Introduction

There is a moment in the early political career of Julius Caesar that has become famous to historians of ancient Rome. Trudging the rounds of the assize circuit in Spain, Caesar came across a statue of Alexander the Great in the town of Gades. According to Suetonius, the thirty-two-year-old Caesar “was overheard to sigh impatiently, vexed, it seems, that at an age when Alexander had already conquered the whole world, he himself had done nothing in the least epoch-making. Moreover, when on the following night, much to his dismay, he had a dream of raping his own mother, the soothsayers greatly encouraged him by their interpretation of it: namely, that he was destined to conquer the earth, our Universal Mother” (Suetonius 1.7 = 1980:15). ¹