Something About Julius Caesar Doesn't Add Up

A character study built around one question: why would the most dangerous political operator in Rome walk into the Senate on 15 March 44 BC, warned and unguarded? Button’s answer is that Caesar had learned, over and over, that leaning into danger pays, and that the lesson finally outgrew the man who learned it.

He walks the pattern through five episodes. As a young man Caesar refused Sulla’s order to divorce Cornelia, the daughter of Sulla’s dead rival Cinna, hid in the Sabine country while sick with fever, and bribed his way past the men hunting him until the Vestal Virgins and his relatives won him a pardon (Suetonius has Sulla warning that there were “many Mariuses” in him). Taken by pirates on the way to study at Rhodes, he told them their ransom of 20 talents was too low and that they should ask for 50, treated them as his crew, and promised to crucify them; once ransomed he raised ships as a private citizen and did. Plutarch tells the story; Suetonius adds that he had their throats cut first. In politics he borrowed heavily to buy popularity, ran for pontifex maximus in 63 BC against two older and far more distinguished men (Catulus and Servilius Isauricus), told his mother he would come home as high priest or not at all, and won. In Gaul, at Alesia in 52 BC, he answered Vercingetorix’s plan to trap him between the town and a relief army by building two rings of fortification, one facing in and one facing out, so the attackers fought on ground the Romans had built. At Pharsalus in 48 BC he hid a fourth line of cohorts behind his flank and had them thrust their javelins at the faces of Pompey’s far larger cavalry, which broke. Button’s image for all of it is a small boxer who steps inside a bigger man’s reach: the danger stays, but the terms of the fight change.

The turn is clemency. Having won, Caesar pardoned his enemies and promoted some of them, which let him look merciful while making their survival depend on him. Button’s point is that submission is not surrender, and that a man trained to read danger in what enemies do could not read it in obedience. Made dictator for life early in 44 BC, his portrait on coins while he was alive, he kept fighting like the outsider he no longer was. He ignored the soothsayer Spurinna, Calpurnia’s dream and a note naming the plot that he never read, and was stabbed 23 times at the foot of Pompey’s statue. The video ends on the irony that the killers expected the old Republic back and got Octavian and another round of civil wars instead.

The facts check out against Plutarch and Suetonius, with two loose ends. The heavy spending Button dates to “around 69 BC” belongs to Caesar’s aedileship in 65 BC; 69 BC was his quaestorship. And the opening puzzle, why he went in without protection, has an answer in the sources that the video leaves out: both Plutarch and Suetonius say he had recently dismissed his Spanish bodyguard, and Suetonius records that some thought he no longer cared to live, given his failing health. Button’s pattern is one reading among several, not the consensus.