Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Julius Caesar's Sex Life

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

"I came. I saw. I conquered".Perhaps the most famous Julius Caesar quote of all time. But after hearing all about his bedroom antics, it takes on a slightly...different meaning.From Cleopatra, to his three wives, to male lovers, to mistresses - Julius Caesar definitely slept his way round Rome.Today Kate is Betwixt the Ancient Roman Sheets with Emma Southon, to find out all about his rampant sex life.This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. My favorite twixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here once more, as I will be for now, until the show is deemed unprofitable, or until we're just wiped off the face of the planet, but until that point, I will be here with your fair do's warning. Here it is.

This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, about a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. And now, if you get offended, well, that's just on you, quite frankly, because fair do's, you were warned. I came, I saw, I conquered. Perhaps the most famous Julius Caesar quote of all time. But after hearing about all of his bedroom antics, perhaps it would be better to rearrange that too. I saw, I conquered, I came. Because it seems betwixters that he liked to conquer and come an awful lot.

And today, we are going Bertwix, the ancient Roman, albeit slightly sticky sheets. to find out more about his rampant sex life. From Cleopatra to his three wives to male lovers to mistresses, Julius Caesar definitely slept his way around Rome. And today, we are going to hear all about it. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful damn. Goodness had nothing to do with it, Dary. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, with me, Kate Lister.

Today, we have a special Roman treat for you. We are finding out all about Julius Caesar's sex life. And let me tell you, he was not a man inclined to hold back. He went big before he went home, and then he went big again. He particularly enjoyed seducing the wives of his friends and business

associates and his enemies. Really, just everyone. He wanted to seduce everybody. But we're also going to find out things like, what did Caesar want to be kept away from the public? His receding hairline was one? But also, was he hot? Who were his three wives? And just what went on with Queen Cleopatra? We have Emma Southern back on the podcast to tell us all about it. If you like this interview, Emma has been on two other fabulous episodes, one on Agrippina, most powerful empress and another on the most infamous murders in ancient Rome. Right, let's get back to Julius Caesar and his voracious sexual appetite. And welcome back to Betwicks the Sheets. It's only Emma Southern. How are you doing?

I am great. How are you? I am thrilled to be talking to you because not only are you just an absurd amount of fun, but we are talking today about Julius Caesar's sex life. What a topic? Oh my God, I was so excited. when you said you want me to talk about Julia's sex life because he has so much sex. It's amazing he has time to do anything else. Like the first day I want to ask you is they,

how do we know about his sex life? Like he didn't have a diary that he kept or we don't have medical records. How do we know? Because when was he knocking around and humping stuff? So he's the late public, so he's the kind of first century BCE. is he's born in 100 BCE.

He dies 44 BCE, so he's knocking around in that 50 year period. And he is one of the major players in bringing down the Roman Republic, partly through shagging and partly through doing a lot of army-based violence. But because he is so enormously prominent, lots and lots of people write about him. And so conveniently we have a really, really good biography of him by Suetonius, who is writing a couple of hundred years later, but is very interested in the personalities of the people that he's writing about. And so he writes this biography of Julius Caesar, and he's very keen on not just writing about his military exploits and his political exploits, but also about his private

life and how that fed into what he did. And he also, in the Julius Caesar one, names a lot of names of where he's getting his information from. So he will be like, and so this guy says that Julia Caesar was shagging this person's wife. And in the Senate, Cicero, said, we also have Cicero's letters because Cicero is around at this time, and Cicero is a wild gossip. We kind of imagine him as a very sensible man, and whenever you see him on telly or in books or anything, he's always so sensible and serious and stoic, but he is such a gossip. He's like Truman Capote. He just loves drama, and he loves writing to his friends about drama and like, oh my God, you won't believe what so-and-so said on the Senate the other day.

Wow. And he really hates Cesar, so he writes about everything that he's done. And we also have poems. So there is a guy called Catullus who is around during Julia Caesar's lifetime, who thinks that Julius Caesar is a pompous ass and also thinks that he's very badly behaved in the bedroom. And so he writes lots of incredibly rude poems about what the people in his social circle are doing, some of which are about Julius Caesar and all of the people that Julia Caesar is shagging. So he basically made himself incredibly famous.

And then as soon as you're famous, people really want to know what you're doing in the bedroom. And he was doing a lot. He has that reputation. I've not even particularly studied Julius Caesar in any depth. And even I know he's got that reputation as like, if he can't kill it, ill fuck it and vice versa. Yeah. Is that accurate or is this just a convenient way to slag off somebody that you don't like? Because if I had a political enemy, my go-to move might be to say that they were really bad in bed.

I might do that. Well, I'll tell you, nobody ever says he's bad in bed. Oh, do they not? They don't. I mean, if anything, they imply that he's very good at it because he seduces everybody. Like, nobody ever says no to Julius Caesar, partly because if he can't shag it or kill you. But he's not the kind of person that you would say no to. But also, he's not like traditionally handsome necessarily. Like, if you look at statues of him or on his coinage, he just looks like mostly a middle-aged man.

Like, you wouldn't necessarily pick him out. And when he's bald and he has a comb over because he's really stressed about it, he's very fastidious in how he dresses. So he's always combing his hair. And Plutarch says that he scratches his head with one finger so as not to disturb his hair. So where other people would just like mess up the hair,

he scratches his head very gently with one finger, which he's considered to be extremely dandyish. Right. But he like takes a lot of care with what he wears and he wears kind of slightly fabulous clothing. So he's notorious for wearing looomely. belts and long sleeves with fringes, which is considered to be wildly fashionable and very dandyish kind of borderline feminine behaviour. You know, he cares about how he looks. He cares about

how he comes across and he's super duper powerful. And so nobody has ever written saying Julius Caesar was bad in bed. But it seems like it probably was true because the sources that we have are named, which is quite unusual. And usually if we're going to have somebody just slagging someone off, then there's going to be like, people said, da-da-da, or there were rumours. Whereas Cicero mentions this stuff in the Senate, like he will bring up who he's allegedly having sex with, and he like makes jokes about him having sex with Brutus's sister, for example, like in the Senate. And also his own troops made jokes about it. So when he's, when you have a Roman triumph, the troops march and they sing songs about the general, the triumphant general. And so his own troops

would be singing songs about how he spent all of his time in Gaul, shagging every woman, and that the men of Rome now need to look out because Julius Caesar the bald adulterer is here. So that's their like fond recollection of him that he's such a shagger, that they're singing about it in front of the entirety of Rome. So yeah, it probably is at least partly true that he has this reputation as someone who will seduce anything and anyone. and people call him every man's woman and every woman's man. Okay, I think you've convinced me then that there's at least something in this. That even people at the time and the troops that were fighting for him, this is well known.

Yeah. Was he good looking? Because I've heard the story that he was really sensitive about his bald patch. And if he was around today, he definitely would have had a hair transplant. Oh, for sure. But was he good looking? Do we have any accounts? I mean, we have lots of statues of him.

And he's not like, you know, I'll go. He is said to be kind of tall and the Romans say tend to say weird things like well-shaped, which basically means it. He has, you know, good-looking limbs, I guess. Like he's got no deformities or any visible injuries. Apparently he has black eyes, which are very striking and they really like bore into you. And he's pretty healthy. He may or may not have had epilepsy.

People say that he had epilepsy. But apart from that, he's very strident. but mostly what he has is intense charisma, an unbelievable confidence. Like he just has no self-doubt at all. And he has a total and complete belief in his ability to have whatever he wants. And one of the first things that he does in his career is he goes to Greece to study oratory. So he goes to study speaking. And while he's there, he discovers that Mithridates, who is a king in Turkey,

is harrying the borders of the Roman. empire at the time. So he raises a personal army with his own money and fights Mithridides for the Roman Empire. No one asked him to do this. He just does it and then writes back to Rome and says, oh, so I raised an army and fought Mithridates and he's going to leave us alone now. Jesus Christ. And that kind of like confidence and just go getting problem solving behavior is unbelievably hard. It is, you know, confidence does a lot. Like someone that is confident in their own abilities and their own sexuality is so attractive. There are many, many people that are famed for being, you know, Lotharios and womanisers. And not all of them drop dead gorgeous,

but there's something about them that's confident. And I think as well, it's like once you've got a reputation as being a great lover, that kind of becomes a self-perpetuating thing, because I guess people are thinking, well, I'd quite like to try that out. Yeah, exactly. And once he's slept with half the wives in Rome, the other half of the wives in Rome are going to be like, well, I kind of want to go. Like, I feeling left out at this stage. Like, why is my husband not important enough that Julia Caesar wants to sleep with me? And again, we have, like, names of all of these wives that he's sleeping with.

So Suetonius gives us all these names. He's like, he's sleeping with posthumia and he's sleeping with Lollia and he's sleeping with Titullianni. He's sleeping with Pompey's wife and he's sleeping with Sevilla. And, like, these aren't just, oh, he sleeps with all the wives in Rome. It's, like, named people and the names of that. their husbands so you can identify exactly who he is shagging his way around. A lot of the time throughout history when you've got a super, super, super powerful man,

they do have a lot of sex and that the husbands, they kind of, they either have to turn a blind eye to it or they actively encourage it because you are currying favour with an incredibly influential man. Was that the situation or was Caesar just turning up and just going, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? Tell me no. Yeah, basically, tell me no. So he's sleeping with their wives, partly because he gets information out of their wives. So a lot of these people are his political rivals.

He wants to be number one in everything. And there's this story about him when he's on his way to Spain on his first kind of actual job that the Romans give him, he passes through a little village. And he says, you know, I would rather be number one in a village like this than number two anywhere in the world. He considers everyone to be a rival. So partly he's getting information and partly he is doing it because he can. Like, they can't stop him. To be sleeping with Pompey's wife, Pompey is his great rival,

who is older than him, was the big man in Rome. He's the only person in Roman history, really, who gets called the Great, he's Pompey Magnus, because he conquers so much stuff. And to be sleeping with Pompey's wife is partly to be getting information, but partly emotionally to be getting a one-up on Pompey.

Like, you're married my daughter, but I'm sleeping with your wife. And you're not sleeping with mine. It's a hell of a flex. It is. And then because he has wives who are remarkably patient, and he is very, very keen that they're not sleeping with anyone, and he is very, very protective of their chastity.

And when there's even the slightest implication that someone has been close to them in a way that he deems to be inappropriate, he divorces them, it's a projection of that power that he can sleep with anyone's wife. They can't protect their wives, but he can protect the chastity of his wife because he is the most powerful. And then that's kind of self-repetuating in its hotness, like that power radiates outwards.

This would never survive the Me Too movement. Oh, absolutely not. Like, what's your take on it? Would these wives have been like, oh, hello, Caesar. Oh, I don't mind a bit. Or would there have been a certain amount of just like, oh, Jesus, Caesar's here again. Bloody out what we're going to do? Is there a consent in this?

Because there's literally nowhere that you can go. Caesar's knocked at the door. Like you said, what are you going to do? Who are you going to complain to? There's nothing. So do you think this was all consensual? I mean, the problem with it is that we've got no version of any stories from the perspective of the women, or which even considers the women to be actors with agency.

Like, it is all from the perspective of men who have wives, or whether they are consenting or not, is kind of irrelevant to the people that are writing about it. And there is always an element that a lot of the time when Julius Caesar is sleeping with you, who's sleeping with an army behind him. But also, you do kind of get stuff out. of it. Like, he is also ludicrously rich and ludicrously generous. If he takes a liking to you, then he will give you everything. And if you are sleeping with them, you will end up with piles of jewelry and gold. And you will find that you and your husband are given slightly preferential

treatment by Junior Caesar, which is nice, even if you don't necessarily fancy Julius Caesar. But there's no way of knowing, really, whether they consented or, you know, or, you know, whether they were into it or whether they were doing it because they got something other than, you know, sexual satisfaction out of it because no source is interested at all in them as people. Of course, why would they? They are just wives, yeah,

which is one of the many downsides of Roman sources, which is that they really don't largely consider women to be people. They consider them to be accessories to men. Julia says he sounds unstoppable. That's how he is with everything, is that he's unstoppable. You give him even the slightest modicum of an inn to anything. Like you go, okay, we're going to make you the governor of cis alpine gul.

It's a bit of a shit province. And he's like, right, well, I say, I conquered the entirety of Gaul. I have a million slaves now. I'm the richest man who's ever lived. Also, I conquered a bit of Britain, and I refuse to give up my thing. So I'm going to literally invade Rome so that I don't have to give up any power. And no, any time you try to give him even the time. tiniest bit of power or the tiniest in to getting into someone's pants, he's like, he's there.

He's on it and he's not going to give up. I'd like to introduce you to my wife, Caesar, and then three seconds later, like he's fucked your entire family and giving you enough money to build an extension. It's just like, there you go. It's so nice to meet you, Savilly. If you could just give us a minute. If you could just wait outside, we'll be back in 10. I'll be back in bed with Emma and Caesar after this short break.

He did have wives, though, and I often think. But there's no way they can't have known exactly what was going on. So that's an interesting deal. So tell me who he married and what was their life, like being married to this absolute rapacious horn dog? So he has three wives. The first he marries when he's 16. Very young.

Was that normal in Roman society? It's normal in elite Roman circles. It's less common for men necessarily, but marriage is a way to connect families. And so it's super normal to as soon as you can marry your kids to each other so your family is connected and he is married to the daughter of Kina her name is Cornelia she's very very very rich very powerful and at the time that he has married there's what's called the social wars are going on so it ties him very clearly to one side of

those social wars and he seems to actually really like Cornelia during that period of his life he's very few stories of the shagging he also is super young but it's the only one that he has a child with. So they have a daughter together. And they are together until she dies. So she dies when she's in her late 20s. He's in his late 20s. And he gives a kind of lovely memorial for her. He gives a speech. And there's no real stories about her particularly. She's the ideal Roman woman and that we know virtually nothing about her. She marries young. She has a child. And then she dies politely off screen. What does she die of? We don't know. The tradition is that she died in childbirth, but there's no child

and there's no kind of actual evidence that that happened. She might have just been shagged to death by Susan. She might have been shagged to death. She might have been great. If you're a woman and you die in your 20s, childbirth is the most common way that you die. Okay, yeah, that kind of makes sense. Yeah, but it could have been anything. She could have got a fever or, you know,

been hit by a cart. He then marries again and he marries a woman called Popaya, who is another very rich, powerful woman, but in the other side of the social wars. So the side that Julia Caesar was on in those wars, lost. And actually Sulla tried to force him to divorce Cornelia, like tried everything in his power to force him to divorce Cornelia,

and he refused, which is to his credit. So he marries the granddaughter of the winner. He is clever, you've got to give him that. Yeah, so as soon as he realizes there is a way into the winning side, he marries into that side. They don't have any children and they're not married for a huge amount of time. but this is the wife who he is with as he's on his political rise, and he divorces her because there are questions over her chastity.

Ooh, okay. Yeah, not that she necessarily did anything, but he is the head priest in Rome, and so as his wife, Pompeia holds a women-only festival in her house called the Bonadaya, and only women are allowed, and it's very kind of secretive, and no men are allowed. What was that? What happened is that? Well, we don't know, because only women were allowed, so sacrifice.

It was a very good secret. Exactly. But a kind of notorious nightmare person, I love him, but he's a nightmare person called Claudius, dresses up as a woman and sneaks in through a window. That's just dumb. Of Julius Caesar's house, partly because he wants to know what's going on, and partly because he wants to try to seduce Caesar's wife. And he is also known as a shagger.

But he's immediately caught because apparently he's very bad at drag. And so he's caught in a cupboard and is arrested and is put on trial for basically trying to violate the sacred holy order of the Bonadaya. But Caesar immediately divorces Pompeia, even though there's no real question over whether she actually slept with him or whether she did anything wrong. But because a man was caught in his house and because the rumours were around that he was trying to sleep with Pompeia, Julius Caesar says very famously, Caesar's wife must be above suspicion and divorces her. Even the slightest rumour that she could possibly have wanted to shag somebody else or that there was the vague possibility that she was near a man means that he can't have her on his team anymore, so he divorces her.

And we don't know anything about what happened to her afterwards. But then he marries a third time, a couple of years after that. This time marries a very young, very rich girl called Calpania, who is 17 when he marries her. He's now in his 40s. Yeah. I just say that Kate has called the best face of like, the...

Yeah, that's the, uh-face. It's all legal. Technically legal. She is younger than his daughter, her stepdaughter, and she is said to be kind of just a very nice girl, like very humble, very retiring, very shy. She is with him until he dies

over the next 20 years. And she's, She's there during all of the triumphs while the people are shouting about how many people he's been shagging. Great. Yeah. She's there while he is shagging all of the women in Rome. She's there while people are talking about all of the men he shagged.

She is also there when he runs off with Cleopatra. Father's a child with Cleopatra and then brings Cleopatra to Rome. Installs her in one of his houses and nips in to give her a shag every so often. And she still cares enough to try to warn him not to go to the Senate on the day that he is assassinated. I would not have done that. I'd be like, off you go. I've packed you some sandwiches, Caesar. Off you go. I would probably be like sending letters to the assassins. Like, do you want some help? Like I've got access to him in the back. He sleeps really deeply.

Do we have any sense of like, I suppose we wouldn't because she's a woman so nobody cared? But like how she was dealing with this? Because I'd be like going to a football stadium with your husband and have everybody there like chanting and singing that he's showing other people. When he goes to work, someone's making a joke about all the women that he showed. Yeah. I suppose you just have to eventually just like steering at the skin with it. And just like, yeah, that's what he does. But I live in a palace. So basically, yeah, like I live in a palace.

I'm the most powerful woman in Rome. I have so much money. Like, I can Scrooge McDuck my way into it. And if necessary, I can go to one of my like 1,000 houses on the Italian coast and gays at the sea. Yeah, I'm good. Yeah. And she's young. She seems like a sweet girl.

And it just seems like she's like, okay, this is the package. of being married to Julius Caesar. He's not going to be faithful, and that's fine. That's just not who he is. The deal that I made when I married him was that this is it. She's not complaining about it. She's not joining the assassins. She seems to want to keep him alive.

And so that's what it is. Is he going to shag a queen? Is he going to come home? He apparently at one point talks about trying to pass a law. He's made dictator for life. That's his official position. He's not technically an emperor. He's dictator for life.

and he tries to pass a law at one point to say that he can have as many wives as he wants and they will all be his legal wife so that he can have as many children as possible and then it'll be his legal children. So that's the kind of way that he's talking privately and she's just like, okay, sure, fine. Tell me about Queen Cleo then because that's one of the big love affairs, isn't it, that's gone down in history. Is the story that he snuck her into his palace hiding in a carpet or something like that? Is any of that true?

From just what you're saying, I can't imagine he would ever feel there need to be that discreet. So he doesn't sneak her in, she sneaks herself in. Ah. So he's in Egypt after the wars with Pompey. So after he's crossed the Rubicon, declared war on Rome, Pompey tries to fight him off. And Pompey is killed in Egypt by the king of Egypt, Ptolemy, who is clear. Eapatra's brother, unexpectedly and much to Caesar's dismay. They basically invite him in and then Kai's head off thinking that Julia

Caesar will be delighted and Julius Caesar is not delighted at all. So he turns up in Egypt in order to have a word and be like, what do you think you're doing in fearing with Roman politics like this? Nobody asked you to chop the head off of a great statement who I now actually love, Pompey Magnus, and is engaged in some negotiations with Ptolemy and thus involves himself in the ongoing war in Egypt between Ptolemy and his sister-wife, Cleopatra. And Cleopatra gets concerned that Caesar is going to fall in with her brother.

So she has herself wrapped up in a carpet or in, it's called a bed roll, more of like a big duvet, and snuck into the palace where Julius Caesar is staying and then appears in his dining room, basically. So it unrolls and all of us. sudden Cleopatra is there. She's young, she's beautiful, she speaks eight languages, and he is so delighted by the chutzpah of that, basically, like the boldness and the creativity, and it is exactly the kind of thing that he would do if he was in this situation and he needed to talk to

somebody who wouldn't talk to him, that he just immediately falls in love with her. He's absolutely enchanted and is like, oh yeah, no, you should be the queen of Egypt. Your brother's rubbish. Like, I am now going to join your side and is immediately persuaded. to join in and then throws himself into this war in Egypt supporting Cleopatra and puts her on the throne and chases out Ptolemy. And so he is then wildly indiscreet about it. He is happily be parading around with Cleopatra all the time, allows her to call the son that she has while they're together, Kaiser, basically son of Caesar. He never officially in Rome acknowledges, like legally acknowledges the child. But he does talk about her.

and talk about the child in a way that makes it clear that he thinks this kid is his. And although under Roman law not legally his and therefore can't inherit anything in Rome, he treats the child as if it was and he talks about the possibility that this is his child and he talks about them being in a relationship. And then when Cleopatra is the queen in the 40s, he brings her and this enormous entourage to Rome and happily like parades around. Cicero is disgusted. Cicero will only call her,

That woman. Oh, nice. But he puts her up in his fanciest house. He has this gorgeous house with massive gardens on the Tiber. He puts her up there. He visits her. They have dinners. He's very happily, like, this is Cleopatra.

Isn't she brilliant? Everybody come and meet Cleopatra. So there is zero discretion whatsoever. Everybody knows that they are shagging. She's not the only queen. He also shags the queen of Mauritania because... Wow. He is busy.

Yeah. He is. See, it's a wonder. He also, you know, re-did the entirety of the Senate and re-imagined how the Roman calendar worked by working out the patterns of the moon and gave a load of things his name and built all of these things and invaded a bunch of countries and visited virtually everywhere. And you're like, did you sleep? I feel like he was like a slept two hours a day person, but he's such a micromanager as well. It'd have to be. And his relationship with Cleo was cut short on account of him being

stabbed to death, wasn't it? Yes. So he stabbed to death while she's in Rome. So she has to skedaddle very quickly. Sharp exits. Yeah. So he stabbed on the Senate floor because he had declared himself dictator for life. And then his plan was that he was going to go back to the eastern Mediterranean, he was going to invade Persia, which is a thing that Romans attempt to do occasionally when they're trying to make a name himself. But he had basically made all of these plans for the next five years of Roman politics and people were stressed that that meant that there was going to be no end. He was never going to stop being the sole ruler. And they wanted the chance to be a sole ruler. Fair. So they stab him to death and everything falls into chaos. And Cleopatra

has to leg it out of Rome as quickly as she possibly can. But maintains diplomatic relations with Mark Antony. Yeah. Yeah, she wasn't too upset about that for too long, was she? She threw herself back into that pretty quick. She knows that the Romans are going to be the power that last and so she knows that she needs to keep them on side as much as possible. She could not have predicted that Octavian was going to come along because he's a child. Like he's 19 years old when Julius Caesar dies and so everybody plans as if they were only going to be dealing with adults and they're going to have to deal with a sociopathic teenager. And so she throws herself in with Mark Anthony very happily. I have read that there is some

evidence that Caesar like boys as well, which doesn't surprise me because it seems like if it stayed still long enough, he'd have a go at it. Like, what is the evidence for that? Do you think that that's right? Yeah, it's about as good as the evidence for the about the he like women. Wow. Specifically, so we've got a really great poem by Kutalas, which is basically about how Caesar and his friend Mamera spend all their time shagging boys. Right. And that they just love shagging boys and girls at the same time. And specifically, that they, he calls them Sodomites and catamites, so that they both pitch and catch.

Top and bottom. Yeah, exactly. So we have this poem that he's notorious for sleeping with all the boys. The most famous one is that he is supposed to have slept with Nicomides of Bithynia, who is the king of Bithynia. So in his younger years, he spent a lot of time in Bithynia, spent some time in the court there, and it was widely believed that he had spent lots of time as his partner,

basically, that he had ousted the queen of Bethinia and spent several months living happily as the partner of Nicomides. The joke constantly was that he was the bottom in that relationship. So everybody calls him the queen's rival and the queen of Bethinia. And there is a long-running joke because the Romans are kind of fine

with homosexual sex as long as you are not the bottom. They're very much about passivity to them is considered to be very shameful, whereas their active role is largely fine, like it doesn't really bother them that much. So they joke relentlessly that he is passive in that relationship. And they bring it up all the time. It comes up again in the triumph

for the wars that he has in Turkey and Pythinia. And when he has his Gallic triumph, the men again are chanting that he conquered all the ghouls just as Nicomede has conquered him. And there's loads of letters of Cicero mocking him. He brings it up in the Senate. Like there's a point where Caesar is trying to argue

for people to give some tax relief to Nicomides and Cicero is like, oh, you would say that, wouldn't you? After everything the Nicomides gave you, now you have to give him something. Wow. Yeah, so it's like something that they'll say directly to his face and is part of his public persona that he has sex with men and that he is perfectly happy in both roles

and that he's just a shaggar. Like he doesn't, he just likes sex. Why would they say that he was the bottom? Like, what is the evidence for that? Or is that like the Roman equivalent of just like nonsense stuff that people say when they're trying to attack someone's masculinity today? Or is there any evidence that he preferred to be a bottom? No.

Our best evidence is that there was a guy called Gaius Memeus, who is kind of just a Roman senator basically, who says that he saw a party where Caesar was there and was acting as a cup bearer to Nicomedes, which demonstrates that he was in a subservient position, and then he names a bunch of people who were also at this party. And the fact that he was a cup bearer is evidence that young Caesar was therefore the passive person in that relationship.

But as far as evidence goes, that's it. Was he younger? Yeah, so this is during his younger years when he's in the East. So he's like being cast as a twink almost. Yeah, basically. Why? And it doesn't seem to be. something that apart from his baldness, almost nothing bothers him. Like, he's so confident about

who he is and what he does and how successful he is that most things just kind of roll off his back. And the fact that his men are chanting, you know, Nicomides conquered sees and now he's conquered ghoul. So what are you going to do about it? That's true. It is a thing that people tease him for. Yeah. Yeah. And it is a demonstration of how much that notion of passivity and sex is considered to be, you know, it's all tied up in the same misogyny that they have. They're considered to be shameful, to be passive in sex. It's not something that particularly affects him because it only works when you're insulting someone if they're hurt by it and he's not.

And he couldn't give two folks, could he really, really couldn't. How much of Roman history and by extension European history do you think has been influenced by this man shagging? Because like, I know that, you know, a brilliant political tactician and all. all of this stuff. But like these also like he can't keep away from it. And it seems like a lot of major decisions and wars and political alliances have been the result of this guy trying to get his end away. Yeah. Well, a lot of Egyptian history, I would say. You might have a different history of when Egypt joins the Roman Empire. If it joins the Roman Empire, if he hadn't met Leopatra

in that way and been so charmed by her tactics and by her personality, then you've got a whole different world if he hadn't tried to shag her. But the shagging is just part of his desire to own and dominate everything. And it is just part of his desire to put his mark on everything in the world. Like nothing is left. Like he changes what Rome looks like. He changes what the calendar looks like. He changes how people interact with their politicians.

You know, he marches through Gaul and Spain and parts of Turkey in the East. And it makes them all. client kings of Rome, but specifically to him. He makes everybody loyal to him. He's not that interested in the concept of Rome and it is all just that he wants everyone to love Julia Caesar and know that Julia Caesar is the best at everything. All right. Final question. Did he ever get sick? I mean, you can't have that much sex with that many different people in all over the place, relentlessly, and not at some point pick something up. Do you have any record? of that at all? No. He has either had the world's greatest immune system or a very, very discrete

doctor. My money's on the discrete doctor. What do you think? I suspect it's the discrete doctor, although knowing the kind of things that Romans used for medicine, I don't know how helpful they would have been if he picked up gonorrhea. But, you know, he's in his 50s when he dies. And so if he'd picked up anything like really awful, like syphilis, then it probably would have been showing by then. So he seems to escaped that, but whether he was all warty or had secretions that you don't want to know about. We just don't know. We just don't know, unfortunately. But you have been so much fun to talk to about this. I think I would have shagged him. What do you think you would have shagged him? I probably would for the story.

For the story, right, for the plot. Yeah. If nothing else, I wouldn't want to be left out. Like, I would have pho. You would. I just want to know if it's true. If the, If the rumours, if the legends are true, I want to know. Yeah. If people want to know more about you and your work, and they should, where can they find you? They can find me at emasothern.com where everything is there. I have my podcast, which is history is sexy. And my book, which is just out, is a history of the Roman Empire in 21 women

in an attempt to prove that women were people in the past two. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you to Emma for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't feel. forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you want us to explore a subject or perhaps you just wanted to say hello, you can now email us at betwixt at

history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets for History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.