Julius Caesar and his Commentaries
Unlike Alexander of Macedon, Julius Caesar had to deal with rivals as ambitious and influential as himself; and S. Usher finds that he has left a lucid account of his rise to greatness.
As a young man in his early thirties, Julius Caesar was appointed to a quaestorship in the province of Further Spain. In the course of his administrative duties he visited Cadiz, a city with a long tradition of Greek and Punic culture. There, in the temple of Hercules, he beheld a statue of Alexander the Great, which caused him to reflect that Alexander had conquered the whole of the known world at an age when he, Caesar, had achieved nothing of note. This thought disturbed him; but he was even more disturbed by a dream he had the following night, in which he saw himself debauching his own mother. But some obliging soothsayers interpreted it as predicting his conquest of the worJd, equating the primeval mother-figure, the Earth, with Caesar’s mother. Encouraged by this interpretation, Caesar arranged for the curtailment of his appointment in Spain and returned to Rome in order to seek a more rapid advancement of his political career.
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