In the 15 years since it was pulled from the water,
this head from the Rhône^1 (see next page) has
achieved celebrity status. It has been the subject of
special art exhibitions and television programs, and
it even ended up on a French postage stamp.
Currently, it stands proudly as the star of an Arles
museum, captured in countless selfies by admiring
visitors. One possible backstory is that it was put
up to honor Caesar during his lifetime by the loyal
citizens of Arles, but it was chucked into the river
after his assassination when the changed political
climate made it seem too hot a property. As soon as
Caesar was yesterday’s man, no one wanted a statue
of him. It was only some two millennia later that
it was dramatically rescued from its watery grave.
So far, so good. But the big question is: How on
earth do we know it is Julius Caesar? There’s no
name attached to the head. So, why do we think it
is him? There are nearly 80 ancient heads found all
over Europe and the United States that have been
claimed to be a true portrait of Caesar. How do we
decide which are and which are not? Ancient writers
note that, as a mark of his power, Caesar flooded the
Roman world with his image. But can we recognize
his head out of the estimated hundreds of thousands
of other Roman portraits that still survive, lined up
on our museum shelves?
This problem has kept archaeologists busy for
centuries and is made all the trickier because none
of the potential candidates carry a name. (As a rule
of thumb, if a marble portrait is neatly inscribed
with the name Julius Caesar, it’s a fake.) The only
firm evidence that survives for what Caesar looked
like is a series of silver coins^2 minted just before his
assassination. These show a characterful, gaunt
face, with a wrinkled neck and a prominent Adam’s
apple and a laurel wreath crown. According to his
biographer, writing a century and a half after his
death, Caesar would position the laurels artfully to
conceal the bald patch of which he was ashamed.
The problem for archaeologists has been to try to
match up the three-dimensional busts with the tiny
images on the coins.
The array of may-be-Caesar portraits in the round
is much more varied than you might expect. One is
a particularly luscious “Green Caesar,”^3 originally
from Egypt and now—after passing through the
hands of the Prussian royal family—on display in
Berlin. It is made out of polished green stone and so
impressive that some overoptimistic historians and
archaeologists have imagined that it might have been
commissioned by Cleopatra herself, who had briefly
been Caesar’s lover. (Equally likely, as more sober
scholars have suggested, it was a portrait of some
Egyptian bigwig who was aping the style of Caesar.)
Another is a full-length portrait statue, which
was the favorite of the Italian Fascist leader Benito
Mussolini, who saw Julius Caesar as his ideological
ancestor. He liked the statue so much that he had
full-scale replicas made and displayed in prominentEXPLORE | THE BIG IDEA
There is only one ancient physical
description of Julius Caesar, by
his original biographer Suetonius,
writing 163 years after Caesar’s
death. “He was particularly fastid-
ious over his body image,” writes
Suetonius, adding that Caesar
used to pluck his body hair. And
he considered his baldness a
terrible disfigurement, finding
it exposed him to the gibes of
abusers. So, he used to brush
forward his thinning hair from the
crown of his head in order to con-
ceal his bald patch—an intriguing
early use of the comb-over.Will the real
Julius Caesar
please stand up?
locations around Italy. He moved the original into
the council chamber of the city of Rome—where
it remains, presiding over discussions of planning
regulations and traffic control. But no serious his-
torian now thinks it a statue of Caesar, certainly not
sculpted from life.
There is even another that was dragged up from
a riverbed, this time from the Hudson in New York,
in 1925. How it got there is anyone’s guess—presum-
ably “lost overboard” while traveling by boat, rather
than being the clinching piece of evidence that the
Romans really did reach America. But for a while it
was hailed as America’s own Julius Caesar. Not for
long. It ended up in a Swedish museum, demoted to
“unknown Roman.”TO MAKE THIS PORTRAIT, artist David Samuel
Stern photographed a bust of Caesar, circa
1512, at New York’s Metropolitan Museum
of Art. Three photos were converted to red,
green, and blue tonal ranges, printed on
translucent vellum, cut into strips, woven
by hand, and then backlit to create this final
image. “Our collective mental picture of
Caesar is almost certainly not what he really
looked like,” Stern says.18 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC