Poems by Julius Caesar are mentioned by several sources in antiquity.Pliny, Natural History 19.8.144; Tacitus, Dialogus de oratoribus 21; Suetonius 56; Nonius Marcellus fr. 15; Isidorus, Etymologiae 4.12.7; Firmicus Maternus, Matheseos 2. pr. 2. 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.Plutarch, Life of Caesar 2, Bill Thayer's edition at LacusCurtius online. Pliny places "the divine Julius" on his list of serious men who wrote not-so-serious poems.Pliny, Epistulae 5.3.5, Latin text at The Latin Library. Caesar's Dicta Collectanea, a collection of his memorable quotations, is assumed to have contained quotations from his verse as well as prose works.Gian Biagio Conte, Latin Literature: A History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 226 online.
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"Brevis et simplex. — 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.Suetonius, Julius Caesar 56, Bill Thayer's edition at LacusCurtius online. This verse travelogue may have been modeled after Lucilius's poem about a trip to Sicily.Lucilius 3; Courtney, Fragmentary Latin Poets, p. 187. 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.Llewelyn Morgan, "Escapes from Orthodoxy: Poetry of the Late Republic," in Literature in the Roman World (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 336–339 online.
Surviving texts A single incomplete line survives that might come from the Iter, quoted by Isidore of SevilleIsidore of Seville, Etymologiae 4.12.7, Bill Thayer's edition of the Latin text at LacusCurtius online. in discussing the word unguentum, "ointment":
The quoted phrase corpusque suaui telino unguimus is part of a scazon or iambic trimeter.Courtney, Fragmentary Latin Poets, p. 187. Its author has also been identified as C. Iulius Caesar Strabo, the dictator's uncle.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.
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.Suetonius, Life of Terence 7. 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.Courtney, Fragmentary Latin Poets, p. 155. 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"Puri sermonis amator. points toward Caesar's own stylistic predilections and linguistic nationalism.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).
Reception Tacitus considered their loss a happy accident for the dictator's literary reputation: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.
References
Bibliography Courtney, Edward. The Fragmentary Latin Poets. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
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