Note 806 — Chapter I · (654-684.)

Valerius Maximus, VIII. ix. § 3.—“Cæsar was twenty-one years of age when he attacked Dolabella, in a speech which we still read to-day with admiration.” (Tacitus, Dialogue on the Orators, 34.)—According to the chronological order which we have adopted, Cæsar, instead of twenty-one, would have been twenty-three years old; but as Tacitus, in the same citation, also errs, by two years, in making Crassus, who had accused Carbo, nineteen instead of twenty-one, we may suppose that he has committed the same mistake with Cæsar. In fact, Crassus tells his own age in Cicero (On the Orators, III. 20, § 74): “Quippe qui omnium maturrime ad publicas causas accesserim, annosque natus unum et viginti nobilissimum hominem in judicium vocarim.”—Crassus, the orator, was born in 614; he accused Carbo in 635, the date given by Cicero.