page_title: Poems by Julius Caesar
hierarchical_section_title: Poems by Julius Caesar
caption_attribution_description: Defunto addobbato come Ercole, scultura romana III sec., ex Museo nazionale del Bardo,Tunisi. English: Roman commemorative sculpture of the 3rd century AD, in which the deceased is dressed as Hercules, from the National Museum of Bardo, Tunisia.
context_page_description: Poems by Julius Caesar are mentioned by several sources in antiquity. 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. Pliny places "the divine Julius" on his list of serious men who wrote not-so-serious poems. Caesar's Dicta Collectanea, a collection of his memorable quotations, is assumed to have contained quotations from his verse as well as prose works.
  The titles of two works Caesar wrote as a young man are known, a Laudes Herculis 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" — letter from Caesar's heir Augustus as incompatible with his program of deification. A third title, Iter, dates from 46 BC, composed during a 24-day trip from Rome to Spain during the civil war. This verse travelogue may have been modeled after Lucilius's poem about a trip to Sicily.
context_section_description: Poems by Julius Caesar are mentioned by several sources in antiquity. 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. Pliny places "the divine Julius" on his list of serious men who wrote not-so-serious poems. Caesar's Dicta Collectanea, a collection of his memorable quotations, is assumed to have contained quotations from his verse as well as prose works.
  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" — 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. This verse travelogue may have been modeled after Lucilius's poem about a trip to Sicily. 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.
caption: The Roman face of Hercules, about whom the young Caesar wrote a poem
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