VI. During his quaestorship he pronounced funeral orations from the
rostra, according to custom, in praise of his aunt (5) Julia, and his
wife Cornelia. In the panegyric on his aunt, he gives the following
account of her own and his father's genealogy, on both sides: "My aunt
Julia derived her descent, by the mother, from a race of kings, and by
her father, from the Immortal Gods. For the Marcii Reges [18], her
mother's family, deduce their pedigree from Ancus Marcius, and the Julii,
her father's, from Venus; of which stock we are a branch. We therefore
unite in our descent the sacred majesty of kings, the chiefest among men,
and the divine majesty of Gods, to whom kings themselves are subject."
To supply the place of Cornelia, he married Pompeia, the daughter of
Quintus Pompeius, and grand-daughter of Lucius Sylla; but he afterwards
divorced her, upon suspicion of her having been debauched by Publius
Clodius. For so current was the report, that Clodius had found access to
her disguised as a woman, during the celebration of a religious solemnity
[19], that the senate instituted an enquiry respecting the profanation of
the sacred rites.

VII. Farther-Spain [20] fell to his lot as quaestor; when there, as he
was going the circuit of the province, by commission from the praetor,
for the administration of justice, and had reached Gades, seeing a statue
of Alexander the Great in the temple of Hercules, he sighed deeply, as if
weary of his sluggish life, for having performed no memorable actions at
an age [21] at which Alexander had already conquered the world. He,
therefore, immediately sued for his discharge, with the view of embracing
the first opportunity, which might present itself in The City, of
entering upon a more exalted career. In the stillness of the night
following, he dreamt that he lay with his own mother; but his confusion
was relieved, and his hopes were raised to the highest pitch, by the