New Delhi, Sept. 14 -- You might have more in common with Julius Caesar than you think. No, it isn't political ambition, military victories, or a tendency to cross dangerous rivers.

It's your hairline.

By the time he was declared dictator for life, Caesar was also, by most historical accounts, a man losing a very different kind of battle: one fought not on the plains of Gaul but on the crown of his own head. Suetonius, the Roman biographer who chronicled the lives of the Caesars, recorded that Julius Caesar was deeply self-conscious about his baldness, so much so that he took to combing his thinning hair forward from the back of his head to disguise it. When the Senate granted him the right to wear a laurel wreath at all times, he repor...