The Pirate's High-Maintenance Hostage

Gaius Julius Caesar was a military genius, but his ego might have been his most impressive weapon. When the young patrician was captured by Cilician pirates on his way to Rhodes, he didn't cower. Instead, he was deeply insulted by their 20-talent ransom demand and insisted they more than double it to 50 talents. He spent 38 days in captivity treating the pirates like his personal staff, reading them his poetry, and cheerfully promising to return and crucify them all once he was free. The pirates laughed it off as a joke. Spoiler alert: they shouldn't have laughed. Once freed, he hunted them down and executed them exactly as promised.

Comb-Overs and Court Scandals

Despite his macho battlefield reputation, Caesar was famously vain. He was intensely self-conscious about his thinning hair, leading him to invent one of history's first recorded comb-overs. The real reason he so happily accepted the Senate's honor of wearing a laurel wreath at all times? It was the perfect accessory to hide his receding hairline! His love life was equally chaotic. Alongside famous romances like his affair with Cleopatra, rumors dogged him that he was the "Queen of Bithynia," stemming from a youthful, scandalous tryst with King Nicomedes. His own soldiers famously sang marching songs mocking their "bald, adulterous" commander.

The Ides of March

Caesar's ambition caught up with him when he declared himself Dictator in Perpetuo. On March 15, 44 BC, senators fearing his tyrannical power ambushed him. The assassination was as strange as it was bloody:

• He was stabbed a total of 23 times, but an ancient physician determined only one of those wounds (the second one to his chest) was actually fatal.
• The legendary last words "Et tu, Brute?" were popularized by Shakespeare; ancient historians suggest he either pulled his toga over his head in silence or said in Greek, "You too, child?"
• In a final twist of dramatic irony, he bled to death at the base of a statue of his great rival, Pompey.