Caesar

At any rate, Clodius was acquitted of the charge, the majority of the jurors giving their verdicts in illegible writing, in order that they might neither risk their lives with the populace by condemning him nor get a bad name among the nobility by acquitting him.[*](The sacrilege and trial of Clodius are described at length also in the Cicero, chapters xxviii. and xxix.)

Immediately after his praetorship Caesar received Spain as his province, and since he found it hard to arrange matters with his creditors, who obstructed his departure and were clamorous, he had recourse to Crassus, the richest of the Romans, who had need of Caesar’s vigour and fire for his political campaign against Pompey. And it was only after Crassus had met the demands of the most importunate and inexorable of these creditors and given surety for eight hundred and thirty talents, that Caesar could go out to his province.[*](Early in 61 B.C.)

We are told that, as he was crossing the Alps and passing by a barbarian village which had very few inhabitants and was a sorry sight, his companions asked with mirth and laughter, Can it be that here too there are ambitious strifes for office, struggles for primacy, and mutual jealousies of powerful men? Whereupon Caesar said to them in all seriousness, I would rather be first here than second at Rome.

In like manner we are told again that, in Spain, when he was at leisure and was reading from the history of Alexander, he was lost in thought for a long time, and then burst into tears. His friends were astonished, and asked the reason for his tears. Do you not think, said he, it is matter for sorrow that while Alexander, at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet achieved no brilliant success?[*](Suetonius (Div. Jul. 7) and Dio Cassius (xxxvii. 52, 2) connect this anecdote more properly with Caesar’s quaestorship in Spain (67 B.C.) when he was thirty-three years of age, the age at which Alexander died.)