Livy Only Proves that Julius Caesar is Fake

Last week I published a thorough historiography of “Julius” Caesar, tracing the literary evolution of the title Caesar, the name Gaius, and the name Julius back through the ancient sources that shape their characters. One of the most surprising and fruitful discoveries came from Livy, a Latin author who is one of the founders of Roman history. Livy offers my case in point, showing that the character of Julius Caesar is partly ripped off of lesser characters named Gaius Julius.

The main body of Livy’s history, through book 45, mentions neither the name nor the character of Julius Caesar. The character of the “great” Caesar eventually shows up in a series of very brief fragments, comprising “books” 46-140, beginning in book 103. Even in these sorry fragments, Livy does not refer to Julius Caesar, only to Gaius Caesar. Yet Livy does mention two different individuals named Gaius Julius who lived in two different time periods long before Caesar, and the biographical details of both were later integrated into the official biography of Gaius Julius Caesar.

Livy writes “In the three hundred and first year after Rome was built, the form of the government was a second time changed” (5th century BC). A dead body was found in the house of a patrician named Publius Sestius, causing a scandal. Then a decemvir named Gaius Julius “appointed a day of trial for Sestius, and appeared before the people as prosecutor (in a matter) of which he was legally a judge; and relinquished his right [to judge]” (Livy 3.33). The fate of Publius Sestius in Livy is unclear.

Some 400 years after Livy’s “Gaius Julius” declined to judge Publius Sestius, Julius Caesar also pardoned a Publius Sestius. This second Sestius was a friend and ally of Cicero who fought for Pompey, but after Pompey’s defeat, Caesar pardoned him. Thus we see not only the proper names from Livy, but also the themes of judgment and pardon, have been mashed together in the biography of Caesar.

There is a second example of this, because Livy mentions another Gaius Julius in one of the first fragments. This text describes the events of 143 BC, when “Gaius Julius, a senator, writes the history of Rome in the Greek language” (Livy 53). Julius Caesar also became known as a Roman historian with his “memoir” of the Gallic wars. Thus two different characterizations of two Gaius Juliuses from two time periods in Livy were rolled into the eventual character of Gaius Julius Caesar.

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