Caesar raised his own ransom from 20 to 50 talents

The crosses that Julius Caesar had raised outside Pergamon, on the coast of modern-day Turkey, in the winter of 74 BC, were paid for by a ransom he himself had inflated: the pirates who kidnapped him asked for 20 talents, and their hostage, offended, demanded that it be 50. The story comes down to us from Plutarch and Suetonius, his two ancient biographers, and it is best understood told backwards, from the crosses to the joke that planted them.

On the last day, in Pergamon, Caesar was acting on his own, with no public office and no superior to back him. He was twenty-five and in a hurry. The Roman governor of the province of Asia, Marcus Juncus, was still wondering what to do with the captured pirates: sold as slaves they were worth a fortune, and a fortune, administered by the governor, had ways of getting lost along the road. Caesar did not wait for the paperwork. He went back to the prison at Pergamon, took the prisoners out on his own authority and crucified them all, which was exactly what he had promised them. He granted them a single discount, and he granted it out of affection: he had their throats cut before they were nailed up, to spare them the agony. He had taken a liking to them.

A few weeks earlier, none of this seemed possible. The ransom had just been paid and the pirates had set him loose on the coast. The first thing the freed man did was go down to the port of Miletus, a Greek city on the coast, fit out some ships with money and local favors, and sail straight back to his captors' anchorage. He caught nearly all of them right where he had left them, counting coins. He recovered the 50 talents, kept whatever was on the ship as spoils for good measure, and delivered the prisoners to Pergamon while he wrote to the governor. From the word sent to the governor to the crosses, days went by, not months.

To understand the scene you have to step back a little further, to the 38 days of captivity on Pharmacusa, an islet off the coast of Asia Minor. Within a few days, the whole camp was running on the hostage's schedule. He wrote speeches and poems and read them aloud to the pirates, and anyone who yawned he called an illiterate barbarian to his face. When he wanted a nap, he ordered the camp to be quiet, and the camp, to the astonishment of history, went quiet. He joined in their games and their exercises, and to everyone's roaring laughter he kept repeating the house joke: once you let me go, I will come back with ships and crucify you one by one. The pirates loved the kid's nerve. Thirty-eight days of laughter, each side for its own reason, and only one of the two sides knew it was not a joke.

And at the very beginning, on the first day, there is a ship bound for Rhodes, the island where young Romans with a career ahead of them went to polish their oratory. On board, a twenty-five-year-old patrician from a family with more name than money, still without a command of his own or an army that knew him. When the Cilician pirates — the de facto owners of that sea, with entire fleets devoted to kidnapping — boarded the vessel off Pharmacusa and priced the passenger at 20 talents, they were doing reasonable arithmetic: 20 talents was a fortune, more than 500 kilos of silver, the price of an entire cargo. The passenger's reply was preserved by the biographers because the scene, two thousand years on, is still priceless. Caesar burst out laughing and corrected their rate: “Twenty talents, for me? You have no idea who you've caught. Ask for fifty.”