Caesar's cursus and the intervals between Offices

Abstract

The puzzle of C. Julius Caesar's date of birth and cursus honorum has never been satisfactorily solved. The facts can be stated quite simply. All but two of the sources referring to his age imply 100 B.C. as the date of his birth, and the date of his quaestorship agrees with this; yet he held the senior magistracies two years earlier than, according to what we know of the normal cursus, that date would allow. Are nearly all the sources wrong (as Mommsen thought) ? Or did Caesar at some time get a special dispensation, which no one has bothered to mention (as the majority opinion would now hold) ? Or is there another explanation of a more general kind, fitting Caesar into a class of exceptions (as Afzelius proposed) ?