The fact was that Caesar had always shown signs of courage and ambition, and had always been confident of his future greatness.  Now that his position in the country was assured men began to remember these stories of his youth.  In the days when Sulla was master of Rome, Caesar had been one of the very few who had ventured to resist the great man’s will.  Marius, the leader of the party, was his uncle, and he had himself married the daughter of Cunia, another of the popular leaders.  This wife Sulla ordered him to divorce, but he flatly refused.  For some time his life was in danger; but Sulla was induced to spare it, remarking, however, to friends who interceded for him, on the ground that he was still but a boy, “You have not a grain of sense, if you do not see that in this boy there is the material for many Mariuses.”  The young Caesar found it safer to leave Italy for a time.  While traveling in the neighborhood of Asia Minor he fell into the hands of the pirates, who were at that time the terror of all the Eastern Mediterranean.  His first proceeding was to ask them how much they wanted for his ransom.  “Twenty talents,” (about five thousand pounds) was their answer.  “What folly!” he said, “you don’t know whom you have got hold of.  You shall have fifty.”  Messengers were sent to fetch the money, and Caesar, who was left with a friend and a couple of slaves, made the best of the situation.  If he wanted to go to sleep he would send a message commanding his captors to be silent.  He joined their sports, read poems and speeches to them, and roundly abused them as ignorant barbarians if they failed to applaud.  But his most telling joke was threatening to hang them.  The men laughed at the free-spoken lad, but were not long in finding that he was in most serious earnest.  In about five weeks’ time the money arrived and Caesar was released.  He immediately went to Miletus, equipped a squadron, and returning to the scene of his captivity, found and captured the greater part of the band.  Leaving his prisoners in safe custody at Pergamus, he made his way to the governor of the province, who had in his hands the power of life and death.  But the governor, after the manner of his kind, had views of his own.  The pirates were rich and could afford to pay handsomely for their lives.  He would consider the case, he said.  This was not at all to Caesar’s mind.  He hastened back to Pergamus, and, taking the law into his own hands, crucified all the prisoners.

This was the cool and resolute man in whom the people saw their best friend and the nobles their worst enemy.  These last seemed to see a chance of ruining him when the conspiracy of Catiline was discovered and crushed.  He was accused, especially by Cato, of having been an accomplice; and when he left the Senate after the debate in which he had argued against putting the arrested conspirators to death, he was mobbed by the gentlemen who formed Cicero’s body-guard, and was even in danger of his life.  But the formal