Dan Snow's History Hit - Julius Caesar's Sex Life

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

"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 around 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.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's that time of the week that everyone looks forward to. When you don't have to listen to me, you can listen to one of our sibling podcasts. In this case, Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society. This one is about Julius Caesar's sex life. I'm afraid, inevitably, we are going with the quote, I came, I saw, I conquered. I'm sorry, and I just want to apologise for that. This is an episode in which the brilliant Kate Lister talks to Emma Southern. She finds out all about Julius Caesar's sex life. And let me tell you, it is remarkable. You weren't just active on the battlefield. Wow. Enjoy.

Hello, my lovely Batricksters. 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 dues 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 dues, 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 to I saw, I conquered, I came.

Because it seems, Bertwixters, that he liked to conquer and come an awful lot. And today we are going Bertwixt 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 in a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the button. Come on, ERA! Come on, now! Come on, ERA! Come on, now! Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful times.

Goodness has nothing to do with it, does it? Hello and 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, Rome's 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.

Hello and welcome back to Betwixt 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 Julius Caesar's sex life because he has so much sex. It's amazing he has time to do anything else. The first thing I want to ask you is, how do we know about his sex life? He didn't have a diary that he kept, or medical records. How do we know? Because when was he knocking around and humping stuff? So he's the late Republic, so he's the kind of first century BCE.

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 Julius 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 set the other day. And he really hates Caesar. 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 Julius 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 Julius 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, he'll fuck it and vice versa. 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, he'll kill you. 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 is 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 loose belts and long sleeves with fringes which is considered to be wildly fashionable and very dandyish kind of borderline feminine behavior. 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, or there were rumors. 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 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 a 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 ugly he is said to be kind of tall and the romans say they tend to say weird things like well shaped which basically means that um 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 will 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 striking. But mostly what he has is intense charisma and unbelievable confidence. 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 Mithridates 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 of Fort 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 womanizers 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. I'm feeling left out at this stage. Like, why is my husband not important enough that Julius Caesar wants to sleep with me?

And again, we have 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 Lolia, and he's sleeping with. So Suetonius gives us all these names. He's like, he's sleeping with Posthumia and he's sleeping with Lolia and he's sleeping with Tertullia and he's sleeping with Pompey's wife and he's sleeping with Sevillea. And like, these aren't just, oh, he sleeps with all the wives in Rome. It's like named people and the names of 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 a 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, I would rather be number one in a village like this than number two anywhere in the world. He passes through a little village and he says, 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. 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 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 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-perpetuating in its hotness like that power radiates outwards this would never survive the me too movement oh absolutely not 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 hell what we're gonna do is there a consent in this because there's literally nowhere that you can go caesar's knocked at the door yeah like you said what are you gonna do who are you gonna 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 so whether they are consenting or not is kind of irrelevant to the people that are writing about it yeah and there is always an element that a lot of the time when Julius Caesar is sleeping with you, he'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 julius 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 whether they were into it or whether they were doing it because they got something other than 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. Julius 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 in to anything. You go, okay, we're going to make you the governor of Cisalpine Gaul. It's a bit of a shit province. And he's like, right, well, so 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 refused 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 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 give you enough money to build an extension it's just like there you go it's so nice to meet you savilla 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 I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. he did have wives though and i often think like 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

horndog? 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 rich, very, very powerful. And at the time that he is 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 twenties, he's in his late twenties, 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.

or, you know, been hit by a cart. He then marries again, and he marries a woman called Poppea, who is another very rich, powerful woman, but in the other side of the social wars. So the side that Julius 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 realises that 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 Bonadea. And only women are allowed and it's very kind of secretive and no men are allowed. What was that? What happened there? Well, we don't know because only women were allowed. So sacrificing and singing. It was a very good secret. Exactly. But a kind of notorious nightmare person, I love him, but he's a nightmare person

called Clodius, dresses up as a woman and sneaks in through a window. That's just dumb. That's just... 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 Bonadio. 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 rumors 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 rumor 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 Calpurnia, who is 17 when he marries her. He's now in his 40s.

Yeah. I'll just say that Kate has pulled the best face of like the... Yeah, the the 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 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's also there when he runs off with Cleopatra, fathers 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 sending 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. 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 it'd be like going to a football stadium with your husband and have everybody there like chanting and singing that yeah and every time he goes to work someone's making a joke about all the women that he showed yeah i suppose you just have to just eventually just like staring 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 mc McDuck my way into it. And if necessary, I can go to one of my like thousand houses on the Italian coast and gaze 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 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 they'll all be his legal children. So that's the kind of way

that he's talking privately, and she's just like, okay, sure, fine. 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 the 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 Cleopatra's brother, unexpectedly and much to Caesar's dismay. They

basically invite him in and then cut his head off thinking that Julius Caesar will be delighted and Julius Caesar was 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 interfering with Roman politics like this? Nobody asked you to chop the head off of our 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 bedroll, like 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 a 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. I am now going to join your side. And he's 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, 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, Caesarean, 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 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 that he shags. He also shags the Queen of Mauritania because... He is busy. Yeah, he is. See, it's a wonder. He also, you know, redid the entirety of the Senate and reimagined 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 quick sharp exit 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 east of the 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 for themselves. 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. 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. 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 lasts 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 if they're going to have to deal with a sociopathic teenager and so she throws herself in with Mark Antony very happily I have read that there is some evidence that Caesar liked 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 fact that he liked women. Wow.

Specifically, so we've got a really great poem by Cthulhu, 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 Nicomedes 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 Bithynia and spent several months living happily as the partner of Nicomedes. The joke constantly was that he was the bottom in that relationship so they everybody calls him the queen's rival and the queen of bithynia 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 um they're very much about passivity to them is considered to be very shameful, whereas their active role is largely

fine. 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 Bithynia. And when he has his Gallic triumph, the men again are chanting that he conquered all the ghouls just as Nicomedes conquered him. And there's loads of letters of Cicero mocking him. He brings it up in the Senate. There's a point where Caesar is trying to argue for people to give some tax relief to Nicomedes. And Cicero is like, oh, you would say that, wouldn't you? After everything that Nicomedes gave you, now is like oh you would say that wouldn't you like after everything the Nicomedes 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 it's 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 shagger 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? I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. To be a bottom. No, our best evidence is that there was a guy called Gaius Memmius, who is a 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 have been something that, apart from his baldness, almost nothing bothers him. 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, Nicomede's conquered Caesar and now he's conquered Gaul. So what are you going to do about it?

That's true. It is a thing that people tease him for. Yeah. And it is a demonstration of how much that notion of passivity in sex is considered to be, you know, it's all tied up in the same misogyny that they have. It's considered to be shameful to be passive in sex is considered to be, you know, it's all tied up in the same misogyny that they have. It's 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. Yeah, that's true. He couldn't give two fucks because he really, really couldn't. How much of Roman history and by extension European history do you think has been influenced by this man's shagging? Because I know that you're a brilliant political tactician and all of this stuff, but 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 Cleopatra 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. Nothing is left. He changes what Rome looks like. He changes what the calendar looks like. He changes how people interact with their politicians. 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 Julius Caesar and know that Julius Caesar is the best at everything. Our final question. Did he ever get sick i mean you can't have that much sex with that many different people in 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 was either had the world's greatest immune system or a very, very discreet doctor. My money's on the discreet doctor. What do you think?

I suspect it's the discreet 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 he's in his 50s when he dies. And so if he'd picked up anything really awful, like syphilis, then it probably would have been showing by then. So he seems to have 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 fun you would i just want to know if it's true if the if the rumors 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 emmasouthern.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 too 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 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 historyhit.com. This podcast was edited by Tom DeLarge and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit. you