The first period of his life ended with his election to the military
tribuneship on his return to Rome after his Asian adventures, and his
first acts were directed towards the reconstruction of what Sylla had
destroyed, by reestablishing the authority of tribunes and recalling
some of Sylla's victims from their political exile. From that time
onward, in his second period, he was more or less continually in office.
Successively a tribune, a quaestor, governor of Farther Spain, aedile,
pontifex maximus, praetor, governor of Spain again, and consul with the
insignificant Bibulus, a man of so small importance that people used to
date documents, by way of a jest, 'in the Consulship of Julius and
Caesar.' Then he obtained Gaul for his province, and lived the life of a
soldier for nine years, during which he created the army that gave him
at last the mastery of Rome. And in the tenth year Rome was afraid, and
his enemies tried to deprive him of his power and passed bills against
him, and drove out the tribunes of the people who took his part; and if
he had returned to Rome then, yielding up his province and his legions,
as he was called upon to do, he would have been judged and destroyed by
his enemies. But he knew that the people loved him, and he crossed the
Rubicon in arms.

This second period of his life closed with the last triumph decreed to
him for his victories in Spain. The third and final period had covered
but one year when his assassins cut it short.

Nothing demonstrates Caesar's greatness so satisfactorily as this, that
at his death Rome relapsed at once into civil war and strife as violent
as that to which Caesar had put an end, and that the man who brought
lasting peace and unity into the distracted state, was the man of
Caesar's choice. But in endeavouring to realize his supreme wisdom,
nothing helps us more than the pettiness of the accusations brought
against him by such historians as Suetonius--that he once remained
seated to receive the whole body of Conscript fathers, that he had a
gilded chair in the Senate house, and appointed magistrates at his own
pleasure to hold office for terms of years, that he laughed at an
unfavourable omen and made himself dictator for life; and such things,
says the historian, 'are of so much more importance than all his good
qualities that he is considered to have abused his power and to have
been justly assassinated.' But it is the people, not the historian, who
make histo