im, 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 mar