[806] Valerius Maximus, VIII. ix. § 3.—“Cæsar was twenty-one years of age when he attacked Dolabella, in a speech which we still read to-day with admiration.” (Tacitus, Dialogue on the Orators, 34.)—According to the chronological order which we have adopted, Cæsar, instead of twenty-one, would have been twenty-three years old; but as Tacitus, in the same citation, also errs, by two years, in making Crassus, who had accused Carbo, nineteen instead of twenty-one, we may suppose that he has committed the same mistake with Cæsar. In fact, Crassus tells his own age in Cicero (On the Orators, III. 20, § 74): “Quippe qui omnium maturrime ad publicas causas accesserim, annosque natus unum et viginti nobilissimum hominem in judicium vocarim.”—Crassus, the orator, was born in 614; he accused Carbo in 635, the date given by Cicero.
[807] Plutarch, Cæsar, 3.—Asconius, Commentaries on the Oration, “In Toga Candida,” pp. 84, 89, edit. Orelli.
[808] Dialogue on the Orators, 21.
[809] Cicero, Oration for Cluentius, 59. The manuscripts of Cicero bear Cn. Decitius.
[810] This island, now called Fermaco, is at the entrance of the Gulf of Assem-Kalessi. Pliny and Stephen of Byzantium are the only geographers who mention it, and the last tells us further, that it was here that Attalus, the famous lieutenant of Philip of Macedon, was slain by Alexander’s order.
[811] Polyænus, Stratagems, VII. 23.
[812] Suetonius, Cæsar, 4.
[813] Velleius Paterculus, II. 41.
[814] Plutarch, Cæsar, 2.
[815] Plutarch, Crassus, 8.