Julius Caesar - The Tusculum Portrait 50-40 BCE

November 22, 2019

Julius Caesar - The Tusculum Portrait 50-40 BCE

"Julius Caesar, the Divine, lost his father when he was in the sixteenth year of his age; and the year following, being nominated to the office of high-priest of Jupiter, he repudiated Cossutia, who was very wealthy, although her family belonged only to the equestrian order, and to whom he had been contracted when he was a mere boy. He then married Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, who was four times consul; and had by her, shortly afterwards, a daughter named Julia. Resisting all the efforts of the dictator Sylla to induce him to divorce Cornelia, he suffered the penalty of being stripped of his sacerdotal office, his wife’s dowry, and his own patrimonial estates; and, being identified with the adverse faction, was compelled to withdraw from Rome. After changing his place of concealment nearly every night, although he was suffering from a quartan ague, and having effected his release by bribing the officers who had tracked his footsteps, he at length obtained a pardon through the intercession of the Vestal Virgins, and of Mamercus Aemilius and Aurelius Cotta, his near relatives. We are assured that when Sylla, having withstood for a while the entreaties of his own best friends, persons of distinguished rank, at last yielded to their importunity, he exclaimed—either by a divine impulse, or from a shrewd conjecture: “Your suit is granted, and you may take him among you; but know,” he added, “that this man, for whose safety you are so extremely anxious, will, some day or other, be the ruin of the party of the nobles, in defence of which you are leagued with me; for in this one Caesar, you will find many a Marius.”

-Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus: The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, section 1

The Tusculum portrait, also called the Tusculum bust, is one of the two accepted portraits of Julius Caesar, alongside the Chiaramonti Caesar, which were made before the beginning of the Roman Empire. According to several scholars, the Tusculum portrait is the only extant portrait of Caesar made during his lifetime. Being one of the copies of the bronze original, the bust is dated to 50–40 BC and is housed in the permanent collection of the Museo d'Antichità in Turin, Italy. Made of fine-grained marble, the bust measures 33 cm (1ft 1in) in height. The bust's head is prolonged, forming a saddle shape which was caused by Caesar's premature ossification of the sutures between the parietal bone and the temporal bone.