should be considered too small to be capable of quickly becoming great by uninterrupted endurance and having no obstacle to their growth by reason of being despised.  Cicero, who is considered to have been the first to suspect and to fear the smiling surface[449] of Caesar’s policy, as a man would the smiling smoothness of a sea, and who observed the bold and determined character which was concealed under a friendly and joyous exterior, said that in all his designs and public measures he perceived a tyrannical purpose; “but on the other hand,” said he, “when I look at his hair, which is arranged with so much care, and see him scratching his head with one finger,[450] I cannot think that such a wicked purpose will ever enter into this man’s mind as the overthrow of the Roman State.”  This, however, belongs to a later period.

V. He received the first proof of the good will of the people towards him when he was a competitor against Caius Popilius for a military tribuneship,[451] and was proclaimed before him.  He received a second and more conspicuous evidence of popular favour on the occasion of the death of Julia[452] the wife of Marius, when Caesar, who was her nephew, pronounced over her a splendid funeral oration in the Forum, and at the funeral ventured to exhibit the images[453] of Marius, which were then seen for the first time since the administration of Sulla, for Marius and his son had been adjudged enemies.  Some voices were raised against Caesar on account of this display, but the people responded by loud shouts, and received him with clapping of hands, and admiration, that he was bringing back as from the regions of Hades, after so long an interval, the glories of Marius to the city.  Now it was an ancient Roman usage to pronounce funeral orations[454] over elderly women, but it was not customary to do it in the case of young women, and Caesar set the first example by pronouncing a funeral oration over his deceased wife, which brought him some popularity and won the many by sympathy to consider him a man of a kind disposition and full of feeling.  After the funeral of his wife he went to Iberia as quaestor to the Praetor Vetus,[455] for whom he always showed great respect, and whose son he made his own quaestor when he filled the office of Praetor.  After his quaestorship he married for his third wife Pompeia[456] he had by his wife Cornelia a daughter, who afterwards married Pompeius Magnus.  Owing to his profuse expenditure (and indeed men generally supposed that he was buying at a great cost a short-lived popularity, though in fact he was purchasing things of the highest value at a low price) it is said that before he attained any public office he was in debt to the amount of thirteen hundred talents.  Upon being appointed curator of the Appian Road,[457] he laid out upon it a large sum of his own; and during his aedileship[458] he exhibited three hundred and twenty pair of gladiators, and by his liberality and expenditure on the theatrical exhibitions, the processions, and the public entertainments, he completely drowned all previous displays, and put the people in such a humour, that every man was seeking for new offices and new honours to requite him with.