Julius Caesar
July 12th, 100BC
When people ask me what I do and I tell them I’m a writer, one of two things tends to happen.
Either their eyes will light up and they’ll say something along the lines of ‘Oh my god! That’s so cool! What do you write about?’ and I’ll tell them that I write about history, mostly Roman history, and they’ll be genuinely fascinated and we’ll have a happy conversation about it that will tend to go down one of several routes. Inevitably one of those routes will be about Julius Caesar.
Or, their eyes will light up and they’ll say something along the lines of ‘Oh my god! That’s so cool! What do you write about?’ and I’ll tell them that I write about history, mostly Roman history, and the smile will die in their eyes, their grin turned suddenly slightly too tight around the corners of their mouth as they realize that both of us are now going to have to negotiate the strange interpersonal minefield of trying to extract ourselves from the incoming conversation about Julius Fucking Caesar.
People like Julius Fucking Caesar tend to dominate random conversations about Roman history because everyone knows who he was. Or, at least, everyone has a pretty well-formed idea of who he was even if they don’t know anything about him at all, really, or they’re pretending to know a lot about him. People who are pretending to know a lot about Julius Fucking Caesar are the type of people who are mostly interested in Roman history because, to use the old euphemism, they ‘like the uniforms.’ Fascists, bigots and racists are fascinated by Julius Fucking Caesar because in him they see a kindred spirit, mostly because that’s how the Romans have been portrayed ever since Gibbon got a hold of them a few hundred years back - a bunch of middle-aged white men who beat up foreigners. As the poster boys for a bravado-inducing British imperialism throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries, the Romans, with Julius Fucking Caesar as some kind of laurel-wreathed Mussolini figurehead, has excited men who wear Paul Smith shirts and have lion tattoos, into an unreasonable froth of spittle-flecked gibberish.
So even if I find myself in a conversation about Julius Fucking Caesar, on a train with a man who is drinking Stella Artois on a Wednesday morning, I too want nothing more than the train to plummet into the nearest harbor and drown us all.
Even Roman writers don’t like banging on about Julius Fucking Caesar.
So, let’s talk about Julius Fucking Caesar.
Everybody knows all about Caesar. How he invented a salad in Mexico after emigrating from Italy in the 1920s, how he added two months to the calendar which is why September is now the ninth month, even though that isn’t true (See Potentially Interesting Roman History, Episode XI), how he crossed the Rubicon, which was a river, although nobody is sure which one or where it was, exactly. The Ides of March, stabbed in the back, ‘Et tu Brute?’. Beat up the French. Wrote a book about it. General. Might have been an emperor, sort of. Umm… Cleopatra.
All that sort of thing.
But for our little chat about him, let’s pick just one of the ‘famous’ things about the old bugger and bore ourselves silly with that.
Ready? Good.
Julius Caesar wasn’t born by caesarean section.
Roman names tended to come in three parts, the tria nomina, that consisted of a praenomen, which was the name your parents called you by, a nomen, which was your gens or family name, and the cognomen which was like a nickname. Like ‘Dave Smith Shorty’ or something like that, with apologies to anyone short called Dave Smith.
Julius Caesar was born Gaius Julius Caesar on 12th July 100 BC in the Suburra district of Rome. So, his family were the Julia and he carried the old family nickname of Caesar.
The first person known to carry the cognomen Caesar was a praetor who fought in the Second Punic Wars of 208 BC, and there was another who was consul in 157 and two more consuls in the 90s. His father was also Gaius Julius Caesar and his mother was Aurelia.
There are several explanations for where the name Caesar originates. Pliny suggests that it derives from caesaries "head of hair," because Julius was born with lots, although as he wasn’t the first with the name, that sounds implausible. Elsewhere, there is the Latin caesius "bluish-gray" (eyes), which is sometimes used as a proper name, although, again, implausible as he wasn’t the first with the name.
And then there is the legend that traces his cognomen to Latin caesus, past participle of caedere "to cut" (hence -cide in English). And it is from here we begin to get the beginning of the idea that Julius Caesar was born by c-section. Quite when this myth became cemented in public opinion isn’t clear, and if an ancient historian says to you ‘isn’t clear’, they normally mean ‘some time in the early medieval period, let’s say the 11th Century, just for a laugh’.
But if we go back way before Caesar’s time, there are some clues.
In the time of Numa Pompilius (715-673 BC), there was a law known as the Lex Caesaria which, among other things, proclaimed that if a mother dies in childbirth, or if they both die, that the baby should be cut from the mother, either to save it or to separate it from the body.
In the Roman afterlife, the ‘soul’ or genius of the departed mother would have to carry around the baby inside it for all eternity, so it was important that she spend it unburdened by a dead baby, who didn’t have a genius yet.
Although such operations were carried out throughout the ancient and medieval world, it wasn’t until the 16th Century that a successful c-section, and by ‘successful’ we mean one in which the mother survived, was performed. It wasn’t until the 19th Century that the mortality rate for the mother dropped below ‘we might as well, because you’re basically dead now anyway’. The baby’s life was always more important than that of the mother - that still comes as no surprise, particularly if you live in Texas.
As recently as 1900, the chances of survival for a mother in such an operation was about 15%. In ancient Rome, it was only ever performed on an already dead mother, or one who was about to die.
The link to the word caedere is probably a mistaken interpretation from a 10th Century Byzantine work called Suda, which suggests that this is how Caesar got his name, but might simply be referring to an ancestor who was born by c-section or simply mixing the whole thing up with Lex Caesaria, putting two and two together and getting five.
Julius Caesar may well have had an ancestor born by c-section, but the link between caedere and Lex Caesaria is probably speculative at best. The truth is probably more prosaic and one of the other explanations more likely. Occam’s Razor would suggest the etymology is probably linked to that of the proper name Caesius.
So how can we tell Caesar wasn’t born by c-section?
Simple, really. His mother, Aurelia, died on July 31st, 54 BC, aged either 65 or 66. She not only survived giving birth to him, but lived to see his greatest triumphs.
The fact that "Julius" became a common first name for men (in the mistaken belief that that was his first name) is another sign of someone propagating incorrect facts as the truth.