deviation, all his life. But he met with little success, and thought it prudent to retire from Rome for a time. He went to Rhodes, ostensibly to study rhetoric in that great school of Greek philosophers and orators, where Cicero also had learned to round his periods. At that time the Mediterranean swarmed with pirates. Cæsar was captured by them, and kept a prisoner until he could procure the enormous ransom of fifty talents. He then manned a few ships in the port of Miletus, though he was not invested with any military authority, surprised the pirates, took them prisoners, and caused them to be strangled and crucified. After this incident, so characteristic of the insecurity and lawlessness of the time, he continued his journey to Rhodes, and devoted about a year to his peaceful pursuits. In the year b.c. 74, hostilities recommenced with Mithridates, king of Pontus. Cæsar, without any commission or authority, collected troops and joined in the war. But he felt that the proper place for him was Rome, the centre of political life. Pompey was at that time considered the greatest man in the state. As yet, the idea of a possible rival did not enter his mind. Pompey had already filled the highest commands; he had triumphed over Sertorius and Spartacus. Cæsar, on the contrary, did not succeed till b.c. 68 in obtaining the quæstorship, the lowest office in the scale that led to the consular dignity. Yet he gained ground steadily. He ingratiated himself with the people, who still enjoyed the much-abused right of bestowing the high offices of state. Above all, he showed affability and liberality. His own fortune was small and soon exhausted, but the money-lenders supplied him with fabulous sums, for they had confidence in his political abilities, and felt sure his time would come to govern a province, to fill his coffers and to repay them with interest.
Cæsar's alliance with Pompey became more intimate in b.c. 67, by his marriage with Pompeia, a near relative of the great political leader. Pompey, who was a good general in the field, and a very bad one in the arena of political and party warfare, longed again for a military command. The aristocracy had begun to be shy and afraid of him; he therefore availed himself of the assistance of the demagogues, and especially of Cæsar, to obtain by a decree of the people, first, the command in a war against the pirates, and, after its speedy termination, the management of the Mithridatic war in Asia. He was absent in the east four years. During this time Cæsar continued to agitate in the Roman senate and the forum. He was a perfect master of this art, for which his rival showed a puerile inaptitude. He was made ædile in b.c. 65, and in that office he exhausted his fertile ingenuity and the coffers of the money-lenders to provide bribes for the populace, in the shape of the most magnificent games ever exhibited before the fastidious eyes of the Roman people, bringing on one occasion no less than six hundred and forty gladiators into the market-place. At the same time he showed his boldness and his disregard of the laws enacted by the aristocracy in the hour of triumph, by restoring on the capitol the trophies of Marius, their most hated enemy. So loud was the applause of the populace, that the senate was obliged to submit to the affront. Emboldened by success, Cæsar continued his warfare without pause or truce. He endeavoured to bring to justice several of the partisans of the senate, who, after the fall of the Gracchi and of Marius, had been guilty of political murders. Though he failed to obtain his ostensible object he contrived to keep up the spirit of opposition, and to rise more and more in the favour of the people, who now began to look upon him as their chief patron and champion. This favour they showed by electing him, under the stimulus of enormous bribes, in the following year, to the high position of pontifex maximus.
The conspiracy of Catiline, which was discovered and punished in this year, revealed more than any other event the rottenness of the republic. Cæsar kept aloof from designs in every respect unworthy the leaders of a great party. He was charged with complicity, and it is certain that he had knowledge of the plot; but, whatever hopes he may have built upon the slight chance of their success, he was too prudent to make common cause with them. But when the conspiracy was discovered, and the senate discussed the measures of repression and punishment, Cæsar, who was then prætor elect, employed the whole power of his eloquence and position to incline the senate to milder measures. But Cato carried the senate with him by his uncompromising firmness and severity. The conspirators suffered death, and Cæsar narrowly escaped a similar fate.
Meanwhile Pompey had terminated the wars and the organization of the east. The troubles caused by the Catilinarian conspiracy seemed to offer a fair pretext for recalling Pompey from the east, and investing him with a military command in Italy. Accordingly one of his creatures, Q. Metellus Nepos, as tribune of the people, proposed a resolution to that effect. Cæsar supported it cordially, for as yet he was not prepared to venture upon a similar policy himself, and yet he wished to prepare the public mind for extraordinary military commands. This move was checkmated by the stubborn opposition of Cato, but not till after one of those armed struggles that so often disgraced the forum in the declining days of the republic.
Cæsar, on the expiration of his prætorship, left Rome to govern Spain as proprætor, just when Pompey returned from Asia. Pompey had dismissed his army, and returned into the rank of a private citizen. But far from conciliating the leaders of the senate, he was unable to obtain from them the confirmation of his measures for the regulation of affairs in Asia, or the agrarian law which he had promised to his soldiers. Under these circumstances he sought the alliance of Cæsar, who had returned from Spain with a claim to a triumph for some successes against the mountaineers of Lusitania and Gallæcia. He waived that claim, in order to become a candidate for the consulship of the year b.c. 59. Having obtained this object, he entered into a close alliance with Pompey and Crassus—an alliance known under the name of the first triumvirate. It was a private and secret compact, cemented by the marriage of Pompey to Julia, Cæsar's daughter; by it these three men bound themselves to co-operate with one another for obtaining the objects they respectively had in view. Crassus, the wealthiest man in Rome, was greedy for more wealth. Pompey desired the confirmation of his acts in Asia, and an agrarian law for his veterans. Cæsar required a military command which would enable him to form a large army. All these measures were successively carried. Cæsar, being invested with the highest office of state, and backed not only by his own supporters, but by the whole interest of Pompey and the wealth of Crassus, soon bore down with a high hand the opposition of the senatorial party. There was no chance of passing his resolutions in the senate. But the constitution of the republic had given into the hands of demagogues the power of superseding that body in legislative as well as administrative measures. The people were, therefore, called to ratify Cæsar's propositions. The constitutional resistance of his colleague Bibulus, and of some of the tribunes, was overcome with physical force; all his motions were declared to be legally carried, and Cæsar was enabled to pass not only the laws agreed upon with Pompey and Crassus, but several other enactments, in which he had not his party, but the welfare of the community at heart. He is sure of our approval for the regulation by which he gave publicity to the discussions in the senate, and for the law which enforced severer punishments for misgovernment and extortion in the provinces.—But the time for acting as legislator and as monarch was not yet come. To arm for the contest, Cæsar chose for his province the rich and populous Cisalpine Gaul, contiguous to Italy. The government of this province and Illyricum was given him by a decree of the people for five years. The senate, whether from fear or with the sinister view of implicating Cæsar in dangerous wars, added Transalpine Gaul. The wars which Cæsar waged for eight years in Gaul, b.c. 58-50, and in which he completely subdued that large country to the Rhine, the channel, and the ocean, are described by himself in a work which ranks among the most eminent productions of classical antiquity. But even Cæsar's pen has failed to give lasting interest to a series of expeditions, sieges, and battles with barbarians, who have no history of their own, and who appear in the page of general history only in their death struggle. There is no method, no plan, no unity of design in the wars of barbarians. The feuds of the Ædui and Sequani, the resistance of the Nervii, the Eburones, the Veneti, and Lexovii, can only possess an antiquarian interest. We shall, therefore, confine ourselves to stating that Cæsar succeeded in conquering the various tribes of Gaul in succession, rarely meeting with a combined and well-conducted resistance; that twice he crossed the Rhine into Germany, and twice the channel into Britain, without, however, making a lasting impression on these countries; that the net was thrown over the necks of the Gauls before they seemed fully aware of it; and that the only formidable combination and the only great man that encountered Cæsar, the heroic Vercingetorix at
