This account was originally written by Plutarch, who was more interested in telling a good moralistic story than sticking to the facts (of ~150 years before).
Plutarch is generally as reliable as his source material in the sense that things he wrote happened, but not necessarily in the way he tells them.
Plutarch selected the stories he told and modified them into moralistic narratives, but he didn't completely make them up. He is not reliable historian in modern sense, of course.
plutarch admits when he’s propagating folklore, or unconfirmed history with moral tones. see for example his narration of the encounter between solon and croesus. that said let’s not forget that history as understood by the ancients were stories told for the purposes of education, not a disinterested recording of facts.
While this account comes from Plutarch, Suetonius also relates the same story. Suetonius, of course, was much more interested in a good story than any concept of truth and was writing in roughly the same period as Plutarch relating tales told and retold long after whatever original events there were transpired.
It's probable that the story had a basis in truth-otherwise, someone would have instantly used it against the young Caesar-but grew in the telling. Caesar, as his commentaries show, was no slouch at bolstering his own legend.
> In 75 BCE a band of Cilician pirates in the Aegean Sea captured a 25-year-old Roman nobleman named Julius Caesar, who had been on his way to study oratory in Rhodes.
I'm pretty sure that nobleman was named Gaius Julius and that's how he introduced himself.
"Roman men were usually known by their praenomina to members of their family and household, clientes and close friends; but outside of this circle, they might be called by their nomen, cognomen, or any combination of praenomen, nomen, and cognomen that was sufficient to distinguish them from other men with similar names."
Ceasar is basically a family name though. I don't think there were that many Julii left at this point? So it might not have been that confusing. However if you were Publius/Lucius Cornelius on the other hand there were probably a dozen other Roman aristocrats with the same name at any given time.
Just for reference a talent was worth about 20 years wages. So while comparing currency values across vast stretches of time is inaccurate, it wouldn’t be totally wrong to consider a talent about $1 million in today’s US dollars.
On the other hand you could buy about 1200 gallons of olive oil which is less than $50,000 or 750 sheep which is might be about $300,000.
Comparing modern/ancient prices get tricky.. To be fair though a worker earning 2 drachma per day would be closer to a modern person minimum wage worker (anyone back then who didn't own land, wasn't a merchant or at least a skilled craftsmen was dirt poor anyway). So if 1 drachma = $30 to $60 a talent would be closer to around $180-360k
I think it's fair to argue than using modern value for goods that you can produce more efficiently thanks to the availability of cheap energy and phosphate is not really fair.
750 sheeps or 1200 gallons of olive oil were certainly worth a fortune at the time, and owning that much would probably have made you a very weathly person when owning 300K USD today does not.
Great man theory describes a real phenomena, it just gets the causality backwards. With lots of people doing lots of things, some are bound to do exceptional things. People who believe they need strong leaders gravitate towards the noteworthy ones, making it more likely that someone who has done exceptional things end up with more power. The more power someone has the more noteworthy acts they are likely to engage in. Then let history forget all but the most noteworthy details, and you have a history defined by great men.
The Roman Republic was steadily dying up to Caesar's reign. He really was just the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of its death, which was surely inevitable in the coming decades. However, without Caeser, the conquest of Gual may have been pushed back drastically?
That conquest was brutal btw, estimates are that Rome killed 1.5m combatants and 1m+ civilians enslaved / executed. There’s also that part where they just cut off the hands of any fighting age males they came across for a while.
I find the denialism around the great man theory somewhat baffling. Does anyone really believe, just for one example, that Apple computer would be what it is today without Steve Jobs?
The issue with the "Great Man" idea of history is that it doesn't take into account that people are created by history more than they create history. the microcomputer revolution was already going before Jobs and Wozniak showed up at the Homebrew Computer Club. Somebody was going to turn this hobby into a big business. If not them, somebody else.
No, but I bet we would still have personal computers and smart phones without Steve Jobs.
That's the argument against the "great man" idea. Sure, specific events would not have happened without that person, but the overall state of the world would not be drastically different.
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Plutarch selected the stories he told and modified them into moralistic narratives, but he didn't completely make them up. He is not reliable historian in modern sense, of course.
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I'm pretty sure that nobleman was named Gaius Julius and that's how he introduced himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_naming_conventions
Even Julius Caesar's full name including all three parts would not be helpful in distinguishing him from many of the other men in his family.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_(title)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Julius_Caesar_(consul_6...
Comparing modern/ancient prices get tricky.. To be fair though a worker earning 2 drachma per day would be closer to a modern person minimum wage worker (anyone back then who didn't own land, wasn't a merchant or at least a skilled craftsmen was dirt poor anyway). So if 1 drachma = $30 to $60 a talent would be closer to around $180-360k
750 sheeps or 1200 gallons of olive oil were certainly worth a fortune at the time, and owning that much would probably have made you a very weathly person when owning 300K USD today does not.
Gold wasn't that commonly used in the west back then.
Really was closer to a genocide.
That's why it is important to rebuke politicians in the mold of Trump. You don't know who will follow him.
That's the argument against the "great man" idea. Sure, specific events would not have happened without that person, but the overall state of the world would not be drastically different.
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https://www.youtube.com/@HistoriaCivilis