Julius Caesar

​In his sixteenth year, he lost his father; and during the term of the following consuls, having been nominated priest of Jupiter, he broke his engagement with Cossutia, a woman of equestrian rank but very wealthy, to whom he had been betrothed while still wearing the toga praetexta, and married Cornelia, daughter of Cinna, who had been four times consul. By her he soon had a daughter, Julia; nor could he be compelled by any means by the dictator Sulla to divorce her. For this reason, deprived of both his priesthood, his wife’s dowry, and his family inheritances, he was regarded as belonging to the opposing party, so that he was forced to withdraw from the public eye and, although suffering from quartan malaria, to change his hiding places almost every single night, and to buy his freedom from inquisitors with money, until through the Vestal Virgins and through Mamercus Aemilius and Aurelius Cotta, his relatives and connections, he obtained a pardon. It is well known that Sulla, having for some time refused the entreaties of his closest and most distinguished friends, and as they persistently pressed him, at last gave way and proclaimed, whether by divine inspiration or by some conjecture: “Let them have their victory and hold their own, provided they know that this man, whose safety they so eagerly desire, will one day be the ruin of the party of the optimates, which they have defended together with him; for there are many Mariuses in Caesar.”

​He saw his first military service in Asia on the staff of Marcus Thermus, the praetor; by whom he was sent to Bithynia to fetch a fleet, and tarried at the court of Nicomedes, not without a rumor of his chastity having been surrendered to the king. This rumor he increased when within a few days he returned to Bithynia on the pretext of collecting money owed to a certain freedman, a client of his. The rest of his military service was of better report, and he was presented by Thermus with a civic crown at the storming of Mytilene.

​He served also in Cilicia under Servilius Isauricus, but only for a short time. For on learning of the death of Sulla, and at the same time in the hope of a new dissension which was being stirred up by Marcus Lepidus, he returned in haste to Rome. And indeed he abstained from joining Lepidus, although he was invited with great offers, because he distrusted his ability and found the opportunity to be less than he had expected.

​But when the civil discord was settled, he prosecuted Cornelius Dolabella, a man of consular rank who had celebrated a triumph, for extortion; and upon the latter’s acquittal, he decided to retire to Rhodes, both to escape unpopularity and to study at leisure under Apollonius Molo, then the most famous master of rhetoric. While crossing thither, already in the winter months, he was captured by pirates near the island of Pharmacussa, and remained with them, not without the greatest indignation, for nearly forty days, with only one physician and two body-servants. For he had immediately at the beginning sent away his companions and the rest of his slaves to secure money with which he might be ransomed. Then, fifty talents having been paid, he was set ashore, and did not delay to pursue the retreating pirates with a fleet immediately manned, and having brought them into his power, he inflicted on them the punishment with which he had often threatened them in jest. Since Mithridates was devastating the neighboring regions, lest he should seem to remain idle in the danger of the allies, he crossed from Rhodes, whither he had been bound, into Asia, and having gathered auxiliary forces and driven the king’s prefect from the province, he held the wavering and doubtful cities in their allegiance.

​In the military tribuneship, which was the first office that fell to him by the votes of the people after his return to Rome, he most energetically supported the promoters of the restoration of the tribunician power, the authority of which Sulla had diminished. He also secured, by the Plotian law, the return to the state for Lucius Cinna, his wife’s brother, and for those who had followed Lepidus with him in the civil strife and after the consul’s death had fled to Sertorius; and he himself made a speech on that matter.

​As quaestor, he delivered the customary funeral orations from the rostra for his aunt Julia and his wife Cornelia, who had died. And indeed in the eulogy of his aunt he wrote thus concerning her maternal and paternal origin and that of his own father: “The maternal ancestry of my aunt Julia is descended from kings, and her paternal ancestry is joined with the immortal gods. For from Ancus Marcius come the Marcii Reges, of which family her mother was; from Venus come the Julii, the family to which our house belongs. There is therefore in our stock both the sanctity of kings, who have the greatest power among men, and the reverence due to the gods, in whose power even kings themselves are.” In place of Cornelia he married Pompeia, daughter of Quintus Pompeius and granddaughter of Lucius Sulla; whom he afterwards divorced, believing that she had committed adultery with Publius Clodius, of whom there was so persistent a rumor that he had gained access to her in woman’s dress during the public ceremonies, that the senate decreed an inquiry into the desecration of the sacred rites.