Was Julius Caesar kidnapped by pirates?

A sea full of pirates

In the 70s BC the eastern Mediterranean belonged to the pirates as much as to Rome. Their main bases lay in Cilicia, the rugged southern coast of today’s Turkey, and their fleets raided shipping and coastal towns and took captives for ransom or for sale. The slave markets made it pay. The geographer Strabo says the free port of Delos could take in and send off ten thousand slaves in a single day (Geography 14.5.2). Rome, busy with its own civil wars, had let the problem grow.

Caesar was about twenty-five, a young noble with debts and ambitions but no office. Suetonius says he was sailing to the island of Rhodes to study public speaking with the famous teacher Apollonius Molon; Plutarch places the voyage on his way back from the court of the king of Bithynia. Either way, near Pharmacusa, a speck of an island that is now the Greek islet of Farmakonisi, the pirates took his ship.

Twenty talents? Make it fifty

The best part of the story is in Plutarch. The pirates asked twenty talents for him. Caesar laughed at them for not knowing whom they had caught, and offered fifty. A talent was a weight of silver of about 26 kilograms, so fifty talents came to some 1,300 kilograms (2,900 pounds) of it. He sent his companions off to the cities of the coast to raise the money and was left with one friend and two attendants among men Plutarch calls the most bloodthirsty in the world (Caesar 2).

He treated them like his bodyguard. When he wanted to sleep, he sent word telling them to be quiet. He joined their games and exercises. He wrote poems and speeches and read them aloud, and when the pirates failed to admire them he called them illiterate barbarians to their faces. Laughing, he often told them he would hang them all. They thought it was a joke. Suetonius is less charming about it. He says Caesar spent nearly forty days in great vexation, with only a doctor and two body-servants (Julius 4).

A promise kept

The ransom came from Miletus, and as soon as it was paid and he was set ashore, Caesar manned ships in that same harbor, though he held no command. He sailed straight back, found the pirates still at anchor off the island and captured most of them, along with their money. He locked them up in the prison at Pergamum and went to Junius, the governor of the province of Asia, whose job it was to punish them. Junius had his eye on the money and said he would think about the prisoners at his leisure. Caesar did not wait. He went back to Pergamum and crucified them all, just as he had warned them on the island (Plutarch, Caesar 2).

Suetonius tells it as an example of Caesar’s mildness. Having sworn to crucify them, he kept his oath, but had their throats cut first, so they would not suffer long on the cross (Julius 74).

How much of it is true?

The core is solid. Velleius Paterculus, writing under Tiberius, tells it too, and Plutarch and Suetonius, writing a century later, clearly used different sources, which is why their details differ: thirty-eight days or nearly forty, a friend and two servants or a doctor and two servants, the outward voyage or the return. The swaggering details most likely go back to Caesar himself, a master at telling his own story. Either way the episode shows two things at once: a Republic that could not keep its own seas safe, until Pompey swept the pirates away in 67 BC, and a young man who already acted as if he were in charge.