With the death of the great dictator, the republic settled into an uneasy new normal, although festering wounds from the civil war and the purges would occasionally flare up into … unpleasantness between fellow citizens.
Caesar, for his part, was free to pursue a promising career now that a metaphorical sword of Damocles was no longer hanging over his head. In 63 BC — the same year a man named Cicero was elected consul and a fellow traveler of Caesar’s named Catiline tried to overthrow the government — Caesar won a long-shot election for Pontifex Maximus — a lifetime position as the high priest of Rome, which was usually given to much older men, but would prove to be very useful in the coming years.
In 59 BC, Caesar was old enough to stand for the consulship himself, and after some legal shenanigans where his enemies in the Senate tried to block his candidacy, he won in a landslide. Unfortunately, Bibulus, his ideological opposite, came in second, which meant he became a consul as well.
Caesar was a dyed-in-the-wool reformer with unapologetically Marian sensibilities — among other things he promised to address the issue of land reform that had gotten the Gracchi brothers into…
