Thursday, April 16, 2015

Reading Suetonius' Lives of the Cesar's on my plane flight

Concerning Julius Caesar:
He is every woman's man and every man's woman.
This was not a compliment to his open-mindesness .

6 comments:

  1. OK, I'm going to go out on a limb and ask for you to explain that to me. It strikes me as a very interesting observation, but I'm not too sure how it applies to Julius Cesar.

    my curiosity is peaked. I'll have to put that book on my "to read" list. Unfortunately my current to read list is about three pages long and has been supplanted by by daughter's "books I need read to me" list. (I have memorized "The Day the Crayons Quit" because she has wanted that book read to her every night for the last ten months.)

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  2. Julius had a reputation for womanizing, and being unselective about men with whom he had sex.

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  3. Ah! Thank you for clarifying that. While I am familiar with the proclivities of other Roman emperors, I was unfamiliar with that particular interest of Julius.

    Thank you for clarifying. Obviously the above mentioned book is not bedtime reading material for my daughter. (Ha!)

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  4. Bisexuality was a popular past-time in both Rome and ancient Greece. The classical Greco-Roman writings are rife with such details which are sometimes quite graphic. Also, there is no shortage of art work from those periods with graphic depictions of the goings on.

    Perhaps a contributing factor to their collapse. Decadence of the ruling and intellectual elites. Not unlike what we have today?

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  5. Ah, yes.

    "Gaius Julius Caesar". (Pronounce it, and you'll get the joke.)

    It also brings to mind the "snails and oysters" scene from Spartacus.

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  6. and being unselective about men with whom he had sex

    Not quite. "Every man's woman" means just what it sounds like it means -- that he took the woman's role when having sex with men. This was a common thing for a prominent man to be accused of back then -- to the Romans, the only sin was weakness.

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