Caesar and the pirates: a promise kept

Around 75 BC, a young Julius Caesar was sailing to Rhodes to study public speaking when Cilician pirates seized his ship near the island of Pharmacusa. They demanded a ransom of twenty talents.

According to Plutarch, Caesar laughed. They clearly did not know who they had captured, he said, and told them to ask for fifty. He sent his companions off to raise the money and spent the next thirty-eight days as if the pirates were his bodyguards rather than his jailers.

He joined their games, wrote poems and speeches and read them aloud, and called the pirates illiterate barbarians when they failed to admire them. He often promised, cheerfully, that he would crucify them all. They thought it was a joke.

Once the ransom was paid, Caesar went straight to Miletus, raised a small fleet, sailed back and captured most of them. When the local governor dragged his feet over punishing them, Caesar did it himself. As a mercy for the kindness they had shown him, he had their throats cut before they were crucified. He had told them the truth from the start.