Cæsar had gone as prætor to Spain, and there began to win military renown--much to the surprise of his friends--and money. He wanted the consulship for the next year, and therefore required the support of Pompeius, who had now been driven away from the aristocratic party to which he belonged by sympathy. Crassus came in as Cæsar’s creditor and as the necessary millionaire. Thus was formed the Triumvirate of the year 60, and in 59 Cæsar became consul. By this time he had conceived high, possibly the highest, ambitions. Marius and Sulla, not to mention Alexander and Æneas, had always been much in his mind. For the present his object was to acquire a lasting office and secure the allegiance of a trained army. Cæsar’s colleague in the consulship was a certain Bibulus, who tried to stop the dangerous proceedings of the democrat by seeing omens in the heavens every day, but no one, least of all Cæsar, took any notice of him. The only serious opposition came from Cato the Younger, who represented the genuine and respectable aristocracy. This Cato was a queer anachronism at Rome, an honest man. He was also, if biography may be trusted, a bigot and a priggish eccentric. He was the sort of man to go about Africa without a hat, or to sit on the judicial bench without shoes, because such was the _mos maiorum_. He tried to revive the ways which had been styled old-fashioned in his grandfather. Nevertheless he was upright and brave, a good soldier, and a man with a clear though impossible policy. Once again it is the fault of rhetorical history that all the good men of Rome appear as prigs and eccentrics. This man most courageously opposed his veto to the proceedings of Cæsar, though he was hustled and beaten by the democratic hirelings, then organised under that most notorious scoundrel Clodius. But the result was that though Cæsar’s laws might pass, they could afterwards be declared illegal, and Cæsar would be liable to prosecution as soon as he became a private citizen. However, he had no immediate intention of becoming a private citizen. He secured the province of Gaul for five years with four legions. Now Gaul was not reckoned an important province. It was only the peaceful plain of Upper Italy to which the senate had added Narbonensian Gaul, a southern strip of France, chiefly considered as a step on the road to Spain. Four legions was a small consular army for those days; no one supposed that he would have much fighting. But either Cæsar had received secret intelligence or else he had very good luck. At the outset he was called to deal with a great immigration of the barbarian Helvetii, who were migrating out of Switzerland into Gaul and threatening the province.