Julius Caesar
Captured by pirates, he raised his own ransom, made his captors an audience — then kept his promise.
The episode
Sailing the Aegean around 75 BC, the young Caesar was captured by Cilician pirates who demanded twenty talents for his release. Plutarch records that Caesar laughed at them for not knowing whom they had caught — and volunteered fifty. For thirty-eight days he behaved less like a hostage than a leader in rehearsal: he joined the pirates' games and exercises, wrote speeches and poems and made his captors the audience, called the unimpressed ones illiterates to their faces, and told them, smiling, that he would crucify them all. They took it as a joke. The moment his ransom freed him, he manned ships at Miletus on his own initiative, hunted down the crews, and carried out the sentence he had promised.
The move — copy this today
Your turn
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