Chapter 1
Pirates of the Mediterranean
Seven burly men crowded around Julius Caesar, taking turns to spit on him. He kept backing away, each step bringing him closer to the edge of the deck. He struggled to keep his balance as the galley pitched beneath his feet. Another step backwards, and he would topple over the edge and into the choppy waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
They can not treat me this way. I will not let them.
His grip tightened around a scroll he had been reading from. “You barbarous lot,” he said, trying to keep fear out of his voice. He brandished his scroll as if it were a pilum. “None among you can appreciate good poetry. Not one.”
The men surrounding him guffawed at his reaction to their vulgarity. Curling his lip, Caesar flung the scroll away. It fluttered in the wind, twirling higher and higher, and away from the group of the seafaring hoodlums.
A small, sunburnt man, who appeared to be their leader, swaggered up to Caesar and smirked. “It is not the poetry that we don’t appreciate,” he said, “but the Roman hand that wrote it. The very hand that will part from the body if the mouth does not give up its impudent ways.”
The men burst into another fit of raucous laughter.
Pirate scum!
… the year was 75 BC, winter was setting in, and Julius Caesar was a prisoner aboard a pirate galley. Two weeks earlier he had left the shores of Italy and set sail towards Rhodes, intending to study rhetoric from Apollonius, the Greek. But as his ship neared the coast of Asia, disaster struck. Pirates attacked, hacked his crew to pieces, and set fire to the ship. Caesar was taken as a hostage and held for ransom.
As he seethed with humiliation, assessing the imminent threat of his hand getting severed, the pirates continued with their mirth.
“Last night, the Roman told us to stop singing as we drank. Ask me why,” a pirate said, barely containing his laughter. “Because his sleep was getting disturbed.”
The men again collapsed in throes of laughter. Their leader, however, did not laugh. He looked sternly at Caesar, then expelled a barrage of pungent air from his mouth.
“It is time we discussed your ransom, Roman.” He eyed Caesar from head to toe, as if appraising his worth. “Twenty talents,” he finally said.
Caesar felt a knot in his stomach. “Twenty?”
“Too much, eh, Roman?”
Caesar took a step forward, his nostrils flaring. “You price my head at twenty talents? A mere twenty?”
The laughter around him stopped abruptly. The deck full of pirates fell silent. Their leader stared at Caesar, his mouth hanging open. The only sound was of the waves sloshing steadily against the pirate galley.
Is my hand about to become fish-fodder? Or all of me? He was still too close to the edge. Caesar held his breath. I must not show them I’m afraid.
He thrust his chest out, raising his chin slightly. “How dare you set my ransom at twenty talents? Never in my life have I been so insulted. I am worth fifty talents. Not twenty. Fifty! Any less than that is beneath me.”
Fifty talents weighed about 300,000 coins of silver: a fortune.
After this incident, the pirates treated Caesar with respect. He became less of a prisoner, more their guest. They let him share their food, gave him softer bedding, and even allowed him to join them for exercises. Many even clapped and cheered during his poetry recitations, though he was certain that they were humouring him.
Meanwhile, Caesar sent some of his men to raise coin for his ransom. Few weeks later, the ransom was paid—fifty talents, as he had promised.
When it was time for his release, the pirate leader spoke to Caesar. “You will be missed, Roman,” he said in an almost-friendly voice. “Never again will such an esteemed prisoner set foot upon our galley.”
Caesar clasped the pirate’s arm, leaned in and smiled. “We will meet again,” he whispered slowly into the hairy ear. Without another word, he stepped off the pirate galley.
Caesar was furious. How dare they menace honest men?
Even though the pirates had eventually treated him well, they had long been the scourge of the Mediterranean Sea. And he was determined to get rid of them.
Once on land, Caesar recruited local militia and their ships for his mission. Then he set sail to meet the pirates, one last time.
One might wonder why Caesar had insisted on paying a much higher ransom than the pirates demanded. Was it hubris? Recklessness? Or simply, bravado? Despite being twenty-five years old, did he entertain visions of grandeur—of becoming a celebrated leader of the Roman republic, one day?
In all probability, when we met Julius Caesar in this story, he had already projected himself into the future where his elevated stature was no longer a dream, but an established reality.
No wonder the sum of twenty talents felt a miserly ransom to him. He was insulted at being valued much beneath his (future) station.
Dear friend, do you envision glimmers of a glorious future for yourself, like Caesar did aboard the pirate galley? And are you working towards making your future come alive?
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