Poems by Julius Caesar explained

Poems by Julius Caesar are mentioned by several sources in antiquity.^[1] None are extant.

Plutarch says that verse compositions were among the entertainments Caesar offered the Cilician pirates who captured him as a young man in 75 BC.^[2] Pliny places "the divine Julius" on his list of serious men who wrote not-so-serious poems.^[3] Caesar's Dicta Collectanea, a collection of his memorable quotations, is assumed to have contained quotations from his verse as well as prose works.^[4]

The titles of two works Caesar wrote as a young man are known, a Laudes Herculis ("Praises of Hercules") and the verse tragedy Oedipus; their planned publication by the librarian Pompeius Macer was squelched by a "short and simple" — or perhaps "curt and direct"^[5] — letter from Caesar's heir Augustus as incompatible with his program of deification. A third title, Iter ("The Journey"), dates from 46 BC, composed during a 24-day trip from Rome to Spain during the civil war.^[6] This verse travelogue may have been modeled after Lucilius's poem about a trip to Sicily.^[7] Caesar's choice of writing as a pastime in prelude to the decisive and brutal Battle of Munda illustrates the dual preoccupations of the Late Republican aristocrat, with militarism and political power-plays balanced by elite intellectual and aesthetic aspirations.^[8]

Surviving texts

A single incomplete line survives that might come from the Iter, quoted by Isidore of Seville^[9] in discussing the word unguentum, "ointment":

The quoted phrase corpusque suaui telino unguimus is part of a scazon or iambic trimeter.^[10] Its author has also been identified as C. Iulius Caesar Strabo, the dictator's uncle.^[11]

In his Life of Terence, Suetonius preserves six lines of dactylic hexameter by Caesar praising the Roman playwright, along with a more lukewarm assessment by Cicero.^[12] These two verse passages, with their similarity of purpose and wording, may have resulted from a school assignment, since both men studied with the teacher and grammarian Gnipho.^[13] As such, Caesar's lines are probably not to be taken too seriously as literary criticism, but his notice of Terence as "lover of a pure conversational style"^[14] points toward Caesar's own stylistic predilections and linguistic nationalism.^[15]

Reception

Tacitus considered their loss a happy accident for the dictator's literary reputation:^[16]

Bibliography

• Courtney, Edward. The Fragmentary Latin Poets. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Notes and References

1. [Pliny the Elder|Pliny]
2. [Plutarch]
3. [Pliny the Younger|Pliny]
4. Gian Biagio Conte, Latin Literature: A History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 226 online.
5. Brevis et simplex.
6. [Suetonius]
7. Lucilius 3; Courtney, Fragmentary Latin Poets, p. 187.
8. Llewelyn Morgan, "Escapes from Orthodoxy: Poetry of the Late Republic," in Literature in the Roman World (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 336–339 online.
9. [Isidore of Seville]
10. Courtney, Fragmentary Latin Poets, p. 187.
11. Priscilla Throop, Isidore of Seville's Etymologies: Complete English Translation (2005), notes to XII online; William D. Sharpe, "Isidore of Seville: The Medical Writings," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 54 (1964), p. 63 online. Michael von Albrecht takes no position on the attribution of this line, but notes that Caesar was likely influenced by his uncle; see A History of Roman Literature: From Livius Andronicus to Boethius (Brill, 1997), p. 409 online.
12. Suetonius, Life of Terence 7.
13. Courtney, Fragmentary Latin Poets, p. 155.
14. Puri sermonis amator.
15. Courtney, Fragmentary Latin Poets, pp. 153–154; Lindsay Hall, "Ratio and Romanitas in the Bellum Gallicum," in Julius Caesar as Artful Reporter: The War Commentaries as Political Instruments (Classical Press of Wales, 1998).
16. Unless otherwise noted, citations of primary sources and general overview from Edward Courtney, The Fragmentary Latin Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 153–155 and 187–188.