In an important paper for modern Suetonian studies, ‘Suetonius the Ventriloquist’, Cynthia Damon has drawn attention to the sheer number of quotes that the biographer places in the mouths of his emperors, more than 250 in the twelve Lives, and has argued that, at the end of categories (i.e. thematically organised sections of material) or episodes, these quotations often take the place of the sententiae that are found in annalistic history.Footnote ¹ They are, she argues, ‘one of Suetonius’ most distinctive biographical techniques’, a powerful device for characterisation, a particularly vivid and direct way of encapsulating a vice or virtue: ‘the Caesars are Suetonius’ dummies, and what makes his act so very clever is that he puts their own words there’ and successfully incriminates them from their own lips.Footnote ²

This article focuses on one example of words placed in the mouth of Julius Caesar which can be considered as both deeply illuminating of Caesar’s humour and of Suetonius’ conception of Caesar. Relatively little has been written on humour in Suetonius. Bob Milns and Trevor Luke have discussed Suetonius’ treatment of Vespasian’s humour,Footnote ³ and more than thirty years ago Tony Reekmans devoted an extensive study to ‘Verbal Humour in Plutarch and Suetonius’ Lives’,Footnote ⁴ but one that gives short shrift to Caesar’s wit in the passage to be discussed here.Footnote ⁵ Just as little attention has been paid to Caesar’s humour, as far as that can be ascertained from his own writings or from the sayings attributed to him in [Pseudo-]Plutarch’s Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata.Footnote ⁶

Before examining this particular example of (alleged) wit, it is necessary to place it in the narrative framework that Suetonius carefully provides, focusing on the events of Caesar’s consulship.Footnote ⁷ The first part of the extant Divus Iulius is the extensive chronological survey of Caesar’s life up to his crossing of the Rubicon. Suetonius emphasises heavily Caesar’s ambition and ruthlessness in pursuit of his goal of world domination: this destiny was confirmed to him by a dream in Gades (7) and thereafter he strove by every means (legal and otherwise) to achieve it – means that included a planned massacre of the senate (9.1), bribery (13), and corruption (19.1). The final step in his progress through the cursus honorum was his election as consul for 59 (19.1), which came at the price of a sacrificed triumph because anonymous multi spoke against a concession permitting Caesar to declare his candidacy in absentia. Thwarted in their attempts to prevent Caesar’s candidacy, the Optimates employed bribery on an unprecedented scale (justified even by the sanctimonious Cato) to ensure that he would have an obstructive colleague and attempted to frustrate his ambitions for future military glory by allocating a consular province, silvae callesque (‘woods and drove-roads’), in which no significant military operations would be forthcoming (19.2). Suetonius, then, draws a picture of concerted, persistent opposition and obstruction by Caesar’s political opponents, who deliver a series of slights (iniuriae),Footnote ⁸ which spur (instinctus) him to bring about the unlikely reconciliation of Pompey and Crassus.

Suetonius’ extended account of the year 59 (20–22) is not structured chronologically, but has a logical arrangement and builds to a climax:Footnote ⁹ (i) the lex agraria and its consequences (20.1–2), (ii) the measures by which Caesar demonstrated his sole control and readiness to violate all procedures and precedents (20.3), (iii) the intimidation he employed against his opponents (20.4–5), and (iv) the measures taken to secure his position after his consulship and the arrogance to which that led (21–22.1). This fourth unit ends with Caesar’s personal acknowledgement of his regnum to the senate (22) expressed in remarkable words at a meeting which was probably held on the Ides of June,Footnote ¹⁰ shortly after the senate had voted to add Transalpine Gaul to Caesar’s existing command.Footnote ¹¹ To underscore that Suetonius’ account of 59 is not chronological, the culminating atrocity of Caesar’s behaviour (22.2) predates the elimination of Vettius (20.5), which itself is presented as the climax of the series of intimidations perpetrated by Caesar in chapter 20.Footnote ¹²

Suetonius’ overriding theme is Caesar’s abuse of the collegial magistracy through physical violence, ignoring legitimate forms of obstruction to his legislation and distributing public assets as he sees fit. Aiming to humiliate all his opponents and undo them by fraudulent incrimination, he does not even shrink from the elimination of his own agent Vettius. Aided and abetted by his new son-in-law Pompey and new father-in-law Piso, Caesar is out of control. So, we reach Suetonius’ culminating exemplum in the chapter that he devotes to the military commands that Caesar secured, which is itself the climax to the account of 59 BC.Footnote ¹³

Two linguistic clues mark Caesar’s behaviour as problematic: elatus, used elsewhere in this sense of Nero’s boast that previous principes had never realised what powers lay at their disposal when it came to killing (Ner. 37.3),Footnote ¹⁵ and non temperauit quin, a phrase which explicitly describes a failure of self-control.Footnote ¹⁶ Paucis post diebus reminds the reader that Caesar is not speaking in the heat of the moment after being awarded Gallia Comata, and thus adds another element to Suetonius’ criticism. Before a packed senate, Caesar gloats over the inability of his opponents to prevent him achieving his desiresFootnote ¹⁷ and rubs in the humiliation of their having to concede Gallia Comata, concluding with words that spark our humorous interchange. Presented in oratio obliqua, Caesar says, or perhaps boasts,Footnote ¹⁸ proinde ex eo insultaturum omnium capitibus. Commentators since the sixteenth century have recognised that insultaturum capitibus must have been capable of an obscene interpretation. The two words can bear straightforward or sexual meanings: (i) caput can be the human head or the glans of the penis (elsewhere only in poetry)Footnote ¹⁹ or, as will be the case here, the mouth, particularly when used for oral sex;Footnote ²⁰ (ii) insulto can mean physical dancing or jumping or be a verbal or other insult, even, as Jim Adams puts it, ‘a humiliating or insulting sexual act’.Footnote ²¹ The only other extant combination of noun and verb appears in Virgil: the doddery Evander speaking to his son Pallas says of the cruel Etruscan king/tyrant Mezentius, neque finitimo Mezentius umquam | huic capiti insultans tot ferro saeva dedisset | funera (‘nor would Mezentius, scorning this head of mine, even though I was his close neighbour, have produced so many cruel deaths by his sword’).Footnote ²² Mezentius had been king of Caere before his expulsion for cruelty and Evander ruled the nearby Pallanteum on the site of the future Rome. Insultans describes some disregard of Evander by Mezentius, probably arrogance rather than a physical assault, and ‘head’ is synecdoche for the person.Footnote ²³

Caesar’s interlocutor chooses to interpret insultaturum capitibus as a threat to impose irrumatio, to silence his critics.Footnote ²⁴ Threats of oral rape reflect a brutal, extreme virility that emasculates the victim, rendering him weak and effeminate.Footnote ²⁵ As Anthony Corbeill puts it, this is ‘an assertive sexual posture’ and a claim to a ‘superior masculinity’.Footnote ²⁶ Caesar, moreover, is not threatening just one rape but multiple – his masculinity is infinite and inexhaustible.

It is important to ask, even if any answer cannot be definite, whether Suetonius’ Caesar deliberately used a sexual threat,Footnote ²⁷ and, if he did, whether he meant it physically or metaphorically, or whether he used an expression that was taken in a way that he had not intended. Suetonius’ overall picture of Caesar will suggest strongly that the threat was issued deliberately in sexual terms by one who was highly sensitive to criticism of his masculinity. Jim Adams rightly thinks that Caesar’s words should be understood metaphorically: such threats, whether intended or inferred, ‘were so banal that potential acts of irrumatio had become something of a joke’, a way of expressing aggression ‘but no real intention on the user’s part’.Footnote ²⁸ This is undoubtedly true as far as threats of irrumatio in general are concerned and nothing in Suetonius’ wider portrayal of Caesar paints him as an irrumator. Footnote ²⁹

Logically what follows is to ask why Caesar would use such sexual language. Suetonius presents us with lots of material that sheds light on the language of political discourse in 59.

In the powerful circumstantial case that he builds in chapter 49 relating to the rumours of Caesar having sacrificed his pudicitia to Nicomedes,Footnote ³⁰ Bibulus’ first insult carries the same message as those of Dolabella and Curio Senior, but the second goes further in a way that is consistent with Suetonius’ developed picture of Caesar. Firstly, he claims that Caesar had not been the innocent victim of an elderly predator but actively wanted a royal mate and secondly that Caesar’s ambitions had grown and were dangerous to the state – his current desire in his consulship was to establish himself as a ‘king’, the same charge in the same terms (regnum) as Suetonius has demonstrated was made by Cicero, Caesarem in consulatu confirmasse regnum de quo aedilis cogitarat (9.2: ‘during his consulship Caesar had established the tyranny he had been planning when he was aedile’).Footnote ³¹

Next Suetonius sets out as the first of a further four pieces of evidence the report of M. Iunius Brutus, the future conspirator, that at some stage in 59 a certain Octavius, ‘after calling Pompey “King” before a very large gathering, greeted Caesar as “Queen”’.Footnote ³² That there was some mental issue with Octavius does not detract from Suetonius’ argument, which is to show that Caesar’s reputation was widely compromised, here publicly before a large audience by someone who would appear to be an ordinary citizen, and thus not in possession of privileged information.Footnote ³³ Later in the same chapter Suetonius cites a witty interjection by Cicero in a senatorial debate, which is probably best dated to 60,Footnote ³⁴ and thus further useful information about the currency and ubiquity of the rumours about Caesar’s manliness: quondam etiam in senatu defendenti ei Nysae causam, filiae Nicomedis, beneficiaque regis in se commemoranti, ‘remoue’, inquit, ‘istaec, oro te, quando notum est, et quid ille tibi et quid illi tute dederis’ (‘Once when Caesar was defending Nysa, Nicomedes’ daughter, and was recalling the favours that the king had done him, he said “No more on that subject, I beg you, since it’s well known what he gave you and what you gave him!”’). I suggest, then, that in June 59 Caesar, with an eye on the slurs against his manliness, deliberately taunts his opponents with a sexual insult painting them as his (future) queens. I think this is more appealing (and thoroughly consistent with Suetonius’ characterisation) than to have Caesar simply making a slip.Footnote ³⁵

To return to the interchange that ensued in June 59: the unnamed interlocutor understands, or chooses to understand, that Caesar has issued a threat in sexual language and insultingly (per contumeliam)Footnote ³⁶ retorts ‘that won’t be easy for any woman’ (negante … facile hoc ulli feminae fore).Footnote ³⁷ Commentators have said nothing on ulli; translators render it as either as an indefinite article or more forcefully as ‘any’.Footnote ³⁸ An emphatic sense would align best with Suetonius’ usage,Footnote ³⁹ perhaps with the implied idea of ‘let alone for a woman like you’.Footnote ⁴⁰ While it receives no praise from Suetonius,Footnote ⁴¹ I credit the interlocutor with a delightfully sarcastic retort that cruelly, but unsurprisingly, brings up the most difficult episode of Caesar’s past.

The final element of the interchange is Caesar’s response, in relation to which Suetonius assists the reader with an explanatory phrase, quasi adludens. Suetonius’ English translators do not know what to make of quasi and tend to ignore it;Footnote ⁴² the French are more successful.Footnote ⁴³ ‘As if’ (quasi) adds an important layer of meaning: Caesar’s immediate audience perceived Caesar’s response as humorous and may even have appreciated his use of a common rhetorical device for deflecting and disarming a critic, but the reader understands that behind the apparent wit lies a harsh reality.Footnote ⁴⁴ Perhaps also the quoque that follows is not a variation of ‘both … and’, balancing the reference to Amazons, but means ‘in Syria too a woman (Semiramis) has reigned’. If so, then Caesar retorts that he is no ordinary woman (ulla femina), but one who reigns in Rome. Suetonius has prepared the ground for this by earlier quoting a letter written by Cicero to the senator Q. Axius that in 59 ‘Caesar had established the regnum he had been planning when he was aedile’ (9.2). So, rather than denying the allegation, a manoeuvre he was to adopt disastrously in 46 after the Gallic triumph,Footnote ⁴⁵ Caesar turns the logic of the interlocutor back against him and his senatorial supporters as a pointed insult: ‘if you think being subject to a king is bad, what does it say about you that are subject to a woman, a queen?’

The two exempla that Caesar cites in support of his position should give the interlocutor and the audience much to worry about: Caesar is a warrior queen. Although we think primarily of Amazons as a mythical race of warrior women who appear from the earliest Greek literature, for Romans in 59 they were a historical fact, whose existence had been confirmed just a few years earlier by Pompey. He had even displayed some specimens in his triumph in 61.Footnote ⁴⁶

It is harder to surmise what the senatorial audience in 59 BC knew about Semiramis, although the Greek historical tradition from Herodotus onwards presents her as a female ruler who performed most of the roles associated with men, notably major infrastructure projects and military campaigning.Footnote ⁴⁷ That she was a figure known to the educated may be confirmed by Cicero’s insult to Gabinius in 56 as Semiramis illa;Footnote ⁴⁸ and Valerius Maximus uses her as an exemplar of ira (9.3.ext.4). If it was known at the time, one story that Diodorus relates might have been particularly worrying (2.20.4–5): Semiramis persuaded her husband to hand over his power to her for five days, during which time she won over the armed forces, had her husband arrested and went on to a long, successful solo reign.Footnote ⁴⁹ Through the lex Vatinia queen Caesar had been entrusted with an army for five years and the senators had just exacerbated the problem by handing over Transalpine Gaul with another legion. Caesar’s regnasse taunts the audience with their worst fears of what Caesarian dominance might be. For Suetonius, then, Caesar’s apparent humour is deadly serious (and powerfully prophetic – his current regnum is nothing compared to that of his dictatorships).

Is the Caesar that emerges from this reading of Suetonius any different from that of other modern scholars? Judith Hallett, who so often offers exemplary studies of Roman sexuality, appears to be a poor reader of Suetonius when she claims,Footnote ⁵⁰

This ‘reading’ first appears to ignore the rhetorical situation and to take what was a debating position that in effect turned the tables on his opponents, characterising them as even less manly than they had characterised him, as a confession of real male inadequacy; on this one occasion Caesar did not fight the insinuation, but his general practice cannot be extrapolated from that. Secondly, Hallett appears to focus on only one aspect of Suetonius’s treatment of Caesar’s sexual activities, ignoring the chapters (50–52) devoted to Caesar’s heterosexual enterprises that spanned much of his adult life and culminated in his relationship with Cleopatra, from which sprang a son whom (Suetonius notes) Caesar allowed to bear his name.Footnote ⁵¹ While these chapters begin with rumour, they end powerfully with Suetonius’ own asseveration of Caesar’s love for Servilia, Eunoe, and Cleopatra. Modern historians may suspect that Caesar was impotent, judging by his failure to father children by his last two wives,Footnote ⁵² but Suetonius entertains no such ideas: Caesarion was his child (52.1). Although Suetonius’ Caesar does not complain about his troops’ songs at the Gallic triumph, which seem to have made as much of his numerous heterosexual affairs in Rome and the provinces (51) as they did of his being Nicomedes’ lover (49.4), he is grievously hurt by Catullus’ poems on his alleged sexual relationship with Mamurra, which, he claims, left ‘indelible marks’ (perpetua stigmata) on his reputation (73).Footnote ⁵³

Eva Cantarella suggests that Caesar ‘was … a real man, and could afford to be passive if that was what he wanted’.Footnote ⁵⁴ She gives due weight to the heterosexual Caesar, but like Hallett fails to appreciate the rhetorical nature of Caesar’s words: his actions in 46, namely an angry public denial of the allegations under oath (κατώμνυε), as opposed to an argumentative strategy adopted on the turn in 59, indicate that Caesar could not afford to be seen publicly as passive,Footnote ⁵⁵ even if behind closed doors that was a role he had on occasion played. Suetonius’ very carefully constructed argument in chapter 49 on the ubiquity and longevity of the allegation regarding Nicomedes in fact does two things – it proves the power and the danger of the allegation throughout Caesar’s career and demonstrates that there was no evidence to prove conclusively that Caesar had surrendered his pudicitia to Nicomedes or to anyone else.

Over more than twenty years Anthony Corbeill has argued that Caesar, from the earliest stages of his career, portrayed himself as ‘an individual transgressing normative elite values’,Footnote ⁵⁶ and that on this occasion, no doubt dressed in his usual distinctive toga and loose tunic (a visual embodiment of mollitia), embraces ‘the charge – a move almost never encountered in contemporary invective’.Footnote ⁵⁷ There is, I would suggest, a key difference between embracing and refusing to deny; the latter indeed is an acknowledged technique for deflecting the argument of one’s attacker especially when combined with a retort that puts a telling twist on the original accusation. Corbeill’s comment, ‘by embracing the charges Caesar focuses attention on them in order to expose them to ridicule’,Footnote ⁵⁸ rightly identifies ridicule as important but does not identify that the ridicule falls on Caesar’s opponents themselves rather than on the charges, because the further implication is that they are even more ‘woman’ than Caesar by being ‘her’ subjects; Caesar says rhetorically, ‘Well, if you think that, then …’

In his Johns Hopkins thesis on ‘Wit as Argument in Cicero and Beyond’, Robert Webber argues that Caesar compared himself to an Assyrian queen because that was ‘something so outrageous as to be dismissed outright’.Footnote ⁵⁹ For Suetonius at least, Caesar’s comparison was all too true. Whereas Webber writes (2015: 158) ‘whether or not it was intentional, the Semiramis comparison was slightly absurd, and it had the effect of both deflecting the criticism and insulting the Senate at the same time’, I have suggested that it was (in Suetonius’ eyes) intentional and not absurd; we do not know the effect of the comparison on the senatorial audience, but we can recognise that (in Suetonius’ eyes) Caesar intended to insult the senate (or at least his opponents) by pursuing the logic of the interlocutor.

In my reading of the passage Suetonius grants Caesar intentionality in his threat to irrumate his opponents (metaphorically) and in the striking comparison of himself with Semiramis. While Caesar’s initial invective may not count as wit or humour (at least if we impose the canons of Cicero and Quintilian in relation to double entendre and obscenity for the orator), the interlocutor does provide a good retort that turns the opprobrium back onto Caesar. Caesar responds with what Suetonius and his readers know was darkly true: the Caesar who had jokingly threatened to crucify his pirate-captors (and had done so) now jokingly talks of his reign, perhaps underscoring the present reality of 59 BC but also foreshadowing what was to come.