The Twelve Caesars Read Online Free Page A

quaestorship so far from the capital; he remained no longer than he had to, returning to Rome after a year. In Spain, however, in
the city of Gades (modern Cadiz), Caesar came face to face with a statue of Alexander the Great and the certain knowledge of the magnitude of the task that lay ahead of him. Perhaps that encounter
shaped his response to those offices which he assumed on his return to Rome. Caesar served as aedile in 65 (two years ahead of the minimum age qualification of thirty-seven) and praetor in 62. On
both occasions he found himself coupled in office with Marcus Bibulus, inimical and Optimate, a staid conservative. In the case of the aedileship, Caesar exploited the appointment for maximum
political capital. Rigorously he curried the favour of the masses and consistently overshadowed his less dynamic partner in a dazzling and extravagant programme of public games and spectacles which
included those belated gladiatorial funeral games held in honour of his father; he also restored to positions of prominence trophies of victories against the Germans won by Marius, his uncle by
marriage (previously Sulla had destroyed these).
    In 64 BC , proof that the direction of Rome’s political winds was changing, Caesar presided as a magistrate over the trials of those who had accepted payments from
Sulla in return for killing proscribed men. Generous to the defeated as he would remain in every important contest in his life bar his treatment ofGermans and Gauls, he did
not approach the task in a spirit of vindictiveness. Instead the undertaking provided him with further opportunities to lay claim to Marius’ legacy, a rich ‘inheritance’ of
populist distinction and martial prowess. At the end of 63, as a result of further large-scale spending, Caesar won the position of pontifex maximus , head of the College of Pontiffs to which
he already belonged and chief priest of the state cult. This prestigious appointment provided him with a house in the Forum. It was a foothold in the very centre of Rome which the cash-strapped
Caesar, modestly housed in the Subura, had previously lacked.
    As it turned out, Spain bookended Caesar’s ascent of the cursus honorum. He returned to the province in 61 BC as proconsul, his first overseas command.
Spanish proconsulship earned him a triumph in Rome. Caesar forfeited public adulation in order to stand as a candidate for the consulship of 59 (an example of close observance of legal niceties on
Caesar’s part, necessitated by the vocal hostility of arch-Republican and drunkard Cato). His candidacy was successful. As with the aedileship and praetorship, Caesar’s colleague was
Bibulus.
    Spain had served as the location for Caesar’s quaestorship, his first proconsulship and the award of an (albeit uncelebrated) triumph. More than this, in time it was the site of his first
epileptic fit and, in the wake of war waged against fellow Romans, that dream which an unidentified soothsayer interpreted as foretelling world dominion. The dream itself left Caesar shaken –
understandably, since its substance was his rape of his mother Aurelia. On his return to Rome, he remarried. His choice fell on a granddaughter of Sulla and distant kinswoman of Pompey the Great.
Her name was Pompeia and he would divorce her in time on suspicion of an affair with an audacious rabble-rouser who donned women’s clothes to make good a secret assignation. Justification for
that divorce inspired Caesar’s well-knownassertion that, guilty or otherwise – taking no account of double standards – his wife must be above suspicion.

    In the long term, Caesar’s achievement was not to be a programmatic ascent of the offices of state as prescribed by Republican precedent, culminating in a benign term as
consul. Nor perhaps should it have been, given those extraordinary capabilities to which even hostile sources attest. Such was Caesar’s mental agility and the acuteness of his concentration
that he