This objection, certainly of some force, is dispelled by other historical testimony. Besides, we know that at Rome they did not always observe the laws when dealing with eminent men. Lucullus was raised to be chief magistrate before the required age, and Pompey was consul at thirty-four. (Appian, _Civil Wars_, I. 14.)--Tacitus speaks on this matter thus: “With our ancestors this magistracy (the questorship) was the prize of merit only, for every citizen of ability had then the right to aim at these honours; _even age was so little regarded, that extreme youth did not exclude from either the consulship or the dictatorship_.” (_Annals_, XI. 22.)--In any case, if the opinion of M. Mommsen be adopted, the birth of Cæsar must be referred to 651, not 652. For, if he was born in the month of July, 652, he could only be forty-three years of age in the month of July, 695; and as the nomination of the consuls preceded by six months their entering into office, it would be in the month of July, 694, when he would have attained the legal age, which would bring the date of his birth to the year 651. But Plutarch (_Cæsar_, 69), Suetonius (_Cæsar_, 88), and Appian (_Civil Wars_, II. 149) all agree in saying that Cæsar was fifty-six when he was assassinated on the 15th of March, 710, which fixes his birth in the year 654. On the other hand, according to Velleius Paterculus (II. 43), Cæsar was appointed flamen of Jupiter by Marius and Cinna when scarcely out of infancy, and at Rome infancy ended at about fourteen; and the consulship of Marius and Cinna being in 668, Cæsar, according to our calculation, would then, in fact, have entered on his fourteenth year. The same author adds that he was about eighteen in 672, when he left Rome to escape the proscriptions of Sylla, a new reason for retaining the preceding date. Cæsar made his first campaign in Asia, at the taking of Mitylene, in 674 (Titus Livius, _Epitome_, LXXXIX.), which makes him twenty at the date of his entrance into the service. According to Sallust (_Catilina_, 49), when Cæsar was nominated grand pontiff in competition with Catulus, he was almost a youth (_adolescentulus_); and Dio Cassius says the same, in nearly the same terms. Doubtless they expressed themselves thus because of the great disproportion in the age of the two candidates. The expression of these authors, although unfitting, nevertheless agrees better with our reckoning, which ascribes thirty-seven years of age to Cæsar, than to the other, which gives him thirty-nine. Tacitus also, as we shall see in a note to a subsequent page, when speaking of the accusation against Dolabella, tends to make Cæsar too young rather than too old.