in the military sense) and «to mount» (in the, ahem, carnal sense). So the ditty said two things at once: that just as Caesar had militarily conquered Gaul, King Nicomedes had «conquered» him in bed, and you can guess in which role. His own victorious soldiers, on the most glorious day of his life, singing to their chief that an Eastern king had mounted him. If that isn't the love of the troops, let Jupiter come down and see it.
The Roman key: the problem was not with whom, but how
Here an important explanation is needed to truly understand the scandal, because otherwise it doesn't land. To a Roman of the period, sex between men was not in itself particularly scandalous. What for a male of the elite was an intolerable shame, a humiliating stain on his dignity, was being the PASSIVE party, the receiver, in the relationship. That was considered proper to women, to slaves or to male prostitutes: unworthy of a free man, let alone a future leader of Rome.
That is why the venom of the ditty lay in the «subegit»: they were not singing that Caesar had had an affair with a man and nothing more, they were singing that he had played the woman, that he had been the «subdued» one, the mounted one. That, and no other, was the dart they drove into him. They were attacking his manhood, his dignity as a Roman male, the very foundation of his authority. That is why it hurt him so much and why his enemies would not let go of the prey: it was the one flank through which that invincible man bled.
My malicious hypothesis (and a warning: this part is my own)
And now, dear readers, allow me a personal conjecture, because here I leave the firm ground of the documented and step onto that of malicious speculation, let it be noted. For years I have been turning over a detail almost nobody underlines: of ALL of Julius Caesar's very long and very agitated sex life, this is the ONLY story with a man. A single one, and from his youth. Isn't that curious?
And then a wicked question occurs to me. Recall what the Caesar of that moment was like: a young patrician ambitious to the marrow, with enormous plans… and without a single denarius in his pocket. A ruined aristocrat with hugely expensive dreams of greatness. And opposite him, who? A king, Nicomedes, lord of one of the richest kingdoms of Asia Minor, swimming in gold. (He was not, as is sometimes confused, a descendant of the legendary Croesus of Lydia, that one indeed the richest king of antiquity, of whom I spoke elsewhere; Nicomedes reigned in neighbouring Bithynia. But for money, he was every bit as flush.)
So my suspicion, thoroughly ill-minded, is this: what if the very young Caesar, sharp as a tack and with more ambition than means, simply made a calculation? What if that, rather than a great love story or the slander he swore against, was a strategic investment by a lad without means who knew how to cosy up to the tree that yielded the most gold? The first documented gold-digging in history, so to speak. Let it be noted that this is pure speculation on my part, a novelist's wickedness; the sources record only the rumour, not the motive. But knowing the character —that political animal capable of any calculation in order to climb— it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Caesar never did anything for free.
The immortal gossip
Be it as it may (love, slander, self-interested calculation or who knows what), the fact is that the Nicomedes affair accompanied Caesar to the grave and beyond, turned into the most famous «gay» story of the ancient world. The astonishing thing is the merciless honesty of the Roman sources, which forgave nothing to the most powerful man in the world, and the freedom with which his own soldiers mocked their chief to his face. Rome might adore Caesar, but it had no intention of giving up laughing at him.
And it leaves us a lesson on power and reputation that never expires: that not even the most invincible man of his time, the one who subdued Gaul and crossed the Rubicon, could ever subdue a good piece of gossip. Gaul surrendered to Caesar; the Nicomedes rumour, never. There are battles that not even Caesars win.
By the way, that world of Eastern kings swimming in gold, the world of the fabulous wealth of Croesus and Lydia that this story brushed against from afar, I told in full in my book «The Book of the Muse Clio». If you are fascinated by kings rich to the point of obscenity and the intrigues of Asia Minor, there it awaits you. History as it was never told to you, the spiciest too.