Health

Caesar's biographers have slightly different takes on the question of his health, despite the fact that they are using essentially the same material (possibly from the memoir of Caesar’s friend, C. Oppius; Townend 1987). While Suetonius (Iul. 45) considers Caesar's health as generally good, apart from the fact that towards the end of his life he suffered sudden fits and nightmares, Plutarch ( Caes. 17) has him battling against a delicate constitution, headaches, and epileptic fits - but not making an excuse of them, rather using the rigors of campaign life to increase his strength and energy. For purposes of his own Shakespeare made Caesar deaf in his left ear (‘‘Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf’’; Julius Caesar I. ii.209), but there is no classical source which mentions this. It is possible that Shakespeare was making neat use of Alexander the Great's practice of covering his ear when listening to an accusation in order to hear only the defense (Plut. Alex. 42; Velz 1971). Suetonius (Iul. 1) is the only source for the claim that Caesar suffered from a regular recurrent fever, that is malaria, while in hiding from Sulla (see Ridley 2000: 225 for speculation about the longer-term psychological effects of this).

There can be no denying the restless energy which drove Caesar throughout his life. He was an excellent horseman; as a boy he learned to gallop with his arms crossed behind his back (Plut. Caes. 17). He was a strong swimmer; during the Alexandrian campaign in the chaos of a failed attack he was forced to throw himself into the sea and swim for safety carrying important documents in one hand above the water (Plut. Caes. 49).

Suetonius knew of only two epileptic attacks while Caesar was engaged in public affairs (inter res agendas). He does not specify them. One of the incidents which Suetonius had in mind was alleged in some sources to have happened in the African campaign against the Pompeians in 46 BC at the battle of Thapsus. Plutarch (Caes. 53) in his narrative has Caesar at the head of his army in the attack, as does the author of the African War 83 who has Caesar leading the charge. But Plutarch then goes on to cite a different tradition, in which Caesar was overcome by an epileptic fit just as he was drawing up his troops and had to be carried to a nearby tower where he rested. This alternative narrative smacks of a convenient ‘‘political’’ illness, either feigned by Caesar himself or concocted by his supporters afterwards, because in the battle the Caesarian troops got out of hand and went on the rampage, slaughtering Pompeians without let-up and even turning on their own officers in a way that shocked Caesar. It would have been convenient for Caesar and his reputation to have had a reason for not presiding over this shambles.

The second occasion Suetonius may have had in mind was a fit which Plutarch briefly mentions as having taken place at Corduba in Spain (Caes. 17). Historians have attempted to date this to any of the occasions on which Caesar was in Spain (69, 61, 49, 45 BC). However, if it happened, then it surely belongs to the campaign against the sons of Pompey in Spain in 45 BC, and was the ‘‘illness’’ which Dio (43.32.6) says overcame Caesar as he was besieging Corduba. Again, there is a hint in Dio of the illness being used as an excuse for Caesar’s failure to press home the siege and his retirement in the face of Pompeian reinforcements.

Plutarch has one further possible attack. Among the long list of resentments felt by his opponents at Caesar’s monarchical behavior after the civil war was the occasion when Caesar allegedly failed to stand up at the approach of the senate led by the consuls and praetors (Dio 44.8). It appears that Caesar and his supporters went out of their way to seek to explain his behavior away by alleging an illness, which Dio took to be diarrhea, but which Plutarch (Caes. 60) says was one of his fainting fits. Suetonius finally suggests that Caesar hesitated about attending the senate on the Ides of March because of his poor health - possibly another reference to a ‘‘political’’ use of epilepsy (Suet. lul. 81.4).

All these incidents are surrounded with doubt; but, even if they are instances of a ‘‘convenient illness,’’ they become more plausible if it was known that Julius Caesar in reality suffered from epilepsy. They were sufficient to enroll Caesar among the lists compiled in the Renaissance of great men with epilepsy, which included Hercules, Socrates, Plato, Muhammad, Petrarch, Emperor Charles V, and Torquato Tasso (Temkin 1971: 163-4). The linking of genius with epilepsy and melancholia was made in antiquity (the Aristotelian Problems 30.1, quoted by Cicero in Tusc. 1.73). As Suetonius noted, the incidents all occurred towards the end of Caesar’s life, a fact indirectly confirmed by Appian (B Civ. 2.110), who suggested that Caesar’s epilepsy and convulsions came upon him when he was not active, and contributed to the reason why Caesar sought new challenges by planning the invasion of Parthia at the end of his life. Ancient medicine was not very precise about epilepsy and included all manner of fits. It is possible that Caesar suffered from late-onset epilepsy. Recently, however, medical scholars have linked the nightmares, possible personality changes, and the fits of later years, and suggested the possibility of a brain tumor (Gomez, Kotler, & Long 1995). Diagnosis, of course, must be a very tentative business over such a distance in time.

The recording of dreams was an important aspect of ancient biography. The ‘‘science’’ of the interpretation of dreams was well developed in the classical world and interest in dreams was widespread. However, before Caesar’s dreams are used as clues to his personality, it needs to be recognized that in the ancient world dreams were seen principally as externally generated prophecies, ways of divining the future, and only secondarily, if at all, as internally generated reflections of the dreamer’s personality or state of mind. As Simon Price has pointed out, the work on dreams of the second-century AD scholar Artemidorus, whom Freud admired as a distinguished predecessor, clearly made a distinction between oneiroi, dreams which had a predictive or oracular character, and enhypnia, dreams which reflected the dreamer’s current state of mind; but Artemidorus goes on to dismiss enhypnia as trivial and of little interest, while oneiroi were all-important (Price 1986). Chris Pelling (1997) has argued that the distinction may not be so clear-cut in the ancient historians and biographers. Cicero (Rep. 6.10), for example, sees dreams as often arising from thoughts and conversations in waking hours; but the fact remains that ancient sources did not primarily see dreams as windows on the minds of their subjects. So we should pause before leaping gleefully to a Freudian interpretation of the claim that Caesar had a dream of committing incest with his mother. Such stories often came from collections of dreams, in which the accounts have often been separated from their historical context. In any case, according to Herodotus 6.107, the Athenian tyrant Hippias had had a similar dream before the battle of Marathon. So Plutarch (Caes. 32) has Caesar dreaming of incest with his mother on the night before he crossed the Rubicon, but offers no interpretation, though he does describe the dream as ‘‘unlawful.’’ Suetonius (lul. 7) and Dio (37.52.2), on the other hand, put the dream during Caesar’s quaestorship in Spain in 69 BC. This is, in itself, a curious context because his wife, Cornelia, had died just before he set out for his province. But neither Suetonius nor Dio hesitates in interpreting the dream as a prophetic sign of future greatness. According to Suetonius, interpreters of the dream claimed that he was destined for world power because the mother he had dreamed of dominating was mother earth, the parent of all mankind. This was precisely the interpretation recorded later by Artemidorus (On. 1.79) when he describes the dream as a good one for politicians, because ‘‘the mother signifies one’s native country and, just as a man who follows the guidance of Aphrodite when he makes love, takes complete control of the body of his obedient and willing partner, so the dreamer will control all the affairs of the city.’’