Josephine Quinn in the New York Review of Books:
He had good reason for concern. Although his recent election as a quaestor—one of the officials responsible for finances—had given him a lifetime seat in the Senate, Roman politics were more of a funnel than a ladder: twenty quaestors who had been elected at thirty years old could compete nine years later for eight praetorships, and then, three years after that, for just two annual consulships. To rise, you needed political friends, name recognition, and, in order to buy elections, a great deal of money.
Caesar was already admired as an orator, but he was best known for his debts, and he was good at making enemies, especially among the powerful conservatives in the Senate. Furthermore, while he had ably fulfilled the standard military duties of a young Roman nobleman, he had attracted attention only for his first assignment overseas at the age of about twenty: a trip to Bithynia in northern Anatolia, where he had become friendly—many said extremely friendly—with its king, Nicomedes. Whether or not the rumors were true, this was the first hint of a lifelong tendency to test the bounds of Rome’s unwritten moral and legal codes.
What he realized over the next decade was that two very good friends could make up for a lot of enemies if one was Marcus Crassus, the richest man in Rome, and the other its finest general, Gnaeus Pompey—nicknamed, no doubt to Caesar’s annoyance, “the Great.” This clique—which has gone down in history as the overly official-sounding “First Triumvirate,” but was called at the time the “three-headed monster”—got Caesar elected consul for 59 BCE. It also got Pompey a new wife in Caesar’s daughter Julia, apparently a love match despite the thirty-three-year age gap.
More here.