On returning to Rome from a journey during which, according to Velleius, he was again harassed by pirates, the ‘masters of the seas’, Caesar achieved an early electoral success: he was elected a military tribune in 72 bc for the following year. He was the first to be elected, no doubt because he was well aware of the way to win an electoral campaign. He deployed his energies in the battles characteristic of the tradition and the politics of the populares, all the more significant while the war against Spartacus was raging in Italy. He strove to support, says Suetonius somewhat vaguely, those who tried ‘to re-establish the authority of the tribunes of the plebs, the extent of which Sulla had curtailed’. His other initiative – which is better documented – was to support the Lex Plotia, designed to secure the return of the followers of Lepidus, who in the meantime had taken refuge with Sertorius in Spain, among them Caesar's brother-in-law Lucius Cinna.

The fact that the most delicate problem left behind by Sulla was the restoration of the rights of the tribunes of the plebs was well known to all the contending forces. It had already figured in Lepidus' programme, in the petitions of Gaius Aurelius Cotta in 75 bc, of Lucius Quintius in 74, of Licinius Macer in 73, and it would be one of the achievements of the consulate of Crassus and Pompey in 70.