The Dispatch

Forty years before he wrote a word anyone remembers, Caesar was already managing what would be said about him — in funeral speeches, in restored monuments, and in the first published record of the Roman Senate.

A course on the thought of Caesar.

Philosophy · Antiquity

Course outline

1. The Missing First Page — Two ancient biographies of Caesar survive. Both have lost their openings — the paragraphs that would have given his family, his birth and his childhood. The man who spent his life controlling what…
2. A Prisoner Who Read Aloud — Captured by pirates and held for ransom, Caesar raised the price himself, ordered his captors to be quiet when he wanted to sleep, performed his own compositions to them, and insulted the ones who…
3. The Images of Marius — A Roman funeral was a performance with a fixed grammar, and in 69 BC Caesar used it for two things at once: to claim descent from kings and from Venus, and to put the banned face of Marius back in…
4. The Statue at Gades — Everyone knows Caesar wept before a statue of Alexander. Suetonius has a statue and a sigh; Plutarch has a book and tears; they place it eight years apart; and the historian who has studied…
5. Debt and the Pontificate — Between 65 and 63 Caesar spent money he did not have on games nobody could match and an election he was not expected to win. The bribery is not the interesting part. What he was buying is.
6. Two Men of Striking Worth — The Catilinarian debate is where Caesar first argues in a source we can read. What survives is not really his argument — it is a formal comparison between him and Cato, written by a partisan of his…
7. The Daily Record — Caesar's consulship of 59 is remembered for the violence, the triumvirate and a colleague who barricaded himself indoors issuing omens. Its first act was quieter and is the one this course has been…
8. What He Was Building — Forty-one years, and almost nothing anyone would call an achievement. What there is instead is a consistent, unusual habit — and a body of writing, most of it lost, that shows what the habit was for.

Works read in this course

• The Twelve Caesars — Robert Graves's 1957 translation — IN COPYRIGHT. The Julius opens with its first paragraphs missing in every manuscript.
• Life of Caesar — Dryden's translation, public domain. The surviving text begins abruptly with Sulla; the opening is lost.
• The Conspiracy of Catiline — S. A. Handford's translation — IN COPYRIGHT. Sallust was a Caesarian, writing within twenty years.

Built from

A synthesis of 6 books.

• Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (Graves)
• Plutarch, Life of Caesar (Dryden)
• Sallust, The Conspiracy of Catiline (Handford)
• Diana Spencer, The Roman Alexander
• Matthew Roller, Models from the Past in Roman Culture
• Luca Grillo, The Art of Caesar's Bellum Civile

Terms introduced

exemplum, imagines, Pontifex Maximus, acta diurna, cursus honorum

Part of the Simposeum course library.