e thousand pounds) was their answer. "What folly!"
he said, "you don't know whom you have got hold of. You shall have
fifty." Messengers were sent to fetch the money, and Caesar, who was
left with a friend and a couple of slaves, made the best of the
situation. If he wanted to go to sleep he would send a message
commanding his captors to be silent. He joined their sports, read poems
and speeches to them, and roundly abused them as ignorant barbarians if
they failed to applaud. But his most telling joke was threatening to
hang them. The men laughed at the free-spoken lad, but were not long in
finding that he was in most serious earnest. In about five weeks' time
the money arrived and Caesar was released. He immediately went to
Miletus, equipped a squadron, and returning to the scene of his
captivity, found and captured the greater part of the band. Leaving his
prisoners in safe custody at Pergamus, he made his way to the governor
of the province, who had in his hands the power of life and death. But
the governor, after the manner of his kind, had views of his own. The
pirates were rich and could afford to pay handsomely for their lives. He
would consider the case, he said. This was not at all to Caesar's mind.
He hastened back to Pergamus, and, taking the law into his own hands,
crucified all the prisoners.

This was the cool and resolute man in whom the people saw their best
friend and the nobles their worst enemy. These last seemed to see a
chance of ruining him when the conspiracy of Catiline was discovered and
crushed. He was accused, especially by Cato, of having been an
accomplice; and when he left the Senate after the debate in which he had
argued against putting the arrested conspirators to death, he was mobbed
by the gentlemen who formed Cicero's body-guard, and was even in danger
of his life. But the formal charge was never pressed; indeed it was
manifestly false, for Caesar was too sure of the favor of the people to
have need of conspiring to win it. The next year he was made praetor,
and after his term of office was ended, governor of Further Spain. The
old trouble of debt still pressed upon him, and he could not leave Rome
till he had satisfied the most pressing of his creditors. This he did by
help of Crassus, the richest man in Rome, who stood security for nearly
two hundred thousand pounds. To this time belong two anecdotes which,
whether true or no, are curiously characteristic of his character. He
was p