to
leave Rome. But his will did not bend. Sulla realized something of the
stuff of which, youthful and unknown as he was, Caesar was made. 'In
that young man', he said, 'there are many Mariuses.'

At the time, and for long after, however, no sign of this was perceived
by most people. At an age when Pompeius, the darling of fortune, had
celebrated a triumph and was, despite his youth, a leading man in Rome,
looked up to by every one, rather feared by the Senate, wealthy,
prosperous, and important, Caesar was poor and quite unknown, attached
by his relationship to Marius and Cinna to a defeated faction and a
broken and discredited party. Yet Sulla was right. Caesar had a genius,
a patience, and a power of will such as Marius never possessed. Of his
military talents no one, not even Caesar himself, had any suspicion till
long after. His rise was slow and difficult. Until his alliance with
Crassus he was perpetually hampered by poverty and debts, both in fact
and in the opinion of Rome.

When he escaped from Rome (81) Caesar went abroad first to the Greek
islands, where he served his first campaign, and afterward to Bithynia;
he also raised an expeditionary force against the Rhodian pirates. After
Sulla's death he returned to Rome. His eloquence soon won him a position
in the Popular party. No one, however, regarded him as a serious rival
to Pompeius, who was at this time regarded as inclining more or less to
the Popular side. The enormous debts which were to be such a burden to
Caesar were mainly contracted while Pompeius was in the East. He carried
through magnificent building schemes, and gave superb games to the
people--such being the road to popularity. Wider plans were forming in
his mind, however: plans on the lines of Gracchus.

The great difficulty in Caesar's way, over and above his own debts, was
the character of the Popular party. It stood, to the majority of
Conservatives and men of wealth and standing, for nothing but disorder
and insecurity, with revolution in the background. These Conservatives
did not see that they were helping to bring about all the things they
dreaded by their opposition to change and their effort to keep all power
in the hands of their own order, and their fear, distrust, and jealousy
of any man of real ability. They drove young able men into the Popular
party; and the Popular party to them was always the party of Marius and
Cinna. There were in fact too many men in it of low characte