The early life of Caesar may be seen as the story of a young man being hunted, but possessed of an indomitable spirit and a fierce determination to defend the honour of the defeated party of the populares. He incurs the enmity of the dictator Sulla, who seeks to eliminate the nephew of Gaius Marius. But Caesar is also the scion of one of the most venerable patrician families, the gens Julia, which boasted a mythical descent from Julus, the son of Aeneas. Any overt action against the young son of Gaius Julius Caesar the Elder (who had died in 85 bc, when the future dictator was only sixteen) would have been fraught with difficulty. Instead Sulla preferred to attempt to humiliate him, trying among other things to make him leave his wife Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, the other leader of the populares, whom Sulla had defeated when he marched on Rome.

For Caesar the defining experience was perhaps his first few years of ‘conscious’ life, under the dictatorship of Sulla. That was when he learned what it meant to stake all while facing the overwhelming power of political adversaries. He learned what the unlimited control of the factio paucorum could mean.