After the trial of Antonius, his young accuser went off again to the East. It is said that he had not been satisfied with his own speeches, and that he was determined, before resuming his political career, to learn all the tricks of the orator's trade. With this object he sailed for Rhodes, where he intended to study under the celebrated rhetorician Apollonius Molon, who had also been one of the instructors of Cicero. But these years were the golden age of piracy in the Levant, and as Cæsar sailed by the island of Pharmacusa, off the Ionian coast, his galley was captured by a Cilician corsair. The whole tale of his captivity, as told by Plutarch and Suetonius, is too full of characteristic traits of the young man to be omitted. The pirates, who were business-like persons, bent on ransom and not on massacre, took stock of their prisoner, and rated him at twenty talents-about £5000 of our money. Cæsar professed to be deeply hurt at being valued at such a small sum, and said that he was well worth fifty talents. This was a kind of captive to whom the Cilicians were unaccustomed; they eagerly accepted him at his own valuation, and let his companions and freedmen depart to Miletus to raise the money. Cæsar remained alone at their headquarters, accompanied only by his physician and two valets. "He lived among the pirates for thirty-eight days," says Plutarch, "treating them as if they had been his bodyguard instead of his gaolers. He used to send out, whenever he wished to take his siesta, and order them to keep quiet. Fearless and secure, he joined in their diversions, and took his exercise among them. He wrote poems and orations, and rehearsed them to the gang, and when they expressed too little admiration, he called them blockheads and barbarians." He would often tell them, in a jesting manner, that when he should be liberated, he intended to come back and crucify them all, a threat

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which they took as a piece of playful humour on the part of this affable young gentleman. But he was speaking in perfect candour. The moment that the fifty talents of ransom money had been paid, he hired a few galleys at Miletus and ran out to look for his late captors. He found them still at Pharmacusa, celebrating their stroke of luck by a great carouse. He surprised them, captured the whole gang, and recovered his money intact. He then took them to Pergamus, to hand them over for execution to Junius, the governor of Asia. But learning that the worthy magistrate had an itching palm, and would probably let off the Cilicians for a bribe, he proceeded to put them to death on his own responsibility. He crucified the whole of the late audience of his poems and orations, after having first, as a special favour, cut their throats before he affixed them to the cross.

Cæsar then resumed his interrupted voyage to Rhodes, and studied rhetoric with Apollonius for some months. His stay in the island was brought to an end by the news that one of the generals of Mithradates had invaded proconsular Asia. He sailed to the mainland, raised some levies at his own expense, and soon expelled from the province the raiding cavalry of the Pontic king (B.C. 74). At this moment he received letters from Italy informing him that he had been elected a pontifex, in the place of his deceased uncle, C. Aurelius Cotta. He returned at once to Rome to take up this not unimportant religious office; how such a comparatively unknown young man came to be elected to it, and that too in his absence, our authorities do not tell us.

From his return to Rome (B.C. 73) down to the time of his praetorship in B.C. 62, Cæsar was gradually working himself up from a position of comparative insignificance to that of the managing director of the Democratic party. How popularity with the urban multitude was

achieved in the last days of the Roman Republic we know only too well. The days were long past when the favour of the citizens could be won by fluent oratory and noble sentiments alone. The would-be demagogue had not only to tickle the ear of the sovereign people with his harangues; he had to be continually slipping bribes into its eager palm, and filling its insatiable belly with doles and distributions of corn. The age of Tiberius Gracchus was long past; Saturninus and Sulpicius were the heroes and martyrs whom the Democratic party regretted. Clodius was looming in the not far distant future.

Dazzled by the magnificent career of Cæsar in his middle age, many writers have striven to represent him as an enlightened statesman and a true lover of Rome (even of the world at large !) in his youth. It is difficult to support any such theory from the facts of his early years of political activity. It must be confessed that he appears as a demagogue of the usual type. If he had died in B.C. 62, he would be dimly remembered in history as a second Glaucia, whose wit was less vulgar than that of his model, as the legitimate successor of Sulpicius and the natural predecessor of Clodius. He fought with the common weapons and with the usual methods of other popular leaders of his day. We perpetually hear of him as organising and leading down to the Forum or the Campus Martius gangs of armed rabble. He broke up assemblies, or overawed them with the stones and bludgeons of his satellites. He swept the streets, and fought on equal terms with the hired bands of the Optimates. He was the ally and assistant of Gabinius and Manilius in all their turbulent proceedings in 67 and B.C. 66; it was his gangs which supported the stupid Metellus Nepos in B.C. 62, and bruised and battered the bellicose Cato. Worst of all, he was more than suspected of having been deeply engaged in the Catilinarian con

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Not one, but many

spiracy, at least in its earlier stages. authors tell us that in the plot of B.C. 66 Cæsar and Catiline had joined their bands for the coup d'état which was to make Crassus Dictator and Cæsar his Master of the Horse. Why the outbreak never took place is explained to us in half-a-dozen different versions, one of which says that it was Cæsar, not Catiline, who failed at the critical moment to give the signal for the rioting to commence. Whatever may have been the exact truth at the bottom of the many floating rumours which have survived, it is certain that, rightly or wrongly, Cæsar was regarded as having been even more deeply implicated than Crassus in the obscure plots of B.C. 66-63. We may guess that he ceased to be an active mover in them only when he discovered the full scope of Catiline's designs, and realised that he was too reckless and violent to make a safe coadjutor. Those modern writers who urge that it is improbable that the two men could ever have acted in concert, use as their main arguments two very weak pleas. The first is that Cæsar was too magnanimous and patriotic to have joined in a conspiracy which involved treason and massacre. The second is that Catiline was such a notorious criminal and ruffian, that no sensible man, with a career before him, would have compromised himself by taking such a partner. But the first argument is wanting in historical perspective. Cæsar, the demagogue of B.C. 66, was a very different person from Cæsar the dictator of B.C. 48. We must not argue back from his last stage to his first; an ambitious young man, with his way to make in the world, may well have contemplated things which would not have commended themselves to the statesman who, twenty years later, had fought his way to supreme power. The second argument that Catiline was frankly impossible as a colleague-falls to the ground before the fact that the respectable Cicero

was in B.C. 64 only too eager to secure him as a friend and ally. What Cicero desired may well have commended itself to the more adventurous Cæsar. Evidence as to good or bad character is as useless in the one case as in the other. Cæsar, as a popular demagogue, must have rubbed elbows with so many strange people between B.C. 73 and 60, that we shall not easily believe that he drew the line above Catiline's name.

Indeed, it would be useless to pretend that Cæsar paid any particular attention during his early years to the reputation of his associates, or indeed to his own. His way of life did not resemble that of the blameless Tiberius Gracchus or the priggish Livius Drusus. He had rather borrowed his manners and morals from Sulla. He was anything rather than an austere fanatic or a model of all the virtues. Romans of the old school detested him for his absurd fastidiousness in dress; the long fringes of his toga, the breadth of his purple stripe, and the peculiar loose style in which he girt himself displeased them. They sneered at his exquisite care over his toilet; his barber not only shaved him, but finished him off with tongs and tweezers. When an early baldness came upon him, every art of the hairdresser was employed to hide the growing deformity. Cicero once observed that it had been long before he had taken seriously, or dreaded as an enemy of the state, the man who could spend so much time and thought over his personal appearance. In his latter days, it was remarked, nothing pleased him so much, of all the honours which were heaped upon him, as the grant of the laurel crown, which served to hide the disappearance of his once abundant locks. But Cæsar was much more than an exquisite. It is doubtful whether his recklessness in money affairs or his promiscuous amours were the more displeasing to those of his contemporaries who still loved the old Roman virtues. Of