• Rome's citizen-soldiers were now "semi-professionals" who fought largely in the hope of bettering themselves through pay, loot, promotion, and above all grants of land or money to provide them with a living when they are discharged. 
• Many Army commanders turned into what amounted to independent warlords. 
• But government by supreme warlords was bound to be brief and unstable unless one of them could turn military dictatorship into legitimate power.
• Julius Caesar came from an old patrician family that had come down in the world, and he entered the city's politics as a young man determined to regained the fame and power of his ancestors.
• But he was also a flexible patrician, and in 60 B.C. he began to collaborate with Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey), an officer promoted by Sulla who had conquered many eastern Mediterranean lands. The two allies formed a triumvirate ("Three-Man Board"), together with another former henchman of Sulla, Marcus Crassus, that was for a time the dominant political force in Rome.
• With the help of his new friends Caesar won an appointment as proconsul of a province that included the southern regions of Gaul, a territory stretching all the way from northern Italy and the Mediterranean coast to the Rhine River, and the Atlantic Ocean.
• The Gaulish tribes outside the Roman-ruled areas were powerful enough that they might one day become dangerous to Rome and were wealthy enough to be a tempting target.