Certainly Caesar's enemies thought so, and did their best to prevent his election as consul, or to commit him in advance to a harmlessly administrative consular command (the forests and drove-roads of Italy). ' Caesar has the wind in his sails just now', wrote Cicero in June 60 bc ( Cicero, ad Atticum, ii.1.6). After the consulship there would be a greater command, one like those the people had conferred on Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey the Great), whose triumph over the pirates and Mithridates, an affair of unprecedented splendour, had taken place in 61 bc. His ambitions were not those of ordinary Romans. He wanted the consulship, and by entering the city to declare his candidacy he had to abandon his military command. He was granted the right to a triumph, which for most Romans was the height of ambition. He was thirty-seven, already a formidable politician, and no friend of the conservative ‘establishment’ in the senate.Īfter a stormy praetorship in 62 bc, Caesar's first military command came with his proconsulship of Further Spain, in campaigns against the Callaeci and Lusitani conducted with characteristic decisiveness and dash. In 63 bc, though still a junior senator, and in competition with two distinguished ex-consuls, he got himself elected to the high office of pontifex maximus. Caesar advertised his allegiance by his funeral speech for his aunt Julia, widow of Marius, in 69 bc, and by restoring to public view, as aedile, the Marian trophies Sulla had pulled down. It was a period of revived hope for popularis politicians: the Sullan oligarchy had proved itself corrupt, and the people's tribunes had regained the powers of which Sulla had stripped them. In 75 bc, sailing to Rhodes to study rhetoric, he was captured by pirates on payment of the ransom, he raised a squadron to defeat them, and had them crucified.Ĭaesar's first public office was the elective military tribunate (probably in 72 bc) in 69 he was quaestor, serving in Spain in 65, curule aedile. He came back to Rome at the news of Sulla's death, and announced his arrival on the political scene with the prosecution (unsuccessful) of a senior senator for extortion.
Caesar left Rome to serve in Asia Minor, where he was decorated for bravery in the attack on Mytilene. His relatives successfully pleaded for his life, but the dictator sourly commented ' There are many Mariuses in that boy' ( Life of Caesar). In 82 bc Sulla returned victorious from the east by now Marius and Cinna were both dead, and Caesar went into hiding. When he was fifteen, his father died the following year Caesar broke off his engagement to a girl from a wealthy equestrian family to marry Cinna's daughter Cornelia ( d. He was twelve when his uncle Marius was driven into exile by Sulla's march on Rome, and thirteen at the time of Marius's vengeful return with Lucius Cornelius Cinna. He had two sisters, married to Quintus Pedius and to Marcus Atius Balbus of Aricia the latter's grandson, adopted in Caesar's will, became the emperor Augustus. Caesar ( 100–44 bc), politician, author, and military commander, was born on 13 Quinctilis (July) 100 bc, probably at Rome, the son of Gaius Julius Caesar, a patrician of old but recently undistinguished family whose brother-in-law was Gaius Marius, and Aurelia, probably daughter of Lucius Aurelius Cotta (consul in 119 bc).
0 kommentar(er)
