Caesar, to the Ides

Part 1 of the Caesar–Cleopatra period. The life to 15 March 44 BC, stated from the surviving sources: who he was, how he came to command armies, and what was in motion when he was killed.

1. The numbers

• Born 12 or 13 July 100 BC; the day is disputed between sources, and a minority of modern scholarship argues for 102 BC.
• Father dead in Caesar’s sixteenth year (Suetonius 1).
• Civic crown at about 20 (Suetonius 2); captured by pirates at about 25 (Plutarch, Caesar 1–2; Suetonius 4).
• Quaestor at about 31; aedile at 35; pontifex maximus at about 37; praetor at 38; first independent command (Further Spain) at 39; consul at 40.
• Gaul: 58–50 BC, nine campaign seasons. Plutarch’s totals, stated as his: 3,000,000 men fought, 1,000,000 killed, 1,000,000 enslaved (Caesar 15).
• Civil war: crossed the Rubicon January 49; Pharsalus 9 August 48; Alexandria October 48 to spring 47; Zela 47; Thapsus 46; Munda 17 March 45.
• Caesarion born in Alexandria 23 June 47 BC (Serapeum stele, Memphis).
• Will made 13 September 45 BC at Lavicum (Suetonius 83).
• Dictator perpetuo February 44; diadem refused twice 15 February 44; killed 15 March 44, aged 55, 23 wounds, about 60 conspirators (Suetonius 80–82).
• Departure for the Parthian war was set for 18 March 44. On that day the will was read instead.
• Helvius Cinna, the tribune holding the drafted marriage bill, killed 20 March 44 (Suetonius 85).

2. The Julii

The gens Julia was patrician, and by Roman tradition among the Alban families settled in Rome after the destruction of Alba Longa — a family story older than the Republic. The claimed descent ran from the goddess Venus through Aeneas to his son Iulus, from whom the name; Venus Genetrix, Venus the Ancestress, was the family’s cult. The temple Caesar vowed at Pharsalus and dedicated in his forum in 46 BC was a temple to his own claimed ancestor.

Four ancient traditions explain the cognomen Caesar, and none is certain: an ancestor born by the cut (caesus); an ancestor with a thick head of hair (caesaries); grey eyes (caesii oculi); an ancestor who killed an elephant, said to be caesai in Moorish. Pliny the Elder carries the cut-birth etymology. Each is a tradition about the name, not a record of any birth.

Against the divine pedigree stood the recent record. The family had produced consuls, but few and long spaced; there was no great fortune and no mass clientele. Caesar’s father reached the praetorship and a governorship of Asia, not the consulship. The connection that mattered was by marriage: Caesar’s aunt Julia was the wife of Gaius Marius, seven times consul, commander of the popular faction in the civil wars that filled Caesar’s childhood.

Caesar minted the family claim during the civil war: the denarius of 47–46 BC carries Venus on one face and Aeneas bearing Anchises on the other. The full family history — Troy, Alba Longa, the kings, the stone at Bovillae, the Republic’s consuls, and the adoption break after the Ides — is its own volume: The Julii: From Troy to the Ides.

3. Birth, blood and the Subura

The record holds no birth omen for Caesar. Suetonius’s life of Augustus devotes a chapter to portents surrounding that birth (Augustus 94); the corresponding material for Caesar does not exist, and the openings of both major Lives are lost — Suetonius’s Divus Julius begins abruptly in his sixteenth year, and the beginning of Plutarch’s Caesar is also missing. The childhood chapters of both biographies are holes in the transmission.

The birth by surgical section is a later construction. It rests on Pliny’s caesus etymology for the family name. Roman practice confined the operation to a dead or dying mother, and Caesar’s mother Aurelia lived some four and a half decades after his birth, active in his career throughout. The etymology concerns an ancestor; no ancient source states that Caesar himself was born by section.

The household stood in the Subura, the crowded valley quarter between the Esquiline and Viminal hills; Suetonius 46 records that he lived in a modest house there until his election as pontifex maximus moved him to the official residence on the Sacred Way.

His mother Aurelia, of the Aurelii Cottae, ran the house; the later tradition names her among the model Roman mothers. His boyhood tutor was Marcus Antonius Gnipho, a Gaul by origin, who taught in the family home. In his sixteenth year his father died suddenly; Pliny’s catalogue of sudden deaths records that he died in the morning while putting on his shoes. The son became head of the household at fifteen.

4. The Sullan test

Under the regime of Cinna, the young Caesar was designated flamen Dialis — the priesthood of Jupiter. The office carried disabling taboos: its holder could not mount a horse, look upon an army under arms, or spend successive nights outside Rome. He was married to Cornelia, Cinna’s daughter; their daughter Julia was born about 76 BC.

Sulla took Rome in 82 BC and ordered Caesar to divorce Cornelia. He refused. Suetonius 1 records the consequences: loss of the priesthood, of Cornelia’s dowry, and of his family inheritance; he was hunted, changed hiding places nightly in the Sabine country while sick with quartan fever, and bought off at least one search party’s captain.

The Vestal Virgins and his kinsmen Mamercus Aemilius and Aurelius Cotta interceded. Suetonius reports Sulla’s answer to those who begged for him: they would have their way, but the man they wanted saved would one day destroy the party they had defended together, for in Caesar there were many Mariuses.

No other individual in the surviving record is stated to have refused a direct order of Sulla and lived.

5. The East: the crown, the smear, the pirates

He left for military service in Asia. At the storming of Mytilene, about 80 BC, he won the civic crown (Suetonius 2) — the oak-leaf decoration for saving the life of a citizen, which carried the right, when its wearer entered the games, for senators to rise.

From the same posting came the lifelong smear. Sent to the court of Nicomedes IV of Bithynia to fetch a fleet, he stayed long enough for his enemies to assert, for the rest of his life, that he had been the king’s lover.

Suetonius 49 collects the material: soldiers’ verses at his triumph, senate-floor taunts, and the elder Curio’s phrase that he was every woman’s man and every man’s woman. No evidence beyond assertion is recorded. It is the first documented campaign of sexual slander against him, and it dates from his early twenties.

About 75 BC, crossing to Rhodes, he was captured by pirates and held on the island of Pharmacussa. Plutarch, Caesar 1–2, and Suetonius 4 and 74 carry the episode: when the pirates set his ransom at twenty talents he laughed and promised fifty; he spent thirty-eight days among them writing poems and speeches, reading them aloud, calling them illiterates to their faces, and telling them he would crucify them.

When the ransom arrived he sailed to Miletus, raised ships holding no public office, captured the pirates, and, when the governor of Asia delayed over the prize money, took them from prison on his own authority and crucified them. Suetonius 74 adds the mercy: he had their throats cut first.

He then studied rhetoric at Rhodes under Apollonius Molon, the teacher who had also trained Cicero. When Mithridates’ forces raided the province, he crossed back and raised local troops on his own initiative, again holding no office. The pattern is in the record twice before he was thirty: the stated word kept exactly, and the official machinery outrun by private action.

6. The return: kings and gods

Back in Rome he prosecuted Gnaeus Cornelius Dolabella, an ex-consul, for extortion — a standard opening move for a young orator, lost, but noticed. He was elected military tribune, his first election. As quaestor in 69 BC he served in Further Spain.

Two sources place a scene there in front of Alexander the Great: Suetonius 7 has him sighing before a statue of Alexander at Gades at having done nothing memorable at the age when Alexander had conquered the world; Plutarch 11 has him weeping over a written history of Alexander, and places it in his later governorship. The two versions do not agree and are both given.

In 69 BC his aunt Julia, widow of Marius, died, and Caesar delivered her public funeral eulogy. A fragment survives, quoted by Suetonius 6 — one of the only passages of Caesar’s oratory that exists:

The family of my aunt Julia is descended by her mother from the kings, and on her father’s side is akin to the immortal gods; for the Marcii Reges go back to Ancus Marcius, and the Julii, the family of which ours is a branch, to Venus. Our stock therefore has at once the sanctity of kings, whose power is supreme among mortal men, and the claim to reverence which attaches to the gods, who hold sway over kings themselves.

The claim of royal and divine descent was made in public, in Rome, when Caesar was about thirty. At the same funeral he displayed the images of Marius, banned from view since Sulla; Plutarch 5 records the crowd’s reaction. Cornelia died in the same period, and he gave her a public eulogy also — not then customary for a young wife.

As aedile in 65 BC he staged games with 320 pairs of gladiators and restored Marius’s trophies to the Capitol overnight. The spending ran on borrowed money; Crassus, the richest man in Rome, stood surety for his debts.

In 63 BC he stood for pontifex maximus against two senior ex-consuls, spending at a scale the sources treat as decisive; Suetonius 13 and Plutarch 7 both record his words to his mother on the morning of the vote — that he would come home pontifex maximus or not at all. He won. The chief priesthood of the Roman state was held from age about 37 until his death.

7. Wives, lovers, teachers

The marriages, in order. Cossutia, of a rich equestrian family, betrothed or married in his youth and put aside when the flaminate and Cornelia came (Suetonius 1).

Cornelia, Cinna’s daughter — the marriage he kept against Sulla’s order — mother of Julia, his only legitimate child; she died about 69 BC.

Pompeia, granddaughter of Sulla, married about 67 BC; divorced in 62 after Publius Clodius entered Caesar’s house in women’s clothing during the Bona Dea rites held there. At Clodius’s trial Caesar testified that he knew nothing against his wife; asked why he had then divorced her, he answered that his household must be free even of suspicion — the exchange is in Suetonius 74 and Plutarch 10, the origin of the phrase that Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.

Calpurnia, daughter of Lucius Piso, married in 59 BC; she was his wife at his death, and the reported dream she had on the night of 14 March 44 is in Suetonius 81.

His daughter Julia was married in 59 BC to Pompey, sealing the political alliance. She died in childbirth in 54 BC; the child died with her. The sources on both sides treat her death as the removal of the last personal bond between the two men.

The lovers the record names. Servilia, mother of Marcus Brutus, foremost: Suetonius 50 records the pearl he gave her, valued at six million sesterces; Plutarch (Brutus 5; Cato the Younger 24) records the note passed to Caesar on the Senate floor during the Catiline debate, which Cato demanded be read out and which proved to be a love letter from his own half-sister Servilia.

The ancient rumour that Brutus was Caesar’s son is in the sources; the dates are against it — Caesar was about fifteen when Brutus was born — and the memo states the rumour and the arithmetic together.

Suetonius 50 names other noblewomen, including Mucia, wife of Pompey. Suetonius 52 names the royal mistresses: Eunoe, wife of Bogudes of Mauretania, and Cleopatra. The Nicomedes material and Curio’s line are in section 5; the sexual invective, hostile and lifelong, is part of the record of how Roman politics was fought, and is listed here as record, not adjudicated.

His teachers, as they appear: Aurelia in the household; Gnipho in the schoolroom; Molon at Rhodes for rhetoric. Marius stood over the childhood as kinsman and faction; Sulla provided the demonstration of absolute power exercised and resigned — Suetonius 77 preserves Caesar’s later judgement that Sulla did not know his political ABC when he laid down the dictatorship. Crassus financed the climb. None of these is recorded as a tutor in statecraft; the offices themselves were the training.

8. The ladder: how one man came to hold an army

Rome had no standing career of army command. Command was imperium, attached to elected office, held for a term. Since Marius’s reforms opened the legions to men without property, soldiers had looked to their commander, not the state, for pay, plunder and land on discharge. The armies had become personal, and the constitution had not been altered to match.

Caesar’s ladder was the standard one, climbed at speed and at maximum debt: military tribune; quaestor 69 (Spain); aedile 65 (the games); pontifex maximus 63; praetor 62; propraetor of Further Spain 61 — the first independent command.

In Spain he made war on the Lusitanians, reached the Atlantic, and was acclaimed imperator by his troops. He was entitled to apply for a triumph. A general awaiting a triumph could not cross the city boundary; a candidate for the consulship had to declare in person inside it. The Senate refused him leave to stand in absentia. Suetonius 18 and Plutarch 13 record the choice: he gave up the triumph and entered the city to stand. He was elected consul for 59 BC.

As consul he formed the private compact with Pompey and Crassus. The lex Vatinia of 59 BC then assigned him Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum for five years with three legions; the Senate added Transalpine Gaul and a fourth legion.

At the Luca conference of 56 BC the compact renewed his command for five years more. The instrument was in every step lawful: a statute of the assembly, a senatorial grant, a renewal. By 50 BC he had held continuous command for approximately a decade, with an army built to about eleven legions, many raised on his own credit, paid from Gaul, and attached to him personally in the manner the Marian system produced.

9. Gaul, 58–50 BC

The campaigns in sequence: the Helvetii turned back and defeated, and Ariovistus’s Germans driven across the Rhine (58); the Belgic confederation broken (57); the Veneti defeated at sea and the Atlantic seaboard reduced (56).

The Rhine bridged — the bridge built, Caesar records, within ten days of the timber being felled — and the first crossing into Germany, then the first landing in Britain (55).

The second British expedition, and the winter revolt in which a legion and five cohorts under Sabinus and Cotta were destroyed (54); the general rising under Vercingetorix, the loss at Gergovia, and the double siege lines of Alesia — Caesar besieging the town while entrenched against the relief army outside — ending in Vercingetorix’s surrender (52); the reduction of the last resistance, and Uxellodunum’s defenders’ hands cut off, recorded by the continuator Hirtius (51).

Plutarch 15 gives the totals stated in section 1, drawn, he says, from the campaigns as a whole. Caesar’s own account, the Commentaries on the Gallic War, seven books with an eighth by Hirtius, was written by the commander, in the third person, and circulated while the war ran. It is the only substantial body of Caesar’s writing that survives, and it is a participant’s account published to the home audience during the events it describes.

10. The civil war, 49–45 BC

On 10–11 January 49 BC, ordered to lay down his command, Caesar crossed the Rubicon with one legion. Suetonius 32 records the words in Latin — the die is cast; Plutarch 32 records that he spoke them in Greek, quoting the playwright Menander. The versions differ in language and are both given.

The war in sequence: Italy taken without a battle and Pompey’s evacuation to Greece (49); the Spanish army defeated at Ilerda (49); the near-defeat at Dyrrachium and the decisive battle at Pharsalus, 9 August 48, where Pompey’s larger army broke.

Pompey’s flight to Egypt and his murder there before Caesar arrived; the Alexandrian war, October 48 to spring 47, ending with Cleopatra restored (covered in the period timeline and in Part 2).

The march north and the defeat of Pharnaces at Zela in 47 — reported to Rome, per Plutarch 50, in three words: came, saw, conquered, and displayed at the triumph on a placard, per Suetonius 37; the African campaign and Thapsus, 46, followed by Cato’s suicide at Utica; the last campaign in Spain and Munda, 17 March 45, of which Plutarch 56 records Caesar’s remark that he had often fought for victory, but at Munda for his life.

The policy the war made famous is in the record as a practice: pardon. Brutus and Cassius were among those spared and promoted after Pharsalus. Cicero was received back. The consequences of the practice belong to section 15; here it is stated as fact: the men who killed him were, in the main, men he had pardoned.

11. Cleopatra in Rome, 46–44 BC

Cleopatra came to Rome in 46 BC with her nominal co-ruler Ptolemy XIV and her son, and was housed in Caesar’s villa in his gardens across the Tiber; Suetonius 52 records the invitation and the honours, Cicero’s letters record her presence and his dislike (Att. 15.15: reginam odi — I hate the queen). She remained, with departures and returns debated in scholarship, until about a month after the Ides; Cicero, Att. 14.8, of 15 April 44, notes her flight.

The boy had been born in Alexandria on 23 June 47 BC, a few months after Caesar left Egypt; the date is read from a contemporary stele from the Serapeum at Memphis. Suetonius 52 records that Caesar allowed the child to be called by his name. The Alexandrians called him Caesarion — little Caesar.

The same chapter records the acknowledgment dispute in full: Mark Antony declared to the Senate that Caesar had acknowledged the boy, citing Gaius Matius, Gaius Oppius and other friends of Caesar as men who knew it; Oppius afterwards published a book to prove the boy was not Caesar’s son.

In 46 BC Caesar placed a gilded statue of Cleopatra in the new temple of Venus Genetrix, beside the goddess — the ancestral temple of the Julian house, dedicated that year; Appian, Civil Wars 2.102 records the placement, and Dio 51.22 records the statue still standing in his own day, two and a half centuries later.

12. The dynastic machinery

Roman law contained the constraint. Citizenship passed to a child only through a lawful Roman marriage, which required conubium — the capacity to intermarry — and no conubium existed between a Roman and a foreigner unless specifically granted. A child born outside lawful marriage took the mother’s status. Birthplace conferred nothing.

The son of Caesar and the queen of Egypt was, in Roman law, a non-citizen and no heir, and no act of acknowledgment could alter it. The instruments that existed in March 44 BC were three.

The will. Made 13 September 45 BC at his estate near Lavicum, deposited with the chief Vestal Virgin, opened after his death at Antony’s house at the request of Lucius Piso (Suetonius 83). Its terms as Suetonius states them: three heirs, his sisters’ grandsons — Gaius Octavius to three-quarters, Lucius Pinarius and Quintus Pedius to the remainder; Octavius adopted into the family and name in the closing lines; gardens by the Tiber to the people, and 300 sesterces to every citizen. Octavius was a Julian through women only — his mother Atia was the daughter of Caesar’s sister; in the male line he was an Octavius — and the descent claim of the eulogy runs father to son: the adoption made him a Julius in law, not in blood. In law the line ended on the Ides; in blood — through Caesarion, the attested natural son — it ran to late August 30 BC (the two endings are set out in The Julii, section 9).

Several of his future assassins named among the guardians of a son, should one be born to him, and Decimus Brutus among the heirs in the second degree. Suetonius adds Quintus Tubero’s statement that from his first consulship until the civil war began, Caesar’s written heir had been Pompey, and that he had read the will to his soldiers. Cleopatra and Caesarion appear nowhere in it; under the law above, no will of any date could have named the boy.

The marriage bill. Suetonius 52.3: the tribune of the plebs Helvius Cinna admitted to several persons that he had a bill drawn up in due form, which Caesar had ordered him to propose to the people in his absence, making it lawful for Caesar to marry what wives he wished, and as many as he wished, for the purpose of begetting children — liberorum quaerendorum causa, the formula of lawful heirs.

The bill is attested by this single passage. Cicero’s surviving letters from these months do not mention it. Its authenticity is debated in scholarship; its circulation as a report in early 44 is what the source attests.

A law in those terms would have created conubium and lawful marriage without requiring Calpurnia’s divorce, and a legitimate son of such a marriage would have taken the father’s status; under the law of the postumus, the birth or legitimation of such an heir voided an earlier will that had not instituted him.

The government in absence. Magistrates, consuls and tribunes for the years of the Parthian campaign were designated in advance from Caesar’s men; Dolabella was to take the vacated consulship on his departure. Sixteen legions and ten thousand cavalry were assigned to the war; six legions and a war chest were already across the Adriatic in Macedonia; Gaius Octavius, eighteen, was at Apollonia beside them, sent ahead ostensibly to study. The departure was set for 18 March 44.

13. The crescendo, January to March 44

The honours and the omens of the last weeks, dated where the record dates them. Dictator perpetuo — dictator without term — by February 44, on the coinage within his lifetime, the first living Roman so shown.

At the Lupercalia, 15 February, the consul Mark Antony twice offered Caesar a diadem before the crowd in the Forum; Caesar twice refused and ordered it taken to the Capitol for Jupiter; Cicero, Philippics 2.84–87, an eyewitness account delivered within the year, adds that Antony had the offer entered in the public calendar against the date, and charges that the act was planned. Plutarch, Caesar 61, carries the scene with the crowd’s reactions.

Dio 44.15 records the report that moved the conspirators’ timing: the keepers of the Sibylline books were said to be about to announce that Parthia could be conquered only by a king, and to propose the title for Caesar; Dio marks the report “whether true or false,” and states that it forced the conspirators to hasten.

Suetonius 79 names Lucius Cotta as the member of the Fifteen expected to move it. The same chapter records a further report of those months: that Caesar intended to move the seat of empire to Alexandria or to Ilium — Troy, the family’s claimed city; the report’s circulation is what the source attests. Cicero, De Divinatione 2, written the following year, calls the prophecy a fabrication. The three statements stand together: the report circulated; its mover was named; a contemporary called it false.

The omens the tradition attaches to the death, all recorded by Suetonius 81: the tombs at Capua, opened by colonists founding a settlement, yielding a bronze tablet of Capys the founder, with a Greek inscription that when the bones of Capys were disturbed, a descendant of Iulus would be slain by kinsmen and avenged at great cost to Italy — Suetonius names Cornelius Balbus, Caesar’s intimate, as his authority.

The horses consecrated at the Rubicon refusing food and weeping; the wren torn apart by other birds in Pompey’s hall the day before the Ides; the soothsayer Spurinna’s warning of danger not later than the Ides; Calpurnia’s dream on the last night. The record holds no omens of his birth and a chapter of omens of his death; the corresponding chapter of birth omens exists for Augustus (Augustus 94), written under Augustus’s dynasty.

14. The window

The dates of March 44 in sequence. The departure for Parthia stood at 18 March. The Senate sitting of 15 March was the last before it. The Sibylline motion was expected at a Senate sitting; the marriage bill was drafted for proposal in Caesar’s absence, on his order, per Suetonius; the magistracies for the years of absence were filled; the army and the money were in Macedonia with Octavius beside them.

Suetonius 86 records the further facts of the last period: the Spanish bodyguard dismissed, and the opinion among his friends that he no longer wished to guard his life. Each item is attested independently; their coincidence in the same five days is the calendar’s.

15. The Ides

About sixty men joined the conspiracy (Suetonius 80). The leaders were Gaius Cassius and Marcus Brutus, both pardoned at Pharsalus and promoted since; Decimus Brutus, named in the will and among the guardians; and others of Caesar’s own officers and beneficiaries. The cause they proclaimed was the Republic and liberty against the perpetual dictatorship.

On the morning of 15 March, Caesar, delayed by Calpurnia’s dream and ill omens from the sacrifices, decided to send the Senate away; Decimus Brutus came to the house and persuaded him to attend (Suetonius 81; Plutarch 64).

At the meeting in the hall attached to Pompey’s theatre, Tillius Cimber gave the signal by pulling Caesar’s toga; Casca struck first; he fell at the base of Pompey’s statue with twenty-three wounds, of which the physician Antistius afterwards judged only the second, to the chest, mortal (Suetonius 82).

Suetonius records both traditions of his last words: that he said nothing, and that some reported he said to Marcus Brutus, in Greek, You too, child.

16. Five days

15 March, evening: Antony, consul and unharmed, secured Caesar’s papers and money from Calpurnia. 17 March: the Senate, on Cicero’s motion, voted an amnesty for the assassins and the confirmation of Caesar’s acts together. 18 March, the day set for the Parthian departure: the will was unsealed and read at Antony’s house. 20 March: the funeral in the Forum; Antony’s oration; the crowd burned the body in the Forum and attacked the houses of the conspirators.

In the riot the tribune and poet Helvius Cinna, coming to the funeral, was mistaken for the praetor Cornelius Cinna, who had spoken against Caesar, and was torn to pieces, his head carried on a spear (Suetonius 85; Plutarch 68; Appian 2.147). He was the only man attested to hold the drafted marriage bill. It is never mentioned again in any source.

In mid-April Cleopatra and her son left for Egypt (Cicero, Att. 14.8); on 2 September 44 the boy was crowned co-ruler of Egypt as Ptolemy XV. The rest is the period timeline’s, and Parts 2 to 5 of this series.

17. The missing documents

The record of this life is incomplete in listable ways. The following existed and are attested; none survives.

• Caesar’s speeches — a principal orator of the age; the corpus is lost. The Julia eulogy fragment in section 6, preserved by Suetonius, is among the only survivals.
• Anticato — his two-book reply to Cicero’s praise of Cato. Lost.
• De Analogia — two books on Latin usage, written while recrossing the Alps to the army, dedicated to Cicero. Lost except fragments; Gellius 1.10 preserves his rule to avoid an unheard-of word as a sailor avoids a reef.
• Iter — the poem of the road, written on the march to the last Spanish campaign. Lost.
• The youthful works — the Praises of Hercules, a tragedy Oedipus, and collected sayings. Suetonius 56 records that Augustus sent a letter to Pompeius Macer, whom he had charged with arranging the libraries, forbidding their publication. This is the one category of loss with the suppressing order preserved.
• The letters — dispatches to the Senate, which Suetonius 56 says he was the first to convert to page form; letters to Cicero; private letters written in a cipher of shifted letters, described in the same chapter. Collections existed; all are lost.
• The Acta — as consul in 59 he ordered the daily proceedings of the Senate and people compiled and published (Suetonius 20). No issue from his lifetime survives.
• Sulla’s Memoirs — twenty-two books, used by Plutarch; the dictator’s own account of the years covering section 4. Lost.
• Sallust’s Histories — covering 78–67 BC, the decade of section 5. Fragments only.
• Tanusius Geminus — a hostile contemporary history cited by Suetonius and Plutarch. Lost; its citations cannot be checked.
• Oppius’s life of Caesar and his book on Caesarion’s paternity — the intimate’s biography and the commissioned denial. Both lost; both known from citations.
• Cicero’s letters to Caesar — a published collection existed in antiquity. Lost. One side of the correspondence survives.
• Livy, books 103–116 — the Augustan-era narrative of the lifetime. One-line summaries only.
• The openings of the Lives — the beginnings of both Suetonius’s and Plutarch’s biographies, covering birth and childhood, are lost in transmission.

Of Caesar’s own writing, what survives is the war commentaries; what is lost or suppressed is the oratory, the scholarship, the poetry, the correspondence and the juvenilia. The suppression order for the last category survives; the works do not.

18. Sources

Master register numbers refer to the master source register, where each source’s date, distance from events and survival condition is stated.

1. Suetonius, Divus Julius (~AD 121) — the controlling source throughout: the Sullan years and the many-Mariuses saying (1); Mytilene and Nicomedes (2, 49); the pirates (4, 74); the Julia eulogy fragment (6); the Alexander scene at Gades (7); pontifex maximus (13); the triumph-or-consulship choice (18); the Acta (20); the Rubicon words (32); veni vidi vici on the placard (37); the Subura house (46); the lovers and the royal mistresses (50, 52); Caesarion, the acknowledgment dispute and the Cinna marriage bill (52); the lost works, the cipher, and Augustus’s suppression letter to Pompeius Macer (56); Caesar on Sulla’s abdication (77); the conspiracy, omens, Capys tablet, assassination and last words (80–82); the will (83); the funeral and Helvius Cinna’s death (85); the dismissed bodyguard (86). Master register 9. The opening of the Life is lost; it begins in Caesar’s sixteenth year.
2. Plutarch, Caesar, with Brutus and Cato the Younger (~AD 100–120) — the pirates (1–2); the Marius images (5); pontifex maximus (7); Bona Dea and the divorce (10); the Alexander scene, book version (11); the triumph choice (13); the Gallic totals (15); the Rubicon in Greek from Menander (32); Zela (50); Munda, fighting for his life (56); the Lupercalia (61); Decimus at the door (64); the funeral and Cinna (68); the Servilia letter in the Senate (Brutus 5; Cato 24). Master register 8. The opening of the Life is lost.
3. Cicero — Philippics 2.84–87 (the Lupercalia, the calendar entry, the premeditation charge); Letters to Atticus 14.8 (Cleopatra’s departure) and 15.15 (reginam odi); De Divinatione 2 (the Sibylline prophecy called fabricated). Contemporary, participant. Master register 2.
4. Caesar, Commentaries on the Gallic War and Civil War, with the continuations — the campaigns of sections 9–10 as the participant’s published account; the Rhine bridge’s ten days (Gallic War 4). Master register 1.
5. Appian, Civil Wars 2 — the statue of Cleopatra in the temple of Venus Genetrix (2.102); the funeral riot and Cinna (2.147). Master register 10.
6. Cassius Dio — the Sibylline report, “whether true or false,” and the forced timing (44.15); the statue still standing (51.22). Master register 11.
7. Pliny the Elder, Natural History — the caesus etymology of the name (book 7); the father’s sudden death while dressing (book 7, the catalogue of sudden deaths). Master register 24.
8. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 1.10 — the surviving rule from De Analogia.
9. The Serapeum stele, Memphis — the birth date of Caesarion, 23 June 47 BC, as read in the scholarship. Master register 4.
10. The missing documents of section 17 are entered in the master register as items 25–31, each with the passage attesting its existence.
11. Verification register. This memo was drafted without live access to the source texts. The chapter numbers cited from Suetonius, Plutarch, Pliny and Gellius follow the standard editions as held in the author’s working notes; the passages verified against the texts during the period-page research (the will, the Cinna bill, the Lupercalia, the Sibylline report, the Capys tablet, the funeral, the Cleopatra material) are pinned; the remainder — in particular the youth chapters (Suetonius 1–7, Plutarch 1–13), the exact wording of the Julia eulogy translation, Pliny’s and Gellius’s passages, and the campaign chronology details — are to be checked against the linked editions in the master register before this memo is published or revised.