Suetonius: “Life of Julius Caesar”

[Julius Caesar] got his start in the military while serving in Asia on the staff of the praetor Marcus Thermus. Thermus sent him to Bithynia to pick up a fleet, but he stayed with King Nicomedes for so long that it sparked a persistent rumor: people said he had slept with the king. This rumor intensified when, just a few days later, he went back to Bithynia, claiming he needed to collect money owed to one of his ex-slaves. His later military service was more respectable . . . honestly, nothing damaged Caesar’s reputation for chastity more than his time with Nicomedes. It became a serious, permanent scandal that everyone threw in his face. I won’t even mention the famous lines by Calvus Licinius: “Whatever Bithynia, and the one who screwed Caesar, ever had.” I’ll skip over the speeches by Dolabella and old Curio, where Dolabella called him the “queen’s rival” and the “inner cusion of the royal couch,” while Curio labeled him “Nicomedes’ stable” and the “Bithynian brothel.” I’m also ignoring the public posters put up by Bibulus that declared his co-consul [Caesar] was the “Queen of Bithynia,” noting he used to love the king, and now he loves the kingdom . . . once, when Caesar was in the Senate defending Nicomedes’ daughter, Nysa, and listing the king’s favors to him, Cicero snapped: “Take those compliments away, I beg you, since everyone knows what you gave to him, and what he gave to you!” And finally, during his great Triumph after conquering Gaul, his soldiers sang this extremely popular chant among the usual jokes they yelled after the chariot: “Caesar conquered the Gauls; Nicomedes conquered Caesar. Look, Caesar now triumphs, who conquered the Gauls; Nicomedes doesn’t triumph, who conquered Caesar!”