[737] Cicero, De Oratore, II. 39.—“A law which, among the ancients, embraced different objects: treasons in the army, seditions at Rome, diminution of the majesty of the Roman people by the bad administration of a magistrate.” (Tacitus, Annals, I. 72.)
[738] Appian, Civil Wars, I. 104.
[739] He waited the death of the dictator to rob the treasury of a sum which he owed to the State. (Plutarch, Sylla, 46.)
[740] Appian, Civil Wars, I. 106.
[741] Sylla had taken the name of Fortunate (Felix). (Mommsen, Inscriptiones Latinæ Antiquissimæ, p. 168), or of Faustus, according to Velleius Paterculus.
[742] “It cannot be denied that Sylla had then the power of a king, although he had restored the Republic.” (Cicero, Speech on the Report of the Aruspices, 25.)
[743] The celebrated German author, Mommsen (Roman History, III. 15), does not admit this date of 654. He proposes, under correction, the date of 652, for the reason that the ages required for the higher offices of State, since Sylla’s time, were thirty-seven for the edileship, forty for the prætorship, forty-three for the consulship, and as Cæsar was curule ædile in 689, prætor in 692, consul in 695, he would, had he been born in 654, have filled each of these offices two years before the legal age.
This objection, certainly of some force, is dispelled by other historical testimony. Besides, we know that at Rome they did not always observe the laws when dealing with eminent men. Lucullus was raised to be chief magistrate before the required age, and Pompey was consul at thirty-four. (Appian, Civil Wars, I. 14.)—Tacitus speaks on this matter thus: “With our ancestors this magistracy (the questorship) was the prize of merit only, for every citizen of ability had then the right to aim at these honours; even age was so little regarded, that extreme youth did not exclude from either the consulship or the dictatorship.” (Annals, XI. 22.)—In any case, if the opinion of M. Mommsen be adopted, the birth of Cæsar must be referred to 651, not 652. For, if he was born in the month of July, 652, he could only be forty-three years of age in the month of July, 695; and as the nomination of the consuls preceded by six months their entering into office, it would be in the month of July, 694, when he would have attained the legal age, which would bring the date of his birth to the year 651. But Plutarch (Cæsar, 69), Suetonius (Cæsar, 88), and Appian (Civil Wars, II. 149) all agree in saying that Cæsar was fifty-six when he was assassinated on the 15th of March, 710, which fixes his birth in the year 654. On the other hand, according to Velleius Paterculus (II. 43), Cæsar was appointed flamen of Jupiter by Marius and Cinna when scarcely out of infancy, and at Rome infancy ended at about fourteen; and the consulship of Marius and Cinna being in 668, Cæsar, according to our calculation, would then, in fact, have entered on his fourteenth year. The same author adds that he was about eighteen in 672, when he left Rome to escape the proscriptions of Sylla, a new reason for retaining the preceding date.
Cæsar made his first campaign in Asia, at the taking of Mitylene, in 674 (Titus Livius, Epitome, LXXXIX.), which makes him twenty at the date of his entrance into the service. According to Sallust (Catilina, 49), when Cæsar was nominated grand pontiff in competition with Catulus, he was almost a youth (adolescentulus); and Dio Cassius says the same, in nearly the same terms. Doubtless they expressed themselves thus because of the great disproportion in the age of the two candidates. The expression of these authors, although unfitting, nevertheless agrees better with our reckoning, which ascribes thirty-seven years of age to Cæsar, than to the other, which gives him thirty-nine. Tacitus also, as we shall see in a note to a subsequent page, when speaking of the accusation against Dolabella, tends to make Cæsar too young rather than too old.
[744] The family of the Julii was very ancient, and we find personages bearing this name from the third century of Rome. The first of whom history makes mention was C. Julius Julus, consul in 265. There were other consuls of the same family in 272, 281, 307, 324; consular tribunes in 330, 351, 362, 367; and a dictator, C. Julius Julus, in 402; but their filiation is little known. The genealogy of Cæsar begins in a direct line only from Sextus Julius Cæsar, prætor in 546. We borrow the genealogy of the family of the Julii from the History of Rome by Families, by the learned professor W. Drumann (Vol. III., page 120; Kœnigsberg, 1837), introducing one variation only, explained in Note (4) of page 290.