[Sidenote: B.C. 62.] The execution of Lentulus and Cethegus was
received in Rome with the feeling which Caesar had anticipated. There
was no active sympathy with the conspiracy, but the conspiracy was
forgotten in indignation at the lawless action of the consul and the
Senate. It was still violence--always violence. Was law, men asked,
never to resume its authority?--was the Senate to deal at its pleasure
with the lives and properties of citizens?--criminals though they might
be, what right had Cicero to strangle citizens in dungeons without
trial? If this was to be allowed, the constitution was at an end; Rome
was no longer a republic, but an arbitrary oligarchy. Pompey's name was
on every tongue. When would Pompey come? Pompey, the friend of the
people, the terror of the aristocracy! Pompey, who had cleared the sea
of pirates, and doubled the area of the Roman dominions! Let Pompey
return and bring his army with him, and give to Rome the same peace and
order which he had already given to the world.
A Roman commander, on landing in Italy after foreign service, was
expected to disband his legions, and relapse into the position of a
private person. A popular and successful general was an object of
instinctive fear to the politicians who held the reins of government.
The Senate was never pleased to see any individual too much an object
of popular idolatry; and in the case of Pompey their suspicion was the
greater on account of the greatness of his achievements, and because
his command had been forced upon them by the people, against their
will. In the absence of a garrison, the city was at the mercy of the
patricians and their clients. That the noble lords were unscrupulous in
removing persons whom they disliked they had shown in a hundred
instances, and Pompey naturally enough hesitated to trust himself among
them without security. He required the protection of office, and he had
sent forward one of his most distinguished officers, Metellus Nepos, to
prepare the way and demand the consulship for him. Metellus, to
strengthen his hands, had stood for the tribuneship; and, in spite of
the utmost efforts of the aristocracy, had been elected. It fell to
Metellus to be the first to give expression to the general indignation
in a way peculiarly wounding to the illustrious consul. Cicero imagined
that the world looked upon him as its saviour. In his own eyes he was
another Romulus, a second founder of Rome. The world, unfortunately,
had formed an entirely different estimate of him. The prisoners had
been killed on the 5th of December. On the last day of the year it was
usual for the outgoing consuls to review the events of their term of
office before the Senate; and Cicero had prepared a speech in which he
had gilded his own performances with all his eloquence. Metellus
commenced his tribunate with forbidding Cicero to deliver his oration,
and forbidding him on the special ground that a man who had put Roman
citizens to death without allowing them a hearing did not himself
deserve to be heard. In the midst of the confusion and uproar which
followed, Cicero could only shriek that he had saved his country: a
declaration which could have been dispensed with, since he had so often
insisted upon it already without producing the assent which he desired.
Notwithstanding his many fine qualities, Cicero was wanting in dignity.
His vanity was wounded in its tenderest point, and he attacked Metellus
a day or two after, in one of those violently abusive outpourings of
which so many specimens of his own survive, and which happily so few
other statesmen attempted to imitate. Metellus retorted with a threat
of impeaching Cicero, and the grave Roman Curia became no better than a
kennel of mad dogs. For days the storm raged on with no symptom of
abatement. At last Metellus turned to the people and proposed in the
assembly that Pompey should be recalled with his army to restore law
and order.
Caesar, who was now praetor, warmly supported Metellus. To him, if to
no one else, it was clear as the sun at noonday, that unless some
better government could be provided than could be furnished by five
hundred such gentlemen as the Roman senators, the State was drifting on
to destruction. Resolutions to be submitted to the people were
generally first drawn in writing, and were read from the Rostra. When
Metellus produced his proposal, Cato, who was a tribune also, sprang to
his side, ordered him to be silent, and snatched the scroll out of his
hands. Metellus went on, speaking from memory Cato's friends shut his
mouth by force. The patricians present drew their swords and cleared
the Forum; and the Senate, in the exercise of another right to which
they pretended, declared Caesar and Metullus degraded from their
offices. Metullus, probably at Caesar's advice, withdrew and went off
to Asia, to describe what had passed to Pompey. Caesar remained, and,
quietly disregarding the Senate's sentence, continued to sit and hear
cases as praetor. His court was forcibly closed. He yielded to violence
and retired under protest, being escorted to the door of his house by
an enormous multitude. There he dismissed his lictors and laid aside
his official dress, that he might furnish no excuse for a charge
against him of resisting the established authorities. The mob refused
to be comforted. They gathered day after day. They clustered about the
pontifical palace. They cried to Caesar to place himself at their head,
that they might tear down the senate-house, and turn the caitiffs into
the street. Caesar neither then nor ever lent himself to popular
excesses. He reminded the citizens that if others broke the law, they
must themselves set an example of obeying it, and he bade them return
to their homes.
Terrified at the state of the city, and penitent for their injustice to
Caesar, the Senate hurriedly revoked their decree of deposition, sent a
deputation to him to apologize, and invited him to resume his place
among them. The extreme patrician section remained irreconcilable.
Caesar complied, but only to find himself denounced again with
passionate pertinacity as having been an accomplice of Catiline.
Witnesses were produced, who swore to having seen his signature to a
treasonable bond. Curius, Cicero's spy, declared that Catiline himself
had told him that Caesar was one of the conspirators. Caesar treated
the charge with indignant disdain. He appealed to Cicero's conscience,
and Cicero was obliged to say that he had derived his earliest and most
important information from Caesar himself. The most violent of his
accusers were placed under arrest. The informers, after a near escape
from being massacred by the crowd, were thrown into prison, and for the
moment the furious heats were able to cool.
All eyes were now turned to Pompey. The war in Asia was over. Pompey,
it was clear, must now return to receive the thanks of his countrymen;
and as he had triumphed in spite of the aristocracy, and as his
victories could neither be denied nor undone, the best hope of the
Senate was to win him over from the people, and to prevent a union
between him and Caesar. Through all the recent dissensions Caesar had
thrown his weight on Pompey's side. He, with Cicero, had urged Pompey's
appointment to his successive commands. When Cicero went over to the
patricians, Caesar had stood by Pompey's officers against the fury of
the Senate. Caesar had the people behind him, and Pompey the army.
Unless in some way an apple of discord could be thrown between them,
the two favorites would overshadow the State, and the Senate's
authority would be gone. Nothing could be done for the moment
politically. Pompey owed his position to the democracy, and he was too
great as yet to fear Caesar as a rival in the Commonwealth. On the
personal side there was better hope. Caesar was as much admired in the
world of fashion as he was detested in the Curia. He had no taste for
the brutal entertainments and more brutal vices of male patrician
society. He preferred the companionship of cultivated women, and the
noble lords had the fresh provocation of finding their hated antagonist
an object of adoration to their wives and daughters. Here, at any rate,
scandal had the field to itself. Caesar was accused of criminal
intimacy with many ladies of the highest rank, and Pompey was privately
informed that his friend had taken advantage of his absence to seduce
his wife, Mucia. Pompey was Agamemnon; Caesar had been Aegisthus; and
Pompey was so far persuaded that Mucia had been unfaithful to him, that
he divorced her before his return.
Charges of this kind have the peculiar advantage that even when
disproved or shown to be manifestly absurd, they leave a stain behind
them. Careless equally of probability and decency, the leaders of the
Senate sacrificed without scruple the reputation of their own relatives
if only they could make Caesar odious. The name of Servilia has been
mentioned already. Servilia was the sister of Marcus Cato and the
mother of Marcus Brutus. She was a woman of remarkable ability and
character, and between her and Caesar there was undoubtedly a close
acquaintance and a strong mutual affection. The world discovered that
she was Caesar's mistress, and that Brutus was his son. It might be
enough to say that when Brutus was born Caesar was scarcely fifteen
years old, and that, if a later intimacy existed between them, Brutus
knew nothing of it or cared nothing for it. When he stabbed Caesar at
last it was not as a Hamlet or an Orestes, but as a patriot sacrificing
his dearest friend to his country. The same doubt extends to the other
supposed victims of Caesar's seductiveness. Names were mentioned in the
following century, but no particulars were given. For the most part his
alleged mistresses were the wives of men who remained closely attached
to him notwithstanding. The report of his intrigue with Mucia answered
its immediate purpose, in producing a temporary coldness on Pompey's
part toward Caesar; but Pompey must either have discovered the story to
be false or else have condoned it, for soon afterward he married
Caesar's daughter. Two points may be remarked about these legends:
first, that on no single occasion does Caesar appear to have been
involved in any trouble or quarrel on account of his love affairs; and
secondly, that, with the exception of Brutus and of Cleopatra's
Caesarion, whose claims to be Caesar's son were denied and disproved,
there is no record of any illegitimate children as the result of these
amours--a strange thing if Caesar was as liberal of his favors as
popular scandal pretended. It would be idle to affect a belief that
Caesar was particularly virtuous. He was a man of the world, living in
an age as corrupt as has been ever known. It would be equally idle to
assume that all the ink blots thrown upon him were certainly deserved,
because we find them in books which we call classical. Proof deserving
to be called proof there is none; and the only real evidence is the
town talk of a society which feared and hated Caesar, and was glad of
every pretext to injure him when alive, or to discredit him after his
death. Similar stories have been spread, are spread, and will be spread
of every man who raises himself a few inches above the level of his
fellows. We know how it is with our contemporaries. A single seed of
fact will produce in a season or two a harvest of calumnies, and
sensible men pass such things by, and pay no attention to them. With
history we are less careful or less charitable. An accusation of
immorality is accepted without examination when brought against eminent
persons who can no longer defend themselves, and to raise a doubt of
its truth passes as a sign of a weak understanding. So let it be. It is
certain that Caesar's contemporaries spread rumors of a variety of
intrigues, in which they said that he was concerned. It is probable
that some were well founded. It is possible that all were well founded.
But it is no less indubitable that they rest on evidence which is not
evidence at all, and that the most innocent intimacies would not have
escaped misrepresentation from the venomous tongues of Roman society.
Caesar comes into court with a fairer character than those whose
virtues are thought to overshadow him. Marriage, which under the
ancient Romans was the most sacred of ties, had become the lightest and
the loosest. Cicero divorced Tereutia when she was old and
ill-tempered, and married a young woman. Cato made over his Marcia, the
mother of his children, to his friend Hortensius, and took her back as
a wealthy widow when Hortensius died. Pompey put away his first wife at
Sylla's bidding, and took a second who was already the wife of another
man. Caesar, when little more than a boy, dared the Dictator's
displeasure rather than condescend to a similar compliance. His worst
enemies admitted that from the gluttony, the drunkenness, and the viler
forms of sensuality, which were then so common, he was totally free.
For the rest, it is certain that no friend ever permanently quarrelled
with him on any question of domestic injury; and either there was a
general indifference on such subjects, which lightens the character of
the sin, or popular scandals in old Rome were of no sounder material
than we find them composed of in other countries and in other times.
Turning from scandal to reality, we come now to a curious incident,
which occasioned a fresh political convulsion, where Caesar appears,
not as an actor in an affair of gallantry, but as a sufferer.
Pompey was still absent. Caesar had resumed his duties as praetor, and
was living in the official house of the Pontifex Maximus, with his
mother Aurelia and his wife Pompeia. The age was fertile of new
religions. The worship of the Bona Dea, a foreign goddess of unknown
origin, had recently been introduced into Rome, and an annual festival
was held in her honor in the house of one or other of the principal
magistrates. The Vestal virgins officiated at the ceremonies, and women
only were permitted to be present. This year the pontifical palace was
selected for the occasion, and Caesar's wife Pompeia was to preside.
The reader may remember a certain youth named Clodius, who had been
with Lucullus in Asia, and had been a chief instigator of the mutiny in
his army. He was Lucullus's brother-in-law, a member of the Claudian
family, a patrician of the patricians, and connected by blood and
marriage with the proudest members of the Senate. If Cicero is to be
believed, he had graduated even while a boy in every form of vice,
natural and unnatural. He was bold, clever, unprincipled, and
unscrupulous, with a slender diminutive figure and a delicate woman's
face. His name was Clodius Pulcher. Cicero played upon it and called
him Pulchellus Puer, "the pretty boy." Between this promising young man
and Caesar's wife Pompeia there had sprung up an acquaintance, which
Clodius was anxious to press to further extremes. Pompeia was difficult
of access, her mother-in-law Aurelia keeping a strict watch over her;
and Clodius, who was afraid of nothing, took advantage of the Bona Dea
festival to make his way into Caesar's house dressed as a woman.
Unfortunately for him, his disguise was detected. The insulted Vestals
and the other ladies who were present flew upon him like the dogs of
Actaeon, tore his borrowed garments from him, and drove him into the
street naked and wounded. The adventure became known. It was mentioned
in the Senate, and the College of Priests was ordered to hold an
inquiry. The college found that Clodius had committed sacrilege, and
the regular course in such cases was to send the offender to trial.
There was general unwillingness, however, to treat this matter
seriously. Clodius had many friends in the house, and even Cicero, who
was inclined at first to be severe, took on reflection a more lenient
view. Clodius had a sister, a light lady who, weary of her conquests
over her fashionable admirers, had tried her fascinations on the great
orator. He had escaped complete subjugation, but he had been flattered
by the attention of the seductive beauty, and was ready to help her
brother out of his difficulty. Clodius was not yet the dangerous
desperado which he afterward became; and immorality, though seasoned
with impiety, might easily, it was thought, be made too much of. Caesar
himself did not press for punishment. As president of the college, he
had acquiesced in their decision, and he divorced the unfortunate
Pompeia; but he expressed no opinion as to the extent of her
criminality, and he gave as his reason for separating from her, not
that she was guilty, but that Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.
Cato, however, insisted on a prosecution. Messala, one of the consuls,
was equally peremptory. The hesitation was regarded by the stricter
senators as a scandal to the order; and in spite of the efforts of the
second consul Piso, who was a friend of Clodius, it was decided that a
bill for his indictment should be submitted to the assembly in the
Forum. Clodius, it seems, was generally popular. No political question
was raised by the proceedings against him; for the present his offence
was merely a personal one; the wreck of Catiline's companions, the
dissolute young aristocrats, the loose members of all ranks and
classes, took up the cause, and gathered to support their favorite,
with young Curio, whom Cicero called in mockery _Filiola_, at their
head. The approaches to the Forum were occupied by them. Piso, by whom
the bill was introduced, himself advised the people to reject it. Cato
flew to the Rostra and railed at the consul. Hortensius, the orator,
and many others spoke on the same side. It appeared at last that the
people were divided, and would consent to the bill being passed, if it
was recommended to them by both the consuls. Again, therefore, the
matter was referred to the Senate. One of the tribunes introduced
Clodius, that he might speak for himself. Cicero had now altered his
mind, and was in favor of the prosecution.
[Sidenote: February, B.C. 61.] The "pretty youth" was alternately
humble and violent, begging pardon, and then bursting into abuse of his
brother-in-law, Lucullus, and more particularly of Cicero, whom he
suspected of being the chief promoter of the proceedings against him.
When it came to a division, the Senate voted by a majority of four
hundred to fifteen that the consuls must recommend the bill. Piso gave
way, and the tribune also who had been in Clodius's favor. The people
were satisfied, and a court of fifty-six judges was appointed, before
whom the trial was to take place. It seemed that a conviction must
necessarily follow, for there was no question about the facts, which
were all admitted. There was some manoeuvring, however, in the
constitution of the court, which raised Cicero's suspicions. The
judges, instead of being selected by the praetor, were chosen by lot,
and the prisoner was allowed to challenge as many names as he pleased.
The result was that in Cicero's opinion a more scandalous set of
persons than those who were finally sworn were never collected round a
gaming table--"disgraced senators, bankrupt knights, disreputable
tribunes of the treasury, the few honest men that were left appearing
to be ashamed of their company"--and Cicero considered that it would
have been better if Hortensius, who was prosecuting, had withdrawn, and
had left Clodius to be condemned by the general sense of respectable
people, rather than risk the credit of Roman justice before so
scandalous a tribunal.[1] Still the case as it proceeded appeared so
clear as to leave no hope of an acquittal. Clodius's friends were in
despair, and were meditating an appeal to the mob. The judges, on the
evening of the first day of the trial, as if they had already decided
on a verdict of guilty, applied for a guard to protect them while they
delivered it. The Senate complimented them in giving their consent.
With a firm expectation present in all men's minds the second morning
dawned. Even in Rome, accustomed as it was to mockeries of justice,
public opinion was shocked when the confident anticipation was
disappointed. According to Cicero, Marcus Crassus, for reasons known to
himself, had been interested in Clodius. During the night he sent for
the judges one by one. He gave them money. What else he either gave or
promised them, must continue veiled in Cicero's Latin.[2] Before these
influences the resolution of the judges melted away, and when the time
came, thirty-one out of fifty-six high-born Roman peers and gentlemen
declared Clodius innocent.
The original cause was nothing. That a profligate young man should
escape punishment for a licentious frolic was comparatively of no
consequence; but the trial acquired a notoriety of infamy which shook
once more the already tottering constitution.
"Why did you ask for a guard?" old Catulus growled to the judges: "was
it that the money you have received might not be taken from you?"
"Such is the history of this affair," Cicero wrote to his friend
Atticus. "We thought that the foundation of the Commonwealth had been
surely re-established in my consulship, all orders of good men being
happily united. You gave the praise to me and I to the gods; and now
unless some god looks favorably on us, all is lost in this single
judgment. Thirty Romans have been found to trample justice under foot
for a bribe, and to declare an act not to have been committed, about
which not only not a man, but not a beast of the field, can entertain
the smallest doubt."
Cato threatened the judges with impeachment; Cicero stormed in the
Senate, rebuked the consul Piso, and lectured Clodius in a speech which
he himself admired exceedingly. The "pretty boy" in reply taunted
Cicero with wishing to make himself a king. Cicero rejoined with asking
Clodius about a man named "King," whose estates he had appropriated,
and reminded him of a misadventure among the pirates, from which he had
come off with nameless ignominy. Neither antagonist very honorably
distinguished himself in this encounter of wit. The Senate voted at
last for an inquiry into the judges' conduct; but an inquiry only added
to Cicero's vexation, for his special triumph had been, as he
conceived, the union of the Senate with the equites; and the equites
took the resolution as directed against themselves, and refused to be
consoled.[3]
Caesar had been absent during these scenes. His term of office having
expired, he had been despatched as propraetor to Spain, where the ashes
of the Sertorian rebellion were still smouldering; and he had started
for his province while the question of Clodius's trial was still
pending. Portugal and Gallicia were still unsubdued. Bands of robbers
lay everywhere in the fastnesses of the mountain ranges. Caesar was
already favorably known in Spain for his service as quaestor. He now
completed the conquest of the peninsula. He put down the banditti. He
reorganized the administration with the rapid skill which always so
remarkably distinguished him. He sent home large sums of money to the
treasury. His work was done quickly, but it was done completely. He
nowhere left an unsound spot unprobed. He never contented himself with
the superficial healing of a wound which would break out again when he
was gone. What he began he finished, and left it in need of no further
surgery. As his reward, he looked for a triumph, and the consulship,
one or both; and the consulship he knew could not well be refused to
him, unwelcome as it would be to the Senate.
Pompey meanwhile was at last coming back. All lesser luminaries shone
faint before the sun of Pompey, the subduer of the pirates, the
conqueror of Asia, the glory of the Roman name. Even Cicero had feared
that the fame of the saviour of his country might pale before the
lustre of the great Pompey. "I used to be in alarm," he confessed with
naïve simplicity, "that six hundred years hence the merits of
Sampsiceramus[4] might seem to have been more than mine." [5] But how
would Pompey appear? Would he come at the head of his army, like Sylla,
the armed soldier of the democracy, to avenge the affront upon his
officers, to reform the State, to punish the Senate for the murder of
the Catiline conspirators? Pompey had no such views, and no capacity
for such ambitious operations. The ground had been prepared beforehand.
The Mucia story had perhaps done its work, and the Senate and the great
commander were willing to meet each other, at least with outward
friendliness.
His successes had been brilliant; but they were due rather to his
honesty than to his military genius. He had encountered no real
resistance, and Cato had sneered at his exploits as victories over
women. He had put down the buccaneers, because he had refused to be
bribed by them. He had overthrown Mithridates and had annexed Asia
Minor and Syria to the Roman dominions. Lucullus could have done it as
easily as his successor, if he could have turned his back upon
temptations to increase his own fortune or gratify his own passions.
The wealth of the East had lain at Pompey's feet, and he had not
touched it. He had brought millions into the treasury. He returned, as
he had gone out, himself moderately provided for, and had added nothing
to his private income. He understood, and practised strictly, the
common rules of morality. He detested dishonesty and injustice. But he
had no political insight; and if he was ambitious, it was with the
innocent vanity which desires, and is content with, admiration. In the
time of the Scipios he would have lived in an atmosphere of universal
applause, and would have died in honor with an unblemished name. In the
age of Clodius and Catiline he was the easy dupe of men of stronger
intellect than his own, who played upon his unsuspicious integrity. His
delay in coming back had arisen chiefly from anxiety for his personal
safety. He was eager to be reconciled to the Senate, yet without
deserting the people. While in Asia, he had reassured Cicero that
nothing was to be feared from him.[6] His hope was to find friends on
all sides and in all parties, and he thought that he had deserved their
friendship.
[Sidenote: December, B.C. 62.] Thus when Pompey landed at Brindisi his
dreaded legions were disbanded, and he proceeded to the Capitol, with a
train of captive princes, as the symbols of his victories, and wagons
loaded with treasure as an offering to his country. He was received as
he advanced with the shouts of applauding multitudes. He entered Rome
in a galaxy of glory. A splendid column commemorated the cities which
he had taken, the twelve million human beings whom he had slain or
subjected. His triumph was the most magnificent which the Roman
citizens had ever witnessed, and by special vote he was permitted to
wear his triumphal robe in the Senate as often and as long as might
please him. The fireworks over, and with the aureole of glory about his
brow, the great Pompey, like another Samson shorn of his locks, dropped
into impotence and insignificance. In February, 61, during the debate
on the Clodius affair, he made his first speech in the Senate. Cicero,
listening with malicious satisfaction, reported that "Pompey gave no
pleasure to the wretched; to the bad he seemed without backbone; he was
not agreeable to the well-to-do; the wise and good found him wanting in
substance;" [7] in short, the speech was a failure. Pompey applied for
a second consulship. He was reminded that he had been consul eight
years previously, and that the ten years' interval prescribed by Sylla,
between the first and the second term, had not expired. He asked for
lands for his soldiers, and for the ratification of his acts in Asia.
Cato opposed the first request, as likely to lead to another agrarian
law. Lucullus, who was jealous of him, raised difficulties about the
second, and thwarted him with continual delays.
[Sidenote: February 1, B.C. 60.] Pompey, being a poor speaker, thus
found himself entirely helpless in the new field. Cicero, being
relieved of fear from him as a rival, was wise enough to see that the
collapse might not continue, and that his real qualities might again
bring him to the front. The Clodius business had been a frightful
scandal, and, smooth as the surface might seem, ugly cracks were
opening all round the constitution. The disbanded legions were
impatient for their farms. The knights, who were already offended with
the Senate for having thrown the disgrace of the Clodius trial upon
them, had a fresh and more substantial grievance. The leaders of the
order had contracted to farm the revenues in Asia. They found that the
terms which they had offered were too high, and they claimed an
abatement, which the Senate refused to allow. The Catiline conspiracy
should have taught the necessity of a vigorous administration.
Caecilius Metellus and Lucius Afranius, who had been chosen consuls for
the year 60, were mere nothings. Metellus was a vacant aristocrat,[8]
to be depended on for resisting popular demands, but without insight
otherwise; the second, Afranius, was a person "on whom only a
philosopher could look without a groan;" [9] and one year more might
witness the consulship of Caesar. "I have not a friend," Cicero wrote,
"to whom I can express my real thoughts. Things cannot long stand as
they are. I have been vehement: I have put out all my strength in the
hope of mending matters and healing our disorders, but we will not
endure the necessary medicine. The seat of justice has been publicly
debauched. Resolutions are introduced against corruption, but no law
can be carried. The knights are alienated. The Senate has lost its
authority. The concord of the orders is gone, and the pillars of the
Commonwealth which I set up are overthrown. We have not a statesman, or
the shadow of one. My friend Pompey, who might have done something,
sits silent, admiring his fine clothes.[10] Crassus will say nothing to
make himself unpopular, and the rest are such idiots as to hope that
although the constitution fall they will save their own fish-ponds.[11]
Cato, the best man that we have, is more honest than wise. For these
three months he has been worrying the revenue farmers, and will not let
the Senate satisfy them." [12]
It was time for Cicero to look about him. The Catiline affair was not
forgotten. He might still be called to answer for the executions, and
he felt that he required some stronger support than an aristocracy, who
would learn nothing and seemed to be bent on destroying themselves. In
letter after letter he pours out his contempt for his friends "of the
fish-ponds," as he called them, who would neither mend their ways nor
let others mend them. He would not desert them altogether, but he
provided for contingencies. The tribunes had taken up the cause of
Pompey's legionaries. Agrarian laws were threatened, and Pompey himself
was most eager to see his soldiers satisfied. Cicero, who had hitherto
opposed an agrarian law with all his violence, discovered now that
something might be said in favor of draining "the sink of the city"
[13] and repeopling Italy. Besides the public advantage, he felt that
he would please the mortified but still popular Pompey; and he lent his
help in the Senate to improving a bill introduced by the tribunes, and
endeavoring, though unsuccessfully, to push it through.
[Sidenote: July, B.C. 60.] So grateful was Pompey for Cicero's support
that he called him, in the Senate, "the saviour of the world."
[14]Cicero was delighted with the phrase, and began to look to Pompey
as a convenient ally. He thought that he could control and guide him
and use his popularity for moderate measures. Nay, even in his despair
of the aristocracy, he began to regard as not impossible a coalition
with Caesar. "You caution me about Pompey," he wrote to Atticus in the
following July. "Do not suppose that I am attaching myself to him for
my own protection; but the state of things is such, that if we two
disagree the worst misfortunes may be feared. I make no concessions to
him, I seek to make him better, and to cure him of his popular levity;
and now he speaks more highly by far of my actions than of his own. He
has merely done well, he says, while I have saved the State. However
this may affect me, it is certainly good for the Commonwealth. What if
I can make Caesar better also, who is now coming on with wind and tide?
Will that be so bad a thing? Even if I had no enemies, if I was
supported as universally as I ought to be, still a medicine which will
cure the diseased parts of the State is better than the surgery which
would amputate them. The knights have fallen off from the Senate. The
noble lords think they are in heaven when they have barbel in their
ponds that will eat out of their hands, and they leave the rest to
fate. You cannot love Cato more than I love him, but he does harm with
the best intentions. He speaks as if he was in Plato's Republic,
instead of being in the dregs of that of Romulus. Most true that
corrupt judges ought to be punished! Cato proposed it, the Senate
agreed; but the knights have declared war upon the Senate. Most
insolent of the revenue farmers to throw up their contract! Cato
resisted them, and carried his point; but now when seditions break out,
the knights will not lift a finger to repress them. Are we to hire
mercenaries? Are we to depend on our slaves and freedmen?.... But
enough."[15]
[Sidenote: October, B.C. 60.] [Sidenote: November, B.C. 60.] Cicero
might well despair of a Senate who had taken Cato to lead them. Pompey
had come home in the best of dispositions. The Senate had offended
Pompey, and, more than that, had offended his legionaries. They had
quarrelled with the knights. They had quarrelled with the moneyed
interests. They now added an entirely gratuitous affront to Caesar. His
Spanish administration was admitted by every one to have been
admirable. He was coming to stand for the consulship, which could not
be refused; but he asked for a triumph also, and as the rule stood
there was a difficulty, for if he was to have a triumph, he must remain
outside the walls till the day fixed for it, and if he was a candidate
for office, he must be present in person on the day of the election.
The custom, though convenient in itself, had been more than once set
aside. Caesar applied to the Senate for a dispensation, which would
enable him to be a candidate in his absence; and Cato, either from mere
dislike of Caesar or from a hope that he might prefer vanity to
ambition, and that the dreaded consulship might be escaped, persuaded
the Senate to refuse. If this was the expectation, it was disappointed.
Caesar dropped his triumph, came home, and went through the usual
forms, and it at once appeared that his election was certain, and that
every powerful influence in the State was combined in his favor. From
Pompey he met the warmest reception. The Mucia bubble had burst. Pompey
saw in Caesar only the friend who had stood by him in every step of his
later career, and had braved the fury of the Senate at the side of his
officer Metellus Nepos. Equally certain it was that Caesar, as a
soldier, would interest himself for Pompey's legionaries, and that they
could be mutually useful to each other. Caesar had the people at his
back, and Pompey had the army. The third great power in Rome was that
of the capitalists, and about the attitude of these there was at first
some uncertainty. Crassus, who was the impersonation of them, was a
friend of Caesar, but had been on bad terms with Pompey. Caesar,
however, contrived to reconcile them; and thus all parties outside the
patrician circle were combined for a common purpose. Could Cicero have
taken his place frankly at their side, as his better knowledge told him
to do, the inevitable revolution might have been accomplished without
bloodshed, and the course of history have been different. Caesar wished
it. But it was not so to be. Cicero perhaps found that he would have to
be content with a humbler position than he had anticipated, that in
such a combination he would have to follow rather than to lead. He was
tempted. He saw a promise of peace, safety, influence, if not absolute,
yet considerable. But he could not bring himself to sacrifice the proud
position which he had won for himself in his consulship, as leader of
the Conservatives; and he still hoped to reign in the Senate, while
using the protection of the popular chiefs as a shelter in time of
storms. Caesar was chosen consul without opposition. His party was so
powerful that it seemed at one time as if he could name his colleague,
but the Senate succeeded with desperate efforts in securing the second
place. They subscribed money profusely, the immaculate Cato prominent
among them. The machinery of corruption was well in order. The great
nobles commanded the votes of their _clientèle_, and they succeeded in
giving Caesar the same companion who had accompanied him through the
aedileship and the praetorship, Marcus Bibulus, a dull, obstinate fool,
who could be relied on, if for nothing else, yet for dogged resistance
to every step which the Senate disapproved. For the moment they
appeared to have thought that with Bibulus's help they might defy
Caesar and reduce his office to a nullity. Immediately on the election
of the consuls, it was usual to determine the provinces to which they
were to be appointed when their consulate should expire. The regulation
lay with the Senate, and, either in mere spleen or to prevent Caesar
from having the command of an army, they allotted him the department of
the "Woods and Forests." [16] A very few weeks had to pass before they
discovered that they had to do with a man who was not to be turned
aside so slightingly.
Hitherto Caesar had been feared and hated, but his powers were rather
suspected than understood. As the nephew of Marius and the son-in-law
of Cinna, he was the natural chief of the party which had once governed
Rome and had been trampled under the hoof of Sylla. He had shown on
many occasions that he had inherited his uncle's principles, and could
be daring and skilful in asserting them. But he had held carefully
within the constitutional lines; he had kept himself clear of
conspiracies; he had never, like the Gracchi, put himself forward as a
tribune or attempted the part of a popular agitator. When he had
exerted himself in the political world of Rome, it had been to maintain
the law against violence, to resist and punish encroachments of
arbitrary power, or to rescue the Empire from being gambled away by
incapable or profligate aristocrats. Thus he had gathered for himself
the animosity of the fashionable upper classes and the confidence of
the body of the people. But what he would do in power, or what it was
in him to do, was as yet merely conjectural.
[Sidenote: B.C. 50.] At all events, after an interval of a generation
there was again a popular consul, and on every side there was a harvest
of iniquities ready for the sickle. Sixty years had passed since the
death of the younger Gracchus; revolution after revolution had swept
over the Commonwealth, and Italy was still as Tiberius Gracchus had
found it. The Gracchan colonists had disappeared. The Syllan military
proprietors had disappeared--one by one they had fallen to beggary, and
had sold their holdings, and again the country was parcelled into
enormous estates cultivated by slave-gangs. The Italians had been
emancipated, but the process had gone no further. The libertini, the
sons of the freedmen, still waited for equality of rights. The rich and
prosperous provinces beyond the Po remained unenfranchised, while the
value of the franchise itself was daily diminishing as the Senate
resumed its control over the initiative of legislation. Each year the
elections became more corrupt. The Clodius judgment had been the most
frightful instance which had yet occurred of the depravity of the law
courts; while, by Cicero's own admission, not a single measure could
pass beyond discussion into act which threatened the interests of the
oligarchy. The consulship of Caesar was looked to with hope from the
respectable part of the citizens, with alarm from the high-born
delinquents as a period of genuine reform. The new consuls were to
enter office on the 1st of January. In December it was known that an
agrarian law would be at once proposed under plea of providing for
Pompey's troops; and Cicero had to decide whether he would act in
earnest in the spirit which he had begun to show when the tribunes'
bill was under discussion, or would fall back upon resistance with the
rest of his party, or evade the difficult dilemma by going on foreign
service, or else would simply absent himself from Rome while the
struggle was going on. "I may either resist," he said, "and there will
be an honorable fight; or I may do nothing, and withdraw into the
country, which will be honorable also; or I may give active help, which
I am told Caesar expects of me. His friend, Cornelius Balbus, who was
with me lately, affirms that Caesar will be guided in everything by my
advice and Pompey's, and will use his endeavor to bring Pompey and
Crassus together. Such a course has its advantages; it will draw me
closely to Pompey and, if I please, to Caesar. I shall have no more to
fear from my enemies. I shall be at peace with the people. I can look
to quiet in my old age. But the lines still move me which conclude the
third book (of my Poem on my consulship): 'Hold to the track on which
thou enteredst in thy early youth, which thou pursuedst as consul so
valorously and bravely. Increase thy fame, and seek the praise of the
good.'" [17]
It had been proposed to send Cicero on a mission to Egypt. "I should
like well, and I have long wished," he said, "to see Alexandria and the
rest of that country. They have had enough of me here at present, and
they may wish for me when I am away. But to go now, and to go on a
commission from Caesar and Pompey!
I should blush
To face the men and long-robed dames of Troy.[18]
What will our optimates say, if we have any optimates left? Polydamas
will throw in my teeth that I have been bribed by the opposition--I
mean Cato, who is one out of a hundred thousand to me. What will
history say of me six hundred years hence? I am more afraid of that
than of the chatter of my contemporaries."[19]
So Cicero meditated, thinking as usual of himself first and of his duty
afterward--the fatalest of all courses then and always.
[1] "Si causam quaeris absolutionis, egestas judicum fuit et turpitudo....
Non vidit (Hortensius) satius esse illum in infamiâ relinqui ac
sordibus quam infirmo judicio committi."--_To Atticus_, i. 16.
[2] "Jam vero, oh Dii Boni! rem perditam! etiam noctes certarum mulierum,
atque _adolescentulorum nobilium_ introductiones nonnullis
judicibus pro mercedis cumulo fuerunt."--_Ad Atticum_, i. 16.
[3] "Nos hic in republicâ infirmâ, miserâ commutabilique versamur. Credo
enim te audisse, nostros equites paene a senatu esse disjunctos; qui
primum illud valde graviter tulerund, promulgatum ex senatus consulto
fuisse, ut de iis, qui ob judicaudum pecuniam accepissent queareretur.
Quâ in re decernendâ cum ego casu non affuissem, sensissemque id
equestrem ordinem ferre moleste, neque aperte dicere: objurgavi
senatum, ut mihi visus sum, summâ cum auctoritate, et in causâ non
verecundâ admodum gravis et copiosus fui."--_To Atticus_, i. 17.
[4] A nickname under which Cicero often speaks of Pompey.
[5] "Solebat enim me pungere, ne Sampsicerami merita in patriam ad annos
DC majora viderentur, quam nostra."--_To Atticus_, ii. 17.
[6] "Pompeius nobis amicissimus esse constat."--_To Atticus_, i. 13.
[7] "Non jucunda miseris, inanis improbis, beatis non grata, bonis non
gravis. Itaque frigebat."--_To Atticus_, i. 14.
[8] "Metellus non homo, sed litus atque aer, et solitudo mera."--_To
Atticus_, i. 18.
[9] "Consul est impositus is nobis, quem nemo, praeter nos philosophos,
aspicere sine suspiratu potest."--_Ib_. i. 18.
[10] "Pompeius togulam illam pictam silentio tuetur suam."--_Ib_.
The "picta togula" means the triumphal robe which Pompey was allowed
to wear.
[11] "Ceteros jam nosti; qui ita sunt stulti, ut amissâ republicâ piscinas
suas fore salvas sperare videantur."--_Ib_.
[12] _Ib_., abridged.
[13] "Sentinam urbis," a worse word than he had blamed in Rullus three
years before.--_To Atticus_, i. 19.
[14] "Pompeium adduxi in eam voluntatem, ut in Senatu non semel, sed
saepe, multisque verbis, hujus mihi salutem imperii atque orbis
terrarum adjudicarit."--_ib_.
[15] _To Atticus_, ii. 1, abridged.
[16] _Silvae Callesque_--to which "woods and forests" is a near
equivalent.
[17] "Interea cursus, quos primâ a parte juventae,
Quosque ideo consul virtute animoque petisti,
Hos retine atquae auge famam laudesque bonorum."
_To Atticus_, ii. 3.
[18] Iliad, vi. 442. Lord Derby's translation.
[19] _To Atticus_, ii. 5.