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Caesar's Ashes | ||||||||||||||
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Here's a question for you - where's C. Iulius Caesar, dictator of Rome and generally all-round famous Roman, buried, exactly? | ||||||||||||||
You'd have thought, wouldn't you, that that would be part of the story of his assassination, which has been retold probably hundreds of times over the centuries, yet where Caesar's ashes ended up is only recorded by one source (as far as I know) - Cassius Dio's Roman History, Book 44. 51.: | ||||||||||||||
"After this, when the consuls forbade anyone except the soldiers to carry arms, they refrained from bloodshed, but set up an altar on the site of the pyre (for the freedmen of Caesar had previously taken up his bones and deposited them in the family tomb), and undertook to sacrifice upon it and to offer victims to Caesar, as to a god." | ||||||||||||||
Where is the family tomb Dio talks about? There're two options, since there's certainly no evidence that Augustus moved his adoptive father to his own Mausoleum at a later date: | ||||||||||||||
A: Roman aristocratic families usually had a tomb somewhere outside the city walls. The earliest known example of this is the tomb of the Scipios. Was Caesar taken here? B: Caesar had had a special tomb built for his daughter Julia (d. 54), which he may have intended to house his own remains in due time. Click here to see its location. |
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