The requirements and the costs of a Roman political career in Caesar’s day were high, and the competition was severe; but the potential profits were of enormous magnitude. One of the perquisites of the praetorship and the consulship was the government of a province, which gave ample opportunity for plunder. The whole Mediterranean world was, in fact, at the mercy of the Roman nobility and of a new class of Roman businessmen, the equites (“knights”), which had grown rich on military contracts and on tax farming. Military manpower was supplied by the Roman peasantry. This class had been partly dispissessed by an economic revolution following on the devastation caused by the Second Punic War. The Roman governing class had consequently come to be hated and discredited at home and abroad. From 133 BCE onward there had been a series of alternate revolutionary and counters revolutionary paroxysms. It was evident that the misgovernment of the Roman state and the Greco-Roman world by the Roman nobility could not continue indefinitely and it was fairly clear that the most probable alternative was some form of military dictatorship backed by dispossessed ltelian peasants who had turned to long-term military service. The traditional competition among members of the Roman nobility for office and the spoils of office was thus threatening to turn into a desperate race for seizing autocratic power. The Julii Caesares did not seem to be in the running. It was trun that Sextus Caesar, who was perhaps the dictator’s uncle, had been one of the consuls for 91 BCE; and Lucius Caesar, one of the consuls for 90 BCE, was a distant cousin, whose son and namesake was consul for 64 BCE. In 90 BCE, Rome’s ltalian allies had seceded from Rome because of the Roman government’s obstinate refusal to grant them Roman citizenship, and, as consul, Lucius Caesar had introduced emergency legislation for granting citizenship to the citizens of all ltalian ally states that had not taken up arms or that had returned to their allegiance. Whoever had been consul in this critical year would have had to initiate such legislation, whatever his personal political predilections. There is evidence, however, that the Julii Caesares, though patricians, had already committed themselves to the antinobility party. An aunt of the future dictator had married Gaius Marius, a self-made man (novus homo) who had forced his way up to the summit by his military ability and made the momentous innovation of recruiting his armies form the dispossessed peasants.

The date of Caesar the dictator’s birth has long been disputed. The day was July 12 or 13; the traditional ( and perhaps most probable) year in 100 BCE; but if this date in correct, Caesar must have held each of his offices two years in advance of the legal minimum age. His father, Gaius Caesar, died when Caesar was but 16; his mother, Aurelia, was a notable woman, and it seems certain that he owed much to her. In spire of the inadequacy of his resources, Caesar seems to have chose a political career as a matter of course. Grow the beginning, he probably privately aimed at winning office, not just for the sake of the honours but in order to achieve the power to put the misgoverned Roman state and Greco-Roman world into better order in accordance with ideas of his own. It is improbable that Caesar deliberately sought monarchical power until after he had crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE, though sufficient power to impose his will, as he was determined to do, proved to mean monarchical power. In 84 BCE Caesar committed himself publicly to the redical side by marrying Cornelia, a daughter of Lucius Cornelius Cinna, a noble who was Marius’s associate in revolution. In 83 BCE Lucius Cornelius Sulla returned to ltaly from the East and led the successful counters revolution of 83-82 BCE; Sulla then ordered Caesar to divorce Cornelia. Caesar refused and came close to losing not only his property (such as it was) but his life as well. He found it advisable to remove himself from ltaly and to do military service, first in the province of Asia and then in Cilicia. In 78 BCE, after Sulla’s death, he returned to Rome and started on his political career in the conventional way, by acting as a prosecuting advocate-of course, in his case, against prominent Sullan counters revolutionaries.