Pompeia

Sulla ordered Caesar to divorce Cornelia sometime around 82 BC.

Other men in the same position did what they were told, because a wife from the wrong family seemed like a small price when your life was on the line.

Caesar refused, and went into hiding in the countryside, moving from place to place, and for a while looked like he was going to end up as one more young aristocrat who didn't make it through the purges.

What saved him in the end was the network around him.

In 62 BC, Caesar was praetor, one step below the consulship, and that year's scandal landed in his own household.

It centered on a women's religious rite called the Bona Dea, and a young aristocrat named Clodius, who's going to matter a great deal in a later episode.

Caesar divorced his second wife, Pompeia, over it, and Plutarch has him explaining that Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.

Just so nobody gets tangled up later, Pompeia was no close relation to Pompey, despite the names, and that one trips up a lot of people reading these sources for the first time.

Caesar had married another wife after the death of Cornelia.

Her name was Pompeia.

He divorced Pompeia about this time, under very extraordinary circumstances.

Among the other strange religious ceremonies and celebrations which were observed in those days was one called the celebration of the mysteries of the good goddess.

This celebration was held by females alone, everything masculine being most carefully excluded.

The persons engaged spent the night together in music and dancing and various secret ceremonies, half pleasure, half worship.

according to the ideas and customs of the time the mysteries of the good goddess were to be celebrated one night at caesar's house he himself having of course withdrawn in the middle of the night the whole company in one of the apartments were thrown into consternation at finding that one of their number was a man he had a smooth and youthful looking face and was very perfectly disguised in the dress of a female He proved to be a certain Clodius, a very base and dissolute young man, though of great wealth and high connections.

He had been admitted by a female slave of Pompeia's, whom he had succeeded in bribing.

Pom- Cornelia was the first.

Pompeia was the second, and Calpurnia was the third.

Qué bar.

[laughs]

Yeah.

Um, so it was Pompeia, and she was faithful.

However, when he was away on his adventures, uh, she's always was partying with other people.

And so some people, the rumors began, and Julius Caesar knew that the rumors were not true, but he divorced her anyway.

Behind the scenes, all the power was in his hands, but people were willing to put up with it, and, uh, that was a mark of a remarkably clever politician.

Agrippa has a visitor one day, Pompeia, and I'll be oblique about this, but Pompeia is a woman who knew Julius Caesar, and she, let me put it this way, sees something in Agrippa.

The question about Agrippa is what was his background, and how did he come to rise to such heights? And it was speculated about a century ago that it's possible he was actually Julius Caesar's illegitimate son.

Caesar was in Rome the year before Agrippa was born, so the dates fit.