Everyone knows that a cesarean section, also known as a “C-section,” is when a child is removed from the uterus via surgery rather than by the natural birthing process. The name of the procedure, however, is misleading. Although the term cesarean section most likely does indeed come from the name of the famous ancient Roman general and dictator Gaius Julius Caesar (lived 100 – 44 BC), this is not because Julius Caesar was actually born by cesarean section, but rather because of a later legend with no factual basis claiming that he was.
Why Julius Caesar could not have been born by cesarean section
The ancient Romans did indeed perform cesarean sections on some occasions. In spite of this, however, we know that Julius Caesar was certainly not born by cesarean section. In ancient times, doctors did not have access to modern antibiotics, nor did they possess modern knowledge about how to perform surgery safely. It was therefore virtually impossible to perform a cesarean section in ancient times without killing the mother. For this reason, the ancient Romans only performed a cesarean section as an absolute last resort measure to save an infant whose mother had either already died in childbirth or was certainly going to die shortly.
In fact, for almost all of human history, it was impossible to perform a cesarean section without killing the mother. The earliest reliable record of a caesarean section that both the mother and the child managed to survive comes from the late eighteenth century. Just think about how recent that really is. That was only around two hundred years ago.
We know that Julius Caesar could not have possibly been born by cesarean section because we know that Julius Caesar’s mother Aurelia Cotta survived giving birth to him. In fact, Aurelia Cotta was largely responsible for raising him and she even lived to see her son’s election as imperator (“commander”) for the first time in 60 BC. She eventually died in 54 BC, by which time, her son had already been campaigning in Gaul for years.
If Aurelia Cotta’s survival is not enough evidence to convince you that Julius Caesar was not born by cesarean section, there is also the fact that not a single one of Julius Caesar’s ancient biographers mentions there having been anything unusual at all about his birth. If he had been born by cesarean section and his mother had survived, that would have been truly remarkable. It would have been seen by virtually everyone as a true miracle.
If something like that had happened, you can be sure that the ancient biographers of Caesar would have mentioned it. Instead, neither of the authors of the two surviving ancient biographies of Julius Caesar—the Roman writer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (lived c. 69 – after 122 AD) and the Greek writer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – c. 120 AD)—mentions anything remarkable at all about Julius Caesar’s birth.
In fact, neither Suetonius nor Ploutarchos even really says anything about Julius Caesar’s birth beyond implicitly stating that it happened. Suetonius begins his biography of Caesar with the death of Caesar’s father in around 85 BC and Ploutarchos begins his biography with the dictator Sulla’s command for Caesar to divorce his wife Cornelia in around 82 BC. The fact that neither of these two writers apparently felt there was anything about Caesar’s birth that was even worth mentioning strongly indicates that there was nothing particularly remarkable about the manner in which Julius Caesar was born.
ABOVE: Illustration of the apocryphal story of Julius Caesar’s birth by cesarean section from a medieval English manuscript dating to 1301
A brief history of the misconception
The idea that Julius Caesar was born via the medical procedure we now know as a “cesarean section” originates from a peculiar tidbit of etymological speculation that is first recorded by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder (lived 23 – 79 AD) in Book VII, section nine, of his encyclopedic work Natural History. Here is the passage that apparently generated the misconception, as translated by the scholar H. Rackham for the Loeb Classical Library:
“It is a better omen when the mother dies in giving birth to the child; instances are the birth of the elder Scipio Africanus and the first of the Caesars, who got that name from the surgical operation performed on his mother; the origin of the family name Caeso is also the same. Also Manilius who entered Carthage with his army was born in the same manner.”
Notice that Pliny the Elder does not say that Julius Caesar was born by cesarean section, but rather “the first of the Caesars.” We know that there were many people with the name Caesar who lived and died long before the famous general and dictator Gaius Julius Caesar was even born. For instance, we know there was a man named Sextus Julius Caesar who held the position of praetor in 208 BC, over a century before the famous Gaius Julius Caesar was born.
There were many other people who bore the name Caesar who were born before Gaius Julius Caesar; indeed, it seems to have actually been quite a common name. An older contemporary of Gaius Julius Caesar was the politician and general Lucius Julius Caesar, who was probably born sometime around 135 BC or thereabouts—several decades before the more famous Julius Caesar that we have all heard of.
Therefore, when Pliny the Elder says “the first of the Caesars,” he is clearly not talking about the famous general and dictator in this passage, but rather about someone else who lived much earlier. It is only in much later sources that this story about the origin of the name Caesar came to be mistakenly applied to Gaius Julius Caesar himself.
ABOVE: Woodcut from a Latin printed text dated to 1506 depicting the apocryphal story of Julius Caesar’s birth by cesarean section
Even that doesn’t work, though
Even Pliny’s version of the story—the version about “the first of the Caesars” rather than Gaius Julius Caesar—is still not historically true. The etymology of the name Caesar is, in fact, unknown. There are many fanciful stories about where the name supposedly came from, but all of them, including Pliny’s story about the cesarean section, are probably pure fantasy.
Pliny the Elder—or, more likely, someone else Pliny was using as a source—likely came up with this story about the name Caesar having originally been applied to someone who had been born via surgery solely on the basis of the fact that the word Caesar sounds similar to the Latin word caesus, which is the perfect passive participle form of the Latin verb caedo, meaning “I cut.” As any linguist or even amateur etymologist knows, however, just because two words sound similar does not mean they are etymologically related. This whole story should therefore be regarded as highly dubious to say the least.
Other supposed etymologies of the name Caesar
There were a lot of crazy stories floating around in antiquity about where the name Caesar supposedly came from. The Historia Augusta, a collection of biographies of Roman emperors written in Latin in around the late fourth or early fifth century AD, lists several different unlikely etymologies for the name Caesar. Here are the ones listed in the Historia Augusta, Book II, sections 3 through 4:
- It came from the fact that the first man of this name slew an elephant in battle and the Punic word for elephant is caesai.
- It came from the fact that the first man of this name was cut (caesus) from his mother womb after she died in childbirth.
- It came from the fact that the first man of this name was born with a thick head of hair.
- It came from the fact that the first man of this name was born with beautiful blue-gray (caesius) eyes.
All of these are clearly speculative etymologies based solely on similar-sounding words. None of these explanations are trustworthy.
Conclusion
The term cesarean section originates from an apocryphal legend claiming that Julius Caesar was born by cesarean section. This legend is certainly apocryphal because it is not mentioned by any of Julius Caesar’s ancient biographers and because Julius Caesar’s mother survived the birthing process, which would have been virtually impossible if Caesar had been born by cesarean section, since cesarean sections in Roman times virtually always resulted in the death of the mother.
The legend claiming that Julius Caesar was born by cesarean section originates from a speculative etymology for the name Caesar mentioned in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. This speculative etymology concerned “the first of the Caesars,” not Gaius Julius Caesar, and is probably incorrect anyways. The true etymology of the name Caesar is unknown, but all of the etymologies proposed for it in ancient sources are highly speculative and probably wrong.
