When Julius Caesar was 25, he was kidnapped by pirates. He acted like they worked for him. They demanded a ransom of 20 talents. Caesar laughed at them for not knowing who they had captured, and told them to ask for 50. He spent 38 days as their prisoner. When he wanted to sleep, he ordered them to stop talking. He wrote poems and speeches and read them out loud. When the pirates didn’t admire them, he called them illiterate barbarians. He often told them, laughing, that he would come back and execute them all. They thought he was joking. As soon as the ransom was paid, he raised a fleet, hunted them down and had every one of them crucified, exactly as he had promised.