Ok, it wasn’t your typical late night bar conversation but a friend mentioned to me last night we know more about Julius Caesar than we do about William the Conqueror who was born almost exactly 1000 years after Caesar.
Is this true? And how much of what we know about Caesar is known to be factual history and not just literary interpretations.
I suppose that depends on how you’re defining “know about.”
We have lots of primary source documentation about Caesar, including several books he wrote himself. His contemporaries wrote quite a lot about him as well. We have less contemporary writings about William the Conquerer, but we do know what he did and when he did it.
If you’re going strictly by contemporary writings, though, I think Caesar wins out by a longshot.
It’s an interesting claim. I note with some amusement that we are pretty sure we know Caesar’s birthday; we are not entirely sure what YEAR William I was born.
Caesar is perhaps the most famous human being who has ever lived who was not the central character in a major religion. He was also a major political figure in a state that
I think the statement is pretty much true, but would point out that what we know about Caesar might well be more biased than William I, just because a lot of what was know about Caesar (or think we know) is heavily influenced by Caesar being the primary reporter.
We also have no idea at all what William I looked like, but a pretty likely idea what Caesar looked like.
Yeah, this. A modern analogy would be a US president (and not just any president an epoch-defining one like FDR) compared to a Afghan warlord. Even a relatively successful well known Afghan warlord (like a Dostum or a Shah Masood) is not going to have as much written about them, and biographical details recorded for posterity, as a US president.
We know he was grotesquely obese in later life. So much so that his corpse broke open while they were trying to shove him into his coffin, and a disgusting stench spread throughout the church.
Isn’t this the major factor? I know that the whole idea of the “dark ages” is no longer widely accepted by historians. None the less, there seems to be a lot more written works in general from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds than from medieval Europe during the times previously known as the dark ages.
We can probably infer he was reasonably well-proportioned (i.e. tall), if we accept as reported that he stuck his eldest son with the epithet ‘short-boot’. Robert was apparently short and stout, William was almost certainly fat himself so the only way to make his zinger sting was if he was also tall enough to mock his shorter son.
Orderic Vitalis did refer to William as being ‘tall and strong’ which may well be true but he never knew him - he was abut 12 when William died. I believe the consensus is that was part of a hagiographic passage that was lifted straight from Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars 
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Any body [anybodies body?] who has been unembalmed, transported hither and yon around Rouen and shoved into a box that was too small would probably explode too. The self digesting tendencies of the human digestive tract with little buggies that like to produce various gasses as a result tend to make for exploding bodies.
Is that where the word “pew” comes from?
Realistically, we know more about Julius Caesar than we know about almost every human alive today.
Recency helps but so does self-promotion and historical importance. Genghis Khan, perhaps, matched Caesar on the latter but he was horrible at the former and has left a documented legacy that’s about as historical as your average fairy tale. Casanova is largely unimportant in history, but we know reams and reams of his doings. The baby that was just born to a dark-skinned ranch hand in Oaxaca, most likely, will live her entire life without anyone outside of town knowing about her and, within a couple of decades of her death, she’ll have disappeared entirely from history.
I think both are important. True there were less surviving written records from the early middle ages (that aspect of the “dark” ages, which is what is actually meant by the term, has never been seriously debated). But a minor ruler on the periphery of Europe was never going to have as much written about them as Caesar. If the comparison was with one of the more powerful popes or (maybe) later Byzantine emperors then it might been closer.
I’m not sure this is true. Mexico has (by the standards of history) a pretty sophisticated bureaucracy (and 90% of children attend primary school). I’d say someone born and dying in rural Oaxaca the 21st century has more written records about their life than most of the significant historical figures in history prior to the modern period, even its just birth, death, and school attendance records.
Perhaps. It will still not be very much more than some numbers.
If I know that Watalusa Ferminador was born in 1430 and died in 1473, that’s not nothing, but it’s data, not a person.
I’m not sure that’s true, depending on what you mean by “we.”
Clearly, I don’t know anything at all about most people, and most people don’t know anything at all about me, whereas I and many other people know many things about Julius Caesar. However, that’s just speaking about what currently resides in a person’s memory. Colelctively, in terms of everything we have recorded, we have available to us information about most people in the world to a level of accuracy we don’t have for Julius Caesar. We are not even sure about Julius Caesar’s birthday - traditionally it’d held to be 12 July 100 BC but that’s not certain. Many of his other exploits are, well, PROBABLY true. By way of comparison, you can independently verify with certainty probably ten times as many things about me as you can for Caesar, and I’m not even famous enough to have a Wikipedia page. For someone comparatively famous, like Queen Elizabeth II or Dwight Eisenhower, one could probably verify more facts to a near certainty than you could of EVERYONE in the entire world who lived in 100 BC.
Even the baby born in Oaxaca will leave a well documented trail of facts. Her birth with be officially recorded in a governmental database - Mexico is a modern country - and right there a trail of facts will be established.
Julius was born in July??? What are the odds!
So the zinger about big feet and small feet implying other characteristics harkens back to the middle ages?
The historians of any era were not above inserting exaggerations and outright lies to slander those of competing political factions. I believe Gibbon made a point about this in Decline and Fall that many of the more outrageous behaviours attributed to some Roman emperors were fabrications. I’m reminded too of the allegations that Herod allegedly had progressively rotting flesh in his genital region before he died. Just the sort of thing someone would write (or exaggerate) if they wanted future generations to hate the person too, or repeating titillating but inaccurate malicious gossip.