magnificent scale, and made great additions and improvements to the
public buildings, constructing porticoes and piazzas around the areas
where his gladiatorial shows and the combats with wild beasts were to be
exhibited. He provided gladiators in such numbers, and organized and
arranged them in such a manner, ostensibly for their training, that his
enemies among the nobility pretended to believe that he was intending to
use them as an armed force against the government of the city. They
accordingly made laws limiting and restricting the number of the
gladiators to be employed. Caesar then exhibited his shows on the
reduced scale which the new laws required, taking care that the people
should understand to whom the responsibility for this reduction in the
scale of their pleasures belonged. They, of course, murmured against the
Senate, and Caesar stood higher in their favor than ever.

[Sidenote: Caesar thwarted.]
[Sidenote: His resentment.]
[Sidenote: The statutes of Marius restored.]
[Sidenote: Rage of the patricians.]

He was getting, however, by these means, very deeply involved in debt;
and, in order partly to retrieve his fortunes in this respect, he made
an attempt to have Egypt assigned to him as a province. Egypt was then
an immensely rich and fertile country. It had, however, never been a
Roman province. It was an independent kingdom, in alliance with the
Romans, and Caesar's proposal that it should be assigned to him as a
province appeared very extraordinary. His pretext was, that the people
of Egypt had recently deposed and expelled their king, and that,
consequently, the Romans might properly take possession of it. The
Senate, however, resisted this plan, either from jealousy of Caesar or
from a sense of justice to Egypt; and, after a violent contest, Caesar