I am trying not to discuss Caesar's childhood, for fear of drawing inferences that are unjustified. Unless they are actually involved, it is possible for children to be unaffected by events outside their immediate environment. Certainly Caesar was close to his aunt's adopted son, and to his aunt, at whose funeral he delivered a famous encomium. I have this feeling, however, that the rest of the older generation of Caesar's family might have regarded Marius as slightly beneath them.

As a military commander, Caesar accepted the army as he found it, and benefited from the changes Marius had introduced. Marius himself seems to have been an organiser rather than a skilled tactician, and he never fought, as Caesar did, against a Roman army.

At the end Marius was probably insane as well as drunk. His actions after Cinna had undertaken that there would be no bloodshed were those of a madman: certainly he was also of an age for the time at which he may have been affected by senility. Whether Caesar witnessed the slaughter, we do not know. Considering that the approach of Marius and Cinna was preceded by an outbreak of plague in the city, it seems more likely that Marius's family, and those associated with them, took the opportunity to go elsewhere until things quietened down.