The first incident we know of Caesar is highly characteristic. Pompeius at the time of the proscriptions had put away his wife at Sulla’s behest. Caesar, a little younger, like him a rising young soldier, was descended from one of the most illustrious of patrician families. But his uncle had married Marius’s sister. Not only was he the nephew of Marius; he was allied to the beaten party in the Revolution by his marriage to Cornelia the daughter of Cinna. Sulla commanded him to divorce her. Caesar refused. He loved his wife dearly. Neither then (he was hardly out of his teens) nor at any other time was he ready to take orders from other men. Therefore his property and the dowry of his young wife were confiscated. His own life was in danger and he had to leave Rome. But his will did not bend. Sulla realized something of the stuff of which, youthful and unknown as he was, Caesar was made. ‘In that young man’, he said, ‘there are many Mariuses.’ At the time, and for long after, however, no sign of this was perceived by most people. At an age when Pompeius, the darling of fortune, had celebrated a triumph and was, despite his youth, a leading man in Rome, looked up to by every one, rather feared by the Senate, wealthy, prosperous, and important, Caesar was poor and quite unknown, attached by his relationship to Marius and Cinna to a defeated faction and a broken and discredited party. Yet Sulla was right. Caesar had a genius, a patience, and a power of will such as Marius never possessed. Of his military talents no one, not even Caesar himself, had any suspicion till long after. His rise was slow and difficult. Until his alliance with Crassus he was perpetually hampered by poverty and debts, both in fact and in the opinion of Rome. When he escaped from Rome (81) Caesar went abroad first to the Greek islands, where he served his first campaign, and afterward to Bithynia; he also raised an expeditionary force against the Rhodian pirates. After Sulla’s death he returned to Rome. His eloquence soon won him a position in the Popular party. No one, however, regarded him as a serious rival to Pompeius, who was at this time regarded as inclining more or less to the Popular side. The enormous debts which were to be such a burden to Caesar were mainly contracted while Pompeius was in the East. He carried through magnificent building schemes, and gave superb games to the people--such being the road to popularity. Wider plans were forming in his mind, however: plans on the lines of Gracchus.