Quote From the Twelve Caesars (3)

Julius Caesar was certainly a man of paradoxes, both in his own time, and in the annals of history.

Suetonius writes in The Twelve Caesars of Caesar’s appearance:

His dress was, it seems, unusual: he had added wrist-length sleeves with fringes to his purple-striped senatorial tunic, and the belt which he wore over it was never tightly fastened – hence Sulla’s warning to the aristocratic party: ‘Beware of that boy with the loose clothes!’

Suetonius also writes that Caesar’s enemies charged him with once being the catamite of King Nicomede of Bithynia, “a dark stain on his reputation.” I didn’t know what catamite meant, so I looked it up. It is “a boy kept for homosexual practices.”

Consequently, one of his detractors wrote:

The riches of Bithynia’s King
Who Caesar on his couch abused.

Translation By Robert Graves

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