Julia. All of my beloved women are dead, two of them trying to bear sons. Sweetest little Cinnilla, darling Julia, each just over the threshold of adult life. Neither ever caused me a single heartache save in their dying. Unfair, unfair! I close my eyes and there they are: Cinnilla, wife of my youth; Julia, my only daughter. The other Julia, Aunt Julia the wife of that awful old monster, Gaius Marius. Her perfume can still reduce me to tears when I smell it on some unknown woman. My childhood would have been loveless had it not been for her hugs and kisses. Mater, the perfect partisan adversary, was incapable of hugs and kisses for fear that overt love would corrupt me. She thought me too proud, too conscious of my intelligence, too prone to be royal. But they are all gone, my beloved women. Now I am alone. No wonder I begin to feel my age.

It was on the scales of the gods which one of them had had the harder time succeeding, Caesar or Sulla. Not much in it: a hair, a fibril. They had both been forced to preserve their dignitas their personal share of public fame, of standing and worth by marching on Rome. They had both been made Dictator, the sole office above democratic process or future prosecution. The difference between them lay in how they had behaved once appointed Dictator: Sulla had proscribed, filled the empty Treasury by killing wealthy senators and knight-businessmen and confiscating their estates; Caesar had preferred clemency, was forgiving his enemies and allowing the majority of them to keep their property. The boni had forced Caesar to march on Rome.