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THE BIG QUESTION:

WHAT DID CAESAR LOOK LIKE?

Monday, January 10, 2022

In today’s newsletter, correcting a 130-year-old injustice; discovering a prehistoric rainforest; Sidney Poitier’s dinnertime lesson; a boom in ‘remedies’ in Cuba … and the mystery of the exquisite bronzes.

WOVEN PORTRAIT: DAVID SAMUEL STERN. PHOTOGRAPHED AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

By Amy Briggs, Executive Editor, HISTORY magazine

From “Veni, vidi, vici,” to the Ides of March, Julius Caesar is one of those historical figures people think they know everything about. If you’re looking for books, there’s no shortage of recently published biographies by scholars like Adrian Goldsworthy and Barry Strauss.

Rather read a memoir? Lucky for you, Caesar was a prolific writer. Despite many of his works not surviving to the modern age, those that did are sources of rich detail about his life (including the fact that he charmingly refers to himself in the third person).

Nat Geo’s History magazine has covered many aspects of his life—from crossing the Rubicon to his love child with Cleopatra. It’s tempting to think that we know it all, but there is one aspect of Caesar’s life that remains surprisingly elusive—his appearance.

Historian Mary Beard’s essay in this month’s National Geographic magazine on how we don’t really know what Julius Caesar looked like is fascinating. For a man whose story is so familiar, the fact that his visage is a mystery seems incongruous—a puzzle that historians are keen on solving. It’s easy (and tempting) for me to envision Rex Harrison (who played Caesar in 1963’s Cleopatra) or even Ciarán Hinds (from the HBO series Rome), but no one can say if those actors really resemble Caesar at all. (Pictured above, a woven, imagined “portrait.”)

So why do we do know what Caesar’s successor, Augustus, looked like? Beard points out in SPQR, her essential history of ancient Rome, that Augustus flooded the Roman world with (somewhat idealized) portraits of himself.

It was an unprecedented marketing campaign, designed to popularize him throughout the realm as an icon of leadership. There are few confirmed depictions of Julius Caesar created in his lifetime (mostly on coins), but by contrast, there are as many as 250 confirmed statues of Augustus from all over the Roman Empire. Portraiture becomes power under Augustus, a practice that most rulers have emulated since his time.

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TODAY IN A MINUTE

MICHAEL FRESE

Rainforest Australia: A farmer working a rough patch of land found rocks that turned out to be amazingly preserved fossils from a rainforest 11 million to 16 million years in present-day southeastern Australia. How well preserved? “Spiders [are] fossilized down to their leg hairs, and fossil fish are still engorged with bellies full of midges,” Nat Geo’s Michael Greshko writes of the find. (Pictured above, a fossilized sawfly, with grains of pollen still preserved on its head.)

R.I.P. Sidney Poitier: Former Nat Geo art director Charles W. Blow gained a valuable lesson during a 2014 dinner with legendary actor and activist Sidney Poitier. “[Poitier] had learned that sometimes, when people say something can’t happen, they simply haven’t tried hard enough. Sometimes, can’ts are soft," wrote Blow, now a New York Times columnist. Poitier died Thursday at age 94.

Meet Corinne Tan: That’s the name of the latest doll by American Girl, created partially in response to anti-Asian sentiment during the pandemic. The company hopes the Chinese American doll will validate the experiences of children who have endured racism, while also inspiring children to be “antiracism allies,” it told the New York Times. You can see the doll here.

Justice, finally: Nearly 130 years ago, New Orleans shoemaker Homer Plessy was arrested for sitting in a section of a train because he was Black, even though he had a ticket for that section. The arrest spurred the Supreme Court’s disastrous “separate but equal” ruling on racial segregation that lasted until 1954. Last week, Louisiana’s governor gave a posthumous pardon to Plessy for defying the racial barrier, Erin Blakemore reports. Descendant Keith Plessy said he was holding back tears at the pardon, adding: “It doesn’t feel like my feet are on the ground because my ancestors are carrying me.”

PHOTO OF THE DAY

PHOTOGRAPH BY WILLARD CULVER, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION

How our maps began: National Geographic has been churning out maps for more than a century. In this photo from 1935, Nat Geo’s first cartographic chief, Albert H. Bumstead (standing), checks an atlas while staff members operate a photo-typesetter that Bumstead invented. The image was recently featured in our popular archival Photo of the Day gallery.

SEE VINTAGE PHOTOS

THE BIG TAKEAWAY

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NATALIA FAVRE

Home remedies: Cubans have long used medicinal plants and herbs to treat whatever ails them. Prescription drugs have been scarce, particularly during the pandemic, making plant-based remedies and alternative treatments such as acupuncture and cupping more popular. “Cuba doesn’t have the foreign exchange to import medicines or many other things,” a Cuban scholar tells Natalia Favre. (Pictured above left, plants used to prepare a beverage called Titan are placed on the ground. The Titan is used to cleanse the body. Right, Jesús Villalonga, a traditional healer, feels the back of a patient’s leg to diagnose a stomach ailment.)

IN A FEW WORDS

QUOTE

There are 2,892 miles across the continental United States, and each of those miles represents many lost or invisible stories that could reveal unknown or unacknowledged truths about justice, race, and equity in communities everywhere.

Ashley Lamb-Sinclair

Nat Geo Explorer; leader of the 2892 Miles to Go: A Geographic Walk for Justice project

LAST GLIMPSE

ARTOKOLORO/ALAMY

An Iron Age mystery deepens: It has been nearly a century since exquisite bronze figures emerged from the Zagros Mountains of present-day western Iran. Farmers dug up the artworks of people and animals, embossed bronze cups, and delicate pins dating back 3,000 years. But who created them? There’s still no definitive answer, but Nat Geo’s History magazine covers the archaeological detective story—and the possible sculptors. (Pictured above, dating from about 700 B.C., a sculpture of a horned figure taming mythical beasts.)

SUBSCRIBER EXCLUSIVE

Today's newsletter was curated and edited by Monica Williams, Jen Tse, Heather Kim, and David Beard (no relation to historian Mary Beard). Have an idea or link to a story you think is right down our alley? Let us know at david.beard@natgeo.com. Happy trails!

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