[Sidenote: Caesar accused of treason.]

His rivals and enemies accused him of various schemes, more or less
violent and treasonable in their nature, but how justly it is not now
possible to ascertain. They alleged that one of his plans was to join
some of the neighboring colonies, whose inhabitants wished to be
admitted to the freedom of the city, and, making common cause with them,
to raise an armed force and take possession of Rome. It was said that,
to prevent the accomplishment of this design, an army which they had
raised for the purpose of an expedition against the Cilician pirates was
detained from its march, and that Caesar, seeing that the government
were on their guard against him, abandoned the plan.

They also charged him with having formed, after this, a plan within the
city for assassinating the senators in the senate house, and then
usurping, with his fellow-conspirators, the supreme power. Crassus, who
was a man of vast wealth and a great friend of Caesar's, was associated
with him in this plot, and was to have been made dictator if it had
succeeded. But, notwithstanding the brilliant prize with which Caesar
attempted to allure Crassus to the enterprise, his courage failed him
when the time for action arrived. Courage and enterprise, in fact, ought
not to be expected of the rich; they are the virtues of poverty.

[Sidenote: He is made aedile.]
[Sidenote: Gladiatorial shows.]
[Sidenote: Caesar's increasing popularity.]

Though the Senate were thus jealous and suspicious of Caesar, and were
charging him continually with these criminal designs, the people were on
his side; and the more he was hated by the great, the more strongly he
became intrenched in the popular favor. They chose him _aedile_. The
aedile had the charge of the public edifices of the city, and of the
games spectacles, and shows which were exhibited in them. Caesar
entered with great zeal into the discharge of the duties of this office.
He made arrangements for the entertainment of the people on the most
magnificent scale, and made great additions and improvements to the
public buildings, constructing porticoes and piazzas around the areas
where his gladiatorial shows and the combats with wild beasts were to be
exhibited. He provided gladiators in such numbers, and organized and
arranged them in such a manner, ostensibly for their training, that his
enemies among the nobility pretended to believe that he was intending to
use them as