[Sidenote:  He is made aedile.] [Sidenote:  Gladiatorial shows.] [Sidenote:  Caesar’s increasing popularity.]

Though the Senate were thus jealous and suspicious of Caesar, and were charging him continually with these criminal designs, the people were on his side; and the more he was hated by the great, the more strongly he became intrenched in the popular favor.  They chose him aedile.  The aedile had the charge of the public edifices of the city, and of the games spectacles, and shows which were exhibited in them.  Caesar entered with great zeal into the discharge of the duties of this office.  He made arrangements for the entertainment of the people on the most magnificent scale, and made great additions and improvements to the public buildings, constructing porticoes and piazzas around the areas where his gladiatorial shows and the combats with wild beasts were to be exhibited.  He provided gladiators in such numbers, and organized and arranged them in such a manner, ostensibly for their training, that his enemies among the nobility pretended to believe that he was intending to use them as an armed force against the government of the city.  They accordingly made laws limiting and restricting the number of the gladiators to be employed.  Caesar then exhibited his shows on the reduced scale which the new laws required, taking care that the people should understand to whom the responsibility for this reduction in the scale of their pleasures belonged.  They, of course, murmured against the Senate, and Caesar stood higher in their favor than ever.

[Sidenote:  Caesar thwarted.] [Sidenote:  His resentment.] [Sidenote:  The statutes of Marius restored.] [Sidenote:  Rage of the patricians.]

He was getting, however, by these means, very deeply involved in debt; and, in order partly to retrieve his fortunes in this respect, he made an attempt to have Egypt assigned to him as a province.  Egypt was then an immensely rich and fertile country.  It had, however, never been a Roman province.  It was an independent kingdom, in alliance with the Romans, and Caesar’s proposal that it should be assigned to him as a province appeared very extraordinary.  His pretext was, that the people of Egypt had recently deposed and expelled their king, and that, consequently, the Romans might properly take possession of it.  The Senate, however, resisted this plan, either from jealousy of Caesar or from a sense of justice to Egypt; and, after a violent contest, Caesar found himself compelled to give up the design.  He felt, however, a strong degree of resentment against the patrician party who had thus thwarted his designs.  Accordingly, in order to avenge himself upon them, he one night replaced certain statues and trophies of Marius in the Capitol, which had been taken down by order of Sylla when he returned to power.  Marius, as will be recollected, had been the great champion of the popular party, and the enemy of the patricians; and,