ABSTRACT
Caesar’s first wife died, he divorced the second, and the third was widowed by his assassination. In each case he married a woman from an influential family, but such marriage was far from unconventional. While it cannot be said that all Roman marriages of that time were arranged, only rarely did a Roman patrician enter into marriage without regard to the alliances that would be forged or threatened. However, Caesar appears to have been more than conventionally sensitive to the connections established through marriage. Such connections can be the basis for modulative social control (the first party uses the influence of a third party on a second party), and Caesar had no peer when it came to the effectiveness and extent of such control.
