a very bitter hatred against Cicero, and by way of putting himself in a position to injure him, and to attain other objects of his own, sought to be made tribune.  But there was a great obstacle in the way.  The tribunes were tribunes of the plebs, that is, of the commons, whose interests they were supposed specially to protect; while Clodius was a noble—­indeed, a noble of nobles—­belonging as he did to that great Claudian House which was one of the oldest and proudest of Roman families.  The only thing to be done was to be adopted by some plebeian.  But here, again, there were difficulties.  The law provided that an adoption should be real, that the adopter should be childless and old enough to be the father of his adopted son.  The consent of the priests was also necessary.  This consent was never asked, and indeed never could have been given, for the father was a married man, had children of his own, and was not less than fifteen years, younger than his new son.  Indeed the bill for making the adoption legal had been before the people for more than a year without making any progress.  The Three now took it up to punish Cicero for his presumption in opposing them; and under its new promoters it was passed in a single day, being proposed at noon made law by three o’clock in the afternoon What mischief Clodius was thus enabled to work against Cicero we shall hear in the next chapter but one.

His consulship ended, Caesar received a substantial prize for his services, the government of the province of Gaul for five years.  Before he left Italy to take up his command, he had the satisfaction of seeing Cicero driven into banishment.  That done, he crossed the Alps.  The next nine years (for his government was prolonged for another period when the first came to an end) he was engaged in almost incessant war, though still finding time to manage the politics of Rome.  The campaigns which ended in making Gaul from the Alps to the British Channel, and from the Atlantic to the Rhine, a Roman possession, it is not within my purpose to describe.  Nevertheless, it may be interesting to say a few words about his dealings with our own island.  In his first expedition, in the summer of 55 B.C., he did little more than effect a landing on the coast, and this not without considerable loss.  In the next, made early in the following year, he employed a force of more than forty thousand men, conveyed in a flotilla of eight hundred ships.  This time the Britons did not venture to oppose his landing; and when they met him in the field, as he marched inward, they were invariably defeated.  They then changed their tactics and retired before him, laying waste the country as they went.  He crossed the Thames some little way to the westward of where London now stands, received the submission of one native tribe, and finally concluded a peace with the native leader Cassivelaunus, who gave hostages and promised tribute.  The general result of ten years’ fighting was to add a great