In the second half of the first century BCE, Judea played host to some of the ancient world’s greatest celebrities. Cleopatra and Mark Antony left their footprints, but what about Julius Caesar?

A hundred years after the fact, Roman author Seutonius wrote of Julius Caesar’s funeral: 

At the height of the public grief, a throng of foreigners went about … above all the Jews, who even flocked to the funeral pyre for several successive nights. (Lives of the Caesars, Divus Julius, 84.5)

The Jews of the Roman Empire remembered Caesar’s many interventions on their behalf, apart from his “settlement” of the leadership struggle in Judea. For example, he had arranged for the Senate to exempt synagogues from a general ban on freedom of worship and had released Jews from compulsory military service. He’d granted Jewish communities autonomy in several lands and allowed them to judge civil cases according to their own laws. These privileges set a precedent followed by many Roman emperors in subsequent centuries. But was he ever actually in Judea, or any part of the land of Israel?

Such a visit could have occurred only after Julius Caesar’s successful campaign in Egypt. The decisive battle was fought on March 27 in 47 BCE, and Caesar’s next reported military action took place in Zela, Turkey, on August 2. So there was ample time for a sea or land journey in between. 

Caesar is thought to have remained in Egypt for his dalliance with Cleopatra, perhaps even until she bore him a son. Cicero wrote in Rome on July 5 that he’d heard Caesar had left Egypt. Since news took roughly a month to travel from there to Rome, Caesar must have departed early in June.