an armed force against the government of the city. They
accordingly made laws limiting and restricting the number of the
gladiators to be employed. Caesar then exhibited his shows on the
reduced scale which the new laws required, taking care that the people
should understand to whom the responsibility for this reduction in the
scale of their pleasures belonged. They, of course, murmured against the
Senate, and Caesar stood higher in their favor than ever.

[Sidenote: Caesar thwarted.]
[Sidenote: His resentment.]
[Sidenote: The statutes of Marius restored.]
[Sidenote: Rage of the patricians.]

He was getting, however, by these means, very deeply involved in debt;
and, in order partly to retrieve his fortunes in this respect, he made
an attempt to have Egypt assigned to him as a province. Egypt was then
an immensely rich and fertile country. It had, however, never been a
Roman province. It was an independent kingdom, in alliance with the
Romans, and Caesar's proposal that it should be assigned to him as a
province appeared very extraordinary. His pretext was, that the people
of Egypt had recently deposed and expelled their king, and that,
consequently, the Romans might properly take possession of it. The
Senate, however, resisted this plan, either from jealousy of Caesar or
from a sense of justice to Egypt; and, after a violent contest, Caesar
found himself compelled to give up the design. He felt, however, a
strong degree of resentment against the patrician party who had thus
thwarted his designs. Accordingly, in order to avenge himself upon them,
he one night replaced certain statues and trophies of Marius in the
Capitol, which had been taken down by order of Sylla when he returned to
power. Marius, as will be recollected, had been the great champion of
the popular party, and the enemy of the patricians; and, at the time of
his down-fall, all the memorials of his power and greatness had been
every where removed from Rome, and among them these statues and
trophies, which had been erected in the Capitol in commemoration of some
former victories, and had remained there until Sylla's triumph, when
they were taken down and destroyed. Caesar now ordered new ones to be
made, far more magnificent than before. They were made secretly, and put
up in the night. His office as aedile gave him the necessary authority.
The next morning, when the people saw these splendid monuments of their
great favorite restored, the whole city was