Sextus himself had accepted an appointment to a tribuneship in a legion of Caesar in Gaul.

When he departed for the wars he took with him as fellow officer a life-long friend, Caius Cornelius Lentulus; and ere leaving for the campaign the two had formed a compact quite in keeping with the stern Roman spirit that made the child the slave of the father: Young Quintus Drusus should marry Cornelia, Lentulus's only child, as soon as the two came to a proper age.

And so the friends went away to win glory in Gaul; to perish side by side, when Sabinus's ill-fated legion was cut off by the Eburones.[15] [13] Every Roman had a _praenomen_, or "Christian name"; also a gentile name of the gens or clan to which he belonged; and commonly in addition a cognomen, usually an epithet descriptive of some personal peculiarity of an ancestor, which had fastened itself upon the immediate descendants of that ancestor.

The _Livii Drusi_ were among the noblest of the Roman houses.
[14] Died in 91 B.C.
[15] In 54 B.C.
The son and the daughter remained.

Quintus Drusus had had kindly guardians; he had been sent for four years to the "University" at Athens; had studied rhetoric and philosophy; and now he was back with his career before him,--master of himself, of a goodly fortune, of a noble inheritance of high-born ancestry.