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Title: Caesar: A Sketch

Author: James Anthony Froude

Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8425]
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[This file was first posted on July 9, 2003]

Edition: 10

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[Illustration: Julius Caesar]


CAESAR

_A SKETCH_




BY

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A.

FORMERLY FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD




                   _"Pardon, gentles all
  The flat unraised spirit that hath dared
  On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
  So great an object."_

  --SHAKESPEARE, Henry V.




PREFACE.


I have called this work a "sketch" because the materials do not exist for
a portrait which shall be at once authentic and complete. The original
authorities which are now extant for the life of Caesar are his own
writings, the speeches and letters of Cicero, the eighth book of the
"Commentaries" on the wars in Gaul and the history of the Alexandrian war,
by Aulus Hirtius, the accounts of the African war and of the war in Spain,
composed by persons who were unquestionably present in those two
campaigns. To these must be added the "Leges Juliae" which are preserved
in the Corpus Juris Civilis. Sallust contributes a speech, and Catullus a
poem. A few hints can be gathered from the Epitome of Livy and the
fragments of Varro; and here the contemporary sources which can be
entirely depended upon are brought to an end.

The secondary group of authorities from which the popular histories of the
time have been chiefly taken are Appian, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Dion
Cassius. Of these the first three were divided from the period which they
describe by nearly a century and a half, Dion Cassius by more than two
centuries. They had means of knowledge which no longer exist--the
writings, for instance, of Asinius Pollio, who was one of Caesar's
officers. But Asinius Pollio's accounts of Caesar's actions, as reported
by Appian, cannot always be reconciled with the Commentaries; and all
these four writers relate incidents as facts which are sometimes
demonstrably false. Suetonius is apparently the most trustworthy. His
narrative, like those of his contemporaries, was colored by tradition. His
biographies of the earlier Caesars betray the same spirit of animosity
against them which taints the credibility of Tacitus, and prevailed for so
many years in aristocratic Roman society. But Suetonius shows nevertheless
an effort at veracity, an antiquarian curiosity and diligence, and a
serious anxiety to tell his story impartially. Suetonius, in the absence
of evidence direct or presumptive to the contrary, I have felt myself able
to follow. The other three writers I have trusted only when I have found
them partially confirmed by evidence which is better to be relied upon.

The picture which I have drawn will thus be found deficient in many
details which have passed into general acceptance, and I have been unable
to claim for it a higher title than that of an outline drawing.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I.

Free Constitutions and Imperial Tendencies.--Instructiveness of Roman
History.--Character of Historical Epochs.--The Age of Caesar.--Spiritual
State of Rome.--Contrasts between Ancient and Modern Civilization.


CHAPTER II.

The Roman Constitution.--Moral Character of the Romans.--Roman Religion.--
Morality and Intellect.--Expansion of Roman Power.--The Senate.--Roman
Slavery.--Effects of Intercourse with Greece.--Patrician Degeneracy.--The
Roman Noble.--Influence of Wealth.--Beginnings of Discontent.


CHAPTER III.

Tiberius Gracchus.--Decay of the Italian Yeomanry.--Agrarian Law.--Success
and Murder of Gracchus.--Land Commission.--Caius Gracchus.--Transfer of
Judicial Functions from the Senate to the Equites.--Sempronian Laws.--Free
Grants of Corn.--Plans for Extension of the Franchise.--New Colonies.--
Reaction.--Murder of Caius Gracchus


CHAPTER IV.

Victory of the Optimates.--The Moors.--History of Jugurtha.--The Senate
corrupted.--Jugurthine War.--Defeat of the Romans.--Jugurtha comes to
Rome.--Popular Agitation.--The War renewed.--Roman Defeats in Africa and
Gaul.--Caecilius Metellus and Caius Marius.--Marriage of Marius.--The
Caesars.--Marius Consul.--First Notice of Sylla.--Capture and Death of
Jugurtha


CHAPTER V.

Birth of Cicero.--The Cimbri and Teutons.--German Immigration into Gaul.--
Great Defeat of the Romans on the Rhone.--Wanderings of the Cimbri.--
Attempted Invasion of Italy.--Battle of Aix.--Destruction of the
Teutons.--Defeat of the Cimbri on the Po.--Reform in the Roman Army.--
Popular Disturbances in Rome.--Murder of Memmius.--Murder of Saturninus
and Glaucia


CHAPTER VI.

Birth and Childhood of Julius Caesar.--Italian Franchise.--Discontent of
the Italians.--Action of the Land Laws.--The Social War.--Partial
Concessions.--Sylla and Marius.--Mithridates of Pontus.--First Mission of
Sylla into Asia.


CHAPTER VII.

War with Mithridates.--Massacre of Italians in Asia.--Invasion of
Greece.--Impotence and Corruption of the Senate.--End of the Social War.--
Sylla appointed to the Asiatic Command.--The Assembly transfer the Command
to Marius.--Sylla marches on Rome.--Flight of Marius.--Change of the
Constitution.--Sylla sails for the East.--Four Years' Absence.--Defeat of
Mithridates.--Contemporary Incidents at Rome.--Counter Revolution.--
Consulship of Cinna.--Return of Marius.--Capitulation of Rome.--Massacre
of Patricians and Equites.--Triumph of Democracy.


CHAPTER VIII.

The Young Caesar.--Connection with Marius.--Intimacy with the Ciceros.--
Marriage of Caesar with the Daughter of Cinna.--Sertorius.--Death of
Cinna.--Consulships of Norbanus and Scipio.--Sylla's Return.--First
Appearance of Pompey.--Civil War.--Victory of Sylla.--The Dictatorship and
the Proscription.--Destruction of the Popular Party and Murder of the
Popular Leaders.--General Character of Aristocratic Revolutions.--The
Constitution remodelled.--Concentration of Power in the Senate.--Sylla's
General Policy.--The Army.--Flight of Sertorius to Spain.--Pompey and
Sylla.--Caesar refuses to divorce his Wife at Sylla's Order.--Danger of
Caesar.--His Pardon.--Growing Consequence of Cicero.--Defence of
Roscius.--Sylla's Abdication and Death


CHAPTER IX.

Sertorius in Spain.--Warning of Cicero to the Patricians.--Leading
Aristocrats.--Caesar with the Army in the East.--Nicomedes of Bithynia.--
The Bithynian Scandal.--Conspiracy of Lepidus.--Caesar returns to Rome.--
Defeat of Lepidus.--Prosecution of Dolabella.--Caesar taken by Pirates.--
Senatorial Corruption.--Universal Disorder.--Civil War in Spain.--Growth
of Mediterranean Piracy.--Connivance of the Senate.--Provincial
Administration.--Verres in Sicily.--Prosecuted by Cicero.--Second War
with Mithridates.--First Success of Lucullus.--Failure of Lucullus, and
the Cause of it.--Avarice of Roman Commanders.--The Gladiators.--The
Servile War.--Results of the Change in the Constitution introduced by
Sylla


CHAPTER X.

Caesar Military Tribune.--Becomes known as a Speaker.--Is made Quaestor.--
Speech at his Aunt's Funeral.--Consulship of Pompey and Crassus.--Caesar
marries Pompey's Cousin.--Mission to Spain.--Restoration of the Powers of
the Tribunes.--The Equites and the Senate.--The Pirates.--Food Supplies
cut off from Rome.--The Gabinian Law.--Resistance of the Patricians.--
Suppression of the Pirates by Pompey.--The Manilian Law.--Speech of
Cicero.--Recall of Lucullus.--Pompey sent to command in Asia.--Defeat and
Death of Mithridates.--Conquest of Asia by Pompey


CHAPTER XI.

History of Catiline.--A Candidate for the Consulship.--Catiline and
Cicero.--Cicero chosen Consul.--Attaches Himself to the Senatorial
Party.--Caesar elected Aedile.--Conducts an Inquiry into the Syllan
Proscriptions.--Prosecution of Rabirius.--Caesar becomes Pontifex
Maximus--and Praetor.--Cicero's Conduct as Consul.--Proposed Agrarian
Law.--Resisted by Cicero.--Catiline again stands for the Consulship.--
Violent Language in the Senate.--Threatened Revolution.--Catiline again
defeated.--The Conspiracy.--Warnings sent to Cicero.--Meeting at
Catiline's House.--Speech of Cicero in the Senate.--Cataline joins an Army
of Insurrection in Etruria.--His Fellow-conspirators.--Correspondence with
the Allobroges.--Letters read in the Senate.--The Conspirators seized.--
Debate upon their Fate.--Speech of Caesar.--Caesar on a Future State.--
Speech of Cato--and of Cicero.--The Conspirators executed untried.--Death
of Catiline.


CHAPTER XII.

Preparations for the Return of Pompey.--Scene in the Forum.--Cato and
Metellus.--Caesar suspended from the Praetorship.--Caesar supports
Pompey.--Scandals against Caesar's Private Life.--General Character of
them.--Festival of the Bona Dea.--Publius Clodius enters Caesar's House
dressed as a Woman.--Prosecution and Trial of Clodius.--His Acquittal, and
the Reason of it.--Successes of Caesar as Propraetor in Spain.--Conquest
of Lusitania.--Return of Pompey to Italy.--First Speech in the Senate.--
Precarious Position of Cicero.--Cato and the Equites.--Caesar elected
Consul.--Revival of the Democratic Party.--Anticipated Agrarian Law.--
Uneasiness of Cicero.


CHAPTER XIII.

The Consulship of Caesar.--Character of his Intended Legislation.--The
Land Act first proposed in the Senate.--Violent Opposition.--Caesar
appeals to the Assembly.--Interference of the Second Consul Bibulus.--The
Land Act submitted to the People.--Pompey and Crassus support it.--Bibulus
interposes, but without Success.--The Act carried--and other Laws.--The
Senate no longer being Consulted.--General Purpose of the Leges Juliae.--
Caesar appointed to Command in Gaul for Five Years.--His Object in
accepting that Province.--Condition of Gaul, and the Dangers to be
apprehended from it.--Alliance of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus.--The
Dynasts.--Indignation of the Aristocracy.--Threats to repeal Caesar's
Laws.--Necessity of Controlling Cicero and Cato.--Clodius is made
Tribune.--Prosecution of Cicero for Illegal Acts when Consul.--Cicero's
Friends forsake him.--He flies, and is banished.


CHAPTER XIV.

Caesar's Military Narrative.--Divisions of Gaul.--Distribution of
Population.--The Celts.--Degree of Civilization.--Tribal System.--The
Druids.--The AEdui and the Sequani.--Roman and German Parties.--Intended
Migration of the Helvetii.--Composition of Caesar's Army.--He goes to
Gaul.--Checks the Helvetii.--Returns to Italy for Larger Forces.--The
Helvetii on the Saone.--Defeated, and sent back to Switzerland.--Invasion
of Gaul by Ariovistus.--Caesar invites him to a Conference.--He refuses.--
Alarm in the Roman Army.--Caesar marches against Ariovistus.--Interview
between them.--Treachery of the Roman Senate.--Great Battle at Colmar.--
Defeat and Annihilation of the Germans.--End of the First Campaign.--
Confederacy among the Belgae.--Battle on the Aisne.--War with the
Nervii.--Battle of Maubeuge.--Capture of Namur.--The Belgae conquered.--
Submission of Brittany.--End of the Second Campaign.


CHAPTER XV.

Cicero and Clodius.--Position and Character of Clodius.--Cato sent to
Cyprus.--Attempted Recall of Cicero defeated by Clodius.--Fight in the
Forum.--Pardon and Return of Cicero.--Moderate Speech to the People.--
Violence in the Senate.--Abuse of Piso and Gabinius.--Coldness of the
Senate toward Cicero.--Restoration of Cicero's House.--Interfered with by
Clodius.--Factions of Clodius and Milo.--Ptolemy Auletes expelled by his
Subjects.--Appeals to Rome for Help.--Alexandrian Envoys assassinated.--
Clodius elected aedile.--Fight in the Forum.--Parties in Rome.--Situation
of Cicero.--Rally of the Aristocracy.--Attempt to repeal the Leges
Juliae.--Conference at Lucca.--Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus.--Cicero
deserts the Senate.--Explains his Motives.--Confirmation of the Ordinances
of Lucca.--Pompey and Crassus Consuls.--Caesar's Command prolonged for
Five Additional Years.--Rejoicings in Rome.--Spectacle in the
Amphitheater.


CHAPTER XVI.

Revolt of the Veneti.--Fleet prepared in the Loire.--Sea-fight at
Quiberon.--Reduction of Normandy and of Aquitaine.--Complete Conquest of
Gaul.--Fresh Arrival of Germans over the Lower Rhine.--Caesar orders them
to retire, and promises them Lands elsewhere.--They refuse to go--and are
destroyed.--Bridge over the Rhine.--Caesar invades Germany.--Returns after
a Short Inroad.--First Expedition into Britain.--Caesar lands at Deal, or
Walmer.--Storm and Injury to the Fleet.--Approach of the Equinox.--
Further Prosecution of the Enterprise postponed till the following Year.--
Caesar goes to Italy for the Winter.--Large Naval Preparations.--Return of
Spring.--Alarm on the Moselle.--Fleet collects at Boulogne.--Caesar sails
for Britain a Second Time.--Lands at Deal.--Second and more Destructive
Storm.--Ships repaired, and placed out of Danger.--Caesar marches through
Kent.--Crosses the Thames, and reaches St. Albans.--Goes no further, and
returns to Gaul.--Object of the Invasion of Britain.--Description of the
Country and People.


CHAPTER XVII.

Distribution of the Legions after the Return from Britain.--Conspiracy
among the Gallic Chiefs.--Rising of the Eburones.--Destruction of Sabinus,
and a Division of the Roman Army.--Danger of Quintus Cicero.--Relieved by
Caesar in Person.--General Disturbance.--Labienus attacked at
Lavacherie.--Defeats and kills Induciomarus.--Second Conquest of the
Belgae.--Caesar again crosses the Rhine.--Quintus Cicero in Danger a
Second Time.--Courage of a Roman Officer.--Punishment of the Revolted
Chiefs.--Execution of Acco.


CHAPTER XVIII.

Correspondence of Cicero with Caesar.--Intimacy with Pompey and Crassus.--
Attacks on Piso and Gabinius.---Cicero compelled to defend Gabinius--and
Vatinius.--Dissatisfaction with his Position.--Corruption at the Consular
Elections.--Public Scandal.--Caesar and Pompey.--Deaths of Aurelia and
Julia.--Catastrophe in the East.--Overthrow and Death of Crassus.--
Intrigue to detach Pompey from Caesar.---Milo a Candidate for the
Consulship.--Murder of Clodius.--Burning of the Senate-house.--Trial and
Exile of Milo.--Fresh Engagements with Caesar.--Promise of the Consulship
at the End of his Term in Gaul.


CHAPTER XIX.

Last Revolt of Gaul.--Massacre of Romans at Gien.--Vercingetorix.--Effect
on the Celts of the Disturbances at Rome.--Caesar crosses the Cevennes.--
Defeats the Arverni.--Joins his Army on the Seine.--Takes Gien, Nevers,
and Bourges.--Fails at Gergovia.--Rapid March to Sens.--Labienus at
Paris.--Battle of the Vingeanne.--Siege of Alesia.--Caesar's Double
Lines.--Arrival of the Relieving Army of Gauls.--First Battle on the
Plain.--Second Battle.--Great Defeat of the Gauls.--Surrender of
Alesia.--Campaign against the Carnutes and the Bellovaci.--Rising on the
Dordogne.--Capture of Uxellodunum.--Caesar at Arras.--Completion of the
Conquest.


CHAPTER XX.

Bibulus in Syria.--Approaching Term of Caesar's Government.--Threats of
Impeachment.--Caesar to be Consul or not to be Consul?--Caesar's Political
Ambition.--Hatred felt toward him by the Aristocracy.--Two Legions taken
from him on Pretense of Service against the Parthians.--Caesar to be
recalled before the Expiration of his Government.--Senatorial Intrigues.--
Curio deserts the Senate.--Labienus deserts Caesar.--Cicero in Cilicia.--
Returns to Rome.--Pompey determined on War.--Cicero's Uncertainties.--
Resolution of the Senate and Consuls.--Caesar recalled.--Alarm in Rome.--
Alternative Schemes.--Letters of Cicero.--Caesar's Crime in the Eyes of
the Optimates.


CHAPTER XXI.

Caesar appeals to his Army.--The Tribunes join him at Rimini.--Panic and
Flight of the Senate.--Incapacity of Pompey.--Fresh Negotiations.--
Advance of Caesar.--The Country Districts refuse to arm against him.--
Capture of Corfinium.--Release of the Prisoners.--Offers of Caesar.--
Continued Hesitation of Cicero.--Advises Pompey to make Peace.--Pompey,
with the Senate and Consuls, flies to Greece.--Cicero's Reflections.--
Pompey to be another Sylla.--Caesar Mortal, and may die by more Means than
one.


CHAPTER XXII.

Pompey's Army in Spain.--Caesar at Rome.--Departure for Spain.--Marseilles
refuses to receive him.--Siege of Marseilles.--Defeat of Pompey's
Lieutenants at Lerida.--The whole Army made Prisoners.--Surrender of
Varro.--Marseilles taken.--Defeat of Curio by King Juba in Africa.--
Caesar named Dictator.--Confusion in Rome.--Caesar at Brindisi.--Crosses
to Greece in Midwinter.--Again offers Peace.--Pompey's Fleet in the
Adriatic.--Death of Bibulus.--Failure of Negotiations.--Caelius and Milo
killed.--Arrival of Antony in Greece with the Second Division of Caesar's
Army.--Siege of Durazzo.--Defeat and Retreat of Caesar.--The Senate and
Pompey.--Pursuit of Caesar.--Battle of Pharsalia.--Flight of Pompey.--The
Camp taken.--Complete Overthrow of the Senatorial Faction.--Cicero on the
Situation once more.


CHAPTER XXIII.

Pompey flies to Egypt.--State of Parties in Egypt.--Murder of Pompey.--His
Character.--Caesar follows him to Alexandria.--Rising in the City.--
Caesar besieged in the Palace.--Desperate Fighting.--Arrival of
Mithridates of Pergamus.--Battle near Cairo, and Death of the Young
Ptolemy.--Cleopatra.--The Detention of Caesar enables the Optimates to
rally.--Ill Conduct of Caesar's Officers in Spain.--War with Pharnaces.--
Battle of Zela, and Settlement of Asia Minor.


CHAPTER XXIV.

The Aristocracy raise an Army in Africa.--Supported by Juba.--Pharsalia
not to end the War.--Caesar again in Rome.--Restores Order.--Mutiny in
Caesar's Army.--The Mutineers submit.--Caesar lands in Africa.--
Difficulties of the Campaign.--Battle of Thapsus.--No more Pardons.--
Afranius and Faustus Sylla put to Death.--Cato kills himself at Utica.--
Scipio killed.--Juba and Petreius die on each other's Swords.--A Scene in
Caesar's Camp.


CHAPTER XXV.

Rejoicings in Rome.--Caesar Dictator for the Year.--Reforms the
Constitution.--Reforms the Calendar--and the Criminal Law.--
Dissatisfaction of Cicero.--Last Efforts in Spain of Labienus and the
Young Pompeys.--Caesar goes thither in Person, accompanied by Octavius.--
Caesar's Last Battle at Munda.--Death of Labienus.--Capture of Cordova.--
Close of the Civil War.--General Reflections.


CHAPTER XXVI.

Caesar once more in Rome.--General Amnesty.--The Surviving Optimates
pretend to submit.--Increase in the Number of Senators.--Introduction of
Foreigners.--New Colonies.--Carthage.--Corinth.--Sumptuary Regulations.--
Digest of the Law.--Intended Parthian War.--Honors heaped on Caesar.--The
Object of them.--Caesar's Indifference.--Some Consolations.--Hears of
Conspiracies, but disregards them.--Speculations of Cicero in the Last
Stage of the War.--Speech in the Senate.--A Contrast, and the Meaning of
it.--The Kingship.--Antony offers Caesar the Crown, which Caesar
refuses.--The Assassins.--Who they were.--Brutus and Cassius.--Two
Officers of Caesar's among them.--Warnings.--Meeting of the
Conspirators.--Caesar's Last Evening.--The Ides of March.--The
Senate-house.--Caesar killed.


CHAPTER XXVII.

Consternation in Rome.--The Conspirators in the Capitol.--Unforeseen
Difficulties.--Speech of Cicero.--Caesar's Funeral.--Speech of Antony.--
Fury of the People.--The Funeral Pile in the Forum.--The King is dead, but
the Monarchy survives.--Fruitlessness of the Murder.--Octavius and
Antony.--Union of Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus.--Proscription of the
Assassins.--Philippi, and the end of Brutus and Cassius.--Death of
Cicero.--His Character.


CHAPTER XXVIII.

General Remarks on Caesar.--Mythological Tendencies.--Supposed Profligacy
of Caesar.--Nature of the Evidence.--Servilia.--Cleopatra.--Personal
Appearance of Caesar.--His Manners in Private Life.--Considerations upon
him as a Politician, a Soldier, and a Man of Letters.--Practical Justice
his Chief Aim as a Politician.--Universality of Military Genius.--Devotion
of his Army to him, how deserved.--Art of reconciling Conquered
Peoples.--General Scrupulousness and Leniency.--Oratorical and Literary
Style.--Cicero's Description of it.--His Lost Works.--Cato's Judgment on
the Civil War.--How Caesar should be estimated.--Legend of Charles V.--
Spiritual Condition of the Age in which Caesar lived.--His Work on Earth
to establish Order and Good Government, to make possible the Introduction
of Christianity.--A Parallel.






CAESAR: A SKETCH



CHAPTER I.


To the student of political history, and to the English student above all
others, the conversion of the Roman Republic into a military empire
commands a peculiar interest. Notwithstanding many differences, the
English and the Romans essentially resemble one another. The early Romans
possessed the faculty of self-government beyond any people of whom we have
historical knowledge, with the one exception of ourselves. In virtue of
their temporal freedom, they became the most powerful nation in the known
world; and their liberties perished only when Rome became the mistress of
conquered races, to whom she was unable or unwilling to extend her
privileges. If England was similarly supreme, if all rival powers were
eclipsed by her or laid under her feet, the Imperial tendencies, which are
as strongly marked in us as our love of liberty, might lead us over the
same course to the same end. If there be one lesson which history clearly
teaches, it is this, that free nations cannot govern subject provinces. If
they are unable or unwilling to admit their dependencies to share their
own constitution, the constitution itself will fall in pieces from mere
incompetence for its duties.

We talk often foolishly of the necessities of things, and we blame
circumstances for the consequences of our own follies and vices; but there
are faults which are not faults of will, but faults of mere inadequacy to
some unforeseen position. Human nature is equal to much, but not to
everything. It can rise to altitudes where it is alike unable to sustain
itself or to retire from them to a safer elevation. Yet when the field is
open it pushes forward, and moderation in the pursuit of greatness is
never learnt and never will be learnt. Men of genius are governed by their
instinct; they follow where instinct leads them; and the public life of a
nation is but the life of successive generations of statesmen, whose
horizon is bounded, and who act from day to day as immediate interests
suggest. The popular leader of the hour sees some present difficulty or
present opportunity of distinction. He deals with each question as it
arises, leaving future consequences to those who are to come after him.
The situation changes from period to period, and tendencies are generated
with an accelerating force, which, when once established, can never be
reversed. When the control of reason is once removed, the catastrophe is
no longer distant, and then nations, like all organized creations, all
forms of life, from the meanest flower to the highest human institution,
pass through the inevitably recurring stages of growth and transformation
and decay. A commonwealth, says Cicero, ought to be immortal, and for ever
to renew its youth. Yet commonwealths have proved as unenduring as any
other natural object:

                    Everything that grows
  Holds in perfection but a little moment,
  And this huge state presenteth nought but shows,
  Whereon the stars in silent influence comment.

Nevertheless, "as the heavens are high above the earth, so is wisdom above
folly." Goethe compares life to a game at whist, where the cards are dealt
out by destiny, and the rules of the game are fixed: subject to these
conditions, the players are left to win or lose, according to their skill
or want of skill. The life of a nation, like the life of a man, may be
prolonged in honor into the fulness of its time, or it may perish
prematurely, for want of guidance, by violence or internal disorders. And
thus the history of national revolutions is to statesmanship what the
pathology of disease is to the art of medicine. The physician cannot
arrest the coming on of age. Where disease has laid hold upon the
constitution he cannot expel it. But he may check the progress of the evil
if he can recognize the symptoms in time. He can save life at the cost of
an unsound limb. He can tell us how to preserve our health when we have
it; he can warn us of the conditions under which particular disorders will
have us at disadvantage. And so with nations: amidst the endless variety
of circumstances there are constant phenomena which give notice of
approaching danger; there are courses of action which have uniformly
produced the same results; and the wise politicians are those who have
learnt from experience the real tendencies of things, unmisled by
superficial differences, who can shun the rocks where others have been
wrecked, or from foresight of what is coming can be cool when the peril is
upon them.

For these reasons, the fall of the Roman Republic is exceptionally
instructive to us. A constitutional government the most enduring and the
most powerful that ever existed was put on its trial, and found wanting.
We see it in its growth; we see the causes which undermined its strength.
We see attempts to check the growing mischief fail, and we see why they
failed. And we see, finally, when nothing seemed so likely as complete
dissolution, the whole system changed by a violent operation, and the
dying patient's life protracted for further centuries of power and
usefulness.

Again, irrespective of the direct teaching which we may gather from them,
particular epochs in history have the charm for us which dramas have--
periods when the great actors on the stage of life stand before us with
the distinctness with which they appear in the creations of a poet. There
have not been many such periods; for to see the past, it is not enough for
us to be able to look at it through the eyes of contemporaries; these
contemporaries themselves must have been parties to the scenes which they
describe. They must have had full opportunities of knowledge. They must
have had eyes which could see things in their true proportions. They must
have had, in addition, the rare literary powers which can convey to others
through the medium of language an exact picture of their own minds; and
such happy combinations occur but occasionally in thousands of years.
Generation after generation passes by, and is crumbled into sand as rocks
are crumbled by the sea. Each brought with it its heroes and its villains,
its triumphs and its sorrows; but the history is formless legend,
incredible and unintelligible; the figures of the actors are indistinct as
the rude ballad or ruder inscription, which may be the only authentic
record of them. We do not see the men and women, we see only the outlines
of them which have been woven into tradition as they appeared to the loves
or hatreds of passionate admirers or enemies. Of such times we know
nothing, save the broad results as they are measured from century to
century, with here and there some indestructible pebble, some law, some
fragment of remarkable poetry which has resisted decomposition. These
periods are the proper subject of the philosophic historian, and to him we
leave them. But there are others, a few, at which intellectual activity
was as great as it is now, with its written records surviving, in which
the passions, the opinions, the ambitions of the age are all before us,
where the actors in the great drama speak their own thoughts in their own
words, where we hear their enemies denounce them and their friends praise
them; where we are ourselves plunged amidst the hopes and fears of the
hour, to feel the conflicting emotions and to sympathize in the struggles
which again seem to live: and here philosophy is at fault. Philosophy,
when we are face to face with real men, is as powerless as over the Iliad
or King Lear. The overmastering human interest transcends explanation. We
do not sit in judgment on the right or the wrong; we do not seek out
causes to account for what takes place, feeling too conscious of the
inadequacy of our analysis. We see human beings possessed by different
impulses, and working out a pre-ordained result, as the subtle forces
drive each along the path marked out for him; and history becomes the more
impressive to us where it least immediately instructs.

With such vividness, with such transparent clearness, the age stands
before us of Cato and Pompey, of Cicero and Julius Caesar; the more
distinctly because it was an age in so many ways the counterpart of our
own, the blossoming period of the old civilization, when the intellect was
trained to the highest point which it could reach, and on the great
subjects of human interest, on morals and politics, on poetry and art,
even on religion itself and the speculative problems of life, men thought
as we think, doubted where we doubt, argued as we argue, aspired and
struggled after the same objects. It was an age of material progress and
material civilization; an age of civil liberty and intellectual culture;
an age of pamphlets and epigrams, of salons and of dinner-parties, of
senatorial majorities and electoral corruption. The highest offices of
state were open in theory to the meanest citizen; they were confined, in
fact, to those who had the longest purses, or the most ready use of the
tongue on popular platforms. Distinctions of birth had been exchanged for
distinctions of wealth. The struggles between plebeians and patricians for
equality of privilege were over, and a new division had been formed
between the party of property and a party who desired a change in the
structure of society. The free cultivators were disappearing from the
soil. Italy was being absorbed into vast estates, held by a few favored
families and cultivated by slaves, while the old agricultural population
was driven off the land, and was crowded into towns. The rich were
extravagant, for life had ceased to have practical interest, except for
its material pleasures; the occupation of the higher classes was to obtain
money without labor, and to spend it in idle enjoyment. Patriotism
survived on the lips, but patriotism meant the ascendency of the party
which would maintain the existing order of things, or would overthrow it
for a more equal distribution of the good things which alone were valued.
Religion, once the foundation of the laws and rule of personal conduct,
had subsided into opinion. The educated, in their hearts, disbelieved it.
Temples were still built with increasing splendor; the established forms
were scrupulously observed. Public men spoke conventionally of Providence,
that they might throw on their opponents the odium of impiety; but of
genuine belief that life had any serious meaning, there was none remaining
beyond the circle of the silent, patient, ignorant multitude. The whole
spiritual atmosphere was saturated with cant--cant moral, cant political,
cant religious; an affectation of high principle which had ceased to touch
the conduct, and flowed on in an increasing volume of insincere and unreal
speech. The truest thinkers were those who, like Lucretius, spoke frankly
out their real convictions, declared that Providence was a dream, and that
man and the world he lived in were material phenomena, generated by
natural forces out of cosmic atoms, and into atoms to be again resolved.

Tendencies now in operation may a few generations hence land modern
society in similar conclusions, unless other convictions revive meanwhile
and get the mastery of them; of which possibility no more need be said
than this, that unless there be such a revival in some shape or other, the
forces, whatever they be, which control the forms in which human things
adjust themselves, will make an end again, as they made an end before, of
what are called free institutions. Popular forms of government are
possible only when individual men can govern their own lives on moral
principles, and when duty is of more importance than pleasure, and justice
than material expediency. Rome at any rate had grown ripe for judgment.
The shape which the judgment assumed was due perhaps, in a measure, to a
condition which has no longer a parallel among us. The men and women by
whom the hard work of the world was done were chiefly slaves, and those
who constitute the driving force of revolutions in modern Europe lay then
outside society, unable and perhaps uncaring to affect its fate. No change
then possible would much influence the prospects of the unhappy bondsmen.
The triumph of the party of the constitution would bring no liberty to
them. That their masters should fall like themselves under the authority
of a higher master could not much distress them. Their sympathies, if they
had any, would go with those nearest their own rank, the emancipated
slaves and the sons of those who were emancipated; and they, and the poor
free citizens everywhere, were to a man on the side which was considered
and was called the side of "the people," and was, in fact, the side of
despotism.




CHAPTER II.


The Roman Constitution had grown out of the character of the Roman nation.
It was popular in form beyond all constitutions of which there is any
record in history. The citizens assembled in the Comitia were the
sovereign authority in the State, and they exercised their power
immediately and not by representatives. The executive magistrates were
chosen annually. The assembly was the supreme Court of Appeal; and without
its sanction no freeman could be lawfully put to death. In the assembly
also was the supreme power of legislation. Any consul, any praetor, any
tribune, might propose a law from the Rostra to the people. The people if
it pleased them might accept such law, and senators and public officers
might be sworn to obey it under pains of treason. As a check on
precipitate resolutions, a single consul or a single tribune might
interpose his veto. But the veto was binding only so long as the year of
office continued. If the people were in earnest, submission to their
wishes could be made a condition at the next election, and thus no
constitutional means existed of resisting them when these wishes showed
themselves.

In normal times the Senate was allowed the privilege of preconsidering
intended acts of legislation, and refusing to recommend them if
inexpedient, but the privilege was only converted into a right after
violent convulsions, and was never able to maintain itself. That under
such a system the functions of government could have been carried on at
all was due entirely to the habits of self-restraint which the Romans had
engraved into their nature. They were called a nation of kings, kings over
their own appetites, passions, and inclinations. They were not
imaginative, they were not intellectual; they had little national poetry,
little art, little philosophy. They were moral and practical. In these two
directions the force that was in them entirely ran. They were free
politically, because freedom meant to them not freedom to do as they
pleased, but freedom to do what was right; and every citizen, before he
arrived at his civil privileges, had been schooled in the discipline of
obedience. Each head of a household was absolute master of it, master over
his children and servants, even to the extent of life and death. What the
father was to the family, the gods were to the whole people, the awful
lords and rulers at whose pleasure they lived and breathed. Unlike the
Greeks, the reverential Romans invented no idle legends about the
supernatural world. The gods to them were the guardians of the State,
whose will in all things they were bound to seek and to obey. The forms in
which they endeavored to learn what that will might be were childish or
childlike. They looked to signs in the sky, to thunder-storms and comets
and shooting stars. Birds, winged messengers, as they thought them,
between earth and heaven, were celestial indicators of the gods' commands.
But omens and auguries were but the outward symbols, and the Romans, like
all serious peoples, went to their own hearts for their real guidance.
They had a unique religious peculiarity, to which no race of men has
produced anything like. They did not embody the elemental forces in
personal forms; they did not fashion a theology out of the movements of
the sun and stars or the changes of the seasons. Traces may be found among
them of cosmic traditions and superstitions, which were common to all the
world; but they added of their own this especial feature: that they built
temples and offered sacrifices to the highest human excellences, to
"Valor," to "Truth," to "Good Faith," to "Modesty," to "Charity," to
"Concord." In these qualities lay all that raised man above the animals
with which he had so much in common. In them, therefore, were to be found
the link which connected him with the divine nature, and moral qualities
were regarded as divine influences which gave his life its meaning and its
worth. The "Virtues" were elevated into beings to whom disobedience could
be punished as a crime, and the superstitious fears which run so often
into mischievous idolatries were enlisted with conscience in the direct
service of right action.

On the same principle the Romans chose the heroes and heroines of their
national history. The Manlii and Valerii were patterns of courage, the
Lucretias and Virginias of purity, the Decii and Curtii of patriotic
devotion, the Reguli and Fabricii of stainless truthfulness. On the same
principle, too, they had a public officer whose functions resembled those
of the Church courts in mediaeval Europe, a Censor Morum, an inquisitor
who might examine into the habits of private families, rebuke
extravagance, check luxury, punish vice and self-indulgence, nay, who
could remove from the Senate, the great council of elders, persons whose
moral conduct was a reproach to a body on whose reputation no shadow could
be allowed to rest.

Such the Romans were in the day when their dominion had not extended
beyond the limits of Italy; and because they were such they were able to
prosper under a constitution which to modern experience would promise only
the most hopeless confusion.

Morality thus engrained in the national character and grooved into habits
of action creates strength, as nothing else creates it. The difficulty of
conduct does not lie in knowing what it is right to do, but in doing it
when known. Intellectual culture does not touch the conscience. It
provides no motives to overcome the weakness of the will, and with wider
knowledge it brings also new temptations. The sense of duty is present in
each detail of life; the obligatory "must" which binds the will to the
course which right principle has marked out for it produces a fibre like
the fibre of the oak. The educated Greeks knew little of it. They had
courage and genius and enthusiasm, but they had no horror of immorality as
such. The Stoics saw what was wanting, and tried to supply it; but though
they could provide a theory of action, they could not make the theory into
a reality, and it is noticeable that Stoicism as a rule of life became
important only when adopted by the Romans. The Catholic Church effected
something in its better days when it had its courts which treated sins as
crimes. Calvinism, while it was believed, produced characters nobler and
grander than any which Republican Rome produced. But the Catholic Church
turned its penances into money payments. Calvinism made demands on faith
beyond what truth would bear; and when doubt had once entered, the spell
of Calvinism was broken. The veracity of the Romans, and perhaps the happy
accident that they had no inherited religious traditions, saved them for
centuries from similar trials. They had hold of real truth unalloyed with
baser metal; and truth had made them free and kept them so. When all else
has passed away, when theologies have yielded up their real meaning, and
creeds and symbols have become transparent, and man is again in contact
with the hard facts of nature, it will be found that the "Virtues" which
the Romans made into gods contain in them the essence of true religion,
that in them lies the special characteristic which distinguishes human
beings from the rest of animated things. Every other creature exists for
itself, and cares for its own preservation. Nothing larger or better is
expected from it or possible to it. To man it is said, you do not live for
yourself. If you live for yourself you shall come to nothing. Be brave, be
just, be pure, be true in word and deed; care not for your enjoyment, care
not for your life; care only for what is right. So, and not otherwise, it
shall be well with you. So the Maker of you has ordered, whom you will
disobey at your peril.

Thus and thus only are nations formed which are destined to endure; and as
habits based on such convictions are slow in growing, so when grown to
maturity they survive extraordinary trials. But nations are made up of
many persons in circumstances of endless variety. In country districts,
where the routine of life continues simple, the type of character remains
unaffected; generation follows on generation exposed to the same
influences and treading in the same steps. But the morality of habit,
though the most important element in human conduct, is still but a part of
it. Moral habits grow under given conditions. They correspond to a given
degree of temptation. When men are removed into situations where the use
and wont of their fathers no longer meets their necessities; where new
opportunities are offered to them; where their opinions are broken in upon
by new ideas; where pleasures tempt them on every side, and they have but
to stretch out their hand to take them--moral habits yield under the
strain, and they have no other resource to fall back upon. Intellectual
cultivation brings with it rational interests. Knowledge, which looks
before and after, acts as a restraining power, to help conscience when it
flags. The sober and wholesome manners of life among the early Romans had
given them vigorous minds in vigorous bodies. The animal nature had grown
as strongly as the moral nature, and along with it the animal appetites;
and when appetites burst their traditionary restraints, and man in himself
has no other notion of enjoyment beyond bodily pleasure, he may pass by an
easy transition into a mere powerful brute. And thus it happened with the
higher classes at Rome after the destruction of Carthage. Italy had fallen
to them by natural and wholesome expansion; but from being sovereigns of
Italy, they became a race of imperial conquerors. Suddenly, and in
comparatively a few years after the one power was gone which could resist
them, they became the actual or virtual rulers of the entire circuit of
the Mediterranean. The south-east of Spain, the coast of France from the
Pyrenees to Nice, the north of Italy, Illyria and Greece, Sardinia,
Sicily, and the Greek Islands, the southern and western shores of Asia
Minor, were Roman provinces, governed directly under Roman magistrates. On
the African side Mauritania (Morocco) was still free. Numidia (the modern
Algeria) retained its native dynasty, but was a Roman dependency. The
Carthaginian dominions, Tunis and Tripoli, had been annexed to the Empire.
The interior of Asia Minor up to the Euphrates, with Syria and Egypt, were
under sovereigns called Allies, but, like the native princes in India,
subject to a Roman protectorate. Over this enormous territory, rich with
the accumulated treasures of centuries, and inhabited by thriving,
industrious races, the energetic Roman men of business had spread and
settled themselves, gathering into their hands the trade, the financial
administration, the entire commercial control of the Mediterranean basin.
They had been trained in thrift and economy, in abhorrence of debt, in
strictest habits of close and careful management. Their frugal education,
their early lessons in the value of money, good and excellent as those
lessons were, led them, as a matter of course, to turn to account their
extraordinary opportunities. Governors with their staffs, permanent
officials, contractors for the revenue, negotiators, bill-brokers,
bankers, merchants, were scattered everywhere in thousands. Money poured
in upon them in rolling streams of gold. The largest share of the spoils
fell to the Senate and the senatorial families. The Senate was the
permanent Council of State, and was the real administrator of the Empire.
The Senate had the control of the treasury, conducted the public policy,
appointed from its own ranks the governors of the provinces. It was
patrician in sentiment, but not necessarily patrician in composition. The
members of it had virtually been elected for life by the people, and were
almost entirely those who had been quaestors, aediles, praetors, or
consuls; and these offices had been long open to the plebeians. It was an
aristocracy, in theory a real one, but tending to become, as civilization
went forward, an aristocracy of the rich. How the senatorial privileges
affected the management of the provinces will be seen more particularly as
we go on. It is enough at present to say that the nobles and great
commoners of Rome rapidly found themselves in possession of revenues which
their fathers could not have imagined in their dreams, and money in the
stage of progress at which Rome had arrived was convertible into power.

The opportunities opened for men to advance their fortunes in other parts
of the world drained Italy of many of its most enterprising citizens. The
grandsons of the yeomen who had held at bay Pyrrhus and Hannibal sold
their farms and went away. The small holdings merged rapidly into large
estates bought up by the Roman capitalists. At the final settlement of
Italy, some millions of acres had been reserved to the State as public
property. The "public land," as the reserved portion was called, had been
leased on easy terms to families with political influence, and by lapse of
time, by connivance and right of occupation, these families were beginning
to regard their tenures as their private property, and to treat them as
lords of manors in England have treated the "commons." Thus everywhere the
small farmers were disappearing, and the soil of Italy was fast passing
into the hands of a few territorial magnates, who, unfortunately (for it
tended to aggravate the mischief), were enabled by another cause to turn
their vast possessions to advantage. The conquest of the world had turned
the flower of the defeated nations into slaves. The prisoners taken either
after a battle or when cities surrendered unconditionally were bought up
steadily by contractors who followed in the rear of the Roman armies. They
were not ignorant like the negroes, but trained, useful, and often
educated men, Asiatics, Greeks, Thracians, Gauls, and Spaniards, able at
once to turn their hands to some form of skilled labor, either as clerks,
mechanics, or farm-servants. The great landowners might have paused in
their purchases had the alternative lain before them of letting their
lands lie idle or of having freemen to cultivate them. It was otherwise
when a resource so convenient and so abundant was opened at their feet.
The wealthy Romans bought slaves by thousands. Some they employed in their
workshops in the capital. Some they spread over their plantations,
covering the country, it might be, with olive gardens and vineyards,
swelling further the plethoric figures of their owners' incomes. It was
convenient for the few, but less convenient for the Commonwealth. The
strength of Rome was in her free citizens. Where a family of slaves was
settled down, a village of freemen had disappeared; the material for the
legions diminished; the dregs of the free population which remained behind
crowded into Rome, without occupation except in politics, and with no
property save in their votes, of course to become the clients of the
millionaires, and to sell themselves to the highest bidders. With all his
wealth there were but two things which the Roman noble could buy,
political power and luxury; and in these directions his whole resources
were expended. The elections, once pure, became matters of annual bargain
between himself and his supporters. The once hardy, abstemious mode of
living degenerated into grossness and sensuality.

And his character was assailed simultaneously on another side with equally
mischievous effect. The conquest of Greece brought to Rome a taste for
knowledge and culture; but the culture seldom passed below the surface,
and knowledge bore but the old fruit which it had borne in Eden. The elder
Cato used to say that the Romans were like their slaves--the less Greek
they knew the better they were. They had believed in the gods with pious
simplicity. The Greeks introduced them to an Olympus of divinities whom
the practical Roman found that he must either abhor or deny to exist. The
"Virtues" which he had been taught to reverence had no place among the
graces of the new theology. Reverence Jupiter he could not, and it was
easy to persuade him that Jupiter was an illusion; that all religions were
but the creations of fancy, his own among them. Gods there might be, airy
beings in the deeps of space, engaged like men with their own enjoyments;
but to suppose that these high spirits fretted themselves with the affairs
of the puny beings that crawled upon the earth was a delusion of vanity.
Thus, while morality was assailed on one side by extraordinary
temptations, the religious sanction of it was undermined on the other.
The, Romans ceased to believe, and in losing their faith they became as
steel becomes when it is demagnetized; the spiritual quality was gone out
of them, and the high society of Rome itself became a society of powerful
animals with an enormous appetite for pleasure. Wealth poured in more and
more, and luxury grew more unbounded. Palaces sprang up in the city,
castles in the country, villas at pleasant places by the sea, and parks,
and fish-ponds, and game-preserves, and gardens, and vast retinues of
servants. When natural pleasures had been indulged in to satiety,
pleasures which were against nature were imported from the East to
stimulate the exhausted appetite. To make money--money by any means,
lawful or unlawful--became the universal passion. Even the most cultivated
patricians were coarse alike in their habits and their amusements. They
cared for art as dilettanti, but no schools either of sculpture or
painting were formed among themselves. They decorated their porticos and
their saloons with the plunder of the East. The stage was never more than
an artificial taste with them; their delight was the delight of
barbarians, in spectacles, in athletic exercises, in horse-races and
chariot-races, in the combats of wild animals in the circus, combats of
men with beasts on choice occasions, and, as a rare excitement, in fights
between men and men, when select slaves trained as gladiators were matched
in pairs to kill each other. Moral habits are all-sufficient while they
last; but with rude strong natures they are but chains which hold the
passions prisoners. Let the chain break, and the released brute is but the
more powerful for evil from the force which his constitution has
inherited. Money! the cry was still money!--money was the one thought from
the highest senator to the poorest wretch who sold his vote in the
Comitia. For money judges gave unjust decrees and juries gave corrupt
verdicts. Governors held their provinces for one, two, or three years;
they went out bankrupt from extravagance, they returned with millions for
fresh riot. To obtain a province was the first ambition of a Roman noble.
The road to it lay through the praetorship and the consulship; these
offices, therefore, became the prizes of the State; and being in the gift
of the people, they were sought after by means which demoralized alike the
givers and the receivers. The elections were managed by clubs and
coteries; and, except on occasions of national danger or political
excitement, those who spent most freely were most certain of success.

Under these conditions the chief powers in the Commonwealth necessarily
centred in the rich. There was no longer an aristocracy of birth, still
less of virtue. The patrician families had the start in the race. Great
names and great possessions came to them by inheritance. But the door of
promotion was open to all who had the golden key. The great commoners
bought their way into the magistracies. From the magistracies they passed
into the Senate; and the Roman senator, though in Rome itself and in free
debate among his colleagues he was handled as an ordinary man, when he
travelled had the honors of a sovereign. The three hundred senators of
Rome were three hundred princes. They moved about in other countries with
the rights of legates, at the expense of the province, with their trains
of slaves and horses. The proud privilege of Roman citizenship was still
jealously reserved to Rome itself and to a few favored towns and colonies;
and a mere subject could maintain no rights against a member of the
haughty oligarchy which controlled the civilized world. Such generally the
Roman Republic had become, or was tending to become, in the years which
followed the fall of Carthage, B.C. 146. Public spirit in the masses was
dead or sleeping; the Commonwealth was a plutocracy. The free forms of the
constitution were themselves the instruments of corruption. The rich were
happy in the possession of all that they could desire. The multitude was
kept quiet by the morsels of meat which were flung to it when it
threatened to be troublesome. The seven thousand in Israel, the few who in
all states and in all times remained pure in the midst of evil, looked on
with disgust, fearing that any remedy which they might try might be worse
than the disease. All orders in a society may be wise and virtuous, but
all cannot be rich. Wealth which is used only for idle luxury is always
envied, and envy soon curdles into hate. It is easy to persuade the masses
that the good things of this world are unjustly divided, especially when
it happens to be the exact truth. It is not easy to set limits to an
agitation once set on foot, however justly it may have been provoked, when
the cry for change is at once stimulated by interest and can disguise its
real character under the passionate language of patriotism. But it was not
to be expected that men of noble natures, young men especially whose
enthusiasm had not been cooled by experience, would sit calmly by while
their country was going thus headlong to perdition. Redemption, if
redemption was to be hoped for, could come only from free citizens in the
country districts whose manners and whoso minds were still uncontaminated,
in whom the ancient habits of life still survived, who still believed in
the gods, who were contented to follow the wholesome round of honest
labor. The numbers of such citizens were fast dwindling away before the
omnivorous appetite of the rich for territorial aggrandizement. To rescue
the land from the monopolists, to renovate the old independent yeomanry,
to prevent the free population of Italy, out of which the legions had been
formed which had built up the Empire, from being pushed out of their
places and supplanted by foreign slaves, this, if it could be done, would
restore the purity of the constituency, snatch the elections from the
control of corruption, and rear up fresh generations of peasant soldiers
to preserve the liberties and the glories which their fathers had won.




CHAPTER III.


Tiberius Gracchus was born about the year 164 B.C. He was one of twelve
children, nine of whom died in infancy, himself, his brother Caius, and
his sister Cornelia being the only survivors. His family was plebeian, but
of high antiquity, his ancestors for several generations having held the
highest offices in the Republic. On the mother's side he was the grandson
of Scipio Africanus. His father, after a distinguished career as a soldier
in Spain and Sardinia, had attempted reforms at Rome. He had been censor,
and in this capacity he had ejected disreputable senators from the Curia;
he had degraded offending equites; he had rearranged and tried to purify
the Comitia. But his connections were aristocratic. His wife was the
daughter of the most illustrious of the Scipios. His own daughter was
married to the second most famous of them, Scipio Africanus the Younger.
He had been himself in antagonism with the tribunes, and had taken no part
at any time in popular agitations.

The father died when Tiberius was still a boy, and the two brothers grew
up under the care of their mother, a noble and gifted lady. They displayed
early remarkable talents. Tiberius, when old enough, went into the army,
and served under his brother-in-law in the last Carthaginian campaign. He
was first on the walls of the city in the final storm. Ten years later he
went to Spain as Quaestor, where he carried on his father's popularity,
and by taking the people's side in some questions fell into disagreement
with his brother-in-law. His political views had perhaps already inclined
to change. He was still of an age when indignation at oppression calls out
a practical desire to resist it. On his journey home from Spain he
witnessed scenes which confirmed his conviction and determined him to
throw all his energies into the popular cause. His road lay through
Tuscany, where he saw the large-estate system in full operation--the
fields cultivated by the slave gangs, the free citizens of the Republic
thrust away into the towns, aliens and outcasts in their own country,
without a foot of soil which they could call their own. In Tuscany, too,
the vast domains of the landlords had not even been fairly purchased. They
were parcels of the _ager publicus_, land belonging to the State,
which, in spite of a law forbidding it, the great lords and commoners had
appropriated and divided among themselves. Five hundred acres of State
land was the most which by statute any one lessee might be allowed to
occupy. But the law was obsolete or sleeping, and avarice and vanity were
awake and active. Young Gracchus, in indignant pity, resolved to rescue
the people's patrimony. He was chosen tribune in the year 133. His brave
mother and a few patricians of the old type encouraged him, and the battle
of the revolution began. The Senate, as has been said, though without
direct legislative authority, had been allowed the right of reviewing any
new schemes which were to be submitted to the assembly. The constitutional
means of preventing tribunes from carrying unwise or unwelcome measures
lay in a consul's veto, or in the help of the College of Augurs, who could
declare the auspices unfavorable, and so close all public business. These
resources were so awkward that it had been found convenient to secure
beforehand the Senate's approbation, and the encroachment, being long
submitted to, was passing by custom into a rule. But the Senate, eager as
it was, had not yet succeeded in engrafting the practice into the
constitution. On the land question the leaders of the aristocracy were the
principal offenders. Disregarding usage, and conscious that the best men
of all ranks were with him, Tiberius Gracchus appealed directly to the
people to revive the agrarian law. His proposals were not extravagant.
That they should have been deemed extravagant was a proof of how much some
measure of the kind was needed. Where lands had been enclosed and money
laid out on them he was willing that the occupants should have
compensation. But they had no right to the lands themselves. Gracchus
persisted that the _ager publicus_ belonged to the people, and that
the race of yeomen, for whose protection the law had been originally
passed, must be re-established on their farms. No form of property gives
to its owners so much consequence as land, and there is no point on which
in every country an aristocracy is more sensitive. The large owners
protested that they had purchased their interests on the faith that the
law was obsolete. They had planted and built and watered with the sanction
of the government, and to call their titles in question was to shake the
foundations of society. The popular party pointed to the statute. The
monopolists were entitled in justice to less than was offered them. They
had no right to a compensation at all. Political passion awoke again after
the sleep of a century. The oligarchy had doubtless connived at the
accumulations. The suppression of the small holdings favored their
supremacy, and placed the elections more completely in their control.
Their military successes had given them so long a tenure of power that
they had believed it to be theirs in perpetuity; and the new sedition, as
they called it, threatened at once their privileges and their fortunes.
The quarrel assumed the familiar form of a struggle between the rich and
the poor, and at such times the mob of voters becomes less easy to
corrupt. They go with their order, as the prospect of larger gain makes
them indifferent to immediate bribes. It became clear that the majority of
the citizens would support Tiberius Gracchus, but the constitutional forms
of opposition might still be resorted to. Octavius Caecina, another of the
tribunes, had himself large interests in the land question. He was the
people's magistrate, one of the body appointed especially to defend their
rights, but he went over to the Senate, and, using a power which
undoubtedly belonged to him, he forbade the vote to be taken.

There was no precedent for the removal of either consul, praetor, or
tribune, except under circumstances very different from any which could as
yet be said to have arisen. The magistrates held office for a year only,
and the power of veto had been allowed them expressly to secure time for
deliberation and to prevent passionate legislation. But Gracchus was young
and enthusiastic. Precedent or no precedent, the citizens were omnipotent.
He invited them to declare his colleague deposed. They had warmed to the
fight, and complied. A more experienced statesman would have known that
established constitutional bulwarks cannot be swept away by a momentary
vote. He obtained his agrarian law. Three commissioners were appointed,
himself, his younger brother, and his father-in-law, Appius Claudius, to
carry it into effect; but the very names showed that he had alienated his
few supporters in the higher circles, and that a single family was now
contending against the united wealth and distinction of Rome. The issue
was only too certain. Popular enthusiasm is but a fire of straw. In a year
Tiberius Gracchus would be out of office. Other tribunes would be chosen
more amenable to influence, and his work could then be undone. He
evidently knew that those who would succeed him could not be relied on to
carry on his policy. He had taken one revolutionary step already; he was
driven on to another, and he offered himself illegally to the Comitia for
re-election. It was to invite them to abolish the constitution and to make
him virtual sovereign; and that a young man of thirty should have
contemplated such a position for himself as possible is of itself a proof
of his unfitness for it. The election-day came. The noble lords and
gentlemen appeared in the Campus Martius with their retinues of armed
servants and clients; hot-blooded aristocrats, full of disdain for
demagogues, and meaning to read a lesson to sedition which it would not
easily forget. Votes were given for Gracchus. Had the hustings been left
to decide the matter, he would have been chosen; but as it began to appear
how the polling would go, sticks were used and swords; a riot rose, the
unarmed citizens were driven off, Tiberius Gracchus himself and three
hundred of his friends were killed and their bodies were flung into the
Tiber.

Thus the first sparks of the coming revolution were trampled out. But
though quenched and to be again quenched with fiercer struggles, it was to
smoulder and smoke and burst out time after time, till its work was done.
Revolution could not restore the ancient character of the Roman nation,
but it could check the progress of decay by burning away the more
corrupted parts of it. It could destroy the aristocracy and the
constitution which they had depraved, and under other forms present for a
few more centuries the Roman dominion. Scipio Africanus, when he heard in
Spain of the end of his brother-in-law, exclaimed, "May all who act as he
did perish like him!" There were to be victims enough and to spare before
the bloody drama was played out. Quiet lasted for ten years, and then,
precisely when he had reached his brother's age, Caius Gracchus came
forward to avenge him, and carry the movement through another stage. Young
Caius had been left one of the commissioners of the land law; and it is
particularly noticeable that though the author of it had been killed, the
law had survived him being too clearly right and politic in itself to be
openly set aside. For two years the commissioners had continued to work,
and in that time forty thousand families were settled on various parts of
the _ager publicus_, which the patricians had been compelled to
resign. This was all which they could do. The displacement of one set of
inhabitants and the introduction of another could not be accomplished
without quarrels, complaints, and perhaps some injustice. Those who were
ejected were always exasperated. Those who entered on possession were not
always satisfied. The commissioners became unpopular. When the cries
against them became loud enough, they were suspended, and the law was then
quietly repealed. The Senate had regained its hold over the assembly, and
had a further opportunity of showing its recovered ascendency when, two
years after the murder of Tiberius Gracchus, one of his friends introduced
a bill to make the tribunes legally re-eligible. Caius Gracchus actively
supported the change, but it had no success; and, waiting till times had
altered, and till he had arrived himself at an age when he could carry
weight, the young brother retired from politics, and spent the next few
years with the army in Africa and Sardinia. He served with distinction; he
made a name for himself both as a soldier and an administrator. Had the
Senate left him alone, he might have been satisfied with a regular career,
and have risen by the ordinary steps to the consulship. But the Senate saw
in him the possibilities of a second Tiberius; the higher his reputation,
the more formidable he became to them. They vexed him with petty
prosecutions, charged him with crimes which had no existence, and at
length by suspicion and injustice drove him into open war with them. Caius
Gracchus had a broader intellect than his brother, and a character
considerably less noble. The land question he perceived was but one of
many questions. The true source of the disorders of the Commonwealth was
the Senate itself. The administration of the Empire was in the hands of
men totally unfit to be trusted with it, and there he thought the reform
must commence. He threw himself on the people. He was chosen tribune in
123, ten years exactly after Tiberius. He had studied the disposition of
parties. He had seen his brother fall because the equites and the
senators, the great commoners and the nobles, were combined against him.
He revived the agrarian law as a matter of course, but he disarmed the
opposition to it by throwing an apple of discord between the two superior
orders. The high judicial functions in the Commonwealth had been hitherto
a senatorial monopoly. All cases of importance, civil or criminal, came
before courts of sixty or seventy jurymen, who, as the law stood, must be
necessarily senators. The privilege had been extremely lucrative. The
corruption of justice was already notorious, though it had not yet reached
the level of infamy which it attained in another generation. It was no
secret that in ordinary causes jurymen had sold their verdicts; and, far
short of taking bribes in the direct sense of the word, there were many
ways in which they could let themselves be approached and their favor
purchased. A monopoly of privileges is always invidious. A monopoly in the
sale of justice is alike hateful to those who abhor iniquity on principle
and to those who would like to share the profits of it. But this was not
the worst. The governors of the provinces, being chosen from those who had
been consuls or praetors, were necessarily members of the Senate.
Peculation and extortion in these high functions were offences in theory
of the gravest kind; but the offender could only be tried before a limited
number of his peers, and a governor who had plundered a subject state,
sold justice, pillaged temples, and stolen all that he could lay hands on,
was safe from punishment if he returned to Rome a millionaire and would
admit others to a share in his spoils. The provincials might send
deputations to complain, but these complaints came before men who had
themselves governed provinces or else aspired to govern them. It had been
proved in too many instances that the law which professed to protect them
was a mere mockery.

Caius Gracchus secured the affections of the knights to himself, and some
slightly increased chance of an improvement in the provincial
administration, by carrying a law in the assembly disabling the senators
from sitting on juries of any kind from that day forward, and transferring
the judicial functions to the equites. How bitterly must such a measure
have been resented by the Senate, which at once robbed them of their
protective and profitable privileges, handed them over to be tried by
their rivals for their pleasant irregularities, and stamped them at the
same time with the brand of dishonesty! How certainly must such a measure
have been deserved when neither consul nor tribune could be found to
interpose his veto! Supported by the grateful knights, Caius Gracchus was
for the moment all-powerful. It was not enough to restore the agrarian
law. He passed another, aimed at his brother's murderers, which was to
bear fruit in later years, that no Roman citizen might be put to death by
any person, however high in authority, without legal trial, and without
appeal, if he chose to make it, to the sovereign people. A blow was thus
struck against another right claimed by the Senate, of declaring the
Republic in danger, and the temporary suspension of the constitution.
These measures might be excused, and perhaps commended; but the younger
Gracchus connected his name with another change less commendable, which
was destined also to survive and bear fruit. He brought forward and
carried through, with enthusiastic clapping of every pair of hands in Rome
that were hardened with labor, a proposal that there should be public
granaries in the city, maintained and filled at the cost of the State, and
that corn should be sold at a rate artificially cheap to the poor free
citizens. Such a law was purely socialistic. The privilege was confined to
Rome, because in Rome the elections were held, and the Roman constituency
was the one depositary of power. The effect was to gather into the city a
mob of needy, unemployed voters, living on the charity of the State, to
crowd the circus and to clamor at the elections, available no doubt
immediately to strengthen the hands of the popular tribune, but certain in
the long-run to sell themselves to those who could bid highest for their
voices. Excuses could be found, no doubt, for this miserable expedient in
the state of parties, in the unscrupulous violence of the aristocracy, in
the general impoverishment of the peasantry through the land monopoly, and
in the intrusion upon Italy of a gigantic system of slave labor. But none
the less it was the deadliest blow which had yet been dealt to the
constitution. Party government turns on the majorities at the
polling-places, and it was difficult afterward to recall a privilege which
once conceded appeared to be a right. The utmost that could be ventured in
later times with any prospect of success was to limit an intolerable evil;
and if one side was ever strong enough to make the attempt, their rivals
had a bribe ready in their hands to buy back the popular support. Caius
Gracchus, however, had his way, and carried all before him. He escaped the
rock on which his brother had been wrecked. He was elected tribune a
second time. He might have had a third term if he had been contented to be
a mere demagogue. But he, too, like Tiberius, had honorable aims. The
powers which he had played into the hands of the mob to obtain he desired
to use for high purposes of statesmanship, and his instrument broke in his
hands. He was too wise to suppose that a Roman mob, fed by bounties from
the treasury, could permanently govern the world. He had schemes for
scattering Roman colonies, with the Roman franchise, at various points of
the Empire. Carthage was to be one of them. He thought of abolishing the
distinction between Romans and Italians, and enfranchising the entire
peninsula. These measures were good in themselves--essential, indeed, if
the Roman conquests were to form a compact and permanent dominion. But the
object was not attainable on the road on which Gracchus had entered. The
vagabond part of the constituency was well contented with what it had
obtained--a life in the city, supported at the public expense, with
politics and games for its amusements. It had not the least inclination to
be drafted off into settlements in Spain or Africa, where there would be
work instead of pleasant idleness. Carthage was still a name of terror. To
restore Carthage was no better than treason. Still less had the Roman
citizens an inclination to share their privileges with Samnites and
Etruscans, and see the value of their votes watered down. Political storms
are always cyclones. The gale from the east to-day is a gale from the west
to-morrow. Who and what were the Gracchi, then?--the sweet voices began to
ask--ambitious intriguers, aiming at dictatorship or perhaps the crown.
The aristocracy were right after all; a few things had gone wrong, but
these had been amended. The Scipios and Metelli had conquered the world:
the Scipios and Metelli were alone fit to govern it. Thus when the
election time came round, the party of reform was reduced to a minority of
irreconcilable radicals who were easily disposed of. Again, as ten years
before, the noble lords armed their followers. Riots broke out and
extended day after day. Caius Gracchus was at last killed, as his brother
had been, and under cover of the disturbance three thousand of his friends
were killed along with him. The power being again securely in their hands,
the Senate proceeded at their leisure, and the surviving patriots who were
in any way notorious or dangerous were hunted down in legal manner and put
to death or banished.




CHAPTER IV.


Caius Gracchus was killed at the close of the year 122. The storm was
over. The Senate was once more master of the situation, and the optimates,
"the best party in the State," as they were pleased to call themselves,
smoothed their ruffled plumes and settled again into their places. There
was no more talk of reform. Of the Gracchi there remained nothing but the
forty thousand peasant-proprietors settled on the public lands; the jury
law, which could not be at once repealed for fear of the equites; the corn
grants, and the mob attracted by the bounty, which could be managed by
improved manipulation; and the law protecting the lives of Roman citizens,
which survived in the statute-book, although the Senate still claimed the
right to set it aside when they held the State to be in danger. With these
exceptions, the administration fell back into its old condition. The
tribunes ceased to agitate. The consulships and the praetorships fell to
the candidates whom the Senate supported. Whether the oligarchy had learnt
any lessons of caution from the brief political earthquake which had
shaken but not overthrown them remained to be seen. Six years after the
murder of Caius Gracchus an opportunity was afforded to this distinguished
body of showing on a conspicuous scale the material of which they were now
composed.

Along the south shore of the Mediterranean, west of the Roman province,
extended the two kingdoms of the Numidians and the Moors. To what race
these people belonged is not precisely known. They were not negroes. The
negro tribes have never extended north of the Sahara. Nor were they
Carthaginians or allied to the Carthaginians. The Carthaginian colony
found them in possession on its arrival. Sallust says that they were
Persians left behind by Hercules after his invasion of Spain. Sallust's
evidence proves no more than that their appearance was Asiatic, and that
tradition assigned them an Asiatic origin. They may be called generically
Arabs, who at a very ancient time had spread along the coast from Egypt to
Morocco. The Numidians at this period were civilized according to the
manners of the age. They had walled towns; they had considerable wealth;
their lands were extensively watered and cultivated; their great men had
country houses and villas, the surest sign of a settled state of society.
Among the equipments of their army they had numerous elephants (it may be
presumed of the African breed), which they and the Carthaginians had
certainly succeeded in domesticating. Masinissa, the king of this people,
had been the ally of Rome in the last Carthaginian war; he had been
afterward received as "a friend of the Republic," and was one of the
protected sovereigns. He was succeeded by his son Micipsa, who in turn had
two legitimate children, Hiempsal and Adherbal, and an illegitimate nephew
Jugurtha, considerably older than his own boys, a young man of striking
talent and promise. Micipsa, who was advanced in years, was afraid that if
he died this brilliant youth might be a dangerous rival to his sons. He
therefore sent him to serve under Scipio in Spain, with the hope, so his
friends asserted, that he might there perhaps be killed. The Roman army
was then engaged in the siege of Numantia. The camp was the lounging-place
of the young patricians who were tired of Rome and wished for excitement.
Discipline had fallen loose; the officers' quarters were the scene of
extravagance and amusement. Jugurtha recommended himself on the one side
to Scipio by activity and good service, while on the other he made
acquaintances among the high-bred gentlemen in the mess-rooms. He found
them in themselves dissolute and unscrupulous. He discovered, through
communications which he was able with their assistance to open with their
fathers and relatives at Rome, that a man with money might do what he
pleased. Micipsa's treasury was well supplied, and Jugurtha hinted among
his comrades that if he could be secure of countenance in seizing the
kingdom, he would be in a position to show his gratitude in a substantial
manner. Some of these conversations reached the ears of Scipio, who sent
for Jugurtha and gave him a friendly warning. He dismissed him, however,
with honor at the end of the campaign. The young prince returned to Africa
loaded with distinctions, and the king, being now afraid to pass him over,
named him as joint-heir with his children to a third part of Numidia. The
Numidians perhaps objected to being partitioned. Micipsa died soon after.
Jugurtha at once murdered Hiempsal, claimed the sovereignty, and attacked
his other cousin. Adherbal, closely besieged in the town of Cirta, which
remained faithful to him, appealed to Rome; but Jugurtha had already
prepared his ground, and knew that he had nothing to fear. The Senate sent
out commissioners. The commissioners received the bribes which they
expected. They gave Jugurtha general instructions to leave his cousin in
peace; but they did not wait to see their orders obeyed, and went quietly
home. The natural results immediately followed. Jugurtha pressed the siege
more resolutely. The town surrendered; Adherbal was taken, and was put to
death after being savagely tortured; and there being no longer any
competitor alive in whose behalf the Senate could be called on to
interfere, he thought himself safe from further interference.
Unfortunately in the capture of Citra a number of Romans who resided there
had been killed after the surrender, and after a promise that their lives
should be spared. An outcry was raised in Rome, and became so loud that
the Senate was forced to promise investigation; but it went to work
languidly, with reluctance so evident as to rouse suspicion.
Notwithstanding the fate of the Gracchi and their friends, Memmius, a
tribune, was found bold enough to tell the people that there were men in
the Senate who had taken bribes.

The Senate, conscious of its guilt, was now obliged to exert itself. War
was declared against Jugurtha, and a consul was sent to Africa with an
army. But the consul, too, had his fortune to make, and Micipsa's
treasures were still unexpended. The consul took with him a staff of young
patricians, whose families might be counted on to shield him in return for
a share of the plunder. Jugurtha was as liberal as avarice could desire,
and peace was granted to him on the easy conditions of a nominal fine, and
the surrender of some elephants, which the consul privately restored.

Public opinion was singularly patient. The massacre six years before had
killed out the liberal leaders, and there was no desire on any side as yet
to renew the struggle with the Senate. But it was possible to presume too
far on popular acquiescence. Memmius came forward again, and in a
passionate speech in the Forum exposed and denounced the scandalous
transaction. The political sky began to blacken again. The Senate could
not face another storm with so bad a cause, and Jugurtha was sent for to
Rome. He came, with contemptuous confidence, loaded with gold. He could
not corrupt Memmius, but he bought easily the rest of the tribunes. The
leaders in the Curia could not quarrel with a client of such delightful
liberality. He had an answer to every complaint, and a fee to silence the
complainer. He would have gone back in triumph, had he not presumed a
little too far. He had another cousin in the city who he feared might one
day give him trouble, so he employed one of his suite to poison him. The
murder was accomplished successfully; and for this too he might no doubt
have secured his pardon by paying for it; but the price demanded was too
high, and perhaps Jugurtha, villain as he was, came at last to disdain the
wretches whom he might consider fairly to be worse than himself. He had
come over under a safe-conduct, and he was not detained. The Senate
ordered him to leave Italy; and he departed with the scornful phrase on
his lips which has passed into history: "Venal city, and soon to perish if
only it can find a purchaser." [1]

A second army was sent across, to end the scandal. This time the Senate
was in earnest, but the work was less easy than was expected. Army
management had fallen into disorder. In earlier times each Roman citizen
had provided his own equipments at his own expense. To be a soldier was
part of the business of his life, and military training was an essential
feature of his education. The old system had broken down; the peasantry,
from whom the rank and file of the legions had been recruited, were no
longer able to furnish their own arms. Caius Gracchus had intended that
arms should be furnished by the government, that a special department
should be constituted to take charge of the arsenals and to see to the
distribution. But Gracchus was dead, and his project had died with him.
When the legions were enrolled, the men were ill armed, undrilled, and
unprovided--a mere mob, gathered hastily together and ignorant of the
first elements of their duty. With the officers it was still worse. The
subordinate commands fell to young patricians, carpet knights who went on
campaigns with their families of slaves. The generals, when a movement was
to be made, looked for instruction to their staff. It sometimes happened
that a consul waited for his election to open for the first time a book of
military history or a Greek manual of the art of war.[2]


[Sidenote: B.C 109.]
An army so composed and so led was not likely to prosper. The Numidians
were not very formidable enemies, but, after a month or two of
manoeuvring, half the Romans were destroyed and the remainder were obliged
to surrender. About the same time, and from similar causes, two Roman
armies were cut to pieces on the Rhone. While the great men at Rome were
building palaces, inventing new dishes, and hiring cooks at unheard-of
salaries, the barbarians were at the gates of Italy. The passes of the
Alps were open, and if a few tribes of Gauls had cared to pour through
them, the Empire was at their mercy. Stung with these accumulating
disgraces, and now really alarmed, the Senate sent Caecilius Metellus, the
best man that they had and the consul for the year following to Africa.
Metellus was an aristocrat, and he was advanced in years; but he was a man
of honor and integrity. He understood the danger of further failure; and
he looked about for the ablest soldier that he could find to go with him,
irrespective of his political opinions.

Caius Marius was at this time forty-eight years old. Two thirds of his
life were over, and a name which was to sound throughout the world and be
remembered through all ages had as yet been scarcely heard of beyond the
army and the political clubs in Rome. He was born at Arpinum, a Latin
township, seventy miles from the capital, in the year 157. His father was
a small farmer, and he was himself bred to the plough. He joined the army
early, and soon attracted notice by his punctual discharge of his duties.
In a time of growing looseness, Marius was strict himself in keeping
discipline and in enforcing it as he rose in the service. He was in Spain
when Jugurtha was there, and made himself especially useful to Scipio; he
forced his way steadily upward, by his mere soldierlike qualities, to the
rank of military tribune. Rome, too, had learned to know him, for he was
chosen tribune of the people the year after the murder of Caius Gracchus.
Being a self-made man, he belonged naturally to the popular party. While
in office he gave offence in some way to the men in power, and was called
before the Senate to answer for himself. But he had the right on his side,
it is likely, for they found him stubborn and impertinent, and they could
make nothing of their charges against him. He was not bidding at this
time, however, for the support of the mob. He had the integrity and sense
to oppose the largesses of corn; and he forfeited his popularity by trying
to close the public granaries before the practice had passed into a
system. He seemed as if made of a block of hard Roman oak, gnarled and
knotted, but sound in all its fibres. His professional merit continued to
recommend him. At the age of forty he became praetor, and was sent to
Spain, where he left a mark again by the successful severity by which he
cleared the province of banditti. He was a man neither given himself to
talking nor much talked about in the world; but he was sought for wherever
work was to be done, and he had made himself respected and valued in high
circles, for after his return from the peninsula he had married into one
of the most distinguished of the patrician families.

The Caesars were a branch of the Gens Julia, which claimed descent from
Iulus the son of Aeneas, and thus from the gods. Roman etymologists could
arrive at no conclusion as to the origin of the name. Some derived it from
an exploit on an elephant-hunt in Africa--Caesar meaning elephant in
Moorish; some to the entrance into the world of the first eminent Caesar
by the aid of a surgeon's knife;[3]some from the color of the eyes
prevailing in the family. Be the explanation what it might, eight
generations of Caesars had held prominent positions in the Commonwealth.
They had been consuls, censors, praetors, aediles, and military tribunes,
and in politics, as might be expected from their position, they had been
moderate aristocrats. Like other families they had been subdivided, and
the links connecting them cannot always be traced. The pedigree of the
Dictator goes no further than to his grandfather, Caius Julius. In the
middle of the second century before Christ, this Caius Julius, being
otherwise unknown to history, married a lady named Marcia, supposed to be
descended from Ancus Marcius, the fourth king of Rome. By her he had three
children, Caius Julius, Sextus Julius, and a daughter named Julia. Caius
Julius married Aurelia, perhaps a member of the consular family of the
Cottas, and was the father of the Great Caesar. Julia became the wife of
Caius Marius, a _mesalliance_ which implied the beginning of a
political split in the Caesar family. The elder branches, like the
Cromwells of Hinchinbrook, remained by their order. The younger attached
itself for good or ill to the party of the people.

Marius by this marriage became a person of social consideration. His
father had been a client of the Metelli; and Caecilius Metellus, who must
have known Marius by reputation and probably in person, invited him to go
as second in command in the African campaign. He was moderately
successful. Towns were taken; battles were won: Metellus was
incorruptible, and the Numidians sued for peace. But Jugurtha wanted
terms, and the consul demanded unconditional surrender. Jugurtha withdrew
into the desert; the war dragged on; and Marius, perhaps ambitious,
perhaps impatient at the general's want of vigor, began to think that he
could make quicker work of it. The popular party were stirring again in
Rome, the Senate having so notoriously disgraced itself. There was just
irritation that a petty African prince could defy the whole power of Rome
for so many years; and though a democratic consul had been unheard of for
a century, the name of Marius began to be spoken of as a possible
candidate. Marius consented to stand. The law required that he must be
present in person at the election, and he applied to his commander for
leave of absence. Metellus laughed at his pretensions, and bade him wait
another twenty years. Marius, however, persisted, and was allowed to go.
The patricians strained their resources to defeat him, but he was chosen
with enthusiasm. Metellus was recalled, and the conduct of the Numidian
war was assigned to the new hero of the "populares."

A shudder of alarm ran, no doubt, through the senate-house when the
determination of the people was known. A successful general could not be
disposed of so easily as oratorical tribunes. Fortunately Marius was not a
politician. He had no belief in democracy. He was a soldier, and had a
soldier's way of thinking on government and the methods of it. His first
step was a reformation in the army. Hitherto the Roman legions had been no
more than the citizens in arms, called for the moment from their various
occupations, to return to them when the occasion for their services was
past. Marius had perceived that fewer men, better trained and disciplined,
could he made more effective and be more easily handled. He had studied
war as a science. He had perceived that the present weakness need be no
more than an accident, and that there was a latent force in the Roman
State which needed only organization to resume its ascendency. "He
enlisted," it was said, "the worst of the citizens," men, that is to say,
who had no occupation and who became soldiers by profession; and as
persons without property could not have furnished themselves at their own
cost, he must have carried out the scheme proposed by Gracchus, and
equipped them at the expense of the State. His discipline was of the
sternest. The experiment was new; and men of rank who had a taste for war
in earnest, and did not wish that the popular party should have the whole
benefit and credit of the improvements, were willing to go with him; among
them a dissipated young patrician called Lucius Sylla, whose name also was
destined to be memorable.

By these methods and out of these materials an army was formed such as no
Roman general had hitherto led. It performed extraordinary marches,
carried its water-supplies with it in skins, and followed the enemy across
sandy deserts hitherto found impassable. In less than two years the war
was over. The Moors to whom Jugurtha had fled surrendered him to Sylla,
and he was brought in chains to Rome, where he finished his life in a
dungeon.

So ended a curious episode in Roman history, where it holds a place beyond
its intrinsic importance, from the light which it throws on the character
of the Senate and on the practical working of the institutions which the
Gracchi had perished in unsuccessfully attempting to reform.

[1] "Urbem venalem, et mature perituram, si emptorem invenenit."--Sallust,
    _De Bello Jugurthino_, c. 35. Livy's account of the business,
    however, differs from Sallust's, and the expression is perhaps not
    authentic.

[2] "At ego scio, Quirites, qui, postquam consules facti sunt, acta
    majorum, et Graecorum militaria praecepta legere coeperint. Homines
    praeposteri!"--Speech of Marius, Sallust, _Jugurtha_, 85.

[3] "Caesus ab utero matris."




CHAPTER V.


The Jugurthine war ended in the year 106 B.C. At the same Arpinum which
had produced Marius another actor in the approaching drama was in that
year ushered into the world, Marcus Tullius Cicero. The Ciceros had made
their names, and perhaps their fortunes, by their skill in raising
_cicer_, or vetches. The present representative of the family was a
country gentleman in good circumstances given to literature, residing
habitually at his estate on the Liris and paying occasional visits to
Rome. In that household was born Rome's most eloquent master of the art of
using words, who was to carry that art as far, and to do as much with it,
as any man who has ever appeared on the world's stage.

Rome, however, was for the present in the face of enemies who had to be
encountered with more material weapons. Marius had formed an army barely
in time to save Italy from being totally overwhelmed. A vast migratory
wave of population had been set in motion behind the Rhine and the Danube.
The German forests were uncultivated. The hunting and pasture grounds were
too strait for the numbers crowded into them, and two enormous hordes were
rolling westward and southward in search of some new abiding-place. The
Teutons came from the Baltic down across the Rhine into Luxemburg. The
Cimbri crossed the Danube near its sources into Illyria. Both Teutons and
Cimbri were Germans, and both were making for Gaul by different routes.
The Celts of Gaul had had their day. In past generations they had held the
German invaders at bay, and had even followed them into their own
territories. But they had split among themselves. They no longer offered a
common front to the enemy. They were ceasing to be able to maintain their
own independence, and the question of the future was whether Gaul was to
be the prey of Germany or to be a province of Rome.

Events appeared already to have decided. The invasion of the Teutons and
the Cimbri was like the pouring in of two great rivers. Each division
consisted of hundreds of thousands. They travelled with their wives and
children, their wagons, as with the ancient Scythians and with the modern
South African Dutch, being at once their conveyance and their home. Gray-
haired priestesses tramped along among them, barefooted, in white linen
dresses, the knife at their girdle; northern Iphigenias, sacrificing
prisoners as they were taken to the gods of Valhalla. On they swept,
eating up the country, and the people flying before them. In 113 B.C. the
skirts of the Cimbri had encountered a small Roman force near Trieste, and
destroyed it. Four years later another attempt was made to stop them, but
the Roman army was beaten and its camp taken. The Cimbrian host did not,
however, turn at that time upon Italy. Their aim was the south of France.
They made their way through the Alps into Switzerland, where the Helvetii
joined them, and the united mass rolled over the Jura and down the bank of
the Rhone. Roused at last into exertion, the Senate sent into Gaul the
largest force which the Romans had ever brought into the field. They met
the Cimbri at Orange, and were simply annihilated. Eighty thousand Romans
and forty thousand camp-followers were said to have fallen. The numbers in
such cases are generally exaggerated, but the extravagance of the report
is a witness to the greatness of the overthrow. The Romans had received a
worse blow than at Cannae. They were brave enough, but they were commanded
by persons whose recommendations for command were birth or fortune;
"preposterous men," as Marius termed them, who had waited for their
appointment to open the military manuals.

Had the Cimbri chosen at this moment to recross the Alps into Italy, they
had only to go and take possession, and Alaric would have been antedated
by five centuries. In great danger it was the Senate's business to suspend
the constitution. The constitution was set aside now, but it was set aside
by the people themselves, not by the Senate. One man only could save the
country, and that man was Marius. His consulship was over, and custom
forbade his re-election. The Senate might have appointed him dictator, but
would not. The people, custom or no custom, chose him consul a second
time--a significant acknowledgment that the Empire, which had been won by
the sword, must be held by the sword, and that the sword itself must be
held by the hand that was best fitted to use it. Marius first triumphed
for his African victory, and, as an intimation to the Senate that the
power for the moment was his and not theirs, he entered the Curia in his
triumphal dress. He then prepared for the barbarians who, to the alarmed
imagination of the city, were already knocking at its gates. Time was the
important element in the matter. Had the Cimbri come at once after their
victory at Orange, Italy had been theirs. But they did not come. With the
unguided movements of some wild force of nature they swerved away through
Aquitaine to the Pyrenees. They swept across the mountains into Spain.
Thence, turning north, they passed up the Atlantic coast and round to the
Seine, the Gauls flying before them; thence on to the Rhine, where the
vast body of the Teutons joined them and fresh detachments of the
Helvetii. It was as if some vast tide-wave had surged over the country and
rolled through it, searching out the easiest passages. At length, in two
divisions, the invaders moved definitely toward Italy, the Cimbri
following their old tracks by the eastern Alps toward Aquileia and the
Adriatic, the Teutons passing down through Provence and making for the
road along the Mediterranean. Two years had been consumed in these
wanderings, and Marius was by this time ready for them. The Senate had
dropped the reins, and no longer governed or misgoverned; the popular
party, represented by the army, was supreme. Marius was continued in
office, and was a fourth time consul. He had completed his military
reforms, and the army was now a professional service, with regular pay.
Trained corps of engineers were attached to each legion. The campaigns of
the Romans were thenceforward to be conducted with spade and pickaxe as
much as with sword and javelin, and the soldiers learnt the use of tools
as well as arms. Moral discipline was not forgotten. The foulest of human
vices was growing fashionable in high society in the capital. It was not
allowed to make its way into the army. An officer in one of the legions, a
near relative of Marius, made filthy overtures to one of his men. The man
replied with a thrust of his sword, and Marius publicly thanked and
decorated him.

The effect of the change was like enchantment. The delay of the Germans
made it unnecessary to wait for them in Italy. Leaving Catulus, his
colleague in the consulship, to check the Cimbri in Venetia, Marius went
himself, taking Sylla with him, into the south of France. As the barbarian
host came on, he occupied a fortified camp near Aix. He allowed the
enormous procession to roll past him in their wagons toward the Alps.
Then, following cautiously, he watched his opportunity to fall on them.
The Teutons were brave, but they had no longer mere legionaries to fight
with, but a powerful machine, and the entire mass of them, men, women, and
children, in numbers which however uncertain were rather those of a nation
than an army, were swept out of existence.

The Teutons were destroyed on the 20th of July, 102. In the year following
the same fate overtook their comrades. The Cimbri had forced the passes
through the mountains. They had beaten the unscientific patrician Catulus,
and had driven him back on the Po. But Marius came to his rescue. The
Cimbri were cut to pieces near Mantua, in the summer of 101, and Italy was
saved.

The victories of Marius mark a new epoch in Roman history. The legions
were no longer the levy of the citizens in arms, who were themselves the
State for which they fought. The legionaries were citizens still. They had
votes, and they used them; but they were professional soldiers with the
modes of thought which belong to soldiers, and beside the power of the
hustings was now the power of the sword. The constitution remained to
appearance intact, and means were devised sufficient to encounter, it
might be supposed, the new danger. Standing armies were prohibited in
Italy. Victorious generals returning from campaigns abroad were required
to disband their legions on entering the sacred soil. But the materials of
these legions remained a distinct order from the rest of the population,
capable of instant combination, and in combination irresistible save by
opposing combinations of the same kind. The Senate might continue to
debate, the Comitia might elect the annual magistrates. The established
institutions preserved the form and something of the reality of power in a
people governed so much by habit as the Romans. There is a long twilight
between the time when a god is first suspected to be an idol and his final
overthrow. But the aristocracy had made the first inroad on the
constitution by interfering at the elections with their armed followers
and killing their antagonists. The example once set could not fail to be
repeated, and the rule of an organized force was becoming the only
possible protection against the rule of mobs, patrician or plebeian.

The danger from the Germans was no sooner gone than political anarchy
broke loose again. Marius, the man of the people, was the saviour of his
country. He was made consul a fifth time and a sixth. The party which had
given him his command shared, of course, in his pre-eminence. The
elections could be no longer interfered with or the voters intimidated.
The public offices were filled with the most violent agitators, who
believed that the time had come to revenge the Gracchi and carry out the
democratic revolution, to establish the ideal Republic and the direct rule
of the citizen assembly. This, too, was a chimera. If the Roman Senate
could not govern, far less could the Roman mob govern. Marius stood aside
and let the voices rage. He could not be expected to support a system
which had brought the country so near to ruin. He had no belief in the
visions of the demagogues, but the time was not ripe to make an end of it
all. Had he tried, the army would not have gone with him, so he sat still
till faction had done its work. The popular heroes of the hour were the
tribune Saturninus and the praetor Glaucia. They carried corn laws and
land laws--whatever laws they pleased to propose. The administration
remaining with the Senate, they carried a vote that every senator should
take an oath to execute their laws under penalty of fine and expulsion.
Marius did not like it, and even opposed it, but let it pass at last. The
senators, cowed and humiliated, consented to take the oath, all but one,
Marius's old friend and commander in Africa, Caecilius Metellus. No stain
had ever rested on the name of Metellus. He had accepted no bribes. He had
half beaten Jugurtha, for Marius to finish; and Marius himself stood in a
semi-feudal relation to him. It was unlucky for the democrats that they
had found so honorable an opponent. Metellus persisted in refusal.
Saturninus sent a guard to the senate-house, dragged him out, and expelled
him from the city. Aristocrats and their partisans were hustled and killed
in the street. The patricians had spilt the first blood in the massacre in
121: now it was the turn of the mob.

Marius was an indifferent politician. He perceived as well as any one that
violence must not go on, but he hesitated to put it down. He knew that the
aristocracy feared and hated him. Between them and the people's consul no
alliance was possible. He did not care to alienate his friends, and there
may have been other difficulties which we do not know in his way. The army
itself was perhaps divided. On the popular side there were two parties: a
moderate one, represented by Memmius, who, as tribune, had impeached the
senators for the Jugurthine infamies; the other, the advanced radicals,
led by Glaucia and Saturninus. Memmius and Glaucia were both candidates
for the consulship; and as Memmius was likely to succeed, he was murdered.

Revolutions proceed like the acts of a drama, and each act is divided into
scenes which follow one another with singular uniformity. Ruling powers
make themselves hated by tyranny and incapacity. An opposition is formed
against them, composed of all sorts, lovers of order and lovers of
disorder, reasonable men and fanatics, business-like men and men of
theory. The opposition succeeds; the government is overthrown; the victors
divide into a moderate party and an advanced party. The advanced party go
to the front, till they discredit themselves with crime or folly. The
wheel has then gone round, and the reaction sets in. The murder of Memmius
alienated fatally the respectable citizens. Saturninus and Glaucia were
declared public enemies. They seized the Capitol, and blockaded it.
Patrician Rome turned out and besieged them, and Marius had to interfere.
The demagogues and their friends surrendered, and were confined in the
Curia Hostilia till they could be tried. The noble lords could not allow
such detested enemies the chance of an acquittal. To them a radical was a
foe of mankind, to be hunted down like a wolf, when a chance was offered
to destroy him. By the law of Caius Gracchus no citizen could be put to
death without a trial. The persons of Saturninus and Glaucia were doubly
sacred, for one was tribune and the other praetor. But the patricians were
satisfied that they deserved to be executed, and in such a frame of mind
it seemed but virtue to execute them. They tore off the roof of the senate
house, and pelted the miserable wretches to death with stones and tiles.




CHAPTER VI.


Not far from the scene of the murder of Glaucia and Saturninus there was
lying at this time in his cradle, or carried about in his nurse's arms, a
child who, in his manhood, was to hold an inquiry into this business, and
to bring one of the perpetrators to answer for himself. On the 12th of the
preceding July, B.C. 100,[1] was born into the world Caius Julius Caesar,
the only son of Caius Julius and Aurelia, and nephew of the then Consul
Marius. His father had been praetor, but had held no higher office.
Aurelia was a strict stately lady of the old school, uninfected by the
lately imported fashions. She, or her husband, or both of them, were rich;
but the habits of the household were simple and severe, and the connection
with Marius indicates the political opinions which prevailed in the
family.

No anecdotes are preserved, of Caesar's childhood. He was taught Greek by
Antonius Gnipho, an educated Gaul from the north of Italy. He wrote a poem
when a boy in honor of Hercules. He composed a tragedy on the story of
Oedipus. His passionate attachment to Aurelia in after-years shows that
between mother and child the relations had been affectionate and happy.
But there is nothing to indicate that there was any early precocity of
talent; and leaving Caesar to his grammar and his exercises, we will
proceed with the occurrences which he must have heard talked of in his
father's house, or seen with his eyes when he began to open them. The
society there was probably composed of his uncle's friends; soldiers and
statesmen who had no sympathy with mobs, but detested the selfish and
dangerous system on which the Senate had carried on the government, and
dreaded its consequences. Above the tumults of the factions in the Capitol
a cry rising into shrillness began to be heard from Italy. Caius Gracchus
had wished to extend the Roman franchise to the Italian States, and the
suggestion had cost him his popularity and his life. The Italian provinces
had furnished their share of the armies which had beaten Jugurtha, and had
destroyed the German invaders. They now demanded that they should have the
position which Gracchus designed for them: that they should be allowed to
legislate for themselves, and no longer lie at the mercy of others, who
neither understood their necessities nor cared for their interests. They
had no friends in the city, save a few far-sighted statesmen. Senate and
mob had at least one point of agreement, that the spoils of the Empire
should be fought for among themselves; and at the first mention of the
invasion of their monopoly a law was passed making the very agitation of
the subject punishable by death.

Political convulsions work in a groove, the direction of which varies
little in any age or country. Institutions once sufficient and salutary
become unadapted to a change of circumstances. The traditionary holders of
power see their interests threatened. They are jealous of innovations.
They look on agitators for reform as felonious persons desiring to
appropriate what does not belong to them. The complaining parties are
conscious of suffering and rush blindly on the superficial causes of their
immediate distress. The existing authority is their enemy; and their one
remedy is a change in the system of government. They imagine that they see
what the change should be, that they comprehend what they are doing, and
know where they intend to arrive. They do not perceive that the visible
disorders are no more than symptoms which no measures, repressive or
revolutionary, can do more than palliate. The wave advances and the wave
recedes. Neither party in the struggle can lift itself far enough above
the passions of the moment to study the drift of the general current. Each
is violent, each is one-sided, and each makes the most and the worst of
the sins of its opponents. The one idea of the aggressors is to grasp all
that they can reach. The one idea of the conservatives is to part with
nothing, pretending that the stability of the State depends on adherence
to the principles which have placed them in the position which they hold;
and as various interests are threatened, and as various necessities arise,
those who are one day enemies are frightened the next into unnatural
coalitions, and the next after into more embittered dissensions.

To an indifferent spectator, armed especially with the political
experiences of twenty additional centuries, it seems difficult to
understand how Italy could govern the world. That the world and Italy
besides should continue subject to the population of a single city, of its
limited Latin environs, and of a handful of townships exceptionally
favored, might even then be seen to be plainly impossible. The Italians
were Romans in every point, except in the possession of the franchise.
They spoke the same language; they were subjects of the same dominion.
They were as well educated, they were as wealthy, they were as capable as
the inhabitants of the dominant State. They paid taxes, they fought in the
armies; they were strong; they were less corrupt, politically and morally,
as having fewer temptations and fewer opportunities of evil; and in their
simple country life they approached incomparably nearer to the old Roman
type than the patrician fops in the circus or the Forum, or the city mob
which was fed in idleness on free grants of corn. When Samnium and Tuscany
were conquered, a third of the lands had been confiscated to the Roman
State, under the name of _Ager Publicus_. Samnite and Etruscan
gentlemen had recovered part of it under lease, much as the descendants of
the Irish chiefs held their ancestral domains as tenants of the
Cromwellians. The land law of the Gracchi was well intended, but it bore
hard on many of the leading provincials, who had seen their estates
parcelled out, and their own property, as they deemed it, taken from them
under the land commission. If they were to be governed by Roman laws, they
naturally demanded to be consulted when the laws were made. They might
have been content under a despotism to which Roman and Italian were
subject alike. To be governed under the forms of a free constitution by
men no better than themselves was naturally intolerable.

[Sidenote: B.C. 95.]
[Sidenote: B.C. 91.]
The movement from without united the Romans for the instant in defence of
their privileges. The aristocracy resisted change from instinct; the mob,
loudly as they clamored for their own rights, cared nothing for the rights
of others, and the answer to the petition of the Italians, five years
after the defeat of the Cimbri, was a fierce refusal to permit the
discussion of it. Livius Drusus, one of those unfortunately gifted men who
can see that in a quarrel there is sometimes justice on both sides, made a
vain attempt to secure the provincials a hearing, but he was murdered in
his own house. To be murdered was the usual end of exceptionally
distinguished Romans, in a State where the lives of citizens were
theoretically sacred. His death was the signal for an insurrection, which
began in the mountains of the Abruzzi and spread over the whole peninsula.

The contrast of character between the two classes of population became at
once uncomfortably evident. The provincials had been the right arm of the
Empire. Rome, a city of rich men with families of slaves, and of a crowd
of impoverished freemen without employment to keep them in health and
strength, could no longer bring into the field a force which could hold
its ground against the gentry and peasants of Samnium. The Senate enlisted
Greeks, Numidians, any one whose services they could purchase. They had to
encounter soldiers who had been trained and disciplined by Marius, and
they were taught by defeat upon defeat that they had a worse enemy before
them than the Germans. Marius himself had almost withdrawn from public
life. He had no heart for the quarrel, and did not care greatly to exert
himself. At the bottom, perhaps, he thought that the Italians were in the
right. The Senate discovered that they were helpless, and must come to
terms if they would escape destruction. They abandoned the original point
of difference, and they offered to open the franchise to every Italian
state south of the Po which had not taken arms or which returned
immediately to its allegiance. The war had broken out for a definite
cause. When the cause was removed no reason remained for its continuance.
The Italians were closely connected with Rome. Italians were spread over
the Roman world in active business. They had no wish to overthrow the
Empire if they were allowed to share in its management. The greater part
of them accepted the Senate's terms; and only those remained in the field
who had gone to war in the hope of recovering the lost independence which
their ancestors had so long heroically defended.

The panting Senate was thus able to breathe again. The war continued, but
under better auspices. Sound material could now be collected again for the
army. Marius being in the background, the chosen knight of the
aristocracy, Lucius Sylla, whose fame in the Cimbrian war had been only
second to that of his commander's, came at once to the front.

Sylla, or Sulla, as we are now taught to call him, was born in the year
138 B.C. He was a patrician of the purest blood, had inherited a moderate
fortune, and had spent it like other young men of rank, lounging in
theatres and amusing himself with dinner-parties. He was a poet, an
artist, and a wit, but each and everything with the languor of an amateur.
His favorite associates were actresses, and he had neither obtained nor
aspired to any higher reputation than that of a cultivated man of fashion.
His distinguished birth was not apparent in his person. He had red hair,
hard blue eyes, and a complexion white and purple, with the colors so ill-
mixed that his face was compared to a mulberry sprinkled with flour.
Ambition he appeared to have none; and when he exerted himself to be
appointed quaestor to Marius on the African expedition, Marius was
disinclined to take him as having no recommendation beyond qualifications
which the consul of the plebeians disdained and disliked.

Marius, however, soon discovered his mistake. Beneath his constitutional
indolence Sylla was by nature a soldier, a statesman, a diplomatist. He
had been too contemptuous of the common objects of politicians to concern
himself with the intrigues of the Forum, but he had only to exert himself
to rise with easy ascendency to the command of every situation in which he
might be placed. He had entered with military instinct into Marius's
reform of the army, and became the most active and useful of his officers.
He endeared himself to the legionaries by a tolerance of vices which did
not interfere with discipline; and to Sylla's combined adroitness and
courage Marius owed the final capture of Jugurtha.

Whether Marius became jealous of Sylla on this occasion must be decided by
those who, while they have no better information than others as to the
actions of men, possess, or claim to possess, the most intimate
acquaintance with their motives. They again served together, however,
against the Northern invaders, and Sylla a second time lent efficient help
to give Marius a victory. Like Marius, he had no turn for platform oratory
and little interest in election contests and intrigues. For eight years he
kept aloof from politics, and his name and that of his rival were alike
for all that time almost unheard of. He emerged into special notice only
when he was praetor in the year 93 B.C., and when he characteristically
distinguished his term of office by exhibiting a hundred lions in the
arena matched against Numidian archers. There was no such road to
popularity with the Roman multitude. It is possible that the little
Caesar, then a child of seven, may have been among the spectators, making
his small reflections on it all.

[Sidenote: B.C. 120.]
In 92 Sylla went as propraetor to Asia, where the incapacity of the
Senate's administration was creating another enemy likely to be
troublesome. Mithridates, "child of the sun," pretending to a descent from
Darius Hystaspes, was king of Pontus, one of the semi-independent
monarchies which had been allowed to stand in Asia Minor. The coast-line
of Pontus extended from Sinope to Trebizond, and reached inland to the
line of mountains where the rivers divide which flow into the Black Sea
and the Mediterranean. The father of Mithridates was murdered when he was
a child, and for some years he led a wandering life, meeting adventures
which were as wild and perhaps as imaginary as those of Ulysses. In later
life he became the idol of Eastern imagination, and legend made free with
his history; but he was certainly an extraordinary man. He spoke the
unnumbered dialects of the Asiatic tribes among whom he had travelled. He
spoke Greek with ease and freedom. Placed, as he was, on the margin where
the civilizations of the East and the West were brought in contact, he was
at once a barbarian potentate and an ambitious European politician. He was
well informed of the state of Rome, and saw reason, perhaps, as well he
might, to doubt the durability of its power. At any rate, he was no sooner
fixed on his own throne than he began to annex the territories of the
adjoining princes. He advanced his sea frontier through Armenia to Batoum,
and thence along the coast of Circassia. He occupied the Greek settlements
on the Sea of Azof. He took Kertch and the Crimea, and with the help of
pirates from the Mediterranean he formed a fleet which gave him complete
command of the Black Sea. In Asia Minor no power but the Roman could
venture to quarrel with him. The Romans ought in prudence to have
interfered before Mithridates had grown to so large a bulk, but money
judiciously distributed among the leading politicians had secured the
Senate's connivance; and they opened their eyes at last only when
Mithridates thought it unnecessary to subsidize them further, and directed
his proceedings against Cappadocia, which was immediately under Roman
protection. He invaded the country, killed the prince whom Rome had
recognized, and placed on the throne a child of his own, with the evident
intention of taking Cappadocia for himself.

This was to go too far. Like Jugurtha, he had purchased many friends in
the Senate, who, grateful for past favors and hoping for more, prevented
the adoption of violent measures against him; but they sent a message to
him that he must not have Cappadocia, and Mithridates, waiting for a
better opportunity, thought proper to comply. Of this message the bearer
was Lucius Sylla. He had time to study on the spot the problem of how to
deal with Asia Minor. He accomplished his mission with his usual
adroitness and apparent success, and he returned to Rome with new honors
to finish the Social war.

It was no easy work. The Samnites were tough and determined. For two years
they continued to struggle, and the contest was not yet over when news
came from the East appalling as the threatened Cimbrian invasion, which
brought both parties to consent to suspend their differences by mutual
concessions.

[1] I follow the ordinary date, which has been fixed by the positive
    statement that Caesar was fifty-six when he was killed, the date of
    his death being March, B.C. 44. Mommsen, however, argues plausibly
    for adding another two years to the beginning of Caesar's life, and
    brings him into the world at the time of the battle at Aix.




CHAPTER VII.


Barbarian kings, who found Roman senators ready to take bribes from them,
believed, not unnaturally, that the days of Roman dominion were numbered.
When the news of the Social war reached Mithridates, he thought it
needless to temporize longer, and he stretched out his hand to seize the
prize of the dominion of the East. The Armenians, who were at his
disposition, broke into Cappadocia and again overthrew the government,
which was in dependence upon Rome. Mithridates himself invaded Bithynia,
and replied to the remonstrances of the Roman authorities by a declaration
of open war. He called under arms the whole force of which he could
dispose; frightened rumor spoke of it as amounting to three hundred
thousand men. His corsair fleets poured down through the Dardanelles into
the archipelago; and so detested had the Roman governors made themselves
by their extortion and injustice that not only all the islands, but the
provinces on the continent, Ionia, Lydia, and Caria, rose in revolt. The
rebellion was preconcerted and simultaneous. The Roman residents,
merchants, bankers, farmers of the taxes, they and all their families,
were set upon and murdered; a hundred and fifty thousand men, women, and
children were said to have been destroyed in a single day. If we divide by
ten, as it is generally safe to do with historical round numbers, still
beyond doubt the signal had been given in an appalling massacre to abolish
out of Asia the Roman name and power. Swift as a thunderbolt Mithridates
himself crossed the Bosphorus, and the next news that reached Rome was
that northern Greece had risen also and was throwing itself into the arms
of its deliverers.

The defeat at Cannae had been received with dignified calm. Patricians and
plebeians forgot their quarrels and thought only how to meet their common
foe. The massacre in Asia and the invasion of Mithridates let loose a
tempest of political frenzy. Never was indignation more deserved. The
Senate had made no preparation. Such resources as they could command had
been wasted in the wars with the Italians. They had no fleet, they had no
armies available; nor, while the civil war was raging, could they raise an
army. The garrisons in Greece were scattered or shut in within their lines
and unable to move. The treasury was empty. Individuals were enormously
rich and the State was bankrupt. Thousands of families had lost brothers,
cousins, or friends in the massacre, and the manifest cause of the
disaster was the inefficiency and worthlessness of the ruling classes. In
Africa, in Gaul, in Italy, and now in Asia it had been the same story. The
interests of the Commonwealth had been sacrificed to fill the purses of
the few. Dominion, wealth, honors, all that had been won by the hardy
virtues of earlier generations, seemed about to be engulfed forever.

In their panic the Senate turned to Sylla, whom they had made consul. An
imperfect peace was patched up with the Italians. Sylla was bidden to save
the Republic and to prepare in haste for Greece. But Sylla was a bitter
aristocrat, the very incarnation of the oligarchy, who were responsible
for every disaster which had happened. The Senate had taken bribes from
Jugurtha. The Senate had chosen the commanders whose blunders had thrown
open the Alps to the Germans; and it was only because the people had
snatched the power out of their hands and had trusted it to one of
themselves that Italy had not been in flames. Again the oligarchy had
recovered the administration, and again by following the old courses they
had brought on this new catastrophe. They might have checked Mithridates
while there was time. They had preferred to accept his money and look on.
The people naturally thought that no successes could be looked for under
such guidance, and that even were Sylla to be victorious, nothing was to
be expected but the continuance of the same accursed system. Marius was
the man. Marius after his sixth consulship had travelled in the East, and
understood it as well as Sylla. Not Sylla but Marius must now go against
Mithridates. Too late the democratic leaders repented of their folly in
encouraging the Senate to refuse the franchise to the Italians. The
Italians, they began to perceive, would be their surest political allies.
Caius Gracchus had been right after all. The Roman democracy must make
haste to offer the Italians more than all which the Senate was ready to
concede to them. Together they could make an end of misrule and place
Marius once more at their head.

Much of this was perhaps the scheming passion of revolution; much of it
was legitimate indignation, penitent for its errors and anxious to atone
for them. Marius had his personal grievances. The aristocrats were
stealing from him even his military reputation, and claiming for Sylla the
capture of Jugurtha. He was willing, perhaps anxious, to take the Eastern
command. Sulpicius Rufus, once a champion of the Senate and the most
brilliant orator in Rome, went over to the people in the excitement. Rufus
was chosen tribune, and at once proposed to enfranchise the remainder of
Italy. He denounced the oligarchy. He insisted that the Senate must be
purged of its corrupt members and better men be introduced, that the
people must depose Sylla, and that Marius must take his place. The Empire
was tottering, and the mob and its leaders were choosing an ill moment for
a revolution. The tribune carried the assembly along with him. There were
fights again in the Forum, the young nobles with their gangs once more
breaking up the Comitia and driving the people from the voting-places. The
voting, notwithstanding, was got through as Sulpicius Rufus recommended,
and Sylla, so far as the assembly could do it, was superseded. But Sylla
was not so easily got rid of. It was no time for nice considerations. He
had formed an army in Campania out of the legions which had served against
the Italians. He had made his soldiers devoted to him. They were ready to
go anywhere and do anything which Sylla bade them. After so many murders
and so many commotions, the constitution had lost its sacred character; a
popular assembly was, of all conceivable bodies, the least fit to govern
an empire; and in Sylla's eyes the Senate, whatever its deficiencies, was
the only possible sovereign of Rome. The people were a rabble, and their
voices the clamor of fools, who must be taught to know their masters. His
reply to Sulpicius and to the vote for his recall was to march on the
city. He led his troops within the circle which no legionary in arms was
allowed to enter, and he lighted his watch-fires in the Forum itself. The
people resisted; Sulpicius was killed; Marius, the saviour of his country,
had to fly for his life, pursued by assassins, with a price set upon his
head. Twelve of the prominent popular leaders were immediately executed
without trial, and in hot haste swift decisive measures were taken which
permanently, as Sylla hoped, or if not permanently at least for the
moment, would lame the limbs of the democracy. The Senate, being below its
numbers, was hastily filled up from the patrician families. The
arrangements of the Comitia were readjusted to restore to wealth a
decisive preponderance in the election of the magistrates. The tribunes of
the people were stripped of half their power. Their veto was left to them,
but the right of initiation was taken away, and no law or measure of any
kind was thenceforth to be submitted to the popular assembly till it had
been considered in the Curia and had received the Senate's sanction.

Thus the snake was scotched, and it might be hoped would die of its
wounds. Sulpicius and his brother demagogues were dead. Marius was exiled.
Time pressed, and Sylla could not wait to see his reforms in operation.
Signs became visible before he went that the crisis would not pass off so
easily. Fresh consuls had to be elected. The changes in the method of
voting were intended to secure the return of the Senate's candidates, and
one of the consuls chosen, Cnaeus Octavius, was a man on whom Sylla could
rely. His colleague, Lucius Cinna, though elected under the pressure of
the legions, was of more doubtful temper. But Cinna was a patrician,
though given to popular sentiments. Sylla was impatient to be gone; more
important work was waiting for him than composing factions in Rome. He
contented himself with obliging the new consuls to take an oath to
maintain the constitution in the shape in which he left it, and he sailed
from Brindisi in the winter of B.C. 88.

The campaign of Sylla in the East does not fall to be described in this
place. He was a second Coriolanus, a proud, imperious aristocrat,
contemptuous, above all men living, of popular rights; but he was the
first soldier of his age; he was himself, though he did not know it, an
impersonation of the change which was passing over the Roman character. He
took with him at most 30,000 men. He had no fleet. Had the corsair
squadrons of Mithridates been on the alert, they might have destroyed him
on his passage. Events at Rome left him almost immediately without support
from Italy. He was impeached; he was summoned back. His troops were
forbidden to obey him, and a democratic commander was sent out to
supersede him. The army stood by their favorite commander. Sylla
disregarded his orders from home. He found men and money as he could. He
supported himself out of the countries which he occupied, without
resources save in his own skill and in the fidelity and excellence of his
legions. He defeated Mithridates, he drove him back out of Greece and
pursued him into Asia. The interests of his party demanded his presence at
Rome; the interests of the State required that he should not leave his
work in the East unfinished, and he stood to it through four hard years
till he brought Mithridates to sue for peace upon his knees. He had not
the means to complete the conquest or completely to avenge the massacre
with which the Prince of Pontus had commenced the war. He left Mithridates
still in possession of his hereditary kingdom, but he left him bound, so
far as treaties could bind so ambitious a spirit, to remain thenceforward
within his own frontiers. He recovered Greece and the islands, and the
Roman provinces in Asia Minor. He extorted an indemnity of five millions,
and executed many of the wretches who had been active in the murders. He
raised a fleet in Egypt, with which he drove the pirates out of the
archipelago back into their own waters. He restored the shattered prestige
of Roman authority, and he won for himself a reputation which his later
cruelties might stain but could not efface.

The merit of Sylla shows in more striking colors when we look to what was
passing, during these four years of his absence, in the heart of the
Empire. He was no sooner out of Italy than the democratic party rose, with
Cinna at their head, to demand the restoration of the old constitution.
Cinna had been sworn to maintain Sylla's reforms, but no oath could be
held binding which was extorted at the sword's point. A fresh Sulpicius
was found in Carbo, a popular tribune. A more valuable supporter was found
in Quintus Sertorius, a soldier of fortune, but a man of real gifts, and
even of genius. Disregarding the new obligation to obtain the previous
consent of the Senate, Cinna called the assembly together to repeal the
acts which Sylla had forced on them. Sylla, it is to be remembered, had as
yet won no victories, nor was expected to win victories. He was the
favorite of the Senate, and the Senate had become a byword for incapacity
and failure. Again, as so many times before, the supremacy of the
aristocrats had been accompanied with dishonor abroad and the lawless
murder of political adversaries at home. No true lover of his country
could be expected, in Cinna's opinion, to sit quiet under a tyranny which
had robbed the people of their hereditary liberties.

The patricians took up the challenge. Octavius, the other consul, came
with an armed force into the Forum, and ordered the assembly to disperse.
The crowd was unusually great. The country voters had come in large
numbers to stand up for their rights. They did not obey, They were not
called on to obey. But because they refused to disperse they were set upon
with deliberate fury, and were hewn down in heaps where they stood. No
accurate register was, of course, taken of the numbers killed; but the
intention of the patricians was to make a bloody example, and such a scene
of slaughter had never been witnessed in Rome since the first stone of the
city was laid. It was an act of savage, ruthless ferocity, certain to be
followed with a retribution as sharp and as indiscriminating. Men are not
permitted to deal with their fellow-creatures in these methods. Cinna and
the tribunes fled, but fled only to be received with open arms by the
Italians. The wounds of the Social war were scarcely cicatrized, and the
peace had left the allies imperfectly satisfied. Their dispersed armies
gathered again about Cinna and Sertorius. Old Marius, who had been hunted
through marsh and forest, and had been hiding with difficulty in Africa,
came back at the news that Italy had risen again; and six thousand of his
veterans flocked to him at the sound of his name. The Senate issued
proclamations. The limitations on the Italian franchise left by Sylla were
abandoned. Every privilege which had been asked for was conceded. It was
too late. Concessions made in fear might be withdrawn on the return of
safety. Marius and Cinna joined their forces. The few troops in the pay of
the Senate deserted to them. They appeared together at the gate's of the
city, and Rome capitulated.

There was a bloody score to be wiped out. There would have been neither
cruelty nor injustice in the most severe inquiry into the massacre in the
Forum, and the most exemplary punishment of Octavius and his companions.
But the blood of the people was up, and they had suffered too deeply to
wait for the tardy processes of law. They had not been the aggressors.
They had assembled lawfully, to assert their constitutional rights; they
had been cut in pieces as if they had been insurgent slaves, and the
assassins were not individuals, but a political party in the State.

Marius bears the chief blame for the scenes which followed. Undoubtedly he
was in no pleasant humor. A price had been set on his head, his house had
been destroyed, his property had been confiscated, he himself had been
chased like a wild beast, and he had not deserved such treatment. He had
saved Italy when but for him it would have been wasted by the swords of
the Germans. His power had afterward been absolute, but he had not abused
it for party purposes. The Senate had no reason to complain of him. He had
touched none of their privileges, incapable and dishonest as he knew them
to be. His crime in their eyes had been his eminence. They had now shown
themselves as cruel as they were worthless; and if public justice was
disposed to make an end of them, he saw no cause for interference.

Thus the familiar story repeated itself; wrong was punished by wrong, and
another item was entered on the bloody account which was being scored up
year after year. The noble lords and their friends had killed the people
in the Forum. They were killed in turn by the soldiers of Marius. Fifty
senators perished; not those who were specially guilty, but those who were
most politically marked as patrician leaders. With them fell a thousand
equites, commoners of fortune, who had thrown in their lot with the
aristocracy. From retaliatory political revenge the transition was easy to
pillage and wholesale murder, and for many days the wretched city was made
a prey to robbers and cutthroats.

So ended the year 87, the darkest and bloodiest which the guilty city had
yet experienced. Marius and Cinna were chosen consuls for the year
ensuing, and a witch's prophecy was fulfilled that Marius should have a
seventh consulate. But the glory had departed from him. His sun was
already setting, redly, among crimson clouds. He lived but a fortnight
after his inauguration, and he died in his bed on the 13th of January, at
the age of seventy-one.

"The mother of the Gracchi," said Mirabeau, "cast the dust of her murdered
sons into the air, and out of it sprang Caius Marius." The Gracchi were
perhaps not forgotten in the retribution; but the crime which had been
revenged by Marius was the massacre in the Forum by Octavius and his
friends. The aristocracy found no mercy, because they had shown no mercy.
They had been guilty of the most wantonly wicked cruelty which the Roman
annals had yet recorded. They were not defending their country against a
national danger. They were engaged in what has been called in later years
"saving society;" that is to say, in saving their own privileges, their
opportunities for plunder, their palaces, their estates, and their
game-preserves. They had treated the people as if they were so many cattle
grown troublesome to their masters, and the cattle were human beings with
rights as real as their own.

The democratic party were now masters of the situation, and so continued
for almost four years. Cinna succeeded to the consulship term after term,
nominating himself and his colleagues. The franchise was given to the
Italians without reserve or qualification. Northern Italy was still
excluded, being not called Italy, but Cisalpine Gaul. South of the Po
distinctions of citizenship ceased to exist. The constitution became a
rehearsal of the Empire, a democracy controlled and guided by a popular
dictator. The aristocrats who had escaped massacre fled to Sylla in Asia,
and for a brief interval Rome drew its breath in peace.




CHAPTER VIII.


Revolutionary periods are painted in history in colors so dark that the
reader wonders how, amidst such scenes, peaceful human beings could
continue to exist. He forgets that the historian describes only the
abnormal incidents which broke the current of ordinary life, and that
between the spasms of violence there were long quiet intervals when the
ordinary occupations of men went on as usual. Cinna's continuous
consulship was uncomfortable to the upper classes, but the daily business
of a great city pursued its beaten way. Tradesmen and merchants made
money, and lawyers pleaded, and priests prayed in the temples, and
"celebrated" on festival and holy day. And now for the first time we catch
a personal view of young Julius Caesar. He was growing up, in his father's
house, a tall, slight, handsome youth, with dark piercing eyes,[1] a
sallow complexion, large nose, lips full, features refined and
intellectual, neck sinewy and thick beyond what might have been expected
from the generally slender figure. He was particular about his appearance,
used the bath frequently, and attended carefully to his hair. His dress
was arranged with studied negligence, and he had a loose mode of fastening
his girdle so peculiar as to catch the eye.

It may be supposed that he had witnessed Sylla's coming to Rome, the camp-
fires in the Forum, the Octavian massacre, the return of his uncle and
Cinna, and the bloody triumph of the party to which his father belonged.
He was just at the age when such scenes make an indelible impression; and
the connection of his family with Marius suggests easily the persons whom
he must have most often seen, and the conversation to which he must have
listened at his father's table. His most intimate companions were the
younger Marius, the adopted son of his uncle; and, singularly enough, the
two Ciceros, Marcus and his brother Quintus, who had been sent by their
father to be educated at Rome. The connection of Marius with Arpinum was
perhaps the origin of the intimacy. The great man may have heard of his
fellow-townsman's children being in the city, and have taken notice of
them. Certain, at any rate, it is that these boys grew up together on
terms of close familiarity.[2]

Marius had observed his nephew, and had marked him for promotion. During
the brief fortnight of his seventh consulship he gave him an appointment
which reminds us of the boy-bishops of the middle ages. He made him
_flamen dialis_, or priest of Jupiter, and a member of the Sacred
College, with a handsome income, when he was no more than fourteen. Two
years later, during the rule of Cinna, his father arranged a marriage for
him with a lady of fortune named Cossutia. But the young Caesar had more
ambitious views for himself. His father died suddenly at Pisa, in B.C. 84;
he used his freedom to break off his engagement, and instead of Cossutia
he married Cornelia, the daughter of no less a person than the all-
powerful Cinna himself. If the date commonly received for Caesar's birth
is correct, he was still only in his seventeenth year. Such connections
were rarely formed at an age so premature; and the doubt is increased by
the birth of his daughter, Julia, in the year following. Be this as it
may, a marriage into Cinna's family connected Caesar more closely than
ever with the popular party. Thus early and thus definitively he committed
himself to the politics of his uncle and his father-in-law; and the
comparative quiet which Rome and Italy enjoyed under Cinna's
administration may have left a permanent impression upon him.

The quiet was not destined to be of long endurance. The time was come when
Sylla was to demand a reckoning for all which had been done in his
absence. No Roman general had deserved better of his country than Sylla.
He had driven Mithridates out of Greece, and had restored Roman authority
in Asia under conditions peculiarly difficult. He had clung resolutely to
his work, while his friends at home were being trampled upon by the
populace whom he despised. He perhaps knew that in subduing the enemies of
the State by his own individual energy he was taking the surest road to
regain his ascendency. His task was finished. Mithridates was once more a
petty Asiatic prince existing upon sufferance, and Sylla announced his
approaching return to Italy. By his victories he had restored confidence
to the aristocracy, and had won the respect of millions of his countrymen.
But the party in power knew well that if he gained a footing in Italy
their day was over, and the danger to be expected from him was aggravated
by his transcendent services. The Italians feared naturally that they
would lose the liberties which they had won. The popular faction at Rome
was combined and strong, and was led by men of weight and practical
ability. No reconciliation was possible between Cinna and Sylla. They were
the respective chiefs of heaven and hell, and which of the two represented
the higher power and which the lower could be determined only when the
sword had decided between them. In Cinna lay the presumed lawful
authority. He represented the people as organized in the Comitia, and his
colleague in the consulship when the crisis came was the popular tribune
Carbo. Italy was ready with armies; and as leaders there were young
Marius, already with a promise of greatness in him, and Sertorius, gifted,
brilliant, unstained by crime, adored by his troops as passionately as
Sylla himself, and destined to win a place for himself elsewhere in the
Pantheon of Rome's most distinguished men.

Sylla had measured the difficulty of the task which lay before him. But he
had an army behind him accustomed to victory, and recruited by thousands
of exiles who had fled from the rule of the democracy. He had now a fleet
to cover his passage; and he was watching the movements of his enemies
before deciding upon his own, when accident came suddenly to his help.
Cinna had gone down to Brindisi, intending himself to carry his army into
Greece, and to spare Italy the miseries of another civil war, by fighting
it out elsewhere. The expedition was unpopular with the soldiers, and
Cinna was killed in a mutiny. The democracy was thus left without a head,
and the moderate party in the city who desired peace and compromise used
the opportunity to elect two neutral consuls, Scipio and Norbanus. Sylla,
perhaps supposing the change of feeling to be more complete than it really
was, at once opened communications with them. But his terms were such as
he might have dictated if the popular party were already under his feet.
He intended to re-enter Rome with the glory of his conquests about him,
for revenge and a counter-revolution. The consuls replied with refusing to
treat with a rebel in arms, and with a command to disband his troops.

Sylla had lingered at Athens, collecting paintings and statues and
manuscripts, the rarest treasures on which he could lay his hands, to
decorate his Roman palace. On receiving the consuls' answer, he sailed for
Brindisi in the spring of 83, with forty thousand legionaries and a large
fleet. The south of Italy made no resistance, and he secured a standing-
ground where his friends could rally to him. They came in rapidly, some
for the cause which he represented, some for private hopes or animosities,
some as aspiring military adventurers, seeking the patronage of the
greatest soldier of the age. Among these last came Cnaeus Pompey,
afterward Pompey the Great, son of Pompey, surnamed Strabo, or the squint-
eyed, either from some personal deformity or because he had trimmed
between the two factions and was distrusted and hated by them both.

Cnaeus Pompey had been born in the same year with Cicero, and was now
twenty-three. He was a high--spirited ornamental youth, with soft melting
eyes, as good as he was beautiful, and so delightful to women that it was
said they all longed to bite him. The Pompeys had been hardly treated by
Cinna. The father had been charged with embezzlement. The family house in
Rome had been confiscated; the old Strabo had been killed; the son had
retired to his family estate in Picenum,[3] where he was living when Sylla
landed. To the young Roman chivalry Sylla was a hero of romance. Pompey
raised a legion out of his friends and tenants, scattered the few
companies that tried to stop him, and rushed to the side of the deliverer.
Others came, like Sergius Catiline or Oppianicus of Larino,[4] men steeped
in crime, stained with murder, incest, adultery, forgery, and meaning to
secure the fruits of their villanies by well-timed service. They were all
welcome, and Sylla was not particular. His progress was less rapid than it
promised to be at the outset. He easily defeated Norbanus; and Scipio's
troops, having an aristocratic leaven in them, deserted to him. But the
Italians, especially the Samnites, fought most desperately. The war lasted
for more than a year, Sylla slowly advancing. The Roman mob became
furious. They believed their cause betrayed, and were savage from fear and
disappointment. Suspected patricians were murdered: among them fell the
Pontifex Maximus, the venerable Scaevola. At length the contest ended in a
desperate fight under the walls of Rome itself on the 1st of November,
B.C. 82. The battle began at four in the afternoon, and lasted through the
night to the dawn of the following day. The popular army was at last cut
to pieces; a few thousand prisoners were taken, but they were murdered
afterward in cold blood. Young Marius killed himself, Sertorius fled to
Spain, and Sylla and the aristocracy were masters of Rome and Italy. Such
provincial towns as continued to resist were stormed and given up to
pillage, every male inhabitant being put to the sword. At Norba, in
Latium, the desperate citizens fired their own houses and perished by each
other's hands.

Sylla was under no illusions. He understood the problem which he had in
hand. He knew that the aristocracy were detested by nine tenths of the
people; he knew that they deserved to be detested; but they were at least
gentlemen by birth and breeding. The democrats, on the other hand, were
insolent upstarts, who, instead of being grateful for being allowed to
live and work and pay taxes and serve in the army, had dared to claim a
share in the government, had turned against their masters, and had set
their feet upon their necks. The miserable multitude were least to blame.
They were ignorant, and without leaders could be controlled easily. The
guilt and the danger lay with the men of wealth and intellect, the country
gentlemen, the minority of knights and patricians like Cinna, who had
taken the popular side and had deserted their own order. Their motives
mattered not; some might have acted from foolish enthusiasm, some from
personal ambition; but such traitors, from the Gracchi onward, had caused
all the mischief which had happened to the State. They were determined,
they were persevering. No concessions had satisfied them, and one demand
had been a prelude to another. There was no hope for an end of agitation
till every one of these men had been rooted out, their estates taken from
them, and their families destroyed.

To this remarkable work Sylla addressed himself, unconscious that he was
attempting an impossibility, that opinion could not be controlled by the
sword, and that for every enemy to the oligarchy that he killed he would
create twenty by his cruelty. Like Marius after the Octavian massacre, he
did not attempt to distinguish between degrees of culpability. Guilt was
not the question with him. His object was less to punish the past than to
prevent a recurrence of it, and moderate opposition was as objectionable
as fanaticism and frenzy. He had no intention of keeping power in his own
hands. Personal supremacy might end with himself, and he intended to
create institutions which would endure, in the form of a close senatorial
monopoly. But for his purpose it would be necessary to remove out of the
way every single person either in Rome or in the provinces who was in a
position to offer active resistance, and therefore for the moment he
required complete freedom of action. The Senate at his direction appointed
him dictator, and in this capacity he became absolute master of the life
and property of every man and woman in Italy. He might be impeached
afterward and his policy reversed, but while his office lasted he could do
what he pleased.

He at once outlawed every magistrate, every public servant of any kind,
civil or municipal, who had held office under the rule of Cinna. Lists
were drawn for him of the persons of wealth and consequence all over Italy
who belonged to the liberal party. He selected agents whom he could trust,
or supposed he could trust, to enter the names for each district. He
selected, for instance, Oppianicus of Larino, who inscribed individuals
whom he had already murdered, and their relations whose prosecution he
feared. It mattered little to Sylla who were included, if none escaped who
were really dangerous to him; and an order was issued for the slaughter of
the entire number, the confiscation of their property, and the division of
it between the informers and Sylla's friends and soldiers. Private
interest was thus called in to assist political animosity, and to
stimulate the zeal for assassination a reward of L500 was offered for the
head of any person whose name was in the schedule.

It was one of those deliberate acts, carried out with method and order,
which are possible only in countries in an advanced stage of civilization,
and which show how thin is the film spread over human ferocity by what is
called progress and culture. We read in every page of history of invasions
of hostile armies, of towns and villages destroyed and countries wasted
and populations perishing of misery; the simplest war brings a train of
horrors behind it; but we bear them with comparative equanimity. Personal
hatreds are not called out on such occasions. The actors in them are
neither necessarily nor generally fiends. The grass grows again on the
trampled fields. Peace returns, and we forget and forgive. The coldly
ordered massacres of selected victims in political and spiritual struggles
rise in a different order of feelings, and are remembered through all ages
with indignation and shame. The victims perish as the champions of
principles which survive through the changes of time. They are marked for
the sacrifice on account of their advocacy of a cause which to half
mankind is the cause of humanity. They are the martyrs of history, and the
record of atrocity rises again in immortal witness against the opinions
out of which it rose.

Patricians and plebeians, aristocrats and democrats, have alike stained
their hands with blood in the working out of the problem of politics. But
impartial history declares also that the crimes of the popular party have
in all ages been the lighter in degree, while in themselves they have more
to excuse them; and if the violent acts of revolutionists have been held
up more conspicuously for condemnation, it has been only because the fate
of noblemen and gentlemen has been more impressive to the imagination than
the fate of the peasant or the artisan. But the endurance of the
inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society. When the
people complain, said Mirabeau, the people are always right. The popular
cause has been the cause of the laborer struggling for a right to live and
breathe and think as a man. Aristocracies fight for wealth and power,
wealth which they waste upon luxury, and power which they abuse for
their own interests. Yet the cruelties of Marius were as far exceeded by
the cruelties of Sylla as the insurrection of the beggars of Holland was
exceeded by the bloody tribunal of the Duke of Alva, or as "the horrors of
the French Revolution" were exceeded by the massacre of the Huguenots two
hundred years before, for which the Revolution was the expiatory
atonement.

Four thousand seven hundred persons fell in the proscription of Sylla, all
men of education and fortune. The real crime of many of them was the
possession of an estate or a wife which a relative or a neighbor coveted.
The crime alleged against all was the opinion that the people of Rome and
Italy had rights which deserved consideration as well as the senators and
nobles. The liberal party were extinguished in their own blood. Their
estates were partitioned into a hundred and twenty thousand allotments,
which were distributed among Sylla's friends, or soldiers, or freedmen.
The land reform of the Gracchi was mockingly adopted to create a permanent
aristocratic garrison. There were no trials, there were no pardons. Common
report or private information was at once indictment and evidence, and
accusation was in itself condemnation.

The ground being thus cleared, the Dictator took up again his measures of
political reform. He did not attempt a second time to take the franchise
from the Italians. Romans and Italians he was ready to leave on the same
level, but it was to be a level of impotence. Rome was to be ruled by the
Senate, and as a first step, and to protect the Senate's dignity, he
enfranchised ten thousand slaves who had belonged to the proscribed
gentlemen, and formed them into a senatorial guard. Before departing for
the East he had doubled the Senate's numbers out of the patrician order.
Under Cinna the new members had not claimed their privilege, and had
probably been absent from Italy. They were now installed in their places,
and the power of the censors to revise the list and remove those who had
proved unworthy was taken away. The senators were thus peers for life,
peers in a single chamber which Sylla meant to make omnipotent. Vacancies
were to be supplied as before from the retiring consuls, praetors,
aediles, and quaestors. The form of a popular constitution would remain,
since the road into the council of State lay through the popular
elections. But to guard against popular favorites finding access to the
consulship, a provision was made that no person who had been a tribune of
the people could be chosen afterward to any other office.

The Senate's power depended on the withdrawal from the assembly of
citizens of the right of original legislation. So long as the citizens
could act immediately at the invitation of either consul or tribune, they
could repeal at their pleasure any arrangement which Sylla might
prescribe. As a matter of course, therefore, he re-enacted the condition
which restricted the initiation of laws to the Senate. The tribunes still
retained their veto, but a penalty was attached to the abuse of the veto,
the Senate being the judge in its own cause, and possessing a right to
depose a tribune.

In the Senate so reconstituted was thus centred a complete restrictive
control over the legislation and the administration. And this was not all.
The senators had been so corrupt in the use of their judicial functions
that Gracchus had disabled them from sitting in the law courts, and had
provided that the judges should be chosen in future from the equites. The
knights had been exceptionally pure in their office. Cicero challenged his
opponents on the trial of Verres[5] to find a single instance in which an
equestrian court could be found to have given a corrupt verdict during the
forty years for which their privilege survived. But their purity did not
save them, nor, alas! those who were to suffer by a reversion to the old
order. The equestrian courts were abolished: the senatorial courts were
reinstated. It might be hoped that the senators had profited by their
lesson, and for the future would be careful of their reputation.

Changes were made also in the modes of election to office. The College of
Priests had been originally a close corporation, which filled up its own
numbers. Democracy had thrown it open to competition, and given the choice
to the people. Sylla reverted to the old rule. Consuls like Marius and
Cinna, who had the confidence of the people, had been re-elected year
after year, and had been virtual kings. Sylla provided that ten years must
elapse between a first consulship and a second. Nor was any one to be a
consul who was not forty-three years old and had not passed already
through the lower senatorial offices of praetor or quaestor.

The assembly of the people had been shorn of its legislative powers. There
was no longer, therefore, any excuse for its meeting, save on special
occasions. To leave the tribunes power to call the citizens to the Forum
was to leave them the means of creating inconvenient agitation. It was
ordered, therefore, that the assembly should only come together at the
Senate's invitation. The free grants of corn, which filled the city with
idle vagrants, were abolished. Sylla never courted popularity, and never
shrank from fear of clamor.

The Senate was thus made omnipotent and irresponsible. It had the
appointment of all the governors of the provinces. It was surrounded by
its own body-guard. It had the administration completely in hand. The
members could be tried only by their peers, and were themselves judges of
every other order. No legal force was left anywhere to interfere with what
it might please them to command. A senator was not necessarily a
patrician, nor a patrician a senator. The Senate was,[6] or was to be as
time wore on, a body composed of men of any order who had secured the
suffrages of the people. But as the value of the prize became so vast, the
way to the possession of it was open practically to those only who had
wealth or interest. The elections came to be worked by organized
committees, and except in extraordinary circumstances no candidate could
expect success who had not the Senate's support, or who had not bought the
services of the managers, at a cost within the reach only of the reckless
spendthrift or the speculating millionaire.

What human foresight could do to prevent democracy from regaining the
ascendency, Sylla had thus accomplished. He had destroyed the opposition;
he had reorganized the constitution on the most strictly conservative
lines. He had built the fortress, as he said; it was now the Senate's part
to provide a garrison; and here it was, as Caesar said afterward, that
Sylla had made his great mistake. His arrangements were ingenious, and
many of them excellent; but the narrower the body to whose care the
government was entrusted, the more important became the question of the
composition of this body. The theory of election implied that they would
be the best that the Republic possessed; but Sylla must have been himself
conscious that fact and theory might be very far from corresponding.

The key of the situation was the army. As before, no troops were to be
maintained in Italy; but beyond the frontiers the provinces were held by
military force, and the only power which could rule the Empire was the
power which the army would obey. It was not for the Senate's sake that
Sylla's troops had followed him from Greece. It was from their personal
devotion to himself. What charm was there in this new constructed
aristocratic oligarchy, that distant legions should defer to it--more than
Sylla's legions had deferred to orders from Cinna and Carbo? Symptoms of
the danger from this quarter were already growing even under the
Dictator's own eyes, and at the height of his authority. Sertorius had
escaped the proscription. After wandering in Africa he made his way into
Spain, where, by his genius as a statesman and a soldier, he rose into a
position to defy the Senate and assert his independence. He organized the
peninsula after the Roman model; he raised armies, and defeated commander
after commander who was sent to reduce him. He revived in the Spaniards a
national enthusiasm for freedom. The Roman legionaries had their own
opinions, and those whose friends Sylla had murdered preferred Sertorius
and liberty to Rome and an aristocratic Senate. Unconquerable by honorable
means, Sertorius was poisoned at last. But his singular history suggests a
doubt whether, if the Syllan constitution had survived, other Sertoriuses
might not have sprung up in every province, and the Empire of Rome have
gone to pieces like the Macedonian. The one condition of the continuance
of the Roman dominion was the existence of a central authority which the
army as a profession could respect, and the traditionary reverence which
attached to the Roman Senate would scarcely have secured their
disinterested attachment to five hundred elderly rich men who had bought
their way into pre-eminence.

Sylla did not live to see the significance of the Sertorian revolt. He
experienced, however, himself, in a milder form, an explosion of military
sauciness. Young Pompey had been sent, after the occupation of Rome, to
settle Sicily and Africa. He did his work well and rapidly, and when it
was over he received orders from the Senate to dismiss his troops. An
order from Sylla Pompey would have obeyed; but what was the Senate, that
an ambitious brilliant youth with arms in his hands should send away an
army devoted to him and step back into common life? Sylla himself had to
smooth the ruffled plumes of his aspiring follower. He liked Pompey, he
was under obligations to him, and Pompey had not acted after all in a
manner so very unlike his own. He summoned him home, but he gave him a
triumph for his African conquests, and allowed him to call himself by the
title of "_Magnus_," or "_The Great_." Pompey was a promising
soldier, without political ambition, and was worth an effort to secure. To
prevent the risk of a second act of insubordination, Sylla made personal
arrangements to attach Pompey directly to himself. He had a step-daughter,
named Aemilia. She was already married, and was pregnant. Pompey too was
married to Antistia, a lady of good family; but domestic ties were not
allowed to stand in the way of higher objects. Nor did it matter that
Antistia's father had been murdered by the Roman populace for taking
Sylla's side, or that her mother had gone mad and destroyed herself, on
her husband's horrible death. Late Republican Rome was not troubled with
sentiment. Sylla invited Pompey to divorce Antistia and marry Aemilia.
Pompey complied. Antistia was sent away. Aemilia was divorced from her
husband, and was brought into Pompey's house, where she immediately died.

In another young man of high rank, whom Sylla attempted to attach to
himself by similar means, he found less complaisance. Caesar was now
eighteen, his daughter Julia having been lately born. He had seen his
party ruined, his father-in-law and young Marius killed, and his nearest
friends dispersed or murdered. He had himself for a time escaped
proscription; but the Dictator had his eye on him, and Sylla had seen
something in "the youth with the loose girdle" which struck him as
remarkable. Closely connected though Caesar was both with Cinna and
Marius, Sylla did not wish to kill him if he could help it. There was a
cool calculation in his cruelties. The existing generation of democrats
was incurable, but he knew that the stability of the new constitution must
depend on his being able to conciliate the intellect and energy of the
next. Making a favor perhaps of his clemency, he proposed to Caesar to
break with his liberal associates, divorce Cinna's daughter, and take such
a wife as he would himself provide. If Pompey had complied, who had made a
position of his own, much more might it be expected that Caesar would
comply. Yet Caesar answered with a distinct and unhesitating refusal. The
terrible Sylla, in the fulness of his strength, after desolating half the
homes in Italy, after revolutionizing all Roman society, from the
peasant's cottage in the Apennines to the senate-house itself, was defied
by a mere boy! Throughout his career Caesar displayed always a singular
indifference to life. He had no sentimental passion about him, no Byronic
mock-heroics. He had not much belief either in God or the gods. On all
such questions he observed from first to last a profound silence. But one
conviction he had. He intended, if he was to live at all, to live master
of himself in matters which belonged to himself. Sylla might kill him if
he so pleased. It was better to die than to put away a wife who was the
mother of his child, and to marry some other woman at a dictator's
bidding. Life on such terms was not worth keeping.

So proud a bearing may have commanded Sylla's admiration, but it taught
him, also, that a young man capable of assuming an attitude so bold might
be dangerous to the rickety institutions which he had constructed so
carefully. He tried coercion. He deprived Caesar of his priesthood. He
took his wife's dowry from him, and confiscated the estate which he had
inherited from his father. When this produced no effect, the rebellious
youth was made over to the assassins, and a price was set upon his head.
He fled into concealment. He was discovered once, and escaped only by
bribing Sylla's satellites. His fate would soon have overtaken him, but he
had powerful relations, whom Sylla did not care to offend. Aurelius Cotta,
who was perhaps his mother's brother, Mamercus Aemilius, a distinguished
patrician, and singularly also the College of the Vestal Virgins,
interceded for his pardon. The Dictator consented at last, but with
prophetic reluctance. "Take him," he said at length, "since you will have
it so--but I would have you know that the youth for whom you are so
earnest will one day overthrow the aristocracy, for whom you and I have
fought so hardly; in this young Caesar there are many Mariuses." [7]
Caesar, not trusting too much to Sylla's forbearance, at once left Italy,
and joined the army in Asia. The little party of young men who had grown
up together now separated, to meet in the future on altered terms. Caesar
held to his inherited convictions, remaining constant through good and
evil to the cause of his uncle Marius. His companion Cicero, now ripening
into manhood, chose the other side. With his talents for his inheritance,
and confident in the consciousness of power, but with weak health and a
neck as thin as a woman's, Cicero felt that he had a future before him,
but that his successes must be won by other weapons than arms. He chose
the bar for his profession; he resolved to make his way into popularity as
a pleader before the Senate courts and in the Forum. He looked to the
Senate itself as the ultimate object of his ambition. There alone he could
hope to be distinguished, if distinguished he was to be.

Cicero, however, was no more inclined than Caesar to be subservient to
Sylla, as he took an early opportunity of showing. It was to the cause of
the constitution, and not to the person of the Dictator, that Cicero had
attached himself, and he, too, ventured to give free expression to his
thoughts when free speech was still dangerous.

Sylla's career was drawing to its close, and the end was not the least
remarkable feature of it. On him had fallen the odium of the proscription
and the stain of the massacres. The sooner the senators could be detached
from the soldier who had saved them from destruction, the better chance
they would have of conciliating quiet people on whose support they must
eventually rely. Sylla himself felt the position; and having completed
what he had undertaken, with a half-pitying, half-contemptuous self-
abandonment he executed what from the first he had intended--he resigned
the dictatorship, and became a private citizen again, amusing the leisure
of his age, as he had abused the leisure of his youth, with theatres and
actresses and dinner-parties. He too, like so many of the great Romans,
was indifferent to life; of power for the sake of power he was entirely
careless; and if his retirement had been more dangerous to him than it
really was, he probably would not have postponed it. He was a person of
singular character, and not without many qualities which were really
admirable. He was free from any touch of charlatanry. He was true, simple,
and unaffected, and even without ambition in the mean and personal sense.
His fault, which he would have denied to be a fault, was that he had a
patrician disdain of mobs and suffrages and the cant of popular liberty.
The type repeats itself era after era. Sylla was but Graham of Claverhouse
in a Roman dress and with an ampler stage. His courage in laying down his
authority has been often commented on, but the risk which he incurred was
insignificant. There was in Rome neither soldier nor statesman who could
for a moment be placed in competition with Sylla, and he was so
passionately loved by the army, he was so sure of the support of his
comrades, whom he had quartered on the proscribed lands, and who, for
their own interest's sake, would resist attempts at counter-revolution,
that he knew that if an emergency arose he had but to lift his finger to
reinstate himself in command. Of assassination he was in no greater danger
than when dictator, while the temptation to assassinate him was less. His
influence was practically undiminished, and as long as he lived he
remained, and could not but remain, the first person in the Republic.

Some license of speech he was, of course, prepared for, but it required no
small courage to make a public attack either on himself or his dependants,
and it was therefore most creditable to Cicero that his first speech of
importance was directed against the Dictator's immediate friends, and was
an exposure of the iniquities of the proscription. Cicero no doubt knew
that there would be no surer road to favor with the Roman multitude than
by denouncing Sylla's followers, and that, young and unknown as he was,
his insignificance might protect him, however far he ventured. But he had
taken the Senate's side. From first to last he had approved of the
reactionary constitution, and had only condemned the ruthless methods by
which it had been established. He never sought the popularity of a
demagogue, or appealed to popular passions, or attempted to create a
prejudice against the aristocracy, into whose ranks he intended to make
his way. He expressed the opinions of the respectable middle classes, who
had no sympathy with revolutionists, but who dreaded soldiers and military
rule and confiscations of property.

The occasion on which Cicero came forward was characteristic of the time.
Sextus Roscius was a country gentleman of good position, residing near
Ameria, in Umbria. He had been assassinated when on a visit to Rome by two
of his relations, who wished to get possession of his estate. The
proscription was over, and the list had been closed; but Roscius's name
was surreptitiously entered upon it, with the help of Sylla's favorite
freedman, Chrysogonus. The assassins obtained an acknowledgment of their
claims, and they and Chrysogonus divided the spoils. Sextus Roscius was
entirely innocent. He had taken no part in politics at all. He had left a
son who was his natural heir, and the township of Ameria sent up a
petition to Sylla remonstrating against so iniquitous a robbery. The
conspirators, finding themselves in danger of losing the reward of their
crime, shifted their ground. They denied that they had themselves killed
Sextus Roscius. They said that the son had done it, and they charged him
with parricide. Witnesses were easily provided. No influential pleader, it
was justly supposed, would venture into antagonism with Sylla's favorite
and appear for the defence. Cicero heard of the case, however, and used
the opportunity to bring himself into notice. He advocated young Roscius's
cause with skill and courage. He told the whole story in court without
disguise. He did not blame Sylla. He compared Sylla to Jupiter Optimus
Maximus, who was sovereign of the universe, and on the whole a good
sovereign, but with so much business on his hands that he had not time to
look into details. But Cicero denounced Chrysogonus as an accomplice in an
act of atrocious villainy. The court took the same view, and the rising
orator had the honor of clearing the reputation of the injured youth, and
of recovering his property for him.

Sylla showed no resentment, and probably felt none. He lived for a year
after his retirement, and died 78 B.C., being occupied at the moment in
writing his memoirs, which have been unfortunately lost. He was buried
gorgeously in the Campus Martius, among the old kings of Rome. The
aristocrats breathed freely when delivered from his overpowering presence,
and the constitution which he had set upon its feet was now to be tried.

[1] "Nigris vegetisque oculis."--Suetonius.

[2] "Ac primum illud tempus familiaritatis et consuetudinis, quae mihi cum
    illo, quae fratri meo, quae Caio Varroni, consobrino nostro, ab omnium
    nostrum adolescentia fuit, praetermitto."--Cicero, _De Provinciis
    Consularibus_, 17. Cicero was certainly speaking of a time which
    preceded Sylla's dictatorship, for Caesar left Rome immediately after
    it, and when he came back he attached himself to the political party
    to which Cicero was most opposed.

[3] On the Adriatic, between Anconia and Pescara.

[4] See, for the story of Oppianicus, the remarkable speech of Cicero,
    _Pro Cluentio_.

[5] Appian, on the other hand, says that the courts of the equites had
    been more corrupt than the senatorial courts.--_De Bello Civili,
    i_. 22. Cicero was perhaps prejudiced in favor of his own order,
    but a contemporary statement thus publicly made is far more likely to
    be trustworthy.

[6] Sylla had himself nominated a large number of senators.

[7] So says Suetonius, reporting the traditions of the following century;
    but the authority is doubtful, and the story, like so many others, is
    perhaps apocryphal.




CHAPTER IX.


The able men of the democracy had fallen in the proscription. Sertorius,
the only eminent surviving soldier belonging to them, was away, making
himself independent in Spain. The rest were all killed. But the Senate,
too, had lost in Sylla the single statesman that they possessed. They were
a body of mediocrities, left with absolute power in their hands, secure as
they supposed from further interference, and able to return to those
pleasant occupations which for a time had been so rudely interrupted.
Sertorius was an awkward problem with which Pompey might perhaps be
entrusted to deal. No one knew as yet what stuff might be in Pompey. He
was for the present sunning himself in his military splendors; too young
to come forward as a politician, and destitute, so far as appeared, of
political ambition. If Pompey promised to be docile, he might be turned to
use at a proper time; but the aristocracy had seen too much of successful
military commanders, and were in no hurry to give opportunities of
distinction to a youth who had so saucily defied them. Sertorius was far
off, and could be dealt with at leisure.

In his defence of Roscius, Cicero had given an admonition to the noble
lords that unless they mended their ways they could not look for any long
continuance.[1] They regarded Cicero perhaps, if they heard what he
said of them, as an inexperienced young man, who would understand better
by and by of what materials the world was made. There had been excitement
and anxiety enough. Conservatism was in power again. Fine gentlemen could
once more lounge in their clubs, amuse themselves with their fish-ponds
and horses and mistresses, devise new and ever new means of getting money
and spending it, and leave the Roman Empire for the present to govern
itself.

The leading public men belonging to the party in power had all served in
some capacity or other with Sylla or under him. Of those whose names
deserve particular mention there were at most five.

Licinius Lucullus had been a special favorite of Sylla. The Dictator left
him his executor, with the charge of his manuscripts. Lucullus was a
commoner, but of consular family, and a thorough-bred aristocrat. He had
endeared himself to Sylla by a languid talent which could rouse itself
when necessary into brilliant activity, by the easy culture of a polished
man of rank, and by a genius for luxury which his admirers followed at a
distance, imitating their master but hopeless of overtaking him.

Caecilius Metellus, son of the Metellus whom Marius had superseded in
Africa, had been consul with Sylla in 80 B.C. He was now serving in Spain
against Sertorius, and was being gradually driven out of the peninsula.

Lutatius Catulus was a proud but honest patrician, with the conceit of his
order, but without their vices. His father, who had been Marius's
colleague, and had been defeated by the Cimbri, had killed himself during
the Marian revolution. The son had escaped, and was one of the consuls at
the time of Sylla's death.

More noticeable than either of these was Marcus Crassus, a figure
singularly representative, of plebeian family, but a family long adopted
into the closest circle of the aristocracy, the leader and impersonation
of the great moneyed classes in Rome. Wealth had for several generations
been the characteristic of the Crassi. They had the instinct and the
temperament which in civilized ages take to money-making as a natural
occupation. In politics they aimed at being on the successful side; but
living as they did in an era of revolutions, they were surprised
occasionally in unpleasant situations. Crassus the rich, father of Marcus,
had committed himself against Marius, and had been allowed the privilege
of being his own executioner. Marcus himself, who was a little older than
Cicero, took refuge in Sylla's camp. He made himself useful to the
Dictator by his genius for finance, and in return he was enabled to amass
an enormous fortune for himself out of the proscriptions. His eye for
business reached over the whole Roman Empire. He was banker, speculator,
contractor, merchant. He lent money to the spendthrift young lords, but
with sound securities and at usurious interest. He had an army of slaves,
but these slaves were not ignorant field-hands; they were skilled workmen
in all arts and trades, whose labors he turned to profit in building
streets and palaces. Thus all that he touched turned to gold. He was the
wealthiest single individual in the whole Empire, the acknowledged head of
the business world of Rome.

The last person who need be noted was Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, the father
of the future colleague of Augustus and Antony. Lepidus, too, had been an
officer of Sylla's. He had been rewarded for his services by the
government of Sicily, and when Sylla died was the second consul with
Catulus. It was said against him that, like so many other governors, he
had enriched himself by tyrannizing over his Sicilian subjects. His
extortions had been notorious; he was threatened with prosecution as soon
as his consulship should expire; and the adventure to which he was about
to commit himself was undertaken, so the aristocrats afterward maintained,
in despair of an acquittal. Lepidus's side of the story was never told,
but another side it certainly had. Though one of Sylla's generals, he had
married the daughter of the tribune Saturninus. He had been elected consul
by a very large majority against the wishes of the Senate, and was
suspected of holding popular opinions. It may be that the prosecution was
an after-thought of revenge, and that Lepidus was to have been tried
before a senatorial jury already determined to find him guilty.

Among these men lay the fortunes of Rome when the departure of their chief
left the aristocrats masters of their own destiny.

During this time Caesar had been serving his apprenticeship as a soldier.
The motley forces which Mithridates had commanded had not all submitted on
the king's surrender to Sylla. Squadrons of pirates hung yet about the
smaller islands in the Aegean. Lesbos was occupied by adventurers who were
fighting for their own hand, and the praetor Minucius Thermus had been
sent to clear the seas and extirpate these nests of brigands. To Thermus
Caesar had attached himself. The praetor, finding that his fleet was not
strong enough for the work, found it necessary to apply to Nicomedes, the
allied sovereign of the adjoining kingdom of Bithynia, to supply him with
a few additional vessels; and Caesar, soon after his arrival, was
despatched on this commission to the Bithynian court.

Long afterward, when Roman cultivated society had come to hate Caesar, and
any scandal was welcome to them which would make him odious, it was
reported that on this occasion he entered into certain relations with
Nicomedes of a kind indisputably common at the time in the highest
patrician circles. The value of such a charge in political controversy was
considerable, for whether true or false it was certain to be believed; and
similar accusations were flung indiscriminately, so Cicero says, at the
reputation of every eminent person whom it was desirable to stain, if his
personal appearance gave the story any air of probability.[2]

The disposition to believe evil of men who have risen a few degrees above
their contemporaries is a feature of human nature as common as it is base;
and when to envy there are added fear and hatred, malicious anecdotes
spring like mushrooms in a forcing-pit. But gossip is not evidence, nor
does it become evidence because it is in Latin and has been repeated
through many generations. The strength of a chain is no greater than the
strength of its first link, and the adhesive character of calumny proves
only that the inclination of average men to believe the worst of great men
is the same in all ages. This particular accusation against Caesar gains,
perhaps, a certain credibility from the admission that it was the only
occasion on which anything of the kind could be alleged against him. On
the other hand, it was unheard of for near a quarter of a century. It was
produced in Rome in the midst of a furious political contest. No witnesses
were forthcoming; no one who had been at Bithynia at the time; no one who
ever pretended to have original knowledge of the truth of the story.
Caesar himself passed it by with disdain, or alluded to it, if forced upon
his notice, with contemptuous disgust.

The Bithynian mission was otherwise successful. He brought the ships to
Thermus. He distinguished himself personally in the storming of Mitylene,
and won the oak-wreath, the Victoria Cross of the Roman army. Still
pursuing the same career, Caesar next accompanied Servilius Isauricus in a
campaign against the horde of pirates, afterwards so famous, that was
forming itself among the creeks and river-mouths of Cilicia. The
advantages which Servilius obtained over them were considerable enough to
deserve a triumph, but were barren of result. The news that Sylla was dead
reached the army while still in the field; and the danger of appearing in
Rome being over, Caesar at once left Cilicia and went back to his family.
Other causes are said to have contributed to hasten his return. A plot had
been formed, with the consul Lepidus at its head, to undo Sylla's laws and
restore the constitution of the Gracchi. Caesar had been urged by letter
to take part in the movement, and he may have hurried home either to
examine the prospects of success or perhaps to prevent an attempt which,
under the circumstances, he might think criminal and useless. Lepidus was
not a wise man, though he may have been an honest one. The aristocracy had
not yet proved that they were incapable of reform. It might be that they
would digest their lesson after all, and that for a generation to come no
more revolutions would be necessary.

[Sidenote: B.C. 77. Caesar aet. 23.]
Caesar at all events declined to connect himself with this new adventure.
He came to Rome, looked at what was going on, and refused to have anything
to do with it. The experiment was tried without him. Young Cinna, his
brother-in-law, joined Lepidus. Together they raised a force in Etruria,
and marched on Rome. They made their way into the city, but were met in
the Campus Martius by Pompey and other consul, Catulus, at the head of
some of Sylla's old troops; and an abortive enterprise, which, if it had
succeeded, would probably have been mischievous, was ended almost as soon
as it began. The two leaders escaped. Cinna joined Sertorius in Spain.
Lepidus made his way to Sardinia, where in the next year he died, leaving
a son to play the game of democracy under more brilliant auspices.

[Sidenote: Caesar aet. 24.]
Caesar meanwhile felt his way, as Cicero was doing in the law-courts,
attacking the practical abuses which the Roman administration was
generating everywhere. Cornelius Dolabella had been placed by Sylla in
command of Macedonia. His father had been a friend of Saturninus, and had
fallen at his side. The son had gone over to the aristocracy, and for this
reason was perhaps an object of aversion to the younger liberals. The
Macedonians pursued him, when his government had expired, with a list of
grievances of the usual kind. Young Caesar took up their cause, and
prosecuted him. Dolabella was a favorite of the Senate; he had been
allowed a triumph for his services, and the aristocracy adopted his cause
as their own. The unpractised orator was opposed at the trial by his
kinsman Aurelius Cotta and the most celebrated pleaders in Rome. To have
crossed swords with such opponents was a dangerous honor for him; success
against them was not to be expected, and Caesar was not yet master of his
art. Dolabella was acquitted. Party feeling had perhaps entered into the
accusation. Caesar found it prudent to retire again from the scene. There
were but two roads to eminence in Rome--oratory and service in the army.
He had no prospect of public employment from the present administration,
and the platform alone was open to him. Plain words with a plain meaning
in them no longer carried weight with a people who expected an orator to
delight as well as instruct them. The use of the tongue had become a
special branch of a statesman's education, and Caesar, feeling his
deficiency, used his leisure to put himself in training and to go to
school at Rhodes with the then celebrated Apollonius Molo. He had
recovered his property and his priesthood, and was evidently in no want of
money. He travelled with the retinue of a man of rank, and on his way to
Rhodes he fell in with an adventure which may be something more than
legend. When he was crossing the Aegean his vessel is said to have been
taken by pirates. They carried him to Pharmacusa,[3] an island off the
Carian coast, which was then in their possession, and there he was
detained for six weeks with three of his attendants, while the rest of his
servants were sent to the nearest Roman station to raise his ransom. The
pirates treated him with politeness. He joined in their sports, played
games with them, looked into their habits, and amused himself with them as
well as he could, frankly telling them at the same time that they would
all be hanged.

The ransom, a very large one, about L10,000, was brought and paid. Caesar
was set upon the mainland near Miletus, where, without a moment's delay,
he collected some armed vessels, returned to the island, seized the whole
crew while they were dividing their plunder, and took them away to
Pergamus, the seat of government in the Asiatic province, where they were
convicted and crucified. Clemency was not a Roman characteristic. It was
therefore noted with some surprise that Caesar interceded to mitigate the
severity of the punishment. The poor wretches were strangled before they
were stretched on their crosses, and were spared the prolongation of their
torture. The pirate business being disposed of, he resumed his journey to
Rhodes, and there he continued for two years practising gesture and
expression under the tuition of the great master.

[Sidenote: B.C. 78-72]
During this time the government of Rome was making progress in again
demonstrating its unfitness for the duties which were laid upon it, and
sowing the seeds which in a few years were to ripen into a harvest so
remarkable. Two alternatives only lay before the Roman dominion--either
disruption or the abolition of the constitution. If the aristocracy could
not govern, still less could the mob govern. The Latin race was scattered
over the basin of the Mediterranean, no longer bound by any special ties
to Rome or Italy, each man of it individually vigorous and  energetic, and
bent before all things on making his own fortune. If no tolerable
administration was provided from home, their obvious course could only be
to identify themselves with local interests and nationalities and make
themselves severally independent, as Sertorius was doing in Spain.
Sertorius was at last disposed of, but by methods promising ill for the
future. He beat Metellus till Metellus could do no more against him. The
all-victorious Pompey was sent at last to win victories and gain nothing
by them. Six campaigns led to no result and the difficulty was only
removed at last by treachery and assassination.

A more extraordinary and more disgraceful phenomenon was the growth of
piracy, with the skirts of which Caesar had come in contact at Pharmacusa.
The Romans had become masters of the world, only that the sea from one end
of their dominions to the other should be patrolled by organized rovers.
For many years, as Roman commerce extended, the Mediterranean had become a
profitable field of enterprise for those gentry. From every country which
they had overrun or occupied the conquests of the Romans had let loose
swarms of restless patriots who, if they could not save the liberties of
their own countries, could prey upon the oppressor. Illyrians from the
Adriatic, Greeks from the islands and the Asiatic ports, Syrians,
Egyptians, Africans, Spaniards, Gauls, and disaffected Italians, trained
many of them to the sea from their childhood, took to the water in their
light galleys with all the world before them. Under most circumstances
society is protected against thieves by their inability to combine. But
the pirates of the Mediterranean had learnt from the Romans the advantage
of union, and had drifted into a vast confederation. Cilicia was their
head-quarters. Servilius had checked them for a time, but the Roman Senate
was too eager for a revenue, and the Roman governors and farmers of the
taxes were too bent upon filling their private purses, to allow fleets to
be maintained in the provincial harbors adequate to keep the peace. When
Servilius retired, the pirates reoccupied their old haunts. The Cilician
forests furnished them with ship timber. The mountain gorges provided
inaccessible storehouses for plunder. Crete was completely in their hands
also, and they had secret friends along the entire Mediterranean shores.
They grew at last into a thousand sail, divided into squadrons under
separate commanders. They were admirably armed. They roved over the waters
at their pleasure, attacking islands or commercial ports, plundering
temples and warehouses, arresting every trading vessel they encountered,
till at last no Roman could go abroad on business save during the winter
storms, when the sea was comparatively clear. They flaunted their sails in
front of Ostia itself; they landed in their boats at the villas on the
Italian coast, carrying off lords and ladies, and holding them to ransom.
They levied black-mail at their pleasure. The wretched provincials had
paid their taxes to Rome in exchange for promised defence, and no defence
was provided.[4] The revenue which ought to have been spent on the
protection of the Empire a few patricians were dividing among themselves.
The pirates had even marts in different islands, where their prisoners
were sold to the slave-dealers; and for fifteen years nothing was done or
even attempted to put an end to so preposterous an enormity. The ease with
which these buccaneers of the old world were eventually suppressed proved
conclusively that they existed by connivance. It was discovered at last
that large sums had been sent regularly from Crete to some of the most
distinguished members of the aristocracy. The Senate was again the same
body which it was found by Jugurtha, and the present generation were
happier than their fathers in that larger and richer fields were now open
to their operation.

While the pirates were at work on the extremities, the senators in the
provinces were working systematically, squeezing the people as one might
squeeze a sponge of all the wealth that could be drained out of them.
After the failure of Lepidus the elections in Rome were wholely in the
Senate's hands. Such independence as had not been crushed was corrupted.
The aristocracy divided the consulships, praetorships, and quaestorships
among themselves, and after the year of office the provincial prizes were
then distributed. Of the nature of their government a picture has been
left by Cicero, himself one of the senatorial party, and certainly not to
be suspected of having represented it as worse than it was in the famous
prosecution of Verres. There is nothing to show that Verres was worse than
the rest of his order. Piso, Gabinius, and many others equalled or perhaps
excelled him in villainy. But historical fate required a victim, and the
unfortunate wretch has been selected out of the crowd individually to
illustrate his class.

By family he was connected with Sylla. His father was noted as an election
manager at the Comitia. The son had been attached to Carbo when the
democrats were in power, but he had deserted them on Sylla's return. He
had made himself useful in the proscriptions, and had scraped together a
considerable fortune. He was employed afterward in Greece and Asia, where
he distinguished himself by fresh rapacity and by the gross brutality with
which he abused an innocent lady. With the wealth which he had extorted or
stolen he bought his way into the praetorship, probably with his father's
help; he then became a senator, and was sent to govern Sicily--a place
which had already suffered, so the Senate said, from the malpractices of
Lepidus, and needing, therefore, to be generously dealt with.

Verres held his province for three years. He was supreme judge in all
civil and criminal cases. He negotiated with the parties to every suit
which was brought before him, and then sold his decisions. He confiscated
estates on fictitious accusations. The island was rich in works of art.
Verres had a taste for such things, and seized without scruple the finest
productions of Praxiteles or Zeuxis. If those who were wronged dared to
complain, they were sent to forced labor at the quarries, or, as dead men
tell no tales, were put out of the world. He had an understanding with the
pirates, which throws light upon the secret of their impunity. A shipful
of them were brought into Messina as prisoners, and were sentenced to be
executed. A handsome bribe was paid to Verres, and a number of Sicilians
whom he wished out of the way were brought out, veiled and gagged that
they might not be recognized, and were hanged as the pirates' substitutes.
By these methods Verres was accused of having gathered out of Sicily three
quarters of a million of our money. Two thirds he calculated on having to
spend in corrupting the consuls and the court before which he might be
prosecuted. The rest he would be able to save, and with the help of it to
follow his career of greatness through the highest offices of state. Thus
he had gone on upon his way, secure, as he supposed, of impunity. One of
the consuls for the year and the consuls for the year which was to come
next were pledged to support him. The judges would be exclusively
senators, each of whom might require assistance in a similar situation.
The chance of justice on these occasions was so desperate that the
provincials preferred usually to bear their wrongs in silence rather than
expose themselves to expense and danger for almost certain failure. But,
as Cicero said, the whole world inside the ocean was ringing with the
infamy of the Roman senatorial tribunals.

Cicero, whose honest wish was to save the Senate from itself, determined
to make use of Verres's conduct to shame the courts into honesty. Every
difficulty was thrown in his way. He went in person to Sicily to procure
evidence. He was browbeaten and threatened with violence. The witnesses
were intimidated, and in some instances were murdered. The technical
ingenuities of Roman law were exhausted to shield the culprit. The
accident that the second consul had a conscience alone enabled Cicero to
force the criminal to the bar. But the picture which Cicero drew and laid
before the people, proved as it was to every detail, and admitting of no
answer save that other governors had been equally iniquitous and had
escaped unpunished, created a storm which the Senate dared not encounter.
Verres dropped his defence and fled, and part of his spoils was recovered.
There was no shame in the aristocracy to prevent them from committing
crimes: there was enough to make them abandon a comrade who was so
unfortunate as to be detected and brought to justice.

This was the state of the Roman dominion under the constitution as
reformed by Sylla: the Spanish Peninsula recovered by murder to temporary
submission; the sea abandoned to buccaneers; decent industrious people in
the provinces given over to have their fortunes stolen from them, their
daughters dishonored, and themselves beaten or killed if they complained,
by a set of wolves calling themselves Roman senators--and these scenes not
localized to any one unhappy district, but extending through the entire
civilized part of mankind. There was no hope for these unhappy people, for
they were under the tyranny of a dead hand. A bad king is like a bad
season. The next may bring improvement, or if his rule is wholly
intolerable he can be deposed. Under a bad constitution no such change is
possible. It can be ended only by a revolution. Republican Rome had become
an Imperial State--she had taken upon herself the guardianship of every
country in the world where the human race was industrious and prosperous,
and she was discharging her great trust by sacrificing them to the luxury
and ambition of a few hundred scandalous politicians.

[Sidenote: B.C. 74.]
The nature of man is so constructed that a constitution so administered
must collapse. It generates faction within, it invites enemies from
without. While Sertorius was defying the Senate in Spain and the pirates
were buying its connivance in the Mediterranean, Mithridates started into
life again in Pontus. Sylla had beaten him into submission; but Sylla was
gone, and no one was left to take Sylla's place. The watchful barbarian
had his correspondents in Rome, and knew everything that was passing
there. He saw that he had little to fear by trying the issue with the
Romans once more. He made himself master of Armenia. In the corsair fleet
he had an ally ready made. The Roman province in Asia Minor, driven to
despair by the villainy of its governors, was ripe for revolt. Mithridates
rose, and but for the young Caesar would a second time have driven the
Romans out of Asia. Caesar, in the midst of his rhetorical studies at
Rhodes, heard the mutterings of the coming storm. Deserting Apollonius's
lecture-room, he crossed over to the continent, raised a corps of
volunteers, and held Caria to its allegiance; but Mithridates possessed
himself easily of the interior kingdoms and of the whole valley of the
Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. The Black Sea was again covered with his
ships. He defeated Cotta in a naval battle, drove him through the
Bosphorus, and destroyed the Roman squadron. The Senate exerted itself at
last. Lucullus, Sylla's friend, the only moderately able man that the
aristocracy had among them, was sent to encounter him. Lucullus had been
trained in a good school, and the superiority of the drilled Roman legions
when tolerably led again easily asserted itself. Mithridates was forced
back into the Armenian hills. The Black Sea was swept clear, and eight
thousand of the buccaneers were killed at Sinope. Lucullus pursued the
retreating prince across the Euphrates, won victories, took cities and
pillaged them. He reached Lake Van, he marched round Mount Ararat and
advanced to Artaxata. But Asia was a scene of dangerous temptation for a
Roman commander. Cicero, though he did not name Lucullus, was
transparently alluding to him when he told the assembly in the Forum that
Rome had made herself abhorred throughout the world by the violence and
avarice of her generals. No temple had been so sacred, no city so
venerable, no houses so well protected, as to be secure from their
voracity. Occasions of war had been caught at with rich communities where
plunder was the only object. The proconsuls could win battles, but they
could not keep their hands from off the treasures of their allies and
subjects.[5]

Lucullus was splendid in his rapacity, and amidst his victories he had
amassed the largest fortune which had yet belonged to patrician or
commoner, except Crassus. Nothing came amiss to him. He had sold the
commissions in his army. He had taken money out of the treasury for the
expenses of the campaign. Part he had spent in bribing the administration
to prolong his command beyond the usual time; the rest he had left in the
city to accumulate for himself at interest.[6] He lived on the plunder
of friend and foe, and the defeat of Mithridates was never more than a
second object to him. The one steady purpose in which he never varied was
to pile up gold and jewels.

An army so organized and so employed soon loses efficiency and coherence.
The legions, perhaps considering that they were not allowed a fair share
of the spoil, mutinied. The disaffection was headed by young Publius
Clodius, whose sister Lucullus had married. The campaign which had opened
brilliantly ended ignominiously. The Romans had to fall back behind
Pontus, closely pursued by Mithridates. Lucullus stood on the defensive
till he was recalled, and he then returned to Rome to lounge away the
remainder of his days in voluptuous magnificence.

While Lucullus was making his fortune in the East, a spurt of
insurrectionary fire had broken out in Italy. The agrarian laws and
Sylla's proscriptions and confiscations had restored the numbers of the
small proprietors, but the statesmen who had been so eager for their
reinstatement were fighting against tendencies too strong for them. Life
on the farm, like life in the city, was growing yearly more extravagant.
[7] The small peasants fell into debt. Sylla's soldiers were expensive,
and became embarrassed. Thus the small properties artificially
re-established were falling rapidly again into the market. The great
landowners bought them up, and Italy was once more lapsing to territorial
magnates cultivating their estates by slaves.

Vast gangs of slave laborers were thus still dispersed over the peninsula,
while others in large numbers were purchased and trained for the amusement
of the metropolis. Society in Rome, enervated as it was by vicious
pleasures, craved continually for new excitements. Sensuality is a near
relation of cruelty; and the more savage the entertainments, the more
delightful they were to the curled and scented patricians who had lost the
taste for finer enjoyments. Combats of wild beasts were at first
sufficient for them, but to see men kill each other gave a keener delight;
and out of the thousands of youths who were sent over annually by the
provincial governors, or were purchased from the pirates by the
slave-dealers, the most promising were selected for the arena. Each great
noble had his training establishment of gladiators, and was as vain of
their prowess as of his race-horses. The schools of Capua were the most
celebrated; and nothing so recommended a candidate for the consulship to
the electors as the production of a few pairs of Capuan swords-men in the
circus.

[Sidenote: B.C. 72-70.]
These young men had hitherto performed their duties with more
submissiveness than might have been expected, and had slaughtered one
another in the most approved methods. But the horse knows by the hand on
his rein whether he has a fool for his rider. The gladiators in the
schools and the slaves on the plantations could not be kept wholly
ignorant of the character of their rulers. They were aware that the seas
were held by their friends the pirates, and that their masters were again
being beaten out of Asia, from which many of themselves had been carried
off. They began to ask themselves why men who could use their swords
should be slaves when their comrades and kindred were up and fighting for
freedom. They found a leader in a young Thracian robber chief, named
Spartacus, who was destined for the amphitheatre, and who preferred
meeting his masters in the field to killing his friends to make a Roman
holiday. Spartacus, with two hundred of his companions, burst out from the
Capuan "stable," seized their arms, and made their way into the crater of
Vesuvius, which was then, after the long sleep of the volcano, a dense
jungle of wild vines. The slaves from the adjoining plantations deserted
and joined them. The fire spread, Spartacus proclaimed universal
emancipation, and in a few weeks was at the head of an army with which he
overran Italy to the foot of the Alps, defeated consuls and praetors,
captured the eagles of the legions, wasted the farms of the noble lords,
and for two years held his ground against all that Rome could do.

Of all the illustrations of the Senate's incapacity, the slave
insurrection was perhaps the worst. It was put down at last after
desperate exertions by Crassus and Pompey. Spartacus was killed, and six
thousand of his followers were impaled at various points on the sides of
the high-roads, that the slaves might have before their eyes examples of
the effect of disobedience. The immediate peril was over; but another
symptom had appeared of the social disease which would soon end in death
unless some remedy could be found. The nation was still strong. There was
power and worth in the undegenerate Italian race, which needed only to be
organized and ruled. But what remedy was possible? The practical choice of
politicians lay between the Senate and the democracy. Both were alike
bloody and unscrupulous; and the rule of the Senate meant corruption and
imbecility, and the rule of the democracy meant anarchy.

[1] "Unum hoc dico: nostri isti nobiles, nisi vigilantes et boni et fortes
    et misericordes erunt, iis hominibus in quibus haec erunt, ornamenta
    sua concedant necesse est."--_Pro Roscio Amerino_, sec. 48.

[2] "Sunt enim ista maledicta pervulgata in omnes, quorum in adolescentia
    forma et species fuit liberalis."--_Oratio pro Marca Caelio_.

[3] Now Fermaco.

[4] "Videbat enim populum Romanum non locupletari quotannis pecunia
    publica praeter paucos: neque eos quidquam aliud assequi classium
    nomine, nisi ut, detrimentis accipiendis majore affici turpitudine
    videremur."--Cicero, _Pro Lege Manilia_, 23.

[5] "Difficile est dictu, Quirites, quanto in odio simus apud exteras
    nationes, propter eorum, quos ad eas per hos annos cum imperio
    misimus, injurias ac libidines. Quod enim fanum putatis in illis
    terris nostris magistratibus religiosum, quam civitatem sanctam, quam
    domum satis clausam ac munitam fuisse? Urbes jam locupletes ac
    copiosae requiruntur, quibus causa belli propter diripiendi
    cupiditatem inferatur.... Quare etiamsi quem habetis, qui collatis
    signis exercitus regios superare posse videatur, tamen, nisi erit
    idem, qui se a pecuniis sociorum, qui ab eorum conjugibus ac liberis,
    qui ab ornamentis fanorum atque oppidorum, qui ab auro gazaque regia
    manus, oculos, animum cohibere possit, non erit idoneus, qui ad
    bellum Asiaticum regiumque mittatur."--_Pro Lege Manilia_, 22,
    23.

[6] "Quem possumus imperatorem aliquo in numero putare, cujus in exercitu
    veneant centuriatus atque venierint? Quid hunc hominem magnum aut
    amplum de republica cogitare, qui pecuniam ex aerario depromtam ad
    bellum administrandum, aut propter cupiditatem provinciae
    magistratibus diviserit aut propter avaritiam Romae in quaestu
    reliquerit? Vestra admurmuratio facit, Quirites, ut agnoscere
    videamini qui haec fecerint: ego autem neminem nomino."--_Pro Lege
    Manilia_, 13.

[7] Varro mentions curious instances of the change in country manners. He
    makes an old man say that when he was a boy, a farmer's wife used to
    be content with a jaunt in a cart once or twice a year, the farmer not
    taking out the covered wagon (the more luxurious vehicle) at all
    unless he pleased. The farmer used to shave only once a week,
    etc.--_M. Ter. Varronis Reliquiae_, ed. Alexander Riese, pp. 139,
    140.




CHAPTER X.


Caesar, having done his small piece of independent service in Caria, and
having finished his course with Apollonius, now came again to Rome and
re-entered practical life. He lived with his wife and his mother Aurelia
in a modest house, attracting no particular notice. But his defiance of
Sylla, his prosecution of Dolabella, and his known political sympathies
made him early a favorite with the people. The growing disorders at home
and abroad, with the exposures on the trial of Verres, were weakening
daily the influence of the Senate. Caesar was elected military tribune as
a reward for his services in Asia, and he assisted in recovering part of
the privileges so dear to the citizens which Sylla had taken from the
tribunes of the people. They were again enabled to call the assembly
together, and though they were still unable to propose laws without the
Senate's sanction, yet they regained the privilege of consulting directly
with the nation on public affairs. Caesar now spoke well enough to command
the admiration of even Cicero--without ornament, but directly to the
purpose. Among the first uses to which he addressed his influence was to
obtain the pardon of his brother-in-law, the younger Cinna, who had been
exiled since the failure of the attempt of Lepidus. In B.C. 68, being then
thirty-two, he gained his first step on the ladder of high office. He was
made quaestor, which gave him a place in the Senate.

Soon after his election, his aunt Julia, the widow of Marius, died. It was
usual on the death of eminent persons for a near relation to make an
oration at the funeral. Caesar spoke on this occasion. It was observed
that he dwelt with some pride on the lady's ancestry, descending on one
side from the gods, on another from the kings of Rome. More noticeably he
introduced into the burial procession the insignia and images of Marius
himself, whose name for some years it had been unsafe to mention.[1]

Pompey, after Sertorius's death, had pacified Spain. He had assisted
Crassus in extinguishing Spartacus. The Senate had employed him, but had
never liked him or trusted him. The Senate, however, was no longer
omnipotent, and in the year 70 he and Crassus had been consuls. Pompey was
no politician, but he was honorable and straightforward. Like every true
Roman, he was awake to the dangers and disgrace of the existing
mal-administration, and he and Caesar began to know each other, and to
find their interest in working together. Pompey was the elder of the two
by six years. He was already a great man, covered with distinctions, and
perhaps he supposed that he was finding in Caesar a useful subordinate.
Caesar naturally liked Pompey, as a really distinguished soldier and an
upright disinterested man. They became connected by marriage. Cornelia
dying, Caesar took for his second wife Pompey's cousin, Pompeia; and, no
doubt at Pompey's instance, he was sent into Spain to complete Pompey's
work and settle the finances of that distracted country. His reputation as
belonging to the party of Marius and Sertorius secured him the confidence
of Sertorius's friends. He accomplished his mission completely and easily.
On his way back he passed through northern Italy, and took occasion to say
there that he considered the time to have come for the franchise, which
now stopped at the Po, to be extended to the foot of the Alps.

The consulship of Pompey and Crassus had brought many changes with it, all
tending in the same direction. The tribunes were restored to their old
functions, the censorship was re-established, and the Senate was at once
weeded of many of its disreputable members. Cicero, conservative as he
was, had looked upon these measures if not approvingly yet without active
opposition. To another change he had himself contributed by his speeches
on the Verres prosecution. The exclusive judicial powers which the Senate
had abused so scandalously were again taken from them. The courts of the
equites were remembered in contrast, and a law was passed that for the
future the courts were to be composed two thirds of knights and one third
only of senators. Cicero's hope of resisting democracy lay in the fusion
of the great commoners with the Senate. It was no longer possible for the
aristocracy to rule alone. The few equites who, since Sylla's time, had
made their way into the Senate had yielded to patrician ascendency. Cicero
aimed at a reunion of the orders; and the consulship of Crassus, little as
Cicero liked Crassus personally, was a sign of a growing tendency in this
direction. At all costs the knights must be prevented from identifying
themselves with the democrats, and therefore all possible compliments and
all possible concessions to their interests were made to them.

They recovered their position in the law-courts; and, which was of more
importance to them, the system of farming the taxes, in which so many of
them had made their fortunes, and which Sylla had abolished, was once
again reverted to. It was not a good system, but it was better than a
state of things in which little of the revenue had reached the public
treasury at all, but had been intercepted and parcelled out among the
oligarchy.

[Sidenote: B.C. 67.]
With recovered vitality a keener apprehension began to be felt of the
pirate scandal. The buccaneers, encouraged by the Senate's connivance,
were more daring than ever. They had become a sea community, led by
high-born adventurers, who maintained out of their plunder a show of wild
magnificence. The oars of the galleys of their commanders were plated with
silver; their cabins were hung with gorgeous tapestry. They had bands of
music to play at their triumphs. They had a religion of their own, an
oriental medley called the Mysteries of Mithras. They had captured and
pillaged four hundred considerable towns, and had spoiled the temples of
the Grecian gods. They had maintained and extended their depots where they
disposed of their prisoners to the slave-dealers. Roman citizens who could
not ransom themselves, and could not conveniently be sold, were informed
that they might go where they pleased; they were led to a plank projecting
over some vessel's side, and were bidden depart--into the sea. Not
contented with insulting Ostia by their presence outside, they had
ventured into the harbor itself, and had burnt the ships there. They held
complete possession of the Italian waters. Rome, depending on Sicily and
Sardinia and Africa for her supplies of corn, was starving for want of
food, and the foreign trade on which so many of the middle classes were
engaged was totally destroyed. The return of the commoners to power was a
signal for an active movement to put an end to the disgrace. No one
questioned that it could be done if there was a will to do it. But the
work could be accomplished only by persons who would be proof against
corruption. There was but one man in high position who could be trusted,
and that was Pompey. The general to be selected must have unrestricted and
therefore unconstitutional authority. But Pompey was at once capable and
honest. Pompey could not be bribed by the pirates, and Pompey could be
depended on not to abuse his opportunities to the prejudice of the
Commonwealth.

[Sidenote: B.C. 67.]
The natural course, therefore, would have been to declare Pompey dictator;
but Sylla had made the name unpopular; the right to appoint a dictator lay
with the Senate, with whom Pompey had never been a favorite, and the
aristocracy had disliked and feared him more than ever since his
consulship. From that quarter no help was to be looked for, and a method
was devised to give him the reality of power without the title. Unity of
command was the one essential--command untrammelled by orders from
committees of weak and treacherous noblemen, who cared only for the
interest of their class. The established forms were scrupulously observed,
and the plan designed was brought forward first, according to rule, in the
Senate. A tribune, Aulus Gabinius, introduced a proposition there that one
person of consular rank should have absolute jurisdiction during three
years over the whole Mediterranean, and over all Roman territory for fifty
miles inland from the coast; that the money in the treasury should be
at his disposition; that he should have power to raise 500 ships of war
and to collect and organize 130,000 men. No such command for such a time
had ever been committed to any one man since the abolition of the
monarchy. It was equivalent to a suspension of the Senate itself, and of
all constitutional government. The proposal was received with a burst of
fury. Every one knew that the person intended was Pompey. The decorum of
the old days was forgotten. The noble lords started from their seats, flew
at Gabinius, and almost strangled him: but he had friends outside the
house ready to defend their champion; the country people had flocked in
for the occasion; the city was thronged with multitudes such as had not
been seen there since the days of the Gracchi. The tribune freed himself
from the hands that were at his throat; he rushed out into the Forum,
closely pursued by the consul Piso, who would have been torn in pieces in
turn had not Gabinius interposed to save him. Senate or no Senate, it was
decided that Gabinius's proposition should be submitted to the assembly,
and the aristocrats were driven to their old remedy of bribing other
members of the college of tribunes to interfere. Two renegades were thus
secured, and when the voting-day came, Trebellius, who was one of them,
put in a veto; the other, Roscius, said that the power intended for Pompey
was too considerable to be trusted to a single person, and proposed two
commanders instead of one. The mob was packed so thick that the house-tops
were covered. A yell rose from tens of thousands of throats so piercing
that it was said a crow flying over the Forum dropped dead at the sound of
it. The old patrician Catulus tried to speak, but the people would not
hear him. The vote passed by acclamation, and Pompey was for three years
sovereign of the Roman world.

It now appeared how strong the Romans were when a fair chance was allowed
them. Pompey had no extraordinary talents, but not in three years, but in
three months, the pirates were extinguished. He divided the Mediterranean
into thirteen districts, and allotted a squadron to each, under officers
on whom he could thoroughly rely. Ships and seamen were found in abundance
lying idle from the suspension of trade. In forty days he had cleared the
seas between Gibraltar and Italy. He had captured entire corsair fleets,
and had sent the rest flying into the Cilician creeks. There, in defence
of their plunder and their families, they fought one desperate engagement,
and when defeated, they surrendered without a further blow. Of real
strength they had possessed none from the first. They had subsisted only
through the guilty complicity of the Roman authorities, and they fell at
the first stroke which was aimed at them in earnest. Thirteen hundred
pirate ships were burnt. Their docks and arsenals were destroyed, and
their fortresses were razed. Twenty-two thousand prisoners fell into the
hands of Pompey. To the astonishment of mankind, Pompey neither impaled
them, as the Senate had impaled the followers of Spartacus, nor even sold
them for slaves. He was contented to scatter them among inland colonies,
where they could no longer be dangerous.

The suppression of the buccaneers was really a brilliant piece of work,
and the ease with which it was accomplished brought fresh disgrace on the
Senate and fresh glory on the hero of the hour. Cicero, with his thoughts
fixed on saving the constitution, considered that Pompey might be the man
to save it; or, at all events, that it would be unsafe to leave him to the
democrats who had given him power and were triumphing in his success. On
political grounds Cicero thought that Pompey ought to be recognized by the
moderate party which he intended to form; and a person like himself who
hoped to rise by the popular votes could not otherwise afford to seem cold
amidst the universal enthusiasm. The pirates were abolished. Mithridates
was still undisposed of. Lucullus, the hope of the aristocracy, was lying
helpless within the Roman frontier, with a disorganized and mutinous army.
His victories were forgotten. He was regarded as the impersonation of
every fault which had made the rule of the Senate so hateful. Pompey, the
people's general, after a splendid success, had come home with clean
hands; Lucullus had sacrificed his country to his avarice. The contrast
set off his failures in colors perhaps darker than really belonged to
them, and the cry naturally rose that Lucullus must be called back, and
the all-victorious Pompey must be sent for the reconquest of Asia. Another
tribune, Manilius, brought the question forward, this time directly before
the assembly, the Senate's consent not being any more asked for. Caesar
again brought his influence to bear on Pompey's side; but Caesar found
support in a quarter where it might not have been looked for. The Senate
was furious as before, but by far the most gifted person in the
conservative party now openly turned against them. Cicero was praetor this
year, and was thus himself a senator. A seat in the Senate had been the
supreme object of his ambition. He was vain of the honor which he had won,
and delighted with the high company into which he had been received; but
he was too shrewd to go along with them upon a road which could lead only
to their overthrow; and for their own sake, and for the sake of the
institution itself of which he meant to be an illustrious ornament, he not
only supported the Manilian proposition, but supported it in a speech more
effective than the wildest outpourings of democratic rhetoric.

Asia Minor, he said, was of all the Roman provinces the most important,
because it was the most wealthy.[2] So rich it was and fertile that, for
the productiveness of its soil, the variety of its fruits, the extent of
its pastures, and the multitude of its exports, there was no country in
the world to be compared with it; yet Asia was in danger of being utterly
lost through the worthlessnesss of the governors and military commanders
charged with the care of it. "Who does not know," Cicero asked, "that the
avarice of our generals has been the cause of the misfortunes of our
armies? You can see for yourselves how they act here at home in Italy; and
what will they not venture far away in distant countries? Officers who
cannot restrain their own appetites can never maintain discipline in their
troops. Pompey has been victorious because he does not loiter about the
towns for plunder or pleasure, or making collections of statues and
pictures. Asia is a land of temptations. Send no one thither who cannot
resist gold and jewels and shrines and pretty women. Pompey is upright and
pure-sighted. Pompey knows that the State has been impoverished because
the revenue flows into the coffers of a few individuals. Our fleets and
armies have availed only to bring the more disgrace upon us through our
defeats and losses." [3]

After passing a deserved panegyric on the suppression of the pirates,
Cicero urged with all the power of his oratory that Manilius's measures
should be adopted, and that the same general who had done so well already
should be sent against Mithridates.

This was perhaps the only occasion on which Cicero ever addressed the
assembly in favor of the proposals of a popular tribune. Well would it
have been for him and well for Rome if he could have held on upon a course
into which he had been led by real patriotism. He was now in his proper
place, where his better mind must have told him that he ought to have
continued, working by the side of Caesar and Pompey. It was observed that
more than once in his speech he mentioned with high honor the name of
Marius. He appeared to have seen clearly that the Senate was bringing the
State to perdition; and that unless the Republic was to end in
dissolution, or in mob rule and despotism, the wise course was to
recognize the legitimate tendencies of popular sentiment, and to lend the
constant weight of his authority to those who were acting in harmony with
it. But Cicero could never wholly forget his own consequence, or bring
himself to persist in any policy where he could play but a secondary part.

[Sidenote: B.C. 66-63.]
The Manilian law was carried. In addition to his present extraordinary
command, Pompey was entrusted with the conduct of the war in Asia, and he
was left unfettered to act at his own discretion. He crossed the Bosphorus
with fifty thousand men; he invaded Pontus; he inflicted a decisive defeat
on Mithridates, and broke up his army; he drove the Armenians back into
their own mountains, and extorted out of them a heavy war indemnity. The
barbarian king who had so long defied the Roman power was beaten down at
last, and fled across the Black Sea to Kertch, where his sons turned
against him. He was sixty-eight years old, and could not wait till the
wheel should make another turn. Broken down at last, he took leave of a
world in which for him there was no longer a place. His women poisoned
themselves successfully. He, too fortified by antidotes to end as they
ended, sought a surer death, and fell like Saul by the sword of a slave.
Rome had put out her real strength, and at once, as before, all opposition
went down before her. Asia was completely conquered up to the line of the
Euphrates. The Black Sea was held securely by a Roman fleet. Pompey passed
down into Syria. Antioch surrendered without resistance. Tyre and Damascus
followed. Jerusalem was taken by storm, and the Roman general entered the
Holy of Holies. Of all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean Egypt
only was left independent, and of all the islands only Cyprus. A triumphal
inscription in Rome declared that Pompey, the people's general, had in
three years captured fifteen hundred cities, and had slain, taken, or
reduced to submission twelve million human beings. He justified what
Cicero had foretold of his moral uprightness. In the midst of
opportunities such as had fallen to no commander since Alexander, he
outraged no woman's honor, and he kept his hands clean from "the accursed
thing." When he returned to Rome, he returned, as he went, personally
poor, but he filled the treasury to overflowing. His campaign was not a
marauding raid, like the march of Lucullus on Artaxata. His conquests were
permanent. The East, which was then thickly inhabited by an industrious
civilized Graeco-Oriental race, became incorporated in the Roman dominion,
and the annual revenue of the State rose to twice what it had been.
Pompey's success had been dazzlingly rapid. Envy and hatred, as he well
knew, were waiting for him at home, and he was in no haste to present
himself there. He lingered in Asia, organizing the administration and
consolidating his work, while at Rome the constitution was rushing on upon
its old courses among the broken waters, with the roar of the not distant
cataract growing every moment louder.

[1] The name of Marius, it is to be observed, remained so popular in Rome
    that Cicero after this always spoke of him with respect.

[2] "Asia vero tam opima est et fertilis, ut et ubertate agrorum et
    varietate fructuum et magnitudine pastionis, et multitudine earum
    rerum, quae exportentur, facile omnibus terris antecellat."--_Pro
    Lege Manilia_. Cicero's expressions are worth notice at a time when
    Asia Minor has become of importance to England.

[3] _Pro Lege Manilia_. abridged.




CHAPTER XI.


[Sidenote: B.C. 64.]
Among the patricians who were rising through the lower magistracies and
were aspiring to the consulship was Lucius Sergius Catiline. Catiline, now
in middle life, had when young been a fervent admirer of Sylla, and, as
has been already said, had been an active agent in the proscription. He
had murdered his brother-in-law, and perhaps his brother, under political
pretences. In an age when licentiousness of the grossest kind was too
common to attract attention, Catiline had achieved a notoriety for infamy.
Ho had intrigued with a Vestal virgin, the sister of Cicero's wife,
Terentia. If Cicero is to be believed, he had made away with his own wife,
that he might marry Aurelia Orestilla, a woman as wicked as she was
beautiful, and he had killed his child also because Aurelia had objected
to be encumbered with a step-son. But this, too, was common in high
society in those days. Adultery and incest had become familiar
excitements. Boys of ten years old had learnt the art of poisoning their
fathers,[1] and the story of Aurelia Orestilla and Catiline had been
rehearsed a few years before by Sassia and Oppianicus at Larino.[2]
Other enormities Catiline had been guilty of which Cicero declined to
mention, lest he should show too openly what crimes might go unpunished
under the senatorial administration. But villainy, however notorious, did
not interfere with advancement in the public service. Catiline was adroit,
bold, and even captivating. He made his way into high office along the
usual gradations. He was praetor in B.C. 68. He went as governor to Africa
in the year following, and he returned with money enough, as he reasonably
hoped, to purchase the last step to the consulship. He was impeached when
he came back for extortion and oppression, under one of the many laws
which were made to be laughed at. Till his trial was over he was
disqualified from presenting himself as a candidate, and the election for
the year 65 was carried by Autronius Paetus and Cornelius Sylla. Two other
patricians, Aurelius Cotta and Manlius Torquatus, had stood against them.
The successful competitors were unseated for bribery; Cotta and Torquatus
took their places, and, apparently as a natural resource in the existing
contempt into which the constitution had fallen, the disappointed
candidates formed a plot to kill their rivals and their rivals' friends in
the Senate, and to make a revolution. Cneius Piso, a young nobleman of the
bluest blood, joined in the conspiracy. Catiline threw himself into it as
his natural element, and aristocratic tradition said in later years that
Caesar and Crassus were implicated also. Some desperate scheme there
certainly was, but the accounts of it are confused: one authority says
that it failed because Catiline gave the signal prematurely; others that
Caesar was to have given the signal, and did not do it; others that
Crassus's heart failed him; others that the consuls had secret notice
given to them and took precautions. Cicero, who was in Rome at the time,
declares that he never heard of the conspiracy.[3] When evidence is
inconclusive, probability becomes argument. Nothing can be less likely
than that a cautious capitalist of vast wealth like Crassus should have
connected himself with a party of dissolute adventurers. Had Caesar
committed himself, jealously watched as he was by the aristocrats, some
proofs of his complicity would have been forthcoming. The aristocracy
under the empire revenged themselves for their ruin by charging Caesar
with a share in every combination that had been formed against them, from
Sylla's time downwards. Be the truth what it may, nothing came of this
project. Piso went to Spain, where he was killed. The prosecution of
Catiline for his African misgovernment was continued, and, strange to say,
Cicero undertook his defence. He was under no uncertainty as to Catiline's
general character, or his particular guilt in the charge brought against
him. It was plain as the sun at midday.[4] But Cicero was about to stand
himself for the consulship, the object of his most passionate desire. He
had several competitors; and as he thought well of Catiline's prospects,
he intended to coalesce with him.[5] Catiline was acquitted, apparently
through a special selection of the judges, with the connivance of the
prosecutor. The canvass was violent, and the corruption flagrant.
[6]Cicero did not bribe himself, but if Catiline's voters would give him
a help, he was not so scrupulous as to be above taking advantage of it.
Catiline's humor or the circumstances of the time provided him with a more
honorable support. He required a more manageable colleague than he could
have found in Cicero. Among the candidates was one of Sylla's officers,
Caius Antonius, the uncle of Marc Antony, the triumvir. This Antonius had
been prosecuted by Caesar for ill-usage of the Macedonians. He had been
expelled by the censors from the Senate for general worthlessness; but
public disgrace seems to have had no effect whatever on the chances of a
candidate for the consulship in this singular age. Antonius was weak and
vicious, and Catiline could mould him as he pleased. He had made himself
popular by his profusion when aedile in providing shows for the mob. The
feeling against the Senate was so bitter that the aristocracy had no
chance of carrying a candidate of their own, and the competition was
reduced at last to Catiline, Antonius and Cicero. Antonius was certain of
his election, and the contest lay between Catiline and Cicero. Each of
them tried to gain the support of Antonius and his friends. Catiline
promised Antonius a revolution, in which they were to share the world
between them. Cicero promised his influence to obtain some lucrative
province for Antonius to misgovern. Catiline would probably have
succeeded, when the aristocracy, knowing what to expect if so scandalous a
pair came into office, threw their weight on Cicero's side and turned the
scale. Cicero was liked among the people for his prosecution of Verres,
for his support of the Manilian law, and for the boldness with which he
had exposed patrician delinquencies. With the Senate for him also, he was
returned at the head of the poll. The proud Roman nobility had selected a
self-made lawyer as their representative. Cicero was consul, and Antonius
with him. Catiline had failed. It was the turning-point of Cicero's life.
Before his consulship he had not irrevocably taken a side. No public
speaker had more eloquently shown the necessity for reform; no one had
denounced with keener sarcasm the infamies and follies of senatorial
favorites. Conscience and patriotism should have alike held him to the
reforming party; and political instinct, if vanity had left him the use of
his perception, would have led him in the same direction. Possibly before
he received the votes of the patricians and their clients he had bound
himself with certain engagements to them. Possibly he held the Senate's
intellect cheap, and saw the position which he could arrive at among the
aristocracy if he offered them his services. The strongest intellect was
with the reformers, and first on that side he could never be. First among
the Conservatives[7] he could easily be; and he might prefer being at
the head of a party which at heart he despised, to working at the side of
persons who must stand inevitably above him. We may regret that gifted men
should be influenced by personal considerations, but under party
government it is a fact that they are so influenced, and will be as long
as it continues. Caesar and Pompey were soldiers. The army was democratic,
and the triumph of the democracy meant the rule of a popular general.
Cicero was a civilian, and a man of speech. In the forum and in the Curia
he knew that he could reign supreme.

Cicero had thus reached the highest step in the scale of promotion by
trimming between the rival factions. Caesar was rising simultaneously
behind him on lines of his own. In the year B.C. 65 he had been aedile,
having for his colleague Bibulus, his future companion on the successive
grades of ascent. Bibulus was a rich plebeian, whose delight in office was
the introduction which it gave him into the society of the great; and in
his politics he outdid his aristocratic patrons. The aediles had charge of
the public buildings and the games and exhibitions in the capital. The
aedileship was a magistracy through which it was ordinarily necessary to
pass in order to reach the consulship; and as the aediles were expected to
bear their own expenses, the consulship was thus restricted to those who
could afford an extravagant outlay. They were expected to decorate the
city with new ornaments, and to entertain the people with magnificent
spectacles. If they fell short of public expectation, they need look no
further for the suffrages of their many-headed master. Cicero had slipped
through the aedileship, without ruin to himself. He was a self-raised man,
known to be dependent upon his own exertions, and liked from the
willingness with which he gave his help to accused persons on their
trials. Thus no great demands had been made upon him. Caesar, either more
ambitious or less confident in his services, raised a new and costly row
of columns in front of the Capitol. He built a temple to the Dioscuri, and
he charmed the populace with a show of gladiators unusually extensive.
Personally he cared nothing for these sanguinary exhibitions, and he
displayed his indifference ostentatiously by reading or writing while the
butchery was going forward.[8] But he required the favor of the
multitude, and then, as always, took the road which led most directly to
his end. The noble lords watched him suspiciously, and their uneasiness
was not diminished when, not content with having produced the insignia of
Marius at his aunt's funeral, he restored the trophies for the victories
over the Cimbri and Teutons, which had been removed by Sylla. The name of
Marius was growing every day more dear to the popular party. They forgave,
if they had ever resented, his credulities. His veterans who had fought
with him through his campaigns came forward in tears to salute the honored
relics of their once glorious commander.

As he felt the ground stronger under his feet, Caesar now began to assume
an attitude more peremptorily marked. He had won a reputation in the
Forum; he had spoken in the Senate; he had warmly advocated the
appointment of Pompey to his high commands; and he was regarded as a
prominent democratic leader. But he had not aspired to the tribunate; he
had not thrown himself into politics with any absorbing passion. His
exertions had been intermittent, and he was chiefly known as a brilliant
member of fashionable society, a peculiar favorite with women, and
remarkable for his abstinence from the coarse debauchery which disgraced
his patrician contemporaries. He was now playing for a higher stake, and
the oligarchy had occasion to be reminded of Sylla's prophecy. In carrying
out the proscription, Sylla had employed professional assassins, and
payments had been made out of the treasury to wretches who came to him
with bloody trophies in their hands to demand the promised fees. The time
had come when these doings were to be looked into; hundreds of men had
been murdered, their estates confiscated, and their families ruined, who
had not been even ostensibly guilty of any public crime. At Caesar's
instance an inquiry was ordered. He himself was appointed Judex
Quaestionis, or chairman of a committee of investigation; and Catiline,
among others, was called to answer for himself--a curious commentary on
Caesar's supposed connection with him.

[Sidenote: B.C. 63.]
Nor did the inquisition stop with Sylla. Titus Labienus, afterward so
famous and so infamous, was then tribune of the people. His father had
been killed at the side of Saturninus and Glaucia thirty-seven years
before, when the young lords of Rome had unroofed the senate-house, and
had pelted them and their companions to death with tiles. One of the
actors in the scene, Caius Rabirius, now a very old man, was still alive.
Labienus prosecuted him before Caesar. Rabirius was condemned, and
appealed to the people; and Cicero, who had just been made consul, spoke
in his defence. On this occasion Cicero for the first time came actively
in collision with Caesar. His language contrasted remarkably with the tone
of his speeches against Verres and for the Manilian law. It was adroit,
for he charged Marius with having shared the guilt, if guilt there had
been, in the death of those men; but the burden of what he said was to
defend enthusiastically the conservative aristocracy, and to censure with
all his bitterness the democratic reformers. Rabirius was acquitted,
perhaps justly. It was a hard thing to revive the memory of a political
crime which had been shared by the whole patrician order after so long an
interval. But Cicero had shown his new colors; no help, it was evident,
was thenceforward to be expected from him in the direction of reform. The
popular party replied in a singular manner. The office of Pontifex Maximus
was the most coveted of all the honors to which a Roman citizen could
aspire. It was held for life, it was splendidly endowed, and there still
hung about the pontificate the traditionary dignity attaching to the chief
of the once sincerely believed Roman religion. Like other objects of
ambition, the nomination had fallen, with the growth of democracy, to the
people, but the position had always been held by some member of the old
aristocracy; and Sylla, to secure them in the possession of it, had
reverted to the ancient constitution, and had restored to the Sacred
College the privilege of choosing their head. Under the impulse which the
popular party had received from Pompey's successes, Labienus carried a
vote in the assembly, by which the people resumed the nomination to the
pontificate themselves. In the same year it fell vacant by the death of
the aged Metullus Pius. Two patricians, Quintus Catulus and Caesar's old
general Servilius Isauricus, were the Senate's candidates, and vast sums
were subscribed and spent to secure the success of one or other of the
two. Caesar came forward to oppose them. Caesar aspired to be Pontifex
Maximus--Pope of Rome--he who of all men living was the least given to
illusion; he who was the most frank in his confession of entire disbelief
in the legends which, though few credited them any more, yet almost all
thought it decent to pretend to credit. Among the phenomena of the time
this was surely the most singular. Yet Caesar had been a priest from his
boyhood, and why should he not be Pope? He offered himself to the Comitia.
Committed as he was to a contest with the richest men in Rome, he spent
money freely. He was in debt already for his expenses as aedile. He
engaged his credit still deeper for this new competition. The story ran
that when his mother kissed him as he was leaving his home for the Forum
on the morning of the election, he told her that he would return as
pontiff, or she would never see him more. He was chosen by an overwhelming
majority, the votes given for him being larger than the collective numbers
of the votes entered for his opponents.

[Sidenote: B.C. 63.]
The election for the pontificate was on the 6th of March, and soon after
Caesar received a further evidence of popular favor on being chosen
praetor for the next year. As the liberal party was growing in courage and
definiteness, Cicero showed himself more decidedly on the other side. Now
was the time for him, highly placed as he was, to prevent a repetition of
the scandals which he had so eloquently denounced, to pass laws which no
future Verres or Lucullus could dare to defy. Now was his opportunity to
take the wind out of the reformers' sails, and to grapple himself with the
thousand forms of patrician villainy which he well knew to be destroying
the Commonwealth. Not one such measure, save an ineffectual attempt to
check election bribery, distinguished the consulship of Cicero. His entire
efforts were directed to the combination in a solid phalanx of the
equestrian and patrician orders. The danger to society, he had come to
think, was an approaching war against property, and his hope was to unite
the rich of both classes in defence against the landless and moneyless
multitudes.[9] The land question had become again as pressing as in the
time of the Gracchi. The peasant proprietors were melting away as fast as
ever, and Rome was becoming choked with impoverished citizens, who ought
to have been farmers and fathers of families, but were degenerating into a
rabble fed upon the corn grants, and occupied with nothing but spectacles
and politics. The agrarian laws in the past had been violent, and might
reasonably be complained of; but a remedy could now be found for this
fast-increasing mischief without injury to anyone. Pompey's victories had
filled the public treasury. Vast territories abroad had lapsed to the
possession of the State; and Rullus, one of the tribunes, proposed that
part of these territories should be sold, and that out of the proceeds,
and out of the money which Pompey had sent home, farms should be purchased
in Italy and poor citizens settled upon them. Rullus's scheme might have
been crude, and the details of it objectionable; but to attempt the
problem was better than to sit still and let the evil go unchecked. If the
bill was impracticable in its existing form, it might have been amended;
and so far as the immediate effect of such a law was concerned, it was
against the interests of the democrats. The popular vote depended for its
strength on the masses of poor who were crowded into Rome; and the tribune
was proposing to weaken his own army. But the very name of an agrarian law
set patrician households in a flutter, and Cicero stooped to be their
advocate. He attacked Rullus with brutal sarcasm. He insulted his
appearance; he ridiculed his dress, his hair, and his beard. He mocked at
his bad enunciation and bad grammar. No one more despised the mob than
Cicero; but because Rullus had said that the city rabble was dangerously
powerful, and ought to be "drawn off" to some wholesome employment, the
eloquent consul condescended to quote the words, to score a point against
his opponent; and he told the crowd that their tribune had described a
number of excellent citizens to the Senate as no better than the contents
of a cesspool.[10]

By these methods Cicero caught the people's voices. The plan came to
nothing, and his consulship would have waned away, undistinguished by any
act which his country would have cared to remember, but for an accident
which raised him for a moment into a position of real consequence, and
impressed on his own mind a conviction that he was a second Romulus.

Revolutionary conspiracies are only formidable when the government against
which they are directed is already despised and detested. As long as an
administration is endurable the majority of citizens prefer to bear with
it, and will assist in repressing violent attempts at its overthrow. Their
patience, however, may be exhausted, and the disgust may rise to a point
when any change may seem an improvement. Authority is no longer shielded
by the majesty with which it ought to be surrounded. It has made public
its own degradation; and the most worthless adventurer knows that he has
no moral indignation to fear if he tries to snatch the reins out of hands
which are at least no more pure than his own. If he can dress his
endeavors in the livery of patriotism, if he can put himself forward as
the champion of an injured people, he can cover the scandals of his own
character and appear as a hero and a liberator. Catiline had missed the
consulship, and was a ruined man. He had calculated on succeeding to a
province where he might gather a golden harvest and come home to live in
splendor, like Lucullus. He had failed, defeated by a mere plebeian whom
his brother-patricians had stooped to prefer to him. Were the secret
history known of the contest for the consulship, much might be discovered
there to explain Cicero's and Catiline's hatred of each other. Cicero had
once thought of coalescing with Catiline, notwithstanding his knowledge of
his previous crimes: Catiline had perhaps hoped to dupe Cicero, and had
been himself outwitted. He intended to stand again for the year 62, but
evidently on a different footing from that on which he had presented
himself before. That such a man should have been able to offer himself at
all, and that such a person as Cicero should have entered into any kind of
amicable relations with him, was a sign by itself that the Commonwealth
was already sickening for death.

Catiline was surrounded by men of high birth, whose fortunes were
desperate as his own. There was Lentulus, who had been consul a few years
before, and had been expelled from the Senate by the censors. There was
Cethegus, staggering under a mountain of debts. There was Autronius, who
had been unseated for bribery when chosen consul in 65. There was Manlius,
once a distinguished officer in Sylla's army, and now a beggar. Besides
these were a number of senators, knights, gentlemen, and dissolute young
patricians, whose theory of the world was that it had been created for
them to take their pleasure in, and who found their pleasures shortened by
emptiness of purse. To them, as to their betters, the Empire was but a
large dish out of which they considered that they had a right to feed
themselves. They were defrauded of their proper share, and Catiline was
the person who would help them to it.

Etruria was full of Sylla's disbanded soldiers, who had squandered their
allotments, and were hanging about, unoccupied and starving. Catiline sent
down Manlius, their old officer, to collect as many as he could of them
without attracting notice. He himself, as the election day approached, and
Cicero's year of office was drawing to an end, took up the character of an
aristocratic demagogue, and asked for the suffrages of the people as the
champion of the poor against the rich, as the friend of the wretched and
oppressed; and those who thought themselves wretched and oppressed in Rome
were so large a body, and so bitterly hostile were they all to the
prosperous classes, that his election was anticipated as a certainty. In
the Senate the consulship of Catiline was regarded as no less than an
impending national calamity. Marcus Cato, great-grandson of the censor,
then growing into fame by his acrid tongue and narrow republican
fanaticism, who had sneered at Pompey's victories as triumphs over women,
and had not spared even Cicero himself, threatened Catiline in the Curia.
Catiline answered, in a fully attended house, that if any agitation was
kindled against him he would put it out, not with water, but with
revolution. His language became so audacious that, on the eve of the
election day, Cicero moved for a postponement, that the Senate might take
his language into consideration. Catiline's conduct was brought on for
debate, and the consul called on him to explain himself. There was no
concealment in Catiline. Then and always Cicero admits he was perfectly
frank. He made no excuses. He admitted the truth of what had been reported
of him. The State, he said, had two bodies, one weak (the aristocracy),
with a weak leader (Cicero); the other, the great mass of the citizens--
strong in themselves, but without a head, and he himself intended to be
that head.[11] A groan was heard in the house, but less loud than in
Cicero's opinion it ought to have been; and Catiline sailed out in
triumph, leaving the noble lords looking in each other's faces.

[Sidenote: October, B.C. 63.]
Both Cicero and the Senate were evidently in the greatest alarm that
Catiline would succeed constitutionally in being chosen consul, and they
strained every sinew to prevent so terrible a catastrophe. When the
Comitia came on, Cicero admits that he occupied the voting place in the
Campus Martius with a guard of men who could be depended on. He was
violating the law, which forbade the presence of an armed force on those
occasions. He excused himself by pretending that Catiline's party intended
violence, and he appeared ostentatiously in a breastplate as if his own
life was aimed at. The result was that Catiline failed once more, and was
rejected by a small majority. Cicero attributes his defeat to the moral
effect produced by the breastplate. But from the time of the Gracchi
downwards the aristocracy had not hesitated to lay pressure on the
elections when they could safely do it; and the story must be taken with
reservation, in the absence of a more impartial account than we possess of
the purpose to which Cicero's guard was applied. Undoubtedly it was
desirable to strain the usual rules to keep a wretch like Catiline from
the consulship; but as certainly, both before the election and after it,
Catiline had the sympathies of a very large part of the resident
inhabitants of the city, and these sympathies must be taken into account
if we are to understand the long train of incidents of which this occasion
was the beginning.

Two strict aristocrats, Decimus Silanus and Lucius Murena,[12] were
declared elected. Pompey was on his way home, but had not yet reached
Italy. There were no regular troops in the whole peninsula, and the
nearest approach to an army was the body of Syllans, whom Manlius had
quietly collected at Fiesole. Cicero's colleague Antonius was secretly in
communication with Catiline, evidently thinking it likely that he would
succeed. Catiline determined to wait no longer, and to raise an
insurrection in the capital, with slave emancipation and a cancelling of
debt for a cry. Manlius was to march on Rome, and the Senate, it was
expected, would fall without a blow. Caesar and Crassus sent a warning to
Cicero to be on his guard. Caesar had called Catiline to account for his
doings at the time of the proscription, and knew his nature too well to
expect benefit to the people from a revolution conducted under the
auspices of bankrupt patrician adventurers. No citizen had more to lose
than Crassus from a crusade of the poor against the rich. But they had
both been suspected two years before, and in the excited temper of men's
minds they took precautions for their own reputation's sake, as well as
for the safety of the State. Quintus Curius, a senator, who was one of the
conspirators, was meanwhile betraying his accomplices, and gave daily
notice to the consuls of each step which was contemplated. But so weak was
authority and so dangerous the temper of the people that the difficulty
was to know what to do. Secret information was scarcely needed. Catiline,
as Cicero said, was "_apertissimus_," most frank in the declaration
of his intentions. Manlius's army at Fiesole was an open fact, and any day
might bring news that he was on the march to Rome. The Senate, as usual in
extreme emergencies, declared the State in danger, and gave the consuls
unlimited powers to provide for public security. So scornfully confident
was Catiline that he offered to place himself under surveillance at the
house of any senator whom Cicero might name, or to reside with Cicero
himself, if the consul preferred to keep a personal eye upon him. Cicero
answered that he dared not trust himself with so perilous a guest.

[Sidenote: November, B.C. 63.]
So for a few days matters hung in suspense, Manlius expecting an order to
advance, Catiline waiting apparently for a spontaneous insurrection in the
city before he gave the word. Intended attempts at various points had been
baffled by Cicero's precautions. At last, finding that the people remained
quiet, Catiline called a meeting of his friends one stormy night at the
beginning of November, and it was agreed that two of the party should go
the next morning at dawn to Cicero's house, demand to see him on important
business, and kill him in his bed. Curius, who was present, immediately
furnished Cicero with an account of what had passed. When his morning
visitors arrived they were told that they could not be admitted; and a
summons was sent round to the senators to assemble immediately at the
Temple of Jupiter Stator, one of the strongest positions in the city.[13]
The audacious Catiline attended, and took his usual seat; every one shrank
from him, and he was left alone on the bench. Then Cicero rose. In the
Senate, where to speak was the first duty of man, he was in his proper
element, and had abundant courage. He addressed himself personally to the
principal conspirator. He exposed, if exposure be the fitting word when
half the persons present knew as much as he could tell them, the history
of Catiline's proceedings. He described in detail the meeting of the past
evening, looking round perhaps in the faces of the senators who he was
aware had been present at it. He spoke of the visit designed to himself in
the morning, which had been baffled by his precautions. He went back over
the history of the preceding half-century. Fresh from the defence of
Rabirius, he showed how dangerous citizens, the Gracchi, Saturninus,
Glaucia, had been satisfactorily killed when they were meditating
mischief. He did not see that a constitution was already doomed when the
ruling powers were driven to assassinate their opponents, because a trial
with the forms of law would have ended in their acquittal. He told
Catiline that under the powers which the Senate had conferred on him he
might order his instant execution. He detailed Catiline's past enormities,
which he had forgotten when he sought his friendship, and he ended in
bidding him leave the city, go and join Manlius and his army.

Never had Cicero been greater, and never did oratory end in a more absurd
conclusion. He dared not arrest Catiline. He confessed that he dared not.
There was not a doubt that Catiline was meditating a revolution--but a
revolution was precisely what half the world was wishing for. Rightly
read, those sounding paragraphs, those moral denunciations, those appeals
to history and patriotic sentiment, were the funeral knell of the Roman
Commonwealth.

Let Catiline go into open war, Cicero said, and then there would no longer
be a doubt. Then all the world would admit his treason. Catiline went; and
what was to follow next? Antonius, the second consul, was notoriously not
to be relied on. The other conspirators, senators who sat listening while
Cicero poured out his eloquent indignation, remained still in the city
with the threads of insurrection in their hands, and were encouraged to
persevere by the evident helplessness of the government. The imperfect
record of history retains for us only the actions of a few individuals
whom special talent or special circumstances distinguished, and such
information is only fragmentary. We lose sight of the unnamed seething
multitudes by whose desires and by whose hatreds the stream of events was
truly guided. The party of revolution was as various as it was wide.
Powerful wealthy men belonged to it, who were politically dissatisfied;
ambitious men of rank, whose money embarrassments weighted them in the
race against their competitors; old officers and soldiers of Sylla, who
had spent the fortunes which they had won by violence, and were now trying
to bring him back from the dead to renew their lease of plunder; ruined
wretches without number, broken down with fines and proscriptions, and
debts and the accumulation of usurious interest. Add to these "the
dangerous classes," the natural enemies of all governments--parricides,
adulterers, thieves, forgers, escaped slaves, brigands, and pirates who
had lost their occupation; and, finally, Catiline's own chosen comrades,
the smooth-faced patrician youths with curled hair and redolent with
perfumes, as yet beardless or with the first down upon their chins,
wearing scarves and veils and sleeved tunics reaching to their ankles,
industrious but only with the dice-box, night-watchers but in the supper-
rooms, in the small hours before dawn, immodest, dissolute boys, whose
education had been in learning to love and to be loved, to sing and to
dance naked at the midnight orgies, and along with it to handle poniards
and mix poisoned bowls.[14]

[Sidenote: November, B.C. 64.]
Well might Cicero be alarmed at such a combination; well might he say that
if a generation of such youths lived to manhood there would be a
commonwealth of Catilines. But what was to be thought of the prospects of
a society in which such phenomena were developing themselves? Cicero bade
them all go--follow their chief into the war, and perish in the snow of
the Apennines. But how if they would not go? How if from the soil of Rome,
under the rule of his friends the Senate, fresh crops of such youths would
rise perennially? The Commonwealth needed more drastic medicine than
eloquent exhortations, however true the picture might be.

[Sidenote: November, B.C. 63.]
None of the promising young gentlemen took Cicero's advice. Catiline went
alone and joined Manlius, and had he come on at once he might perhaps have
taken Rome. The army was to support an insurrection, and the insurrection
was to support the army. Catiline waited for a signal from his friends in
the city, and Lentulus, Cethegus, Autronius, and the rest of the leaders
waited for Catiline to arrive. Conspirators never think that they have
taken precautions enough or have gained allies enough; and in endeavoring
to secure fresh support they made a fatal mistake. An embassy of
Allobroges was in the city, a frontier tribe on the borders of the Roman
province in Gaul, who were allies of Rome, though not as yet subjects. The
Gauls were the one foreign nation whom the Romans really feared. The
passes of the Alps alone protected Italy from the hordes of German or
Gallic barbarians, whose numbers being unknown were supposed to be
exhaustless. Middle-aged men could still remember the panic at the
invasion of the Cimbri and Teutons, and it was the chief pride of the
democrats that the State had then been saved by their own Marius. At the
critical moment it was discovered that the conspirators had entered into a
correspondence with these Allobroges, and had actually proposed to them to
make a fresh inroad over the Alps. The suspicion of such an intention at
once alienated from Catiline the respectable part of the democratic party.
The fact of the communication was betrayed to Cicero. He intercepted the
letters; he produced them in the Senate with the seals unbroken, that no
suspicion might rest upon himself. Lentulus and Cethegus were sent for,
and could not deny their hands. The letters were then opened and read, and
no shadow of uncertainty any longer remained that they had really designed
to bring in an army of Gauls. Such of the conspirators as were known and
were still within reach were instantly seized.

[Sidenote: December 5, B.C. 63.]
Cicero, with a pardonable laudation of himself and of the Divine
Providence of which he professed to regard himself as the minister,
congratulated his country on its escape from so genuine a danger; and he
then invited the Senate to say what was to be done with these apostates
from their order, whose treason was now demonstrated. A plot for a mere
change of government, for the deposition of the aristocrats and the return
to power of the popular party, it might be impolitic, perhaps impossible,
severely to punish; but Catiline and his friends had planned the betrayal
of the State to the barbarians; and with persons who had committed
themselves to national treason there was no occasion to hesitate. Cicero
produced the list of those whom he considered guilty, and there were some
among his friends who thought the opportunity might be used to get rid of
dangerous enemies, after the fashion of Sylla, especially of Crassus and
Caesar. The name of Crassus was first mentioned, some said by secret
friends of Catiline, who hoped to alarm the Senate into inaction by
showing with whom they would have to deal. Crassus, it is possible, knew
more than he had told the consul. Catiline's success had, at one moment,
seemed assured; and great capitalists are apt to insure against
contingencies. But Cicero moved and carried a resolution that the charge
against him was a wicked invention. The attempt against Caesar was more
determined. Old Catulus, whom Caesar had defeated in the contest for the
pontificate, and Caius Calpurnius Piso,[15] a bitter aristocrat, whom
Caesar had prosecuted for misgovernment in Gaul, urged Cicero to include
his name. But Cicero was too honorable to lend himself to an accusation
which he knew to be false. Some of the young lords in their disappointment
threatened Caesar at the senate-house door with their swords; but the
attack missed its mark, and served only to show how dreaded Caesar already
was, and how eager a desire there was to make an end of him.

The list submitted for judgment contained the names of none but those who
were indisputably guilty. The Senate voted at once that they were traitors
to the State. The next question was of the nature of their punishment. In
the first place the persons of public officers were sacred, and Lentulus
was at the time a praetor. And next the Sempronian law forbade distinctly
that any Roman citizen should be put to death without a trial, and without
the right of appeal to the assembly.[16] It did not mean simply that
Roman citizens were not to be murdered, or that at any time it had been
supposed that they might. The object was to restrain the extraordinary
power claimed by the Senate of setting the laws aside on exceptional
occasions. Silanus, the consul-elect for the following year, was,
according to usage, asked to give his opinion first. He voted for
immediate death. One after the other the voices were the same, till the
turn came of Tiberius Nero, the great-grandfather of Nero the Emperor.
Tiberius was against haste. He advised that the prisoners should be kept
in confinement till Catiline was taken or killed, and that the whole
affair should then be carefully investigated. Investigation was perhaps
what many senators were most anxious to avoid. When Tiberius had done,
Caesar rose. The speech which Sallust places in his mouth was not an
imaginary sketch of what Sallust supposed him likely to have said, but the
version generally received of what he actually did say, and the most
important passages of it are certainly authentic. For the first time we
see through the surface of Caesar's outward actions into his real mind.
During the three quarters of a century which had passed since the death of
the elder Gracchus one political murder had followed upon another. Every
conspicuous democrat had been killed by the aristocrats in some convenient
disturbance. No constitution could survive when the law was habitually set
aside by violence; and disdaining the suspicion with which he knew that
his words would be regarded, Caesar warned the Senate against another act
of precipitate anger which would be unlawful in itself, unworthy of their
dignity, and likely in the future to throw a doubt upon the guilt of the
men upon whose fate they were deliberating. He did not extenuate, he
rather emphasized, the criminality of Catiline and his confederates; but
for that reason and because for the present no reasonable person felt the
slightest uncertainty about it, he advised them to keep within the lines
which the law had marked out for them. He spoke with respect of Silanus.
He did not suppose him to be influenced by feelings of party animosity.
Silanus had recommended the execution of the prisoners, either because he
thought their lives incompatible with the safety of the State, or because
no milder punishment seemed adequate to the enormity of their conduct. But
the safety of the State, he said, with a compliment to Cicero, had been
sufficiently provided for by the diligence of the consul. As to
punishment, none could be too severe; but with that remarkable adherence
to _fact_, which always distinguished Caesar, that repudiation of
illusion and sincere utterance of his real belief, whatever that might be,
he contended that death was not a punishment at all. Death was the end of
human suffering. In the grave there was neither joy nor sorrow. When a man
was dead he ceased to be.[17]He became as he had been before he was born.
Probably almost every one in the Senate thought like Caesar on this
subject. Cicero certainly did. The only difference was that plausible
statesmen affected a respect for the popular superstition, and pretended
to believe what they did not believe. Caesar spoke his convictions out.
There was no longer any solemnity in an execution. It was merely the
removal out of the way of troublesome persons; and convenient as such a
method might be, it was of graver consequence that the Senate of Rome, the
guardians of the law, should not set an example of violating the law.
Illegality, Caesar told them, would be followed by greater illegalities.
He reminded them how they had applauded Sylla, how they had rejoiced when
they saw their political enemies summarily despatched; and yet the
proscription, as they well knew, had been perverted to the license of
avarice and private revenge. They might feel sure that no such consequence
need be feared under their present consul: but times might change. The
worst crimes which had been committed in Rome in the past century had
risen out of the imitation of precedents, which at the moment seemed
defensible. The laws had prescribed a definite punishment for treason.
Those laws had been gravely considered; they had been enacted by the great
men who had built up the Roman dominion, and were not to be set aside in
impatient haste. Caesar therefore recommended that the estates of the
conspirators should be confiscated, that they themselves should be kept in
strict and solitary confinement dispersed in various places, and that a
resolution should be passed forbidding an application for their pardon
either to Senate or people.

The speech was weighty in substance and weightily delivered, and it
produced its effect.[18] Silanus withdrew his opinion. Quintus Cicero,
the consul's brother, followed, and a clear majority of the Senate went
with them, till it came to the turn of a young man who in that year had
taken his place in the house for the first time, who was destined to make
a reputation which could be set in competition with that of the gods
themselves, and whose moral opinion could be held superior to that of the
gods.[19]

Marcus Porcius Cato was born in the year 95, and was thus five years
younger than Caesar and eleven years younger than Cicero. He was the
great-grandson, as was said above, of the stern rugged censor who hated
Greek, preferred the teaching of the plough-tail and the Twelve Tables to
the philosophy of Aristotle, disbelieved in progress, and held by the
maxims of his father--the last, he of the Romans of the old type. The
young Marcus affected to take his ancestor for a pattern. He resembled him
as nearly as a modern Anglican monk resembles St. Francis or St. Bernard.
He could reproduce the form, but it was the form with the life gone out of
it. He was immeasurably superior to the men around him. He was virtuous,
if it be virtue to abstain from sin. He never lied. No one ever suspected
him of dishonesty or corruption. But his excellences were not of the
retiring sort. He carried them written upon him in letters for all to
read, as a testimony to a wicked generation. His opinions were as pedantic
as his life was abstemious, and no one was permitted to differ from him
without being held guilty rather of a crime than of a mistake. He was an
aristocratic pedant, to whom the living forces of humanity seemed but
irrational impulses of which he and such as he were the appointed school-
masters. To such a temperament a man of genius is instinctively hateful.
Cato had spoken often in the Senate, though so young a member of it,
denouncing the immoral habits of the age. He now rose to match himself
against Caesar; and with passionate vehemence he insisted that the
wretches who had plotted the overthrow of the State should be immediately
killed. He noticed Caesar's objections only to irritate the suspicion in
which he probably shared, that Caesar himself was one of Catiline's
accomplices. That Caesar had urged as a reason for moderation the absence
of immediate danger, was in Cato's opinion an argument the more for
anxiety. Naturally, too, he did not miss the opportunity of striking at
the scepticism which questioned future retribution. Whether Cato believed
himself in a future life mattered little, if Caesar's frank avowal could
be turned to his prejudice.

Cato spoke to an audience well disposed to go with him. Silanus went round
to his first view, and the mass of senators followed him. Caesar attempted
to reply; but so fierce were the passions that had been roused, that again
he was in danger of violence. The young knights who were present as a
senatorial guard rushed at him with their drawn swords. A few friends
protected him with their cloaks, and he left the Curia not to enter it
again for the rest of the year. When Caesar was gone, Cicero rose to
finish the debate. He too glanced at Caesar's infidelity, and as Caesar
had spoken of the wisdom of past generations, he observed that in the same
generations there had been a pious belief that the grave was not the end
of human existence. With an ironical compliment to the prudence of
Caesar's advice, he said that his own interest would lead him to follow
it; he would have the less to fear from the irritation of the people. The
Senate, he observed, must have heard with pleasure that Caesar condemned
the conspiracy. Caesar was the leader of the popular party, and from him
at least they now knew that they had nothing to fear. The punishment which
Caesar recommended was, in fact, Cicero admitted, more severe than death.
He trusted, therefore, that if the conspirators were executed, and he had
to answer to the people for the sentence to be passed upon them, Caesar
himself would defend him against the charge of cruelty. Meanwhile he said
that he had the ineffable satisfaction of knowing that he had saved the
State. The Senate might adopt such resolutions as might seem good to them
without alarm for the consequences. The conspiracy was disarmed. He had
made enemies among the bad citizens; but he had deserved and he had won
the gratitude of the good, and he stood secure behind the impregnable
bulwark of his country's love.

So Cicero, in the first effusion of self-admiration with which he never
ceased to regard his conduct on this occasion. No doubt he had acted
bravely, and he had shown as much adroitness as courage. But the whole
truth was never told. The Senate's anxiety to execute the prisoners arose
from a fear that the people would be against them if an appeal to the
assembly was allowed. The Senate was contending for the privilege of
suspending the laws by its own independent will; and the privilege, if it
was ever constitutional, had become so odious by the abuse of it, that to
a large section of Roman citizens a conspiracy against the oligarchy had
ceased to be looked on as treason at all. Cicero and Cato had their way.
Lentulus, Cethegus, Autronius and their companions were strangled in their
cells, on the afternoon of the debate upon their fate. A few weeks later
Catiline's army was cut to pieces, and he himself was killed. So
desperately his haggard bands had fought that they fell in their ranks
where they stood, and never Roman commander gained a victory that cost him
more dear. So furious a resistance implied a motive and a purpose beyond
any which Cicero or Sallust records, and the commission of inquiry
suggested by Tiberius Nero in the Senate might have led to curious
revelations. The Senate perhaps had its own reasons for fearing such
revelations, and for wishing the voices closed which could have made them.

[1] "Nunc quis patrem decem annorum natus non modo aufert sed tollit nisi
    veneno?"--_Varronis Fragmenta_, ed. Alexander Riese, p. 216.

[2] See the story in Cicero, _Pro Cluentio_.

[3] _Pro P. Sulla_, 4.

[4] "Catilina, si judicatum erit, meridie non lucere, certus erit
    competitor."--_Epist. ad Atticum_, i. 1.

[5] "Hoc tempore Catilinam, competitorem nostrum, defendere cogitamus.
    Judices habemus, quos volumus, summa accusatoris voluntate. Spero, si
    absolutus erit, conjunctiorem illum nobis fore in ratione
    petitionis."--_Ib_., i. 2.

[6] "Scito nihil tam exercitum nunc esse Romae quam candidatos omnibus
    iniquitatibus."--_Ib_., i. 11.

[7] I use a word apparently modern, but Cicero himself gave the name of
    Conservatores Reipublicae to the party to which he belonged.

[8] Suetonius, speaking of Augustus, says: "Quoties adesset, nihil
    praeterea agebat, seu vitandi rumoris causa, quo patrem Caesarem vulgo
    reprehensum commemorabat, quod inter spectandum epistolis libellisque
    legendis aut rescribendis vacaret; seu studio spectandi et voluptate,"
    etc.--_Vita Octavii_, 45.

[9] Writing three years later to Atticus, he says: "Confirmabam omnium
    privatorum possessiones, is enim est noster exercitus, ut tute scis
    locupletium."--_To Atticus_, i. 19. Pomponius Atticus, Cicero's
    most intimate correspondent, was a Roman knight, who inheriting a
    large estate from his father, increased it by contracts, banking,
    money-lending, and slave-dealing, in which he was deeply engaged.
    He was an accomplished, cultivated man, a shrewd observer of the
    times, and careful of committing himself on any side. His acquaintance
    with Cicero rested on similarity of temperament, with a solid
    financial basis at the bottom of it. They were mutually useful to
    each other.

[10] "Et nimium istud est, quod ab hoc tribuno plebis dictum est in
    senatu: urbanam plebem nimium in republica posse: exhauriendam esse:
    hoc enim verbo est usus; quasi de aliqua sentina, ac non de optimorum
    civium genere loqueretur."--_Contra Rullum_, ii. 26.

[11] Cicero, _Pro Murena_, 25.

[12] Murena was afterward prosecuted for bribery at this election. Cicero
    defended him; but even Cato, aristocrat as he was, affected to be
    shocked at the virtuous consul's undertaking so bad a case. It is
    observable that in his speech for Murena, Cicero found as many virtues
    in Lucullus as in his speech on the Manilian law he had found vices.
    It was another symptom of his change of attitude.

[13] "In loco munitissimo."

[14] This description of the young Roman aristocracy is given by Cicero in
    his most powerful vein: "Postremum autem genus est, non solum numero,
    verum etiam genere ipso atque vita, quod proprium est Catilinae, de
    ejus delectu, immo vero de complexu ejus ac sinu: quos pexo capillo,
    nitidos, aut imberbes, aut bene barbatos, videtis, manicatis et
    talaribus tunicis; velis amictos, non togis: quorum omnis industria
    vitae et vigilandi labor in antelucanis coenis expromitur. In his
    gregibus omnes aleatores, omnes adulteri, omnes impuri impudicique
    versantur. Hi pueri tam lepidi ac delicati non solum amare et amari
    neque cantare et saltare, sed etiam sicas vibrare et spargere venena
    didicerunt.... Nudi in conviviis saltare didicerunt."--_In
    Catilinam_, ii. 10. Compare _In Pisonem_, 10.

    The Romans shaved their beards at full maturity, and therefore
    "benebarbatos" does not mean grown men, but youths on the edge of
    manhood.

[15] Not to be confounded with Lucius Calpurnius Piso, who was Caesar's
    father-in-law.

[16] "Injussu populi."

[17] The real opinion of educated Romans on this subject was expressed in
    the well-known lines of Lucretius, which were probably written near
    this very time:

     "Nil igitur mors est, ad nos neque pertinet hilum,
     Quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur:
     Et, velut ante acto nil tempore sensimus aegri,
     Ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis;
     Omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu,
     Horrida, contremuere sub altis aetheris auris;
     In dubioque fuit sub utrorum regna cadendum
     Omnibus humanis esset, terraque, marique:
     Sic, ubi non erimus, cum corporis atque animai
     Discidium fuerit, quibus e sumus uniter apti,
     Scilicet haud nobis quicquam, qui non erimus tum,
     Accidere omnino poterit, sensumque movere:
     Non, si terra mari miscebitur, et mare coelo."

     LUCRETIUS, lib. iii. 11. 842-854.

[18] In the following century when Caesar's life had become mythic, a
    story was current that when Caesar was speaking on this occasion a
    note was brought in to him, and Cato, suspecting that it referred to
    the conspiracy, insisted that it should be read. Caesar handed it to
    Cato, and it proved to be a love letter from Cato's sister, Servilia,
    the mother of Brutus. More will be said of the supposed liaison
    between Caesar and Servilia hereafter. For the present it is enough to
    say that there is no contemporary evidence for the story at all; and
    that if it be true that a note of some kind from Servilia was given to
    Caesar, it is more consistent with probability and the other
    circumstances of the case, that it was an innocent note of business.
    Ladies do not send in compromising letters to their lovers when they
    are on their feet in Parliament; nor, if such an accident should
    happen, do the lovers pass them over to be read by the ladies'
    brothers.

[19] "Victrix causa Deis placuit, sed victa Catoni."--LUCAN.




CHAPTER XII.


[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 naive 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 _clientele_, 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 infamia 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 republica infirma, misera 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.
    Qua in re decernenda cum ego casu non affuissem, sensissemque id
    equestrem ordinem ferre moleste, neque aperte dicere: objurgavi
    senatum, ut mihi visus sum, summa cum auctoritate, et in causa non
    verecunda 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 amissa republica 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 prima 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.




CHAPTER XIII.


The consulship of Caesar was the last chance for the Roman aristocracy. He
was not a revolutionist. Revolutions are the last desperate remedy when
all else has failed. They may create as many evils as they cure, and wise
men always hate them. But if revolution was to be escaped, reform was
inevitable, and it was for the Senate to choose between the alternatives.
Could the noble lords have known then, in that their day, the things that
belonged to their peace--could they have forgotten their fish-ponds and
their game-preserves, and have remembered that, as the rulers of the
civilized world, they had duties which the eternal order of nature would
exact at their hands--the shaken constitution might again have regained
its stability, and the forms and even the reality of the Republic might
have continued for another century. It was not to be. Had the Senate been
capable of using the opportunity, they would long before have undertaken a
reformation for themselves. Even had their eyes been opened, there were
disintegrating forces at work which the highest political wisdom could do
no more than arrest; and little good is really effected by prolonging
artificially the lives of either constitutions or individuals beyond their
natural period. From the time when Rome became an empire, mistress of
provinces to which she was unable to extend her own liberties, the days of
her self-government were numbered. A homogeneous and vigorous people may
manage their own affairs under a popular constitution so long as their
personal characters remain undegenerate. Parliaments and Senates may
represent the general will of the community, and may pass laws and
administer them as public sentiment approves. But such bodies can preside
successfully only among subjects who are directly represented in them.
They are too ignorant, too selfish, too divided, to govern others; and
imperial aspirations draw after them, by obvious necessity, an imperial
rule. Caesar may have known this in his heart, yet the most far-seeing
statesman will not so trust his own misgivings as to refuse to hope for
the regeneration of the institutions into which he is born. He will
determine that justice shall be done. Justice is the essence of
government, and without justice all forms, democratic or monarchic, are
tyrannies alike. But he will work with the existing methods till the
inadequacy of them has been proved beyond dispute. Constitutions are never
overthrown till they have pronounced sentence on themselves.

Caesar accordingly commenced office by an endeavor to conciliate. The army
and the moneyed interests, represented by Pompey and Crassus, were already
with him; and he used his endeavors, as has been seen, to gain Cicero, who
might bring with him such part of the landed aristocracy as were not
hopelessly incorrigible. With Cicero he but partially succeeded. The great
orator solved the problem of the situation by going away into the country
and remaining there for the greater part of the year, and Caesar had to do
without an assistance which, in the speaking department, would have been
invaluable to him. His first step was to order the publication of the
"Acta Diurna," a daily journal of the doings of the Senate. The light of
day being thrown in upon that august body might prevent honorable members
from laying hands on each other as they had lately done, and might enable
the people to know what was going on among them--on a better authority
than rumor. He then introduced his agrarian law, the rough draft of which
had been already discussed, and had been supported by Cicero in the
preceding year. Had he meant to be defiant, like the Gracchi, he might
have offered it at once to the people. Instead of doing so, he laid it
before the Senate, inviting them to amend his suggestions, and promising
any reasonable concessions if they would co-operate. No wrong was to be
done to any existing occupiers. No right of property was to be violated
which was any real right at all. Large tracts in Campania which belonged
to the State were now held on the usual easy terms by great landed
patricians. These Caesar proposed to buy out, and to settle on the ground
twenty thousand of Pompey's veterans. There was money enough and to spare
in the treasury, which they had themselves brought home. Out of the large
funds which would still remain land might be purchased in other parts of
Italy for the rest, and for a few thousand of the unemployed population
which was crowded into Rome. The measure in itself was admitted to be a
moderate one. Every pains had been taken to spare the interests and to
avoid hurting the susceptibilities of the aristocrats. But, as Cicero
said, the very name of an agrarian law was intolerable to them. It meant
in the end spoliation and division of property, and the first step would
bring others after it. The public lands they had shared conveniently among
themselves from immemorial time. The public treasure was their treasure,
to be laid out as they might think proper. Cato headed the opposition. He
stormed for an entire day, and was so violent that Caesar threatened him
with arrest. The Senate groaned and foamed; no progress was made or was
likely to be made; and Caesar, as much in earnest as they were, had to
tell them that if they would not help him he must appeal to the assembly.
"I invited you to revise the law," he said; "I was willing that if any
clause displeased you it should be expunged. You will not touch it. Well,
then, the people must decide."

The Senate had made up their minds to fight the battle. If Caesar went to
the assembly, Bibulus, their second consul, might stop the proceedings. If
this seemed too extreme a step, custom provided other impediments to which
recourse might be had. Bibulus might survey the heavens, watch the birds,
or the clouds, or the direction of the wind, and declare the aspects
unfavorable; or he might proclaim day after day to be holy, and on holy
days no legislation was permitted. Should these religious cobwebs be
brushed away, the Senate had provided a further resource in three of the
tribunes whom they had bribed. Thus they held themselves secure, and dared
Caesar to do his worst. Caesar on his side was equally determined. The
assembly was convoked. The Forum was choked to overflowing. Caesar and
Pompey stood on the steps of the Temple of Castor, and Bibulus and his
tribunes were at hand ready with their interpellations. Such passions had
not been roused in Rome since the days of Cinna and Octavius, and many a
young lord was doubtless hoping that the day would not close without
another lesson to ambitious demagogues and howling mobs. In their eyes the
one reform which Rome needed was another Sylla.

Caesar read his law from the tablet on which it was inscribed; and, still
courteous to his antagonist, he turned to Bibulus and asked him if he had
any fault to find. Bibulus said sullenly that he wanted no revolutions,
and that while he was consul there should be none. The people hissed; and
he then added in a rage, "You shall not have your law this year though
every man of you demand it." Caesar answered nothing, but Pompey and
Crassus stood forward. They were not officials, but they were real forces.
Pompey was the idol of every soldier in the State, and at Caesar's
invitation he addressed the assembly. He spoke for his veterans. He spoke
for the poor citizens. He said that he approved the law to the last letter
of it.

"Will you then," asked Caesar, "support the law if it be illegally
opposed?" "Since," replied Pompey, "you consul, and you my fellow-
citizens, ask aid of me, a poor individual without office and without
authority, who nevertheless has done some service to the State, I say that
I will bear the shield if others draw the sword." Applause rang out from a
hundred thousand throats. Crassus followed to the same purpose, and was
received with the same wild delight. A few senators, who retained their
senses, saw the uselessness of the opposition, and retired. Bibulus was of
duller and tougher metal. As the vote was about to be taken, he and his
tribunes rushed to the rostra. The tribunes pronounced their veto. Bibulus
said that he had consulted the sky; the gods forbade further action being
taken that day, and he declared the assembly dissolved. Nay, as if a man
like Caesar could be stopped by a shadow, he proposed to sanctify the
whole remainder of the year, that no further business might be transacted
in it. Yells drowned his voice. The mob rushed upon the steps; Bibulus was
thrown down, and the rods of the lictors were broken; the tribunes who had
betrayed their order were beaten. Cato held his ground, and stormed at
Caesar till he was led off by the police, raving and gesticulating. The
law was then passed, and a resolution besides that every senator should
take an oath to obey it.

So in ignominy the Senate's resistance collapsed: the Caesar whom they had
thought to put off with their "woods and forests" had proved stronger than
the whole of them; and, prostrate at the first round of the battle, they
did not attempt another. They met the following morning. Bibulus told his
story and appealed for support. Had the Senate complied, they would
probably have ceased to exist. The oath was unpalatable, but they made the
best of it. Metellus Celer, Cato, and Favonius, a senator whom men called
Cato's ape, struggled against their fate, but, "swearing they would ne'er
consent, consented." The unwelcome formula was swallowed by the whole of
them; and Bibulus, who had done his part and had been beaten and kicked
and trampled upon, and now found his employers afraid to stand by him,
went off sulkily to his house, shut himself up there, and refused to act
as consul further during the remainder of the year.

There was no further active opposition. A commission was appointed by
Caesar to carry out the land act, composed of twenty of the best men that
could be found, one of them being Atius Balbus, the husband of Caesar's
only sister, and grandfather of a little child now three years old, who
was known afterward to the world as Augustus. Cicero was offered a place,
but declined. The land question having been disposed of, Caesar then
proceeded with the remaining measures by which his consulship was
immortalized. He had redeemed his promise to Pompey by providing for his
soldiers. He gratified Crassus by giving the desired relief to the farmers
of the taxes. He confirmed Pompey's arrangements for the government of
Asia, which the Senate had left in suspense. The Senate was now itself
suspended. The consul acted directly with the assembly, without
obstruction and without remonstrance, Bibulus only from time to time
sending out monotonous admonitions from within doors that the season was
consecrated, and that Caesar's acts had no validity. Still more
remarkably, and as the distinguishing feature of his term of office,
Caesar carried, with the help of the people, the body of admirable laws
which are known to jurists as the "Leges Juliae," and mark an epoch in
Roman history. They were laws as unwelcome to the aristocracy as they were
essential to the continued existence of the Roman State, laws which had
been talked of in the Senate, but which could never pass through the
preliminary stage of resolutions, and were now enacted over the Senate's
head by the will of Caesar and the sovereign power of the nation. A mere
outline can alone be attempted here. There was a law declaring the
inviolability of the persons of magistrates during their term of
authority, reflecting back on the murder of Saturninus, and touching by
implication the killing of Lentulus and his companions. There was a law
for the punishment of adultery, most disinterestedly singular if the
popular accounts of Caesar's habits had any grain of truth in them. There
were laws for the protection of the subject from violence, public or
private; and laws disabling persons who had laid hands illegally on Roman
citizens from holding office in the Commonwealth. There was a law,
intended at last to be effective, to deal with judges who allowed
themselves to be bribed. There were laws against defrauders of the
revenue; laws against debasing the coin; laws against sacrilege; laws
against corrupt State contracts; laws against bribery at elections.
Finally, there was a law, carefully framed, _De repetundis_, to exact
retribution from proconsuls or propraetors of the type of Verres who had
plundered the provinces. All governors were required, on relinquishing
office, to make a double return of their accounts, one to remain for
inspection among the archives of the province, and one to be sent to Rome;
and where peculation or injustice could be proved, the offender's estate
was made answerable to the last sesterce.[1]

Such laws were words only without the will to execute them; but they
affirmed the principles on which Roman or any other society could alone
continue. It was for the officials of the constitution to adopt them, and
save themselves and the Republic, or to ignore them as they had ignored
the laws which already existed, and see it perish as it deserved. All that
man could do for the preservation of his country from revolution Caesar
had accomplished. Sylla had re-established the rule of the aristocracy,
and it had failed grossly and disgracefully. Cinna and Marius had tried
democracy, and that had failed. Caesar was trying what law would do, and
the result remained to be seen. Bibulus, as each measure was passed,
croaked that it was null and void. The leaders of the Senate threatened
between their teeth that all should be undone when Caesar's term was over.
Cato, when he mentioned the "Leges Juliae," spoke of them as enactments,
but refused them their author's name. But the excellence of these laws was
so clearly recognized that they survived the irregularity of their
introduction; and the "Lex de Repetundis" especially remained a terror to
evil-doers, with a promise of better days to the miserable and pillaged
subjects of the Roman Empire.

So the year of Caesar's consulship passed away. What was to happen when it
had expired? The Senate had provided "the woods and forests" for him. But
the Senate's provision in such a matter could not be expected to hold. He
asked for nothing, but he was known to desire an opportunity of
distinguished service. Caesar was now forty-three. His life was ebbing
away, and, with the exception of his two years in Spain, it had been spent
in struggling with the base elements of Roman faction. Great men will bear
such sordid work when it is laid on them, but they loathe it
notwithstanding, and for the present there was nothing more to be done. A
new point of departure had been taken. Principles had been laid down for
the Senate and people to act on, if they could and would. Caesar could
only wish for a long absence in some new sphere of usefulness, where he
could achieve something really great which his country would remember.

And on one side only was such a sphere open to him. The East was Roman to
the Euphrates. No second Mithridates could loosen the grasp with which the
legions now held the civilized parts of Asia. Parthians might disturb the
frontier, but could not seriously threaten the Eastern dominions; and no
advantage was promised by following on the steps of Alexander and annexing
countries too poor to bear the cost of their maintenance. To the west it
was different. Beyond the Alps there was still a territory of unknown
extent, stretching away to the undefined ocean, a territory peopled with
warlike races, some of whom in ages long past had swept over Italy and
taken Rome, and had left their descendants and their name in the northern
province, which was now called Cisalpine Gaul. With these races the Romans
had as yet no clear relations, and from them alone could any serious
danger threaten the State. The Gauls had for some centuries ceased their
wanderings, had settled down in fixed localities. They had built towns and
bridges; they had cultivated the soil, and had become wealthy and partly
civilized. With the tribes adjoining Provence the Romans had alliances
more or less precarious, and had established a kind of protectorate over
them. But even here the inhabitants were uneasy for their independence,
and troubles were continually arising with them; while into these
districts and into the rest of Gaul a fresh and stormy element was now
being introduced. In earlier times the Gauls had been stronger than the
Germans, and not only could they protect their own frontier, but they had
formed settlements beyond the Rhine. These relations were being changed.
The Gauls, as they grew in wealth, declined in vigor. The Germans, still
roving and migratory, were throwing covetous eyes out of their forests on
the fields and vineyards of their neighbors, and enormous numbers of them
were crossing the Rhine and Danube, looking for new homes. How feeble a
barrier either the Alps or the Gauls themselves might prove against such
invaders had been but too recently experienced. Men who were of middle age
at the time of Caesar's consulship could still remember the terrors which
had been caused by the invasion of the Cimbri and Teutons. Marius had
saved Italy then from destruction, as it were, by the hair of its head.
The annihilation of those hordes had given Rome a passing respite. But
fresh generations had grown up. Fresh multitudes were streaming out of
the North. Germans in hundreds of thousands were again passing the Upper
Rhine, rooting themselves in Burgundy, and coming in collision with tribes
which Rome protected. There were uneasy movements among the Gauls
themselves, whole nations of them breaking up from their homes and again
adrift upon the world. Gaul and Germany were like a volcano giving signs
of approaching eruption; and at any moment, and hardly with warning,
another lava-stream might be pouring down into Venetia and Lombardy.

To deal with this danger was the work marked out for Caesar. It is the
fashion to say that he sought a military command that he might have an
army behind him to overthrow the constitution. If this was his object,
ambition never chose a more dangerous or less promising route for itself.
Men of genius who accomplish great things in this world do not trouble
themselves with remote and visionary aims. They encounter emergencies as
they rise, and leave the future to shape itself as it may. It would seem
that at first the defence of Italy was all that was thought of. "The woods
and forests" were set aside, and Caesar, by a vote of the people, was
given the command of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyria for five years; but either
he himself desired, or especial circumstances which were taking place
beyond the mountains recommended, that a wider scope should be allowed
him. The Senate, finding that the people would act without them if they
hesitated, gave him in addition Gallia Comata, the land of the Gauls with
the long hair, the governorship of the Roman province beyond the Alps,
with untrammelled liberty to act as he might think good throughout the
country which is now known as France and Switzerland and the Rhine
provinces of Germany.

He was to start early in the approaching year. It was necessary before he
went to make some provision for the quiet government of the capital. The
alliance with Pompey and Crassus gave temporary security. Pompey had less
stability of character than could have been wished, but he became attached
to Caesar's daughter Julia; and a fresh link of marriage was formed to
hold them together. Caesar himself married Calpurnia, the daughter of
Calpurnius Piso. The Senate having temporarily abdicated, he was able to
guide the elections; and Piso and Pompey's friend Gabinius, who had
obtained the command of the pirate war for him, were chosen consuls for
the year 58. Neither of them, if we can believe a tithe of Cicero's
invective, was good for much; but they were stanch partisans, and were to
be relied on to resist any efforts which might be made to repeal the
"Leges Juliae." These matters being arranged, and his own term having
expired, Caesar withdrew, according to custom, to the suburbs beyond the
walls to collect troops and prepare for his departure. Strange things,
however, had yet to happen before he was gone.

[Sidenote: B. C. 58.]
It is easy to conceive how the Senate felt at these transactions, how ill
they bore to find themselves superseded and the State managed over their
heads. Fashionable society was equally furious, and the three allies went
by the name of Dynasts, or "Reges Superbi." After resistance had been
abandoned, Cicero came back to Rome to make cynical remarks from which all
parties suffered equally. His special grievance was the want of
consideration which he conceived to have been shown for himself. He mocked
at the Senate; he mocked at Bibulus, whom he particularly abominated; he
mocked at Pompey and the agrarian law. Mockery turned to indignation when
he thought of the ingratitude of the Senate, and his chief consolation in
their discomfiture was that it had fallen on them through the neglect of
their most distinguished member. "I could have saved them if they would
have let me," he said. "I could save them still if I were to try; but I
will go study philosophy in my own family." [2] "Freedom is gone," he
wrote to Atticus; "and if we are to be worse enslaved, we shall bear it.
Our lives and properties are more to us than liberty. We sigh, and we do
not even remonstrate." [3]

Cato, in the desperation of passion, called Pompey a dictator in the
assembly, and barely escaped being killed for his pains.[4] The
patricians revenged themselves in private by savage speeches and plots and
purposes. Fashionable society gathered in the theatres and hissed the
popular leaders. Lines were introduced into the plays reflecting on
Pompey, and were encored a thousand times. Bibulus from his closet
continued to issue venomous placards, reporting scandals about Caesar's
life, and now for the first time bringing up the story of Nicomedes. The
streets were impassable where these papers were pasted up, from the crowds
of loungers which were gathered to read them, and Bibulus for the moment
was the hero of patrician saloons. Some malicious comfort Cicero gathered
out of these manifestations of feeling. He had no belief in the noble
lords, and small expectations from them. Bibulus was, on the whole, a fit
representative for the gentry of the fish-ponds. But the Dynasts were at
least heartily detested in quarters which had once been powerful, and
might be powerful again; and he flattered himself, though he affected to
regret it, that the animosity against them was spreading. To all parties
there is attached a draggled trail of disreputables, who hold themselves
entitled to benefits when their side is in power, and are angry when they
are passed over.

"The State," Cicero wrote in the autumn of 59 to Atticus, "is in a worse
condition than when you left us; then we thought that we had fallen under
a power which pleased the people, and which, though abhorrent to the good,
yet was not totally destructive to them. Now all hate it equally, and we
are in terror as to where the exasperation may break out. We had
experienced the ill-temper and irritation of those who in their anger with
Cato had brought ruin on us; but the poison worked so slowly that it
seemed we might die without pain. I hoped, as I often told you, that the
wheel of the constitution was so turning that we should scarcely hear a
sound or see any visible track; and so it would have been could men have
waited for the tempest to pass over them. But the secret sighs turned to
groans, and the groans to universal clamor; and thus our friend Pompey,
who so lately swam in glory and never heard an evil word of himself, is
broken-hearted and knows not whither to turn. A precipice is before him,
and to retreat is dangerous. The good are against him; the bad are not his
friends. I could scarce help weeping the other day when I heard him
complaining in the Forum of the publication of Bibulus. He who but a short
time since bore himself so proudly there, with the people in raptures with
him, and with the world on his side, was now so humble and abject as to
disgust even himself, not to say his hearers. Crassus enjoyed the scene,
but no one else. Pompey had fallen down out of the stars--not by a gradual
descent, but in a single plunge; and as Apelles if he had seen his Venus,
or Protogenes his Ialysus, all daubed with mud, would have been vexed and
annoyed, so was I grieved to the very heart to see one whom I had painted
out in the choicest colors of art thus suddenly defaced.[5] Pompey is
sick with irritation at the placards of Bibulus. I am sorry about them.
They give such excessive annoyance to a man whom I have always liked; and
Pompey is so prompt with his sword, and so unaccustomed to insult, that I
fear what he may do. What the future may have in store for Bibulus I know
not. At present he is the admired of all." [6]

"Sampsiceramus," Cicero wrote a few days later, "is greatly penitent. He
would gladly be restored to the eminence from which he has fallen.
Sometimes he imparts his griefs to me, and asks me what he should do,
which I cannot tell him." [7]

Unfortunate Cicero, who knew what was right, but was too proud to do it!
Unfortunate Pompey, who still did what was right, but was too sensitive to
bear the reproach of it, who would so gladly not leave his duty
unperformed, and yet keep the "sweet voices" whose applause had grown so
delicious to him! Bibulus was in no danger. Pompey was too good-natured to
hurt him; and Caesar let fools say what they pleased, as long as they were
fools without teeth, who would bark but could not bite. The risk was to
Cicero himself, little as he seemed to be aware of it. Caesar was to be
long absent from Rome, and he knew that as soon as he was engaged in Gaul
the extreme oligarchic faction would make an effort to set aside his land
commission and undo his legislation. When he had a clear purpose in view,
and was satisfied that it was a good purpose, he was never scrupulous
about his instruments. It was said of him that when he wanted any work
done he chose the persons best able to do it, let their general character
be what it might. The rank and file of the patricians, proud, idle,
vicious, and self-indulgent, might be left to their mistresses and their
gaming-tables. They could do no mischief unless they had leaders at their
head who could use their resources more effectively than they could do
themselves. There were two men only in Rome with whose help they could be
really dangerous--Cato, because he was a fanatic, impregnable to argument,
and not to be influenced by temptation of advantage to himself; Cicero, on
account of his extreme ability, his personal ambition, and his total want
of political principle. Cato he knew to be impracticable. Cicero he had
tried to gain; but Cicero, who had played a first part as consul, could
not bring himself to play a second, and, if the chance offered, had both
power and will to be troublesome. Some means had to be found to get rid of
these two, or at least to tie their hands and to keep them in order. There
would be Pompey and Crassus still at hand. But Pompey was weak, and
Crassus understood nothing beyond the art of manipulating money. Gabinius
and Piso, the next consuls, had an indifferent reputation and narrow
abilities, and at best they would have but their one year of authority.
Politics, like love, makes strange bedfellows. In this difficulty accident
threw in Cesar's way a convenient but most unexpected ally.

Young Clodius, after his escape from prosecution by the marvellous methods
which Crassus had provided for him, was more popular than ever. He had
been the occasion of a scandal which had brought infamy on the detested
Senate. His offence in itself seemed slight in so loose an age, and was as
nothing compared with the enormity of his judges. He had come out of his
trial with a determination to be revenged on the persons from whose
tongues he had suffered most severely in the senatorial debates. Of these
Cato had been the most savage; but Cicero had been the most exasperating,
from his sarcasms, his airs of patronage, and perhaps his intimacy with
his sister. The noble youth had exhausted the common forms of pleasure. He
wanted a new excitement, and politics and vengeance might be combined. He
was as clever as he was dissolute, and, as clever men are fortunately rare
in the licentious part, of society, they are always idolized, because they
make vice respectable by connecting it with intellect. Clodius was a
second, an abler Catiline, equally unprincipled and far more dexterous and
prudent. In times of revolution there is always a disreputable wing to the
radical party, composed of men who are the natural enemies of established
authority, and these all rallied about their new leader with devout
enthusiasm. Clodius was not without political experience. His first public
appearance had been as leader of a mutiny. He was already quaestor, and so
a senator; but he was too young to aspire to the higher magistracies which
were open to him as a patrician. He declared his intention of renouncing
his order, becoming a plebeian, and standing for the tribuneship of the
people. There were precedents for such a step, but they were rare. The
abdicating noble had to be adopted into a plebeian family, and the consent
was required of the consuls and of the Pontifical College. With the
growth of political equality the aristocracy had become more insistent
upon the privilege of birth, which could not be taken from them; and for a
Claudius to descend among the canaille was as if a Howard were to seek
adoption from a shopkeeper in the Strand.

At first there was universal amazement. Cicero had used the intrigue with
Pompeia as a text for a sermon on the immoralities of the age. The
aspirations of Clodius to be a tribune he ridiculed as an illustration of
its follies, and after scourging him in the Senate, he laughed at him and
jested with him in private.[8] Cicero did not understand with how
venomous a snake he was playing. He even thought Clodius likely to turn
against the Dynasts, and to become a serviceable member of the
conservative party. Gradually he was forced to open his eyes. Speeches
were reported to him as coming from Clodius or his allies threatening an
inquiry into the death of the Catilinarians. At first he pushed his alarms
aside, as unworthy of him. What had so great a man as he to fear from a
young reprobate like "the pretty boy"? The "pretty boy," however, found
favor where it was least looked for. Pompey supported his adventure for
the tribuneship. Caesar, though it was Caesar's house which he had
violated, did not oppose. Bibulus refused consent, but Bibulus had
virtually abdicated and went for nothing. The legal forms were complied
with. Clodius found a commoner younger than himself who was willing to
adopt him, and who, the day after the ceremony, released him from the new
paternal authority. He was now a plebeian, and free. He remained a senator
in virtue of his quaestorship, and he was chosen tribune of the people for
the year 58.

Cicero was at last startled out of his security. So long as the consuls,
or one of them, could be depended on, a tribune's power was insignificant.
When the consuls were of his own way of thinking, a tribune was a very
important personage indeed. Atticus was alarmed for his friend, and
cautioned him to look to himself. Warnings came from all quarters that
mischief was in the wind. Still it was impossible to believe the peril to
be a real one. Cicero, to whom Rome owed its existence, to be struck at by
a Clodius! It could not be. As little could a wasp hurt an elephant.

There can be little doubt that Caesar knew what Clodius had in his mind;
or that, if the design was not his own, he had purposely allowed it to go
forward. Caesar did not wish to hurt Cicero. He wished well to him, and
admired him; but he did not mean to leave him free in Rome to lead a
senatorial reaction. A prosecution for the execution of the prisoners was
now distinctly announced. Cicero as consul had put to death Roman citizens
without a trial. Cicero was to be called to answer for the illegality
before the sovereign people. The danger was unmistakable; and Caesar, who
was still in the suburbs making his preparations, invited Cicero to avoid
it, by accompanying him as second in command into Gaul. The offer was made
in unquestionable sincerity. Caesar may himself have created the situation
to lay Cicero under a pressure, but he desired nothing so much as to take
him as his companion, and to attach him to himself. Cicero felt the
compliment and hesitated to refuse, but his pride again came in his way.
Pompey assured him that not a hair of his head should be touched. Why
Pompey gave him this encouragement Cicero could never afterwards
understand. The scenes in the theatres had also combined to mislead him,
and he misread the disposition of the great body of citizens. He imagined
that they would all start up in his defence, Senate, aristocracy, knights,
commoners, and tradesmen. The world, he thought, looked back upon his
consulship with as much admiration as he did himself, and was always
contrasting him with his successors. Never was mistake more profound. The
Senate, who had envied his talents and resented his assumption, now
despised him as a trimmer. His sarcasms had made him enemies among those
who acted with him politically. He had held aloof at the crisis of
Caesar's election and in the debates which followed, and therefore all
sides distrusted him; while throughout the body of the people there was,
as Caesar had foretold, a real and sustained resentment at the conduct of
the Catiline affair. The final opinion of Rome was that the prisoners
ought to have been tried; and that they were not tried was attributed not
unnaturally to a desire, on the part of the Senate, to silence an inquiry
which might have proved inconvenient.

Thus suddenly out of a clear sky the thunder-clouds gathered over Cicero's
head. "Clodius," says Dion Cassius, "had discovered that among the
senators Cicero was more feared than loved. There were few of them who had
not been hit by his irony, or irritated by his presumption." Those who
most agreed in what he had done were not ashamed to shuffle off upon him
their responsibilities. Clodius, now omnipotent with the assembly at his
back, cleared the way by a really useful step; he carried a law abolishing
the impious form of declaring the heavens unfavorable when an inconvenient
measure was to be stopped or delayed. Probably it formed a part of his
engagement with Caesar. The law may have been meant to act
retrospectively, to prevent a question being raised on the interpellations
of Bibulus. This done, and without paying the Senate the respect of first
consulting it, he gave notice that he would propose a vote to the
assembly, to the effect that any person who had put to death a Roman
citizen without trial, and without allowing him an appeal to the people,
had violated the constitution of the State. Cicero was not named directly;
every senator who had voted for the execution of Cethegus and Lentulus and
their companions was as guilty as he; but it was known immediately that
Cicero was the mark that was being aimed at; and Caesar at once renewed
the offer, which he made before, to take Cicero with him. Cicero, now
frightened in earnest, still could not bring himself to owe his escape to
Caesar. The Senate, ungrateful as they had been, put on mourning with an
affectation of dismay. The knights petitioned the consuls to interfere for
Cicero's protection. The consuls declined to receive their request. Caesar
outside the city gave no further sign. A meeting of the citizens was held
in the camp. Caesar's opinion was invited. He said that he had not changed
his sentiments. He had remonstrated at the time against the execution. He
disapproved of it still, but he did not directly advise legislation upon
acts that were past. Yet, though he did not encourage Clodius, he did not
interfere. He left the matter to the consuls, and one of them was his own
father-in-law, and the other was Gabinius, once Pompey's favorite officer.
Gabinius, Cicero thought, would respect Pompey's promise to him. To Piso
he made a personal appeal. He found him, he said afterwards,[9] at
eleven in the morning, in his slippers, at a low tavern. Piso came out,
reeking with wine, and excused himself by saying that his health required
a morning draught. Cicero attempted to receive his apology, and he stood
for a while at the tavern door, till he could no longer bear the smell and
the foul language and expectorations of the consul. Hope in that quarter
there was none. Two days later the assembly was called to consider
Clodius's proposal. Piso was asked to say what he thought of the treatment
of the conspirators; he answered gravely, and, as Cicero described him,
with one eye in his forehead, that he disapproved of cruelty. Neither
Pompey nor his friends came to help. What was Cicero to do? Resist by
force? The young knights rallied about him eager for a fight, if he would
but give the word. Sometimes as he looked back in after-years he blamed
himself for declining their services, sometimes he took credit to himself
for refusing to be the occasion of bloodshed.[10]

"I was too timid," he said once; "I had the country with me, and I should
have stood firm. I had to do with a band of villains only, with two
monsters of consuls, and with the male harlot of rich buffoons, the
seducer of his sister, the high-priest of adultery, a poisoner, a forger,
an assassin, a thief. The best and bravest citizens implored me to stand
up to him. But I reflected that this Fury asserted that he was supported
by Pompey and Crassus and Caesar. Caesar had an army at the gates. The
other two could raise another army when they pleased; and when they knew
that their names were thus made use of, they remained silent. They were
alarmed perhaps, because the laws which they had carried in the preceding
year were challenged by the new praetors, and were held by the Senate to
be invalid; and they were unwilling to alienate a popular tribune."[11]

And again elsewhere: "When I saw that the faction of Catiline was in
power, that the party which I had led, some from envy of myself, some from
fear for their own lives, had betrayed and deserted me; when the two
consuls had been purchased by promises of provinces, and had gone over to
my enemies, and the condition of the bargain was that I was to be
delivered over, tied and bound, to my enemies; when the Senate and knights
were in mourning, but were not allowed to bring my cause before the
people; when my blood had been made the seal of the arrangement under
which the State had been disposed of; when I saw all this, although 'the
good' were ready to fight for me, and were willing to die for me, I would
not consent, because I saw that victory or defeat would alike bring ruin
to the Commonwealth. The Senate was powerless. The Forum was ruled by
violence. In such a city there was no place for me." [12]

So Cicero, as he looked back afterwards, described the struggle in his own
mind. His friends had then rallied; Caesar was far away; and he could tell
his own story, and could pile his invectives on those who had injured him.
His matchless literary power has given him exclusive command over the
history of his time. His enemies' characters have been accepted from his
pen as correct portraits. If we allow his description of Clodius and the
two consuls to be true to the facts, what harder condemnation can be
pronounced against a political condition in which such men as these could
be raised to the first position in the State?[13] Dion says that Cicero's
resolution to yield did not wholly proceed from his own prudence, but was
assisted by advice from Cato and Hortensius the orator. Anyway, the blow
fell, and he went down before the stroke. His immortal consulship, in
praise of which he had written a poem, brought after it the swift
retribution which Caesar had foretold. When the vote proposed by Clodius
was carried, he fled to Sicily, with a tacit confession that he dared not
abide his trial, which would immediately have followed. Sentence was
pronounced upon him in his absence. His property was confiscated. His
houses in town and country were razed. The site of his palace in Rome was
dedicated to the Goddess of Liberty, and he himself was exiled. He was
forbidden to reside within four hundred miles of Rome, with a threat of
death if he returned; and he retired to Macedonia, to pour out his sorrows
and his resentments in lamentations unworthy of a woman.


[1] See a list of the Leges Juliae in the 48th Book of the Corpus Juris
    Civilis.

[2] _To Atticus_, ii. 16.

[3] "Tenemur undique, neque jam, quo minus serviamus, recusamus, sed
    mortem et ejectionem quasi majora timemus, quae multo sunt minora.
    Atque hic status, qui una voce omnium gemitur neque verbo cujusdam
    sublevatur."--_To Atticus_, ii. 18.

[4] "In concionem ascendit et Pompeium privatus dictatorem appellavit.
    Propius nihil est factum quam ut occideretur."--Cicero, _Ad Quintum
    Fratrem_, i. 2.

[5] _To Athens_, ii, 21. In this comparison Cicero betrays his naive
    conviction that Pompey was indebted to him and to his praises for his
    reputation. Here, as always, Cicero was himself the centre round
    which all else revolved or ought to revolve.

[6] _Ib_.

[7] To Atticus, ii. 22.

[8] "Jam familiariter cum illo etiam cavillor ac jocor."--_To
    Atticus_, ii. 1.

[9] _Oratio in L. Pisonem_.

[10] He seems to have even thought of suicide.--_To Atticus_, iii. 9.

[11] Abridged from the _Oratio pro P. Sextio_.

[12] _Oratio post reditum ad Quirites_.

[13] In a letter to his brother Quintus, written at a time when he did
    not know the real feelings of Caesar and Pompey, and had supposed
    that he had only to deal with Clodius, Cicero announced a distinct
    intention of resisting by force. He expected that the whole of Italy
    would be at his side. He said: "Si diem nobis Clodius dixerit, tota
    Italia concurret, ut multiplicata gloria discedamus. Sin autem vi
    agere conabitur, spero fore, studiis non solum amicorum, sedetiam
    alienorum, ut vi resistamus. Omnes et se et suos liberos, amicos,
    clientes, libertos, servos, pecunias denique suas pollicentur. Nostra
    antiqua manus bonorum ardet studio nostri atque amore. Si qui antea
    aut alieniores fuerant, ant languidiores, nunc horum regum odio se
    cum bonis conjungunt. Pompeius omnia pollicetur et Caesar, do quibus
    ita credo, ut nihil de mea comparatione deminuam."--_Ad Quintum
    Fratrem_, i. 2.




CHAPTER XIV.


From the fermentation of Roman politics, the passions of the Forum and
Senate, the corrupt tribunals, the poisoned centre of the Empire, the
story passes beyond the frontier of Italy. We no longer depend for our
account of Caesar on the caricatures of rival statesmen. He now becomes
himself our guide. We see him in his actions and in the picture of his
personal character which he has unconsciously drawn. Like all real great
men, he rarely speaks of himself. He tells us little or nothing of, his
own feelings or his own purposes. Cicero never forgets his individuality.
In every line that he wrote Cicero was attitudinizing for posterity, or
reflecting on the effect of his conduct upon his interests or his
reputation. Caesar is lost in his work; his personality is scarcely more
visible than Shakespeare's. He was now forty-three years old. His
abstemious habits had left his health unshaken. He was in the fullest
vigor of mind and body, and it was well for him that his strength had not
been undermined. He was going on an expedition which would make
extraordinary demands upon his energies. That he had not contemplated
operations so extended as those which were forced upon him is evident from
the nature of his preparations. His command in Further Gaul had been an
afterthought, occasioned probably by news which had been received of
movements in progress there during his consulship. Of the four legions
which were allowed to him, one only was beyond the Alps; three were at
Aquileia. It was late in life for him to begin the trade of a soldier; and
as yet, with the exception of his early service in Asia and a brief and
limited campaign in Spain when propraetor, he had no military experience
at all. His ambition hitherto had not pointed in that direction; nor is it
likely that a person of so strong an understanding would have contemplated
beforehand the deliberate undertaking of the gigantic war into which
circumstances immediately forced him. Yet he must have known that he had
to deal with a problem of growing difficulty. The danger to Italy from
inroads across the Alps was perpetually before the minds of thoughtful
Roman statesmen. Events were at that moment taking place among the Gallic
tribes which gave point to the general uneasiness. And unwilling as the
Romans were to extend their frontiers and their responsibilities in a
direction so unknown and so unpromising, yet some interference either by
arms or by authority beyond those existing limits was being pressed upon
them in self-defence.

The Transalpine Gaul of Caesar was the country included between the Rhine,
the ocean, the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean, and the Alps. Within these
limits, including Switzerland, there was at this time a population vaguely
estimated at six or seven millions. The Roman Province stretched along the
coast to the Spanish border; it was bounded on the north by the Cevennes
mountains, and for some generations by the Isere; but it had been found
necessary lately[1] to annex the territory of the Allobroges (Dauphine
and Savoy), and the proconsular authority was now extended to within a few
miles of Geneva. The rest was divided into three sections, inhabited by
races which, if allied, were distinctly different in language, laws, and
institutions. The Aquitani, who were connected with the Spaniards or
perhaps the Basques, held the country between the Pyrenees and the
Garonne. The Belgae, whom Caesar believed to have been originally Germans,
extended from the mouth of the Seine to the mouth of the Rhine, and inland
to the Marne and Moselle. The people whom the Romans meant especially when
they spoke of Gauls occupied all the remainder. At one time the Celts had
probably been masters of the whole of France, but had gradually yielded to
encroachment. According to the Druids, they came out of darkness, _ab
Dite Patre_; they called themselves Children of Night, counting time by
nights instead of days, as we say fortnight and sennight. Comparison of
language has taught us that they were a branch of the great Aryan race,
one of the first which rolled westward into Europe, before Greeks or
Latins had been heard of.

This once magnificent people was now in a state of change and
decomposition. On Aquitaine and Belgium Roman civilization had as yet
produced no effect. The severe habits of earlier generations remained
unchanged. The Gauls proper had yielded to contact with the Province and
to intercourse with Italian traders. They had built towns and villages.
They had covered the land with farms and homesteads. They had made roads.
They had bridged their rivers, even such rivers as the Rhone and the
Loire. They had amassed wealth, and had adopted habits of comparative
luxury, which, if it had not abated their disposition to fight, had
diminished their capacity for fighting. Their political and perhaps their
spiritual system was passing through analogous transformations. The
ancient forms remained, but an altered spirit was working under them. From
the earliest antiquity they had been divided into tribes and sub-tribes:
each tribe and sub-tribe being practically independent, or united only by
common objects and a common sentiment of race. The rule was the rule of
the strong, under the rudest forms of tribal organization. The chief was
either hereditary or elected, or won his command by the sword. The mass of
the people were serfs. The best fighters were self-made nobles, under the
chief's authority. Every man in the tribe was the chief's absolute
subject; the chief, in turn, was bound to protect the meanest of them
against injury from without. War, on a large scale or a small, had been
the occupation of their lives. The son was not admitted into his father's
presence till he was old enough to be a soldier. When the call to arms
went out, every man of the required age was expected at the muster, and
the last comer was tortured to death in the presence of his comrades as a
lesson against backwardness.

As the secular side of things bore a rude resemblance to feudalism, so on
the religious there was a similar anticipation of the mediaeval Catholic
Church. The Druids were not a special family, like the Levites, or in any
way born into the priesthood. They were an order composed of persons
selected, when young, out of the higher ranks of the community, either for
speciality of intellect, or from disposition, or by the will of their
parents, or from a desire to avoid military service, from which the Druids
were exempt. There were no tribal distinctions among them. Their head-
quarters were in Britain, to which those who aspired to initiation in the
more profound mysteries repaired for instruction; but they were spread
universally over Gaul and the British Islands. They were the ministers of
public worship, the depositaries of knowledge, and the guardians of public
morality. Young men repaired to the Druids for education. They taught
theology; they taught the movements of the stars. They presided in the
civil courts and determined questions of disputed inheritance. They heard
criminal cases and delivered judgment; and, as with the Church, their
heaviest and most dreaded punishment was excommunication. The
excommunicated person lost his civil rights. He became an outlaw from
society, and he was excluded from participation in the sacrifices. In the
religious services the victims most acceptable to the gods were human
beings--criminals, if such could be had; if not, then innocent persons,
who were burnt to death in huge towers of wicker. In the Quemadero at
Seville, as in our own Smithfield, the prisoners of the Church were
fastened to stakes, and the sticks with which they were consumed were tied
into fagots, instead of being plaited into basket-work. So slight a
difference does not materially affect the likeness.

The tribal chieftainship and the religious organization of the Druids were
both of them inherited from antiquity. They were institutions descending
from the time when the Gauls had been a great people; but both had
outlived the age to which they were adapted, and one at least was
approaching its end. To Caesar's eye, coming new upon them, the Druids
were an established fact, presenting no sign of decay; but in Gaul,
infected with Roman manners, they existed merely by habit, exercising no
influence any longer over the hearts of the people. In the great struggle
which was approaching we find no Druids among the national leaders, no
spirit of religion inspiring and consecrating the efforts of patriotism.
So far as can be seen, the Druids were on the Roman side, or the Romans
had the skill to conciliate them. In half a century they were suppressed
by Augustus, and they and their excommunications, and their flaming
wicker-works, had to be sought for in distant Britain or in the still more
distant Ireland. The active and secular leadership could not disappear so
easily. Leaders of some kind were still required and inevitably found, but
the method of selection in the times which had arrived was silently
changing. While the Gallic nation retained, or desired to retain, a kind
of unity, some one of the many tribes had always been allowed a hegemony.
The first place had rested generally with the aedui, a considerable people
who occupied the central parts of France, between the Upper Loire and the
Saone. The Romans, anxious naturally to extend their influence in the
country without direct interference, had taken the aedui under their
protectorate. The aedui again had their clients in the inferior tribes;
and a Romano-aeduan authority of a shadowy kind had thus penetrated
through the whole nation.

But the aeduans had rivals and competitors in the Sequani, another
powerful body in Burgundy and Franche-Comte. If the Romans feared, the
Gauls, the Gauls in turn feared the Romans; and a national party had
formed itself everywhere, especially among the younger men, who were proud
of their independence, impatient of foreign control, and determined to
maintain the liberties which had descended to them. To these the Sequani
offered themselves as champions. Among the aedui too there were fiery
spirits who cherished the old traditions, and saw in the Roman alliance a
prelude to annexation. And thus it was that when Caesar was appointed to
Gaul, in every tribe and every sub-tribe, in every village and every
family, there were two factions,[2] each under its own captain, each
struggling for supremacy, each conspiring and fighting among themselves,
and each seeking or leaning upon external support. In many, if not in all,
of the tribes there was a senate, or counsel of elders, and these appear
almost everywhere to have been aeduan and Roman in their sympathies. The
Sequani, as the representatives of nationalism, knowing that they could
not stand alone, had looked for friends elsewhere.

The Germans had long turned covetous eyes upon the rich cornfields and
pastures from which the Rhine divided them. The Cimbri and Teutons had
been but the vanguard of a multitude who were eager to follow. The fate of
these invaders had checked the impulse for half a century, but the lesson
was now forgotten. Ariovistus, a Bavarian prince, who spoke Gaelic like a
native, and had probably long meditated conquest, came over into Franche-
Comte at the invitation of the Sequani, bringing his people with him. The
few thousand families which were first introduced had been followed by
fresh detachments; they had attacked and beaten the aedui, out of whose
territories they intended to carve a settlement for themselves. They had
taken hostages from them, and had broken down their authority, and the
faction of the Sequani was now everywhere in the ascendant. The aedui,
three years before Caesar came, had appealed to Rome for assistance, and
the Senate had promised that the Governor of Gaul should support them. The
Romans, hoping to temporize with the danger, had endeavored to conciliate
Ariovistus, and in the year of Caesar's consulship had declared him a
friend of the Roman people. Ariovistus, in turn, had pressed the aedui
still harder, and had forced them to renounce the Roman alliance. Among
the aedui, and throughout the country, the patriots were in the ascendant,
and Ariovistus and his Germans were welcomed as friends and deliverers.
Thoughtful persons in Rome had heard of these doings with uneasiness; an
old aeduan chief had gone in person thither, to awaken the Senate to the
growing peril; but the Senate had been too much occupied with its fears of
Caesar, and agrarian laws, and dangers to the fish-ponds, to attend; and
now another great movement had begun, equally alarming and still closer to
the Roman border.

The Helvetii were old enemies. They were a branch of the Celtic race, who
occupied modern Switzerland, hardy, bold mountaineers, and seasoned in
constant war with their German neighbors. On them, too, the tide of
migration from the north had pressed continuously. They had hitherto
defended themselves successfully, but they were growing weary of these
constant efforts. Their numbers were increasing, and their narrow valleys
were too strait for them. They also had heard of fertile, scantily peopled
lands in other parts, of which they could possess themselves by force or
treaty, and they had already shown signs of restlessness. Many thousands
of them had broken out at the time of the Cimbrian invasion. They had
defeated Cassius Longinus, who was then consul, near their own border, and
had annihilated his army. They had carried fire and sword down the left
bank of the Rhone. They had united themselves with the Teutons, and had
intended to accompany them into Italy. Their first enterprise failed. They
perished in the great battle at Aix, and the parent tribe had remained
quiet for forty years till a new generation had grown to manhood. Once
more their ambition had revived. Like the Germans, they had formed
friendships among the Gallic factions. Their reputation as warriors made
them welcome to the patriots. In a fight for independence they would form
a valuable addition to the forces of their countrymen. They had allies
among the Sequani; they had allies in the anti-Roman party which had risen
among the Aedui; and a plan had been formed in concert with their friends
for a migration to the shores of the Bay of Biscay between the mouths of
the Garonne and the Loire. The Cimbri and Teutons had passed away, but the
ease with which the Cimbri had made the circuit of these districts had
shown how slight resistance could be expected from the inhabitants.
Perhaps their coming had been anticipated and prepared for. The older men
among the Helvetii had discouraged the project when it was first mooted,
but they had yielded to eagerness and enthusiasm, and it had taken at last
a practical form. Double harvests had been raised; provision had been made
of food and transport for a long march; and a complete exodus of the
entire tribe with their wives and families had been finally resolved on.

If the Helvetii deserted Switzerland, the cantons would be immediately
occupied by Germans, and a road would be opened into the province for the
enemy whom the Romans had most reason to dread. The distinction between
Germans and Gauls was not accurately known at Rome. They were confounded
under the common name of Celts[3] or Barbarians. But they formed
together an ominous cloud charged with forces of uncertain magnitude, but
of the reality of which Italy had already terrible experience. Divitiacus,
chief of the Aedui, who had carried to Rome the news of the inroads of
Ariovistus, brought again in person thither the account of this fresh
peril. Every large movement of population suggested the possibility of a
fresh rush across the Alps. Little energy was to be expected from the
Senate. But the body of the citizens were still sound at heart. Their
lives and properties were at stake, and they could feel for the dignity of
the Empire. The people had sent Pompey to crush the pirates and conquer
Mithridates. The people now looked to Caesar, and instead of the "woods
and forests" which the Senate designed for him, they had given him a five
years' command on their western frontier.

The details of the problem before him Caesar had yet to learn, but with
its general nature he must have intimately acquainted himself. Of course
he had seen and spoken with Divitiacus. He was consul when Ariovistus was
made "a friend of the Roman people." He must have been aware, therefore,
of the introduction of the Germans over the Rhine. He could not tell what
he might have first to do. There were other unpleasant symptoms on the
side of Illyria and the Danube. From either quarter the storm might break
upon him. No Roman general was ever sent upon an enterprise so fraught
with complicated possibilities, and few with less experience of the
realities of war.

The points in his favor were these. He was the ablest Roman then living,
and he had the power of attracting and attaching the ablest men to his
service. He had five years in which to look about him and to act at
leisure--as much time as had been given to Pompey for the East. Like
Pompey, too, he was left perfectly free. No senatorial officials could
encumber him with orders from home. The people had given him his command,
and to the people alone he was responsible. Lastly, and beyond everything,
he could rely with certainty on the material with which he had to work.
The Roman legionaries were no longer yeomen taken from the plough or
shopkeepers from the street. They were men more completely trained in
every variety of accomplishment than have perhaps ever followed a general
into the field before or since. It was not enough that they could use
sword and lance. The campaign on which Caesar was about to enter was
fought with spade and pick and axe and hatchet. Corps of engineers he may
have had; but if the engineers designed the work, the execution lay with
the army. No limited department would have been equal to the tasks which
every day demanded. On each evening after a march, a fortified camp was to
be formed, with mound and trench, capable of resisting surprises, and
demanding the labor of every single hand. Bridges had to be thrown over
rivers. Ships and barges had to be built or repaired, capable of service
against an enemy, on a scale equal to the requirements of an army, and in
a haste which permitted no delay. A transport service there must have been
organized to perfection; but there were no stores sent from Italy to
supply the daily waste of material. The men had to mend and perhaps make
their own clothes and shoes, and repair their own arms. Skill in the use
of tools was not enough without the tools themselves. Had the spades and
mattocks been supplied by contract, had the axes been of soft iron, fair
to the eye and failing to the stroke, not a man in Caesar's army would
have returned to Rome to tell the tale of its destruction. How the
legionaries acquired these various arts, whether the Italian peasantry
were generally educated in such occupations, or whether on this occasion
there was a special selection of the best, of this we have no information.
Certain only it was that men and instruments were as excellent in their
kind as honesty and skill could make them; and, however degenerate the
patricians and corrupt the legislature, there was sound stuff somewhere in
the Roman constitution. No exertion, no forethought on the part of a
commander could have extemporized such a variety of qualities. Universal
practical accomplishments must have formed part of the training of the
free Roman citizens. Admirable workmanship was still to be had in each
department of manufacture, and every article with which Caesar was
provided must have been the best of its kind.

The first quarter of the year 58 was consumed in preparations. Caesar's
antagonists in the Senate were still raving against the acts of his
consulship, threatening him with impeachment for neglecting Bibulus's
interpellations, charging him with impiety for disregarding the weather,
and clamoring for the suppression of his command. But Cicero's banishment
damped the ardor of these gentlemen; after a few vicious efforts, they
subsided into sullenness, and trusted to Ariovistus or the Helvetii to
relieve them of their detested enemy. Caesar himself selected his
officers. Cicero having declined to go as his lieutenant, he had chosen
Labienus, who had acted with him, when tribune, in the prosecution of
Rabirius, and had procured him the pontificate by giving the election to
the people. Young men of rank in large numbers had forgotten party
feeling, and had attached themselves to the expedition as volunteers to
learn military experience. His own equipments were of the simplest. No
common soldier was more careless of hardships than Caesar. His chief
luxury was a favorite horse, which would allow no one but Caesar to mount
him; a horse which had been bred in his own stables, and, from the
peculiarity of a divided hoof, had led the augurs to foretell wonders for
the rider of it. His arrangements were barely completed when news came in
the middle of March that the Helvetii were burning their towns and
villages, gathering their families into their wagons, and were upon the
point of commencing their emigration. Their numbers, according to a
register which was found afterward, were 368,000, of whom 92,000 were
fighting men. They were bound for the West; and there were two roads, by
one or other of which alone they could leave their country. One was on the
right bank of the Rhone by the Pas de l'Ecluse, a pass between the Jura
mountains and the river, so narrow that but two carts could go abreast
along it; the other, and easier, was through Savoy, which was now Roman.

Under any aspect the transit of so vast a body through Roman territory
could not but be dangerous. Savoy was the very ground on which Longinus
had been destroyed. Yet it was in this direction that the Helvetii were
preparing to pass, and would pass unless they were prevented; while in the
whole Transalpine province there was but a single legion to oppose them.
Caesar started on the instant. He reached Marseilles in a few days, joined
his legion, collected a few levies in the Province, and hurried to Geneva.
Where the river leaves the lake there was a bridge which the Helvetii had
neglected to occupy. Caesar broke it, and thus secured a breathing time.
The Helvetii, who were already on the move and were assembling in force a
few miles off, sent to demand a passage. If it was refused, there was more
than one spot between the lake and the Pas de l'Ecluse where the river
could be forded. The Roman force was small, and Caesar postponed his
reply.

It was the 1st of April; he promised an answer on the 15th. In the
interval he threw up forts, dug trenches, and raised walls at every point
where a passage could be attempted; and when the time was expired, he
declined to permit them to enter the Province. They tried to ford; they
tried boats; but at every point they were driven back. It remained for
them to go by the Pas de l'Ecluse. For this route they required the
consent of the Sequani; and, however willing the Sequani might be to see
them in their neighbors' territories, they might object to the presence in
their own of such a flight of devouring locusts. Evidently, however, there
was some general scheme, of which the entry of the Helvetii into Gaul was
the essential part; and through the mediation of Dumnorix, an Aeduan and
an ardent patriot, the Sequani were induced to agree.

The Province had been saved, but the exodus of the enormous multitude
could no longer be prevented. If such waves of population were allowed to
wander at pleasure, it was inevitable that sooner or later they would
overflow the borders of the Empire. Caesar determined to show, at once and
peremptorily, that these movements would not be permitted without the
Romans' consent. Leaving Labienus to guard the forts on the Rhone, he
hurried back to Italy, gathered up his three legions at Aquileia, raised
two more at Turin with extreme rapidity, and returned with them by the
shortest route over the Mont Genevre. The mountain tribes attacked him,
but could not even delay his march. In seven days he had surmounted the
passes, and was again with Labienus.

The Helvetii, meanwhile, had gone through the Pas de l'Ecluse, and were
now among the Aedui, laying waste the country. It was early in the summer.
The corn was green, the hay was still uncut, and the crops were being
eaten off the ground. The Aedui threw themselves on the promised
protection of Rome. Caesar crossed the Rhone above Lyons, and came up with
the marauding hosts as they were leisurely passing in boats over the
Saone. They had been twenty days upon the river, transporting their wagons
and their families. Three quarters of them were on the other side. The
Tigurini from Zurich, the most warlike of their tribes, were still on the
left bank. The Tigurini had destroyed the army of Longinus, and on them
the first retribution fell. Caesar cut them to pieces. A single day
sufficed to throw a bridge over the Saone, and the Helvetii, who had
looked for nothing less than to be pursued by six Roman legions, begged
for peace. They were willing, they said, to go to any part of the country
which Caesar would assign to them; and they reminded him that they might
be dangerous if pushed to extremities. Caesar knew that they were
dangerous. He had followed them because he knew it. He said that they must
return the way that they had come. They must pay for the injuries which
they had inflicted on the Aedui, and they must give him hostages for their
obedience. The fierce mountaineers replied that they had been more used to
demand hostages than to give them; and confident in their numbers, and in
their secret allies among the Gauls, they marched on through the Aeduan
territories up the level banks of the Saone, thence striking west toward
Autun.

Caesar had no cavalry; but every Gaul could ride, and he raised a few
thousand horse among his supposed allies. These he meant to employ to
harass the Helvetian march; but they were secret traitors, under the
influence of Dumnorix, and they fled at the first encounter. The Helvetii
had thus the country at their mercy, and they laid it waste as they went,
a day's march in advance of the Romans. So long as they kept by the river,
Caesar's stores accompanied him in barges. He did not choose to let the
Helvetii out of his sight, and when they left the Saone, and when he was
obliged to follow, his provisions ran short. He applied to the Aeduan
chiefs, who promised to furnish him, but they failed to do it. Ten days
passed, and no supplies came in. He ascertained at last that there was
treachery. Dumnorix and other Aeduan leaders were in correspondence with
the enemy. The cavalry defeat and the other failures were thus explained.
Caesar, who trusted much to gentleness and to personal influence, was
unwilling to add the Aeduii to his open enemies. Dumnorix was the brother
of Divitiacus, the reigning chief, whom Caesar had known in Rome.
Divitiacus was sent for, confessed with tears his brother's misdeeds, and
begged that he might be forgiven. Dumnorix was brought in. Caesar showed
that he was aware of his conduct; but spoke kindly to him, and cautioned
him for the future. The corn-carts, however, did not appear; supplies
could not be dispensed with; and the Romans, leaving the Helvetii, struck
off to Bibracte, on Mont Beauvray, the principal Aeduan town in the
highlands of Nivernais. Unfortunately for themselves, the Helvetii thought
the Romans were flying, and became in turn the pursuers. They gave Caesar
an opportunity, and a single battle ended them and their migrations. The
engagement lasted from noon till night. The Helvetii fought gallantly, and
in numbers were enormously superior; but the contest was between skill and
courage, sturdy discipline and wild valor; and it concluded as such
contests always must. In these hand-to-hand engagements there were no
wounded. Half the fighting men of the Swiss were killed; their camp was
stormed; the survivors, with the remnant of the women and children, or
such of them as were capable of moving (for thousands had perished, and
little more than a third remained of those who had left Switzerland),
straggled on to Langres, where they surrendered. Caesar treated the poor
creatures with kindness and care. A few were settled in Gaul, where they
afterward did valuable service. The rest were sent back to their own
cantons, lest the Germans should take possession of their lands; and lest
they should starve in the homes which they had desolated before their
departure, they were provided with food out of the Province till their
next crops were grown.

A victory so complete and so unexpected astonished the whole country. The
peace party recovered the ascendency. Envoys came from all the Gaulish
tribes to congratulate, and a diet of chiefs was held under Caesar's
presidency, where Gaul and Roman seemed to promise one another eternal
friendship. As yet, however, half the mischief only had been dealt with,
and that the lighter part. The Helvetii were disposed of, but the Germans
remained; and till Ariovistus was back across the Rhone, no permanent
peace was possible. Hitherto Caesar had only received vague information
about Ariovistus. When the diet was over, such of the chiefs as were
sincere in their professions came to him privately and explained what the
Germans were about. A hundred and twenty thousand of them were now settled
near Belfort, and between the Vosges and the Rhine, with the connivance of
the Sequani. More were coming, and in a short time Gaul would be full of
them. They had made war on the Aedui; they were in correspondence with the
anti-Roman factions; their object was the permanent occupation of the
country.

Two months still remained of summer. Caesar was now conveniently near to
the German positions. His army was in high spirits from its victory, and
he himself was prompt in forming resolutions and swift in executing them.
An injury to the Aedui could be treated as an injury to the Romans, which
it would be dishonor to pass over. If the Germans were allowed to overrun
Gaul, they might soon be seen again in Italy.

Ariovistus was a "friend of Rome." Caesar had been himself a party to the
conferring this distinction upon him. As a friend, therefore, he was in
the first instance to be approached. Caesar sent to invite him to a
conference. Ariovistus, it seemed, set small value upon his honors. He
replied that if he needed anything from Caesar, he would go to Caesar and
ask for it. If Caesar required anything from him, Caesar might do the
same. Meanwhile Caesar was approaching a part of Gaul which belonged to
himself by right of conquest, and he wished to know the meaning of the
presence of a Roman army there.

After such an answer, politeness ceased to be necessary. Caesar rejoined
that since Ariovistus estimated so lightly his friendship with the Romans
as to refuse an amicable meeting, he would inform him briefly of his
demands upon him. The influx of Germans on the Rhine must cease: no more
must come in. He must restore the hostages which he had taken from the
Aedui, and do them no further hurt. If Ariovistus complied, the Romans
would continue on good terms with him. If not, he said that by a decree of
the Senate the Governor of Gaul was ordered to protect the Aedui, and he
intended to do it.

Ariovistus answered that he had not interfered with the Romans; and the
Romans had no right to interfere with him. Conquerors treated their
subjects as they pleased. The Aedui had begun the quarrel with him. They
had been defeated, and were now his vassals. If Caesar chose to come
between him and his subjects, he would have an opportunity of seeing how
Germans could fight who had not for fourteen years slept under a roof.

It was reported that a large body of Suevi were coming over the Rhine to
swell Ariovistus's force, and that Ariovistus was on the point of
advancing to seize Besancon. Besancon was a position naturally strong,
being surrounded on three sides by the Doubs. It was full of military
stores, and was otherwise important for the control of the Sequani. Caesar
advanced swiftly and took possession of the place, and announced that he
meant to go and look for Ariovistus.

The army so far had gained brilliant successes, but the men were not yet
fully acquainted with the nature of their commander. They had never yet
looked Germans in the face, and imagination magnifies the unknown. Roman
merchants and the Gauls of the neighborhood brought stories of the
gigantic size and strength of these northern warriors. The glare of their
eyes was reported to be so fierce that it could not be borne. They were
wild, wonderful, and dreadful. Young officers, patricians and knights, who
had followed Caesar for a little mild experience, began to dislike the
notion of these new enemies. Some applied for leave of absence; others,
though ashamed to ask to be allowed to leave the army, cowered in their
tents with sinking hearts, made their wills, and composed last messages
for their friends. The centurions caught the alarm from their superiors,
and the legionaries from the centurions. To conceal their fear of the
Germans, the men discovered that, if they advanced farther, it would be
through regions where provisions could not follow them, and that they
would be starved in the forests. At length, Caesar was informed that if he
gave the order to march, the army would refuse to move.

Confident in himself, Caesar had the power, so indispensable for a
soldier, of inspiring confidence in others as soon as they came to know
what he was. He called his officers together. He summoned the centurions,
and rebuked them sharply for questioning his purposes. The German king, he
said, had been received at his own request into alliance with the Romans,
and there was no reason to suppose that he meant to break with them. Most
likely he would do what was required of him. If not, was it to be
conceived that they were afraid? Marius had beaten these same Germans.
Even the Swiss had beaten them. They were no more formidable than other
barbarians. They might trust their commander for the commissariat. The
harvest was ripe, and the difficulties were nothing. As to the refusal to
march, he did not believe in it. Romans never mutinied, save through the
rapacity or incompetence of their general. His life was a witness that he
was not rapacious, and his victory over the Helvetii that as yet he had
made no mistake. He should order the advance on the next evening, and it
would then be seen whether sense of duty or cowardice was the stronger. If
others declined, Caesar said that he should go forward alone with the
legion which he knew would follow him, the 10th, which was already his
favorite.

The speech was received with enthusiasm. The 10th thanked Caesar for his
compliment to them. The rest, officers and men, declared their willingness
to follow wherever he might lead them. He started with Divitiacus for a
guide; and, passing Belfort, came in seven days to Cernay or to some point
near it. Ariovistus was now but four-and-twenty miles from him. Since
Caesar had come so far, Ariovistus said that he was willing to meet him.
Day and place were named, the conditions being that the armies should
remain in their ranks, and that Caesar and he might each bring a guard of
horse to the interview. He expected that Caesar would be contented with an
escort of the Aeduan cavalry. Caesar, knowing better than to trust himself
with Gauls, mounted his 10th legion, and with them proceeded to the spot
which Ariovistus had chosen. It was a tumulus, in the centre of a large
plain equidistant from the two camps. The guard on either side remained
two hundred paces in the rear. The German prince and the Roman general met
on horseback at the mound, each accompanied by ten of his followers.
Caesar spoke first and fairly. He reminded Ariovistus of his obligations
to the Romans. The Aedui, he said, had from immemorial time been the
leading tribe in Gaul. The Romans had an alliance with them of old
standing, and never deserted their friends. He required Ariovistas to
desist from attacking them, and to return their hostages. He consented
that the Germans already across the Rhine might remain in Gaul, but he
demanded a promise that no more should be brought over.

Ariovistus haughtily answered that he was a great king; that he had come
into Gaul by the invitation of the Gauls themselves; that the territory
which he occupied was a gift from them; and that the hostages of which
Caesar spoke had remained with him with their free consent. The Aedui, he
said, had begun the war, and, being defeated, were made justly to pay
forfeit. He had sought the friendship of the Romans, expecting to profit
by it. If friendship meant the taking away his subjects from him, he
desired no more of such friendship. The Romans had their Province. It was
enough for them, and they might remain there unmolested. But Caesar's
presence so far beyond his own borders was a menace to his own
independence, and his independence he intended to maintain. Caesar must go
away out of those parts, or he and his Germans would know how to deal with
him.

Then, speaking perhaps more privately, he told Caesar that he knew
something of Rome and of the Roman Senate, and had learnt how the great
people there stood affected toward the Governor of Gaul. Certain members
of the Roman aristocracy had sent him messages to say that if he killed
Caesar they would hold it a good service done,[4] and would
hold him their friend forever. He did not wish, he said, to bind himself
to these noble persons. He would prefer Caesar rather; and would fight
Caesar's battles for him anywhere in the world if Caesar would but retire
and leave him. Ariovistus was misled, not unnaturally, by these strange
communications from the sovereign rulers of the Empire. He did not know,
he could not know, that the genius of Rome and the true chief of Rome were
not in the treacherous Senate, but were before him there on the field in
the persons of Caesar and his legions.

More might have passed between them; but Ariovistus thought to end the
conference by a stroke of treachery. His German guard had stolen round to
where the Romans stood, and, supposing that they had Gauls to deal with,
were trying to surround and disarm them. The men of the 10th legion stood
firm; Caesar fell back and joined them, and, contenting themselves with
simply driving off the enemy, they rode back to the camp.

[Sidenote: B.C. 57.]
The army was now passionate for an engagement. Ariovistus affected a
desire for further communication, and two officers were despatched to hear
what he had to say; but they were immediately seized and put in chains,
and the Germans advanced to within a few miles of the Roman outposts. The
Romans lay entrenched near Cernay. The Germans were at Colmar. Caesar
offered battle, which Ariovistus declined. Cavalry fights happened daily
which led to nothing. Caesar then formed a second camp, smaller but
strongly fortified, within sight of the enemy, and threw two legions into
it. Ariovistus attacked them, but he was beaten back with loss. The "wise
women" advised him to try no more till the new moon. But Caesar would not
wait for the moon, and forced an engagement. The wives and daughters of
the Germans rushed about their camp, with streaming hair, adjuring their
countrymen to save them from slavery. The Germans fought like heroes; but
they could not stand against the short sword and hand-to-hand grapple of
the legionaries. Better arms and better discipline again asserted the
superiority; and in a few hours the invaders were flying wildly to the
Rhine. Young Publius Crassus, the son of the millionaire, pursued with
the cavalry. A few swam the river; a few, Ariovistus among them, escaped
in boats; all the rest, men and women alike, were cut down and killed. The
Suevi, who were already on the Rhine, preparing to cross, turned back into
their forests; and the two immediate perils which threatened the peace of
Gaul had been encountered and trampled out in a single summer. The first
campaign was thus ended. The legions were distributed in winter quarters
among the Sequani, the contrivers of the mischief; and Labienus was left
in charge of them. Caesar went back over the Alps to the Cisalpine
division of the Province to look into the administration and to
communicate with his friends in Rome.

In Gaul there was outward quiet; but the news of the Roman victories
penetrated the farthest tribes and agitated the most distant households on
the shores of the North Sea. The wintering of the legions beyond the
province was taken to indicate an intention of permanent conquest. The
Gauls proper were divided and overawed; but the Belgians of the north were
not prepared to part so easily with their liberty. The Belgians considered
that they too were menaced, and that now or never was the time to strike
for their independence. They had not been infected with Roman manners.
They had kept the merchants from their borders with their foreign
luxuries. The Nervii, the fiercest of them, as the abstemious Caesar marks
with approbation, were water-drinkers, and forbade wine to be brought
among them, as injurious to their sinews and their courage. Caesar learnt
while in Italy from Labienus that the Belgae were mustering and combining.
A second vast horde of Germans were in Flanders and Artois; men of the
same race with the Belgae and in active confederacy with them. They might
have been left in peace, far off as they were, had they sat still; but the
notes of their preparations were sounding through the country and feeding
the restless spirit which was stunned but not subdued.

Caesar, on his own responsibility, raised two more legions and sent them
across the Alps in the spring. When the grass began to grow he followed
himself. Suddenly, before any one looked for him, he was on the Marne with
his army. The Remi (people of Rheims), startled by his unexpected
appearance, sent envoys with their submission and offers of hostages. The
other Belgian tribes, they said, were determined upon war, and were
calling all their warriors under arms. Their united forces were reported
to amount to 300,000. The Bellovaci from the mouth of the Seine had sent
60,000; the Suessiones from Soissons 50,000; the Nervii, between the
Sambre and the Scheldt, 50,000; Arras and Amiens, 25,000; the coast
tribes, 36,000; and the tribes between the Ardennes and the Rhine, called
collectively Germani, 40,000 more. This irregular host was gathered in the
forests between Laon and Soissons.

Caesar did not wait for them to move. He advanced at once to Rheims, where
he called the Senate together and encouraged them to be constant to the
Roman alliance. He sent a party of Aedui down the Seine to harass the
territory of the Bellovaci and recall them to their own defence; and he
went on himself to the Aisne, which he crossed by a bridge already
existing at Berry-au-Bac. There, with the bridge and river at his back, he
formed an entrenched camp of extraordinary strength, with a wall 12 feet
high and a fosse 22 feet deep. Against an attack with modern artillery
such defences would, of course, be idle. As the art of war then stood,
they were impregnable. In this position Caesar waited, leaving six cohorts
on the left bank to guard the other end of the bridge. The Belgae came
forward and encamped in his front. Their watch-fires at night were seen
stretching along a line eight miles wide. Caesar, after feeling his way
with his cavalry, found a rounded ridge projecting like a promontory into
the plain where the Belgian host was lying. On this he advanced his
legions, protecting his flanks with continuous trenches and earthworks, on
which were placed heavy cross-bows, the ancient predecessors of cannon.
Between these lines, if he attacked the enemy and failed, he had a secure
retreat. A marsh lay between the armies; and each waited for the other to
cross. The Belgians, impatient of delay, flung themselves suddenly on one
side and began to pour across the river, intending to destroy the cohorts
on the other bank, to cut the bridge, and burn and plunder among the Remi.
Caesar calmly sent back his cavalry and his archers and slingers. They
caught the enemy in the water or struggling out of it in confusion; all
who had got over were killed; multitudes were slaughtered in the river;
others, trying to cross on the bodies of their comrades, were driven back.
The confederates, shattered at a single defeat, broke up like an exploded
shell. Their provisions had run short. They melted away and dispersed to
their homes, Labienus pursuing and cutting down all that he could
overtake.

The Roman loss was insignificant in this battle. The most remarkable
feature in Caesar's campaigns, and that which indicates most clearly his
greatness as a commander, was the smallness of the number of men that he
ever lost, either by the sword or by wear and tear. No general was ever so
careful of his soldiers' lives.

Soissons, a fortified Belgian town, surrendered the next day. From
Soissons Caesar marched on Breteuil and thence on Amiens, which
surrendered also. The Bellovaci sent in their submission, the leaders of
the war party having fled to Britain. Caesar treated them all with
scrupulous forbearance, demanding nothing but hostages for their future
good behavior. His intention at this time was apparently not to annex any
of these tribes to Rome, but to settle the country in a quasi-independence
under an Aeduan hegemony.

But the strongest member of the confederacy was still unsubdued. The
hardy, brave, and water-drinking Nervii remained defiant. The Nervii would
send no envoys; they would listen to no terms of peace.[5] Caesar
learnt that they were expecting to be joined by the Aduatuci, a tribe of
pure Germans, who had been left behind near Liege at the time of the
invasion of the Teutons. Preferring to engage them separately, he marched
from Amiens through Cambray, and sent forward some officers and pioneers
to choose a spot for a camp on the Sambre. Certain Gauls, who had observed
his habits on march, deserted to the Nervii, and informed them that
usually a single legion went in advance, the baggage-wagons followed, and
the rest of the army came in the rear. By a sudden attack in front they
could overwhelm the advanced troops, plunder the carts, and escape before
they could be overtaken. It happened that on this occasion the order was
reversed. The country was enclosed with thick fences, which required to be
cut through. Six legions marched in front, clearing a road; the carts came
next, and two legions behind. The site selected by the officers was on the
left bank of the Sambre at Maubeuge, fifty miles above Namur. The ground
sloped easily down to the river, which was there about a yard in depth.
There was a corresponding rise on the other side, which was densely
covered with wood. In this wood the whole force of the Nervii lay
concealed, a few only showing themselves on the water side. Caesar's light
horse which had gone forward, seeing a mere handful of stragglers, rode
through the stream and skirmished with them; but the enemy retired under
cover; the horse did not pursue; the six legions came up, and, not
dreaming of the nearness of the enemy, laid aside their arms and went to
work intrenching with spade and mattock. The baggage-wagons began
presently to appear at the crest of the hill, the signal for which the
Nervii had waited; and in a moment all along the river sixty thousand of
them rushed out of the forest, sent the cavalry flying, and came on so
impetuously that, as Caesar said, they seemed to be in the wood, in the
water, and up the opposite bank at sword's point with the legions at the
same moment. The surprise was complete: the Roman army was in confusion.
Many of the soldiers were scattered at a distance, cutting turf. None were
in their ranks, and none were armed. Never in all his campaigns was Caesar
in greater danger. He could himself give no general orders which there was
time to observe. Two points only, he said, were in his favor. The men
themselves were intelligent and experienced, and knew what they had to do;
and the officers were all present, because he had directed that none of
them should leave their companies till the camp was completed. The troops
were spread loosely in their legions along the brow of the ridge. Caesar
joined the 10th on his right wing, and had but time to tell the men to be
cool and not to agitate themselves, when the enemy were upon them. So
sudden was the onslaught that they could neither put their helmets on, nor
strip the coverings from their shields, nor find their places in the
ranks. They fought where they stood among thick hedges which obstructed
the sight of what was passing elsewhere. Though the Aduatuci had not come
up, the Nervii had allies with them from Arras and the Somme. The allies
encountered the 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th legions, and were driven rapidly
back down the hill through the river. The Romans, led by Labienus, crossed
in pursuit, followed them into the forest, and took their camp. The Nervii
meanwhile flung themselves with all their force on the two legions on the
left, the 12th and 7th, enveloped them with their numbers, penetrated
behind them, and fell upon the baggage-wagons. The light troops and the
camp-followers fled in all directions. The legionaries, crowded together
in confusion, were fighting at disadvantage, and were falling thick and
fast. A party of horse from Treves, who had come to treat with Caesar,
thought that all was lost, and rode off to tell their countrymen that the
Romans were destroyed.

Caesar, who was in the other wing, learning late what was going on,
hurried to the scene. He found the standards huddled together, the men
packed so close that they could not use their swords, almost all the
officers killed or wounded, and one of the best of them, Sextius Baculus
(Caesar always paused in his narrative to note any one who specially
distinguished himself), scarce able to stand. Caesar had come up unarmed.
He snatched a shield from a soldier, and, bareheaded, flew to the front.
He was known; he addressed the centurions by their names. He bade them
open their ranks and give the men room to strike. His presence and his
calmness gave them back their confidence. In the worst extremities he
observes that soldiers will fight well under their commander's eye. The
cohorts formed into order. The enemy was checked. The two legions from the
rear, who had learnt the danger from the flying camp-followers, came up.
Labienus, from the opposite hill, saw what had happened, and sent the 10th
legion back. All was now changed. The fugitives, ashamed of their
cowardice, rallied, and were eager to atone for it. The Nervii fought with
a courage which filled Caesar with admiration--men of greater spirit he
said that he had never seen. As their first ranks fell, they piled the
bodies of their comrades into heaps, and from the top of them hurled back
the Roman javelins. They would not fly; they dropped where they stood; and
the battle ended only with their extermination. Out of 600 senators there
survived but three; out of 60,000 men able to bear arms, only 500. The
aged of the tribe, and the women and children, who had been left in the
morasses for security, sent in their surrender, their warriors being all
dead. They professed to fear lest they might be destroyed by neighboring
clans who were on bad terms with them. Caesar received them and protected
them, and gave severe injunctions that they should suffer no injury.

By the victory over the Nervii the Belgian confederacy was almost
extinguished. The German Aduatuci remained only to be brought to
submission. They had been on their way to join their countrymen; they were
too late for the battle, and returned and shut themselves up in Namur, the
strongest position in the Low Countries. Caesar, after a short rest,
pushed on and came under their walls. The Aduatuci were a race of giants,
and were at first defiant. When they saw the Romans' siege-towers in
preparation, they could not believe that men so small could move such vast
machines. When the towers began to approach, they lost heart and sued for
terms. Caesar promised to spare their lives and properties if they
surrendered immediately, but he refused to grant conditions. They had
prayed to be allowed to keep their arms; affecting to believe, like the
Nervii, that they would be in danger from the Gauls if they were unable to
defend themselves. Caesar undertook that they should have no hurt, but he
insisted that their arms must be given up. They affected obedience. They
flung their swords and lances over the walls till the ditch was filled
with them. They opened their gates; the Romans occupied them, but were
forbidden to enter, that there might be no plundering. It seems that there
was a desperate faction among the Aduatuci who had been for fighting to
extremity. A third part of the arms had been secretly reserved, and after
midnight the tribe sallied with all their force, hoping to catch the
Romans sleeping. Caesar was not to be surprised a second time. Expecting
that some such attempt might be made, he had prepared piles of fagots in
convenient places. These bonfires were set blazing in an instant. By their
red light the legions formed; and, after a desperate but unequal combat,
the Germans were driven into the town again, leaving 4,000 dead. In the
morning the gates were broken down, and Namur was taken without more
resistance. Caesar's usual practice was gentleness. He honored brave men,
and never punished bold and open opposition. Of treachery he made a severe
example. Namur was condemned. The Aduatuci within its walls were sold into
slavery, and the contractors who followed the army returned the number of
prisoners whom they had purchased at 53,000. Such captives were the most
valuable form of spoil.

The Belgae were thus crushed as completely as the Gauls had been crushed
in the previous year. Publius Crassus had meanwhile made a circuit of
Brittany, and had received the surrender of the maritime tribes. So great
was the impression made by these two campaigns, that the Germans beyond
the Rhine sent envoys with offers of submission. The second season was
over. Caesar left the legions in quarters about Chartres, Orleans, and
Blois. He himself returned to Italy again, where his presence was
imperatively required. The Senate, on the news of his successes, had been
compelled, by public sentiment, to order an extraordinary thanksgiving;
but there were men who were anxious to prevent Caesar from achieving any
further victories since Ariovistus had failed to destroy him.


[1] Perhaps in consequence of the Catiline conspiracy.

[2] "In Gallia non solum in omnibus civitatibus atque in omnibus pagis
    partibusque sed paene etiam in singulis domibus factiones sunt,
    earumque factionum principes sunt qui summam auctoritatem eorum
    judicio habere existimantur.... Haec est ratio in summa totius
    Galliae, namque omnes civitates in partes divisae sunt duas. Cum
    Caesar in Galliam venit, alterius factionis principes erant Haedui,
    alterius Sequani."--_De Bello Gallico_, lib. vi. capp. 11, 12.

[3] Even Dion Cassius speaks of the Germans as _Keltoi_.

[4] "Id se ab ipsis per eorum nuntios compertum habere, quorum omnium
    gratiam atque amicitiam ejus morte redimere posset."--_De Bell.
    Gall_., i. 44.

[5] Caesar thus records his admiration of the Nervian character: "Quorum
    de natura moribusque Caesar cum quaereret sic reperiebat, nullum
    aditum esse ad eos mercatoribus; nihil pati vini reliquarumque rerum
    ad luxuriam pertinentium inferri, quod iis rebus relanguescere animos
    eorum et remitti virtutem existimarent: esse homines feros magnaeque
    virtutis; increpitare atque incusare reliquos Belgas qui se populo
    Romano dedidissent patriamque virtutem projecissent; confirmare sese
    neque legatos missuros neque ullam conditionem pacis
    accepturos."--_De Bell. Gall_., ii. 15.




CHAPTER XV.


[Sidenote B.C.58]
Before his own catastrophe, and before he could believe that he was in
danger, Cicero had discerned clearly the perils which threatened the
State. The Empire was growing more extensive. The "Tritons of the fish-
ponds" still held the reins; and believed their own supreme duty was to
divide the spoils among themselves. The pyramid was standing on its point.
The mass which rested on it was becoming more portentous and unwieldy. The
Senate was the official power; the armies were the real power; and the
imagination of the Senate was that after each conquest the soldiers would
be dismissed back into humble life unrewarded, while the noble lords took
possession of the new acquisitions, and added new millions to their
fortunes. All this Cicero knew, and yet he had persuaded himself that it
could continue without bringing on a catastrophe. He saw his fellow-
senators openly bribed; he saw the elections become a mere matter of
money. He saw adventurers pushing themselves into office by steeping
themselves in debt, and paying their debts by robbing the provincials. He
saw these high-born scoundrels coming home loaded with treasure, buying
lands and building palaces, and, when brought to trial, purchasing the
consciences of their judges. Yet he had considered such phenomena as the
temporary accidents of a constitution which was still the best that could
be conceived, and every one that doubted the excellence of it he had come
to regard as an enemy of mankind. So long as there was free speech in
Senate and platform for orators like himself, all would soon be well
again. Had not he, a mere country gentleman's son, risen under it to
wealth and consideration? and was not his own rise a sufficient evidence
that there was no real injustice? Party struggles were over, or had no
excuse for continuance. Sylla's constitution had been too narrowly
aristocratic. But Sylla's invidious laws had been softened by compromise.
The tribunes had recovered their old privileges. The highest offices of
State were open to the meanest citizen who was qualified for them.
Individuals of merit might have been kept back for a time by jealousy; the
Senate had too long objected to the promotion of Pompey; but their
opposition had been overcome by purely constitutional means. The great
general had obtained his command by land and sea; he, Cicero, having by
eloquent speech proved to the people that he ought to be nominated. What
could any one wish for more? And yet Senate and Forum were still filled
with faction, quarrel, and discontent! One interpretation only Cicero had
been able to place on such a phenomenon. In Rome, as in all great
communities, there were multitudes of dissolute, ruined wretches, the
natural enemies of property and order. Bankrupt members of the aristocracy
had lent themselves to these people as their leaders, and had been the
cause of all the trouble of the past years. If such renegades to their
order could be properly discouraged or extinguished, Cicero had thought
that there would be nothing more to desire. Catiline he had himself made
an end of to his own immortal glory, but now Catiline had revived in
Clodius; and Clodius, so far from being discouraged, was petted and
encouraged by responsible statesmen who ought to have known better. Caesar
had employed him; Crassus had employed him; even Pompey had stooped to
connect himself with the scandalous young incendiary, and had threatened
to call in the army if the Senate attempted to repeal Caesar's iniquitous
laws.[1] Still more inexplicable was the ingratitude of the aristocracy
and their friends, the "boni" or good--the "Conservatives of the State,"
[2]  as Cicero still continued to call Caesar's opponents. He respected
them; he loved them; he had done more for their cause than any single man
in the Empire; and yet they had never recognized his services by word or
deed. He had felt tempted to throw up public life in disgust, and retire
to privacy and philosophy.

So Cicero had construed the situation before his exile, and he had
construed it ill. If he had wished to retire he could not. He had been
called to account for the part of his conduct for which he most admired
himself. The ungracious Senate, as guilty as he, if guilt there had been,
had left him to bear the blame of it, and he saw himself driven into
banishment by an insolent reprobate, a patrician turned Radical and
demagogue, Publius Clodius. Indignity could be carried no farther.

Clodius is the most extraordinary figure in this extraordinary period. He
had no character. He had no distinguished talent save for speech; he had
no policy; he was ready to adopt any cause or person which for the moment
was convenient to him; and yet for five years this man was the omnipotent
leader of the Roman mob. He could defy justice, insult the consuls, beat
the tribunes, parade the streets with a gang of armed slaves, killing
persons disagreeable to him; and in the Senate itself he had his high
friends and connections who threw a shield over him when his audacity had
gone beyond endurance. We know Clodius only from Cicero; and a picture of
him from a second hand might have made his position more intelligible, if
not more reputable. Even in Rome it is scarcely credible that the Clodius
of Cicero could have played such a part, or that the death of such a man
should have been regarded as a national calamity. Cicero says that Clodius
revived Catiline's faction; but what was Catiline's faction? or how came
Catiline to have a faction which survived him?

Be this as it may, Clodius had banished Cicero, and had driven him away
over the seas to Greece, there, for sixteen months, to weary Heaven and
his friends with his lamentations. Cicero had refused Caesar's offered
friendship; Caesar had not cared to leave so powerful a person free to
support the intended attacks on his legislation, and had permitted,
perhaps had encouraged, the prosecution. Cicero out of the way, the second
person whose presence in Rome Caesar thought might be inconvenient, Marcus
Cato, had been got rid of by a process still more ingenious. The
aristocracy pretended that the acts of Caesar's consulship had been
invalid through disregard of the interdictions of Bibulus; and one of
those acts had been the reduction of Clodius to the order of plebeians. If
none of them were valid, Clodius was not legally tribune, and no
commission which Clodius might confer through the people would have
validity. A service was discovered by which Cato was tempted, and which he
was induced to accept at Clodius's hands. Thus he was at once removed from
the city, and it was no longer open to him to deny that Caesar's laws had
been properly passed. The work on which he was sent deserves a few words.
The kingdom of Cyprus had long been attached to the crown of Egypt.
Ptolemy Alexander, dying in the year 80, had bequeathed both Egypt and
Cyprus to Rome; but the Senate had delayed to enter on their bequest,
preferring to share the fines which Ptolemy's natural heirs were required
to pay for being spared. One of these heirs, Ptolemy Auletes, or "the
Piper," father of the famous Cleopatra, was now reigning in Egypt, and was
on the point of being expelled by his subjects. He had been driven to
extortion to raise a subsidy for the senators, and he had made himself
universally abhorred. Ptolemy of Cyprus had been a better sovereign, but a
less prudent client. He had not overtaxed his people; he had kept his
money. Clodius, if Cicero's story is true, had a private grudge against
him. Clodius had fallen among Cyprian pirates. Ptolemy had not exerted
himself for his release, and he had suffered unmentionable indignities. At
all events, the unfortunate king was rich, and was unwilling to give what
was expected of him. Clodius, on the plea that the King of Cyprus
protected pirates, persuaded the Assembly to vote the annexation of the
island; and Cato, of all men, was prevailed on by the mocking tribune to
carry out the resolution. He was well pleased with his mission, though he
wished it to appear to be forced upon him. Ptolemy poisoned himself; Cato
earned the glory of adding a new province to the Empire, and did not
return for two years, when he brought 7,000 talents--a million and a half
of English money--to the Roman treasury.

Cicero and Cato being thus put out of the way--Caesar being absent in
Gaul, and Pompey looking on without interfering--Clodius had amused
himself with legislation. He gratified his corrupt friends in the Senate
by again abolishing the censor's power to expel them. He restored cheap
corn establishments in the city--the most demoralizing of all the measures
which the democracy had introduced to swell their numbers. He re-
established the political clubs, which were hot-beds of distinctive
radicalism. He took away the right of separate magistrates to lay their
vetoes on the votes of the sovereign people, and he took from the Senate
such power as they still possessed of regulating the government of the
provinces, and passed it over to the Assembly. These resolutions, which
reduced the administration to a chaos, he induced the people to decree by
irresistible majorities. One measure only he passed which deserved
commendation, though Clodius deserved none for introducing it. He put an
end to the impious pretence of "observing the heavens," of which
conservative officials had availed themselves to obstruct unwelcome
motions. Some means were, no doubt, necessary to check the precipitate
passions of the mob; but not means which turned into mockery the slight
surviving remnants of ancient Roman reverence.

In general politics the young tribune had no definite predilections. He
had threatened at one time to repeal Caesar's laws himself. He attacked
alternately the chiefs of the army and of the Senate, and the people let
him do what he pleased without withdrawing their confidence from him. He
went everywhere spreading terror with his body-guard of slaves. He
quarrelled with the consuls, beat their lictors, and wounded Gabinius
himself. Pompey professed to be in alarm for his life, and to be unable to
appear in the streets. The state of Rome at this time has been well
described by a modern historian as a "Walpurgis dance of political
witches." [3]

Clodius was a licensed libertine; but license has its limits. He had been
useful so far; but a rein was wanted for him, and Pompey decided at last
that Cicero might now be recalled. Clodius's term of office ran out. The
tribunes for the new year were well disposed to Cicero. The new consuls
were Lentulus, a moderate aristocrat, and Cicero's personal friend, and
Metellus Nepos, who would do what Pompey told him. Caesar had been
consulted by letter and had given his assent. Cicero, it might be thought,
had learnt his lesson, and there was no desire of protracting his penance.
There were still difficulties, however. Cicero, smarting from wrath and
mortification, was more angry with the aristocrats, who had deserted him,
than with his open enemies. His most intimate companions, he bitterly
said, had been false to him. He was looking regretfully on Caesar's
offers,[4] and cursing his folly for having rejected them. The people,
too, would not sacrifice their convictions at the first bidding for the
convenience of their leaders; and had neither forgotten nor forgiven the
killing of the Catiline conspirators; while Cicero, aware of the efforts
which were being made, had looked for new allies in an imprudent quarter.
His chosen friend on the conservative side was now Annius Milo, one of the
new tribunes, a man as disreputable as Clodius himself; deep in debt and
looking for a province to indemnify himself--famous hitherto in the
schools of gladiators, in whose arts he was a proficient, and whose
services were at his disposal for any lawless purpose.

[Sidenote: B.C. 57.]
A decree of banishment could only be recalled by the people who had
pronounced it. Clodius, though no longer in office, was still the idol of
the mob; and two of the tribunes, who were at first well inclined to
Cicero, had been gained over by him. As early as possible, on the first
day of the new year, Lentulus Spinther brought Cicero's case before the
Senate. A tribune reminded him of a clause, attached to the sentence of
exile, that no citizen should in future move for its repeal. The Senate
hesitated, perhaps catching at the excuse; but at length, after repeated
adjournments, they voted that the question should be proposed to the
Assembly. The day fixed was the 25th of January. In anticipation of a riot
the temples on the Forum were occupied with guards. The Forum itself and
the senate-house were in possession of Clodius and his gang. Clodius
maintained that the proposal to be submitted to the people was itself
illegal, and ought to be resisted by force. Fabricius, one of the
tribunes, had been selected to introduce it. When Fabricius presented
himself on the Rostra, there was a general rush to throw him down. The
Forum was in theory still a sacred spot, where the carrying of arms was
forbidden; but the new age had forgotten such obsolete superstitions. The
guards issued out of the temples with drawn swords. The people were
desperate and determined. Hundreds were killed on both sides; Quintus
Cicero, who was present for his brother, narrowly escaping with life. The
Tiber, Cicero says--perhaps with some exaggeration--was covered with
floating bodies; the sewers were choked; the bloody area of the Forum had
to be washed with sponges. Such a day had not been seen in Rome since the
fight between Cinna and Octavius.[5] The mob remained masters of the
field, and Cicero's cause had to wait for better times. Milo had been
active in the combat, and Clodius led his victorious bands to Milo's house
to destroy it. Milo brought an action against him for violence; but
Clodius was charmed even against forms of law. There was no censor as yet
chosen, and without a censor the praetors pretended that they could not
entertain the prosecution. Finding law powerless, Milo imitated his
antagonist. He, too, had his band of gladiators about him; and the streets
of the Capital were entertained daily by fights between the factions of
Clodius and Milo. The Commonwealth of the Scipios, the laws and
institutions of the mistress of the civilized world, had become the
football of ruffians. Time and reflection brought some repentance at last.
Toward the summer "the cause of order" rallied. The consuls and Pompey
exerted themselves to reconcile the more respectable citizens to Cicero's
return; and, with the ground better prepared, the attempt was renewed with
more success. In July the recall was again proposed in the Senate, and
Clodius was alone in opposing it. When it was laid before the Assembly,
Clodius made another effort; but voters had been brought up from other
parts of Italy who outnumbered the city rabble; Milo and his gladiators
were in force to prevent another burst of violence; and the great orator
and statesman was given back to his country. Sixteen months he had been
lamenting himself in Greece, bewailing his personal ill-treatment. He was
the single object of his own reflections. In his own most sincere
convictions he was the centre on which the destinies of Rome revolved. He
landed at Brindisi on the 5th of August. His pardon had not yet been
decreed, though he knew that it was coming. The happy news arrived in a
day or two, and he set out in triumph for Rome. The citizens of Brindisi
paid him their compliments; deputations came to congratulate from all
parts of Italy. Outside the city every man of note of all the orders, save
a few of his declared enemies, were waiting to receive him. The roofs and
steps of the temples were thronged with spectators. Crowds attended him to
the Capitol, where he went to pour out his gratitude to the gods, and
welcomed him home with shouts of applause.

Had he been wise he would have seen that the rejoicing was from the lips
outward; that fine words were not gold; that Rome and its factions were
just where he had left them, or had descended one step lower. But Cicero
was credulous of flattery when it echoed his own opinions about himself.
The citizens, he persuaded himself, were penitent for their ingratitude to
the most illustrious of their countrymen. The acclamations filled him with
the delighted belief that he was to resume his place at the head of the
State; and, as he could not forgive his disgrace, his first object in the
midst of his triumph was to revenge himself on those who had caused it.
Speeches of acknowledgment he had naturally to make both to the Senate and
the Assembly. In addressing the people he was moderately prudent; he
glanced at the treachery of his friends, but he did not make too much of
it. He praised his own good qualities, but not extravagantly. He described
Pompey as "the wisest, best, and greatest of all men that had been, were,
or ever would be." Himself he compared to Marius returning also from
undeserved exile, and he delicately spoke in honor of a name most dear to
the Roman plebs, But he, he said, unlike Marius, had no enemies but the
enemies of his country. He had no retaliation to demand for his own
wrongs. If he punished bad citizens, it would be by doing well himself; if
he punished false friends, it would be by never again trusting them. His
first and his last object would be to show his gratitude to his fellow-
citizens.[6]

Such language was rational and moderate. He understood his audience, and
he kept his tongue under a bridle. But his heart was burning in him; and
what he could not say in the Forum he thought he might venture on with
impunity in the Senate, which might be called his own dunghill. His chief
wrath was at the late consuls. They were both powerful men. Gabinius was
Pompey's chief supporter. Calpurnius Piso was Caesar's father-in-law. Both
had been named to the government of important provinces; and, if authority
was not to be brought into contempt, they deserved at least a show of
outward respect. Cicero lived to desire their friendship, to affect a
value for them, and to regret his violence; but they had consented to his
exile; and careless of decency, and oblivious of the chances of the
future, he used his opportunity to burst out upon them in language in
which the foulest ruffian in the streets would have scarcely spoken of the
first magistrates of the Republic. Piso and Gabinius, he said, were
thieves, not consuls. They had been friends of Catiline, and had been
enemies to himself, because he had baffled the conspiracy. Piso could not
pardon the death of Cethegus. Gabinius regretted in Catiline himself the
loss of his lover.[7] Gabinius, he said, had been licentious in his
youth; he had ruined his fortune; he had supplied his extravagance by
pimping; and had escaped his creditors only by becoming tribune. "Behold
him," Cicero said, "as he appeared when consul at a meeting called by the
arch-thief Clodius, full of wine, and sleep, and fornication, his hair
moist, his eyes heavy, his cheeks flaccid, and declaring, with a voice
thick with drink, that he disapproved of putting citizens to death without
trial." [8] As to Piso, his best recommendation was a cunning gravity of
demeanor, concealing mere vacuity. Piso knew nothing--neither law, nor
rhetoric, nor war, nor his fellow-men. "His face was the face of some
half-human brute." "He was like a negro, a thing [_negotium_] without
sense or savor, a Cappadocian picked out of a drove in the
slave-market." [9]

Cicero was not taking the best means to regain his influence in the Senate
by stooping to vulgar brutality. He cannot be excused by the manners of
the age; his violence was the violence of a fluent orator whose temper ran
away with him, and who never resisted the temptation to insult an
opponent. It did not answer with him; he thought he was to be chief of the
Senate, and the most honored person in the State again; he found that he
had been allowed to return only to be surrounded by mosquitoes whose
delight was to sting him, while the Senate listened with indifference or
secret amusement. He had been promised the restoration of his property;
but he had a suit to prosecute before he could get it. Clodius had thought
to make sure of his Roman palace by dedicating it to "Liberty." Cicero
challenged the consecration. It was referred to the College of Priests,
and the College returned a judgment in Cicero's favor. The Senate voted
for the restoration. They voted sums for the rebuilding both of the palace
on the Palatine Hill and of the other villas, at the public expense. But
the grant in Cicero's opinion was a stingy one. He saw too painfully that
those "who had clipped his wings did not mean them to grow again." [10]
Milo and his gladiators were not sufficient support, and if he meant to
recover his old power he found that he must look for stronger allies.
Pompey had not used him well; Pompey had promised to defend him from
Clodius, and Pompey had left him to his fate. But by going with Pompey he
could at least gall the Senate. An opportunity offered, and he caught at
it. There was a corn famine in Rome. Clodius had promised the people cheap
bread, but there was no bread to be had. The hungry mob howled about the
senate-house, threatening fire and massacre. The great capitalists and
contractors were believed to be at their old work. There was a cry, as in
the "pirate" days, for some strong man to see to them and their misdoings.
Pompey was needed again. He had been too much forgotten, and with Cicero's
help a decree was carried which gave Pompey control over the whole corn
trade of the Empire for five years.

This was something, and Pompey was gratified; but without an army Pompey
could do little against the roughs in the streets, and Cicero's house
became the next battle-ground. The Senate had voted it to its owner again,
and the masons and carpenters were set to work; but the sovereign people
had not been consulted. Clodius was now but a private citizen; but private
citizens might resist sacrilege if the magistrates forgot their duty. He
marched to the Palatine with his gang. He drove out the workmen, broke
down the walls, and wrecked the adjoining house, which belonged to
Cicero's brother Quintus. The next day he set on Cicero himself in the Via
Sacra, and nearly murdered him, and he afterward tried to burn the house
of Milo. Consuls and tribunes did not interfere. They were, perhaps,
frightened. The Senate professed regret, and it was proposed to prosecute
Clodius; but his friends were too strong, and it could not be done. Could
Cicero have wrung his neck, as he had wrung the necks of Lentulus and
Cethegus, Rome and he would have had a good deliverance. Failing this, he
might wisely have waited for the law, which in time must have helped him.
But he let himself down to Clodius's level. He railed at him in the Curia
as he had railed at Gabinius and Piso. He ran over his history; he taunted
him with incest with his sister, and with filthy relations with vulgar
millionaires. He accused him of having sold himself to Catiline, of
having forged wills, murdered the heirs of estates and stolen their
property, of having murdered officers of the treasury and seized the
public money, of having outraged gods and men, decency, equity, and law;
of having suffered every abomination and committed every crime of which
human nature was capable. So Cicero spoke in Clodius's own hearing and in
the hearing of his friends. It never occurred to him that if half these
crimes could be proved, a commonwealth in which such a monster could rise
to consequence was not a commonwealth at all, but a frightful mockery
which he and every honest man were called on to abhor. Instead of scolding
and flinging impotent filth, he should have withdrawn out of public life
when he could only remain in it among such companions, or should have
attached himself with all his soul to those who had will and power to mend
it.

Clodius was at this moment the popular candidate for the aedileship, the
second step on the road to the consulship. He was the favorite of the mob.
He was supported by his brother Appius Claudius, the praetor, and the
_clientele_ of the great Claudian family; and Cicero's denunciations
of him had not affected in the least his chances of success. If Clodius
was to be defeated, other means were needed than a statement in the Senate
that the aspirant to public honors was a wretch unfit to live. The
election was fixed for the 18th of November, and was to be held in the
Campus Martius. Milo and his gladiators took possession of the polling-
place in the night, and the votes could not be taken. The Assembly met the
next day in the Forum, but was broken up by violence, and Clodius had
still to wait. The political witch-dance was at its height and Cicero was
in his glory. "The elections," he wrote to Atticus, "will not, I think, be
held; and Clodius will be prosecuted by Milo unless he is first killed.
Milo will kill him if he falls in with him. He is not afraid to do it, and
he says openly that he will do it. He is not frightened at the misfortune
which fell on me. He is not the man to listen to traitorous friends or to
trust indolent patricians." [11]

With recovered spirits the Senate began again to attack the laws of Caesar
and Clodius as irregular; but they were met with the difficulty which
Clodius had provided. Cato had come back from Cyprus, delighted with his
exploit and with himself, and bringing a ship-load of money with him for
the public treasury. If the laws were invalidated by the disregard of
Bibulus and the signs of the sky, then the Cyprus mission had been invalid
also, and Cato's fine performance void. Caesar's grand victories, the news
of which was now coming in, made it inopportune to press the matter
farther; and just then another subject rose, on which the optimates ran
off like hounds upon a fresh scent.

Ptolemy of Cyprus had been disposed of. Ptolemy Auletes had been preserved
on the throne of Egypt by subsidies to the chiefs of the Senate. But his
subjects had been hardly taxed to raise the money. The Cyprus affair had
further exasperated them, and when Ptolemy laid on fresh impositions the
Alexandrians mutinied and drove him out. His misfortunes being due to his
friends at Rome, he came thither to beg the Romans to replace him. The
Senate agreed unanimously that he must be restored to his throne. But then
the question rose, who should be the happy person who was to be the
instrument of his reinstatement? Alexandria was rich. An enormous fine
could be exacted for the rebellion, besides what might be demanded from
Ptolemy's gratitude. No prize so splendid had yet been offered to Roman
avarice, and the patricians quarrelled over it like jackals over a bone.
Lentulus Spinther, the late consul, was now Governor of Cilicia; Gabinius
was Governor of Syria; and each of these had their advocates. Cicero and
the respectable conservatives were for Spinther; Pompey was for Gabinius.
Others wished Pompey himself to go; others wished for Crassus.

[Sidenote: B.C. 56.]
Meanwhile, the poor Egyptians themselves claimed a right to be heard in
protest against the reimposition upon them of a sovereign who had made
himself abhorred. Why was Ptolemy to be forced on them? A hundred of the
principal Alexandrians came to Italy with a remonstrance; and had they
brought money with them they might have had a respectful hearing. But they
had brought none or not enough, and Ptolemy, secure of his patrons'
support, hired a party of banditti, who set on the deputation when it
landed, and killed the greater part of its members. Dion, the leader of
the embassy, escaped for a time. There was still a small party among the
aristocracy (Cato and Cato's followers) who had a conscience in such
things; and Favonius, one of them, took up Dion's cause. Envoys and allied
sovereigns or provinces, he said, were continually being murdered. Noble
lords received hush-money, and there had been no inquiry. Such things
happened too often, and ought to be stopped. The Senate voted decently to
send for Dion and examine him. But Favonius was privately laughed at as
"Cato's ape;" the unfortunate Dion was made away with, and Pompey took
Ptolemy into his own house and openly entertained him there. Pompey would
himself perhaps have undertaken the restoration, but the Senate was
jealous. His own future was growing uncertain; and eventually, without
asking for a consent which the Senate would have refused to give, he sent
his guest to Syria with a charge to his friend Gabinius to take him back
on his own responsibility.[12]

The killing of envoys and the taking of hush-money by senators were, as
Favonius had said, too common to attract much notice; but the affair of
Ptolemy, like that of Jugurtha, had obtained an infamous notoriety. The
Senate was execrated. Pompey himself fell in public esteem. His
overseership of the granaries had as yet brought in no corn. He had been
too busy over the Egyptian matter to attend to it. Clearly enough there
would now have been a revolution in Rome, but for the physical force of
the upper classes with their bands of slaves and clients.

The year of Milo's tribunate being over, Clodius was chosen aedile without
further trouble; and, instead of being the victim of a prosecution, he at
once impeached Milo for the interruption of the Comitia on the 18th of
November. Milo appeared to answer on the 2d of February; but there was
another riot, and the meeting was broken up. On the 6th the court was
again held. The crowd was enormous. Cicero happily has left a minute
account of the scene. The people were starving, the corn question was
pressing. Milo presented himself, and Pompey came forward on the Rostra to
speak. He was received with howls and curses from Clodius's hired
ruffians, and his voice could not be heard for the noise. Pompey held on
undaunted, and commanded occasional silence by the weight of his presence.
Clodius rose when Pompey had done, and rival yells went up from the
Milonians. Yells were not enough; filthy verses were sung in chorus about
Clodius and Clodia, ribald bestiality, delightful to the ears of "Tully."
Clodius, pale with anger, called out, "Who is murdering the people with
famine?" A thousand throats answered, "Pompey!" "Who wants to go to
Alexandria?" "Pompey!" they shouted again. "And whom do you want to go?"
"Crassus!" they cried. Passion had risen too high for words. The Clodians
began to spit on the Milonians. The Milonians drew swords and cut the
heads of the Clodians. The working men, being unarmed, got the worst of
the conflict; and Clodius was flung from the Rostra. The Senate was
summoned to call Pompey to account. Cicero went off home, wishing to
defend Pompey, but wishing also not to offend the "good" party, who were
clamorous against him. That evening nothing could be done. Two days after
the Senate met again; Cato abused Pompey, and praised Cicero much against
Cicero's will, who was anxious to stand well with Pompey. Pompey accused
Cato and Crassus of a conspiracy to murder him. In fact, as Cicero said,
Pompey had just then no friend in any party. The mob was estranged from
him, the noble lords hated him, the Senate did not like him, the patrician
youth insulted him, and he was driven to bring up friends from the country
to protect his life. All sides were mustering their forces in view of an
impending fight.[13]

It would be wasted labor to trace minutely the particulars of so miserable
a scene, or the motives of the principal actors in it--Pompey, bound to
Caesar by engagement and conviction, yet jealous of his growing fame,
without political conviction of his own, and only conscious that his
weight in the State no longer corresponded to his own estimate of his
merits--Clodius at the head of the starving mob, representing mere
anarchy, and nourishing an implacable hate against Cicero--Cicero, anxious
for his own safety, knowing now that he had made enemies of half the
Senate, watching how the balance of factions would go, and dimly conscious
that the sword would have to decide it, clinging, therefore, to Pompey,
whose military abilities his civilian ignorance considered supereminent--
Cato, a virtuous fanatic, narrow, passionate, with a vein of vanity,
regarding all ways as wrong but his own, and thinking all men who would
not walk as he prescribed wicked as well as mistaken--the rest of the
aristocracy scuffling for the plunder of Egypt, or engaged in other
enterprises not more creditable--the streets given over to the factions--
the elections the alternate prize of bribery or violence, and consulates
and praetorships falling to men more than half of whom, if Cicero can be
but moderately believed, deserved to be crucified. Cicero's main affection
was for Titus Annius Milo, to whom he clung as a woman will cling to a man
whose strength she hopes will support her weakness. Milo, at least, would
revenge his wrongs upon Clodius. Clodius, Cicero said even in the Senate,
was Milo's predestined victim.[14] Titus Annius knew how an armed citizen
who burnt temples and honest men's houses ought to be dealt with. Titus
Annius was born to extinguish that pest of the Commonwealth.[15]

Still smarting over his exile, Cicero went one day with Milo and his
gladiators to the Capitol when Clodius was absent, and carried off the
brass tablet on which the decree of his exile had been engraved. It was
some solace to his poor vanity to destroy the record of his misfortune.
But it was in vain. All was going wrong. Caesar's growing glories came
thick to trouble his peace. He, after all, then, was not to be the
greatest man in Rome. How would these splendid successes affect parties?
How would they affect Pompey? How would, they affect the Senate? What
should he do himself?

The Senate distrusted him; the people distrusted him. In his perplexity he
tried to rouse the aristocracy to a sense of their danger, and hinted that
his was the name which yet might save them.

Sextius, who had been a tribune with Milo in the past year, was under
prosecution for one of the innumerable acts of violence which had
disgraced the city. Cicero defended him, and spoke at length on the state
of affairs as he wished the world to believe that he regarded it.

"In the Commonwealth," he said, "there have always been two parties--the
populares and the optimates. The populares say and do what will please the
mob. The optimates say and do what will please the best men. And who are
the best men? They are of all ranks and infinite in number--senators,
municipals, farmers, men of business, even libertini. The type is
distinct. They are the well-to-do, the sound, the honest, who do no wrong
to any man. The object at which they aim is quiet with honor.
[16] They are the conservatives of the State. Religion and good
government, the Senate's authority, the laws and customs of our ancestors,
public faith, integrity, sound administration--these are the principles on
which they rest, and these they will maintain with their lives. Their path
is perilous. The foes of the State are stronger than its defenders; they
are bold and desperate, and go with a will to the work of destruction;
while the good, I know not why, are languid, and will not rouse themselves
unless compelled. They would have quiet without honor, and so lose both
quiet and honor. Some are triflers, some are timid, only a few stand firm.
But it is not now as it was in the days of the Gracchi. There have been
great reforms. The people are conservative at heart; the demagogues cannot
rouse them, and are forced to pack the Assembly with hired gangs. Take
away these gangs, stop corruption at the elections, and we shall be all of
one mind. The people will be on our side. The citizens of Rome are not
populares. They hate the populares, and prefer honorable men. How did they
weep in the theatres where they heard the news that I was exiled! How did
they cheer my name! 'Tully, the preserver of our liberties!' was repeated
a thousand times. Attend to me," he said, turning paternally to the high-
born youths who were listening to him, "attend to me when I bid you walk
in the ways of your forefathers. Would you have praise and honor, would
you have the esteem of the wise and good, value the constitution under
which you live. Our ancestors, impatient of kings, appointed annual
magistrates, and for the administration they nominated a Senate chosen
from the whole people into which the road is open for the poorest
citizen." [17]

So Cicero, trying to persuade others, and perhaps half persuading himself,
that all might yet be well, and that the Roman Constitution would roll on
upon its old lines in the face of the scandal of Ptolemy and the greater
scandals of Clodius and Milo.

Cicero might make speeches; but events followed their inexorable course.
The patricians had forgotten nothing and had learnt nothing. The Senate
had voted thanksgivings for Caesar's victories; but in their hearts they
hated him more for them, because they feared him more. Milo and his
gladiators gave them courage. The bitterest of the aristocrats, Domitius
Ahenobarbus, Cato's brother-in-law and praetor for the year, was a
candidate for the consulship. His enormous wealth made his success almost
certain, and he announced in the Senate that he meant to recall Caesar and
repeal his laws. In April a motion was introduced in the Senate to revise
Caesar's land act. Suspicions had gone abroad that Cicero believed
Caesar's star to be in the ascendant, and that he was again wavering. To
clear himself he spoke as passionately as Domitius could himself have
wished, and declared that he honored more the resistance of Bibulus than
all the triumphs in the world. It was time to come to an end with these
gentlemen. Pompey was deeply committed to Caesar's agrarian law, for it
had been passed primarily to provide for his own disbanded soldiers. He
was the only man in Rome who retained any real authority; and touched, as
for a moment he might have been, with jealousy, he felt that honor, duty,
every principle of prudence or patriotism, required him at so perilous a
crisis to give Caesar his firm support. Clodius was made in some way to
understand that, if he intended to retain his influence, he must conform
to the wishes of the army. His brother, Appius, crossed the Alps to see
Caesar himself; and Caesar, after the troops were in their winter
quarters, came over to the north of Italy. Here an interview was arranged
between the chiefs of the popular party. The place of meeting was Lucca,
on the frontier of Caesar's province. Pompey, who had gone upon a tour
along the coast and through the Mediterranean islands on his corn
business, attended without concealment or mystery. Crassus was present,
and more than a hundred senators. The talking power of the State was in
Rome. The practical and real power was in the Lucca conference. Pompey,
Caesar, and Crassus were irresistible when heartily united, and a complete
scheme was arranged between them for the government of the Empire. There
was to be no Domitius Ahenobarbus for a consul, or aristocratic _coups
d'etat_. Pompey and Crassus were to be consuls for the ensuing year.
The consulship over, Pompey was to have Spain for a province for five
years, with an adequate army. Crassus, who was ambitious also of military
distinction, was to have Syria. Caesar's command in Gaul was to be
extended for five years further in addition to his present term. The
consent of the Assembly was to be secured, if difficulty arose, by the
votes of the army. The elections being in the winter, Caesar's soldiers
were to be allowed to go to Rome on furlough.

In a personal interview Caesar easily asserted his ascendency. Pompey
allowed himself to be guided, and the arrangement was probably dictated by
Caesar's own prudence. He did not mean to leave Gaul half conquered, to
see his work undone, and himself made into a plaything by men who had
incited Ariovistus to destroy him. The senators who were present at Lucca
implied by their co-operation that they too were weary of anarchy, and
would sustain the army in a remodelling of the State if milder measures
failed.

Thus, for the moment, Domitius and Cato were baffled. Domitius was not to
be consul. Caesar was not to be recalled, or his laws repealed. There was
no hope for them or for the reaction, till Pompey and Caesar could be
divided; and their alliance was closer now than ever. The aristocratic
party could but chafe in impotent rage. The effect on Cicero was curious.
He had expected that the conservative movement would succeed, and he had
humiliated himself before the Senate, in the idle hope of winning back
their favor. The conference at Lucca opened his eyes. For a time at least
he perceived that Caesar's was the winning side, and he excused himself
for going over to it by laying the blame on the Senate's folly and
ingratitude to himself. Some private correspondence preceded his change of
sides. He consulted Atticus, and had received characteristic and cautious
advice from him. He described in reply his internal struggles, the
resolution at which he had arrived, and the conclusion which he had formed
upon his own past conduct.

"I am chewing what I have to swallow," he said. "Recantation does not seem
very creditable; but adieu to straightforward, honest counsels. You would
not believe the perfidy of these chiefs; as they wish to be, and what they
might be if they had any faith in them. I had felt, I had known, that I
was being led on by them, and then deserted and cast off; and yet I
thought of making common cause with them. They were the same which they
had always been. You made me see the truth at last. You will say you
warned me. You advised what I should do, and you told me not to write to
Caesar. By Hercules! I wished to put myself in a position where I should
be obliged to enter into this new coalition, and where it would not be
possible for me, even if I desired it, to go with those who ought to pity
me, and, instead of pity, give me grudging and envy. I have been moderate
in what I have written. I shall be more full if Caesar meets me
graciously; and then those gentlemen who are so jealous that I should have
a decent house to live in will make a wry face.... Enough of this. Since
those who have no power will not be my friends, I must endeavor to make
friends with those who have. You will say you wished this long ago. I know
that you wished it, and that I have been a mere ass;[18] but it is time
for me to be loved by myself, since I can get no love from them." [19]

Pompey, after leaving Lucca, sent Cicero a message, through his brother,
complaining of his speech on the land act, but assuring him of his own and
Caesar's friendship if he would now be true to them. In an apologetic
letter to Lentulus Spinther, Cicero explained and justified what he meant
to do.

"Pompey," he said, "did not let me know that he was offended. He went off
to Sardinia, and on his way saw Caesar at Lucca. Caesar was angry with me;
he had seen Crassus, and Crassus had prejudiced him. Pompey, too, was
himself displeased. He met my brother a few days after, and told him to
use his influence with me. He reminded him of his exertions in my behalf;
he swore that those exertions had been made with Caesar's consent, and he
begged particularly that, if I could not support Caesar, I would not go
against him. I reflected. I debated the matter as if with the
Commonwealth. I had suffered much and done much for the Commonwealth. I
had now to think of myself. I had been a good citizen; I must now be a
good man. Expressions came round to me that had been used by certain
persons whom even you do not like. They were delighted to think that I had
offended Pompey, and had made Caesar my mortal enemy. This was annoying
enough. But the same persons embraced and kissed even in my presence my
worst foe--the foe of law, order, peace, country, and every good man
[20].... They meant to irritate me, but I had not spirit to be angry. I
surveyed my situation. I cast up my accounts; and I came to a conclusion,
which was briefly this. If the State was in the hands of bad men, as in my
time I have known it to be, I would not join them though they loaded me
with favors; but when the first person in the Commonwealth was Pompey,
whose services had been so eminent, whose advancement I had myself
furthered, and who stood by me in my difficulties, I was not inconsistent
if I modified some of my opinions, and conformed to the wishes of one who
has deserved so well of me. If I went with Pompey, I must go with Caesar
too; and here the old friendship came to bear between Caesar, my brother,
and myself, as well as Caesar's kindness to me, of which I had seen
evidence in word and deed.... Public interest, too, moved me. A quarrel
with these men would be most inexpedient, especially after what Caesar has
done.... If the persons who assisted in bringing me back had been my
friends afterward, they would have recovered their power when they had me
to help them. The 'good' had gained heart when you were consul. Pompey was
then won to the 'good' cause. Even Caesar, after being decorated by the
Senate for his victories, might have been brought to a better judgment,
and wicked citizens would have had no opening to make disturbances. But
what happened? These very men protected Clodius, who cared no more for the
Bona Dea than for the Three Sisters. They allowed my monument to be
engraved with a hostile record....[21] The good party are not as you left
them. Those who ought to have been staunch have fallen away. You see it in
their faces. You see it in the words and votes of those whom we called
'optimates;' so that wise citizens, one of whom I wish to be and to be
thought, must change their course. 'Persuade your countrymen, if you can,'
said Plato; 'but use no violence.' Plato found that he could no longer
persuade the Athenians, and therefore he withdrew from public life. Advice
could not move them, and he held force to be unlawful. My case was
different. I was not called on to undertake public responsibilities. I was
content to further my own interests, and to defend honest men's causes.
Caesar's goodness to me and to my brother would have bound me to him
whatever had been his fortunes. Now after so much glory and victory I
should speak nobly of him though I owed him nothing." [22]

Happy it would have been for Cicero, and happy for Rome, had he persevered
in the course which he now seemed really to have chosen. Cicero and Caesar
united might have restored the authority of the laws, punished corruption
and misgovernment, made their country the mother as well as the mistress
of the world; and the Republic, modified to suit the change of times,
might have survived for many generations. But under such a modification,
Cicero would have no longer been the first person in the Commonwealth. The
talkers would have ceased to rule, and Cicero was a talker only. He could
not bear to be subordinate. He was persuaded that he, and not Caesar, was
the world's real great man; and so he held on, leaning now to one faction
and now to another, waiting for the chance which was to put him at last in
his true place. For the moment, however, he saved himself from the
degradation into which the Senate precipitated itself. The arrangements at
Lucca were the work of the army. The conservative majority refused to let
the army dictate to them. Domitius intended still to be consul, let the
army say what it pleased. Pompey and Crassus returned to Rome for the
elections; the consuls for the year, Marcellinus and Philip, declined to
take their names. The consuls and the Senate appealed to the Assembly, the
Senate marching into the Forum in state, as if calling on the genius of
the nation to defend the outraged constitution. In vain. The people would
not listen. The consuls were groaned down. No genius of Rome presided in
those meetings, but the genius of revolution in the person of Clodius. The
senators were driven back into the Curia, and Clodius followed them there.
The officers forbade his entrance. Furious young aristocrats flew upon
him, seized him, and would have murdered him in their rage. Clodius
shrieked for help. His rascal followers rushed in with lighted torches,
swearing to burn house and Senate if a hair of Clodius's head were hurt.
They bore their idol off in triumph; and the wretched senators sat gazing
at each other, or storming at Pompey, and inquiring scornfully if he and
Crassus intended to appoint themselves consuls. Pompey answered that they
had no desire for office, but anarchy must be brought to an end.

Still the consuls of the year stubbornly refused to take the names of the
Lucca nominees. The year ran out, and no election had been held. In such a
difficulty, the constitution had provided for the appointment of an
_Interrex_ till fresh consuls could be chosen. Pompey and Crassus
were then nominated, with a foregone conclusion. Domitius still persisted
in standing; and, had it been safe to try the usual methods, the
patricians would have occupied the voting-places as before with their
retinues, and returned him by force. But young Publius Crassus was in Rome
with thousands of Caesar's soldiers, who had come up to vote from the
north of Italy. With these it was not safe to venture on a conflict, and
the consulships fell as the Lucca conference had ordered.

[Sidenote: B.C. 55.]
The consent of the Assembly to the other arrangements remained to be
obtained. Caesar was to have five additional years in Gaul; Pompey and
Crassus were to have Spain and Syria, also for five years each, as soon as
their year of office should be over. The defenders of the constitution
fought to the last. Cato foamed on the Rostra. When the two hours allowed
him to speak were expired, he refused to sit down, and was removed by a
guard. The meeting was adjourned to the next day. Publius Gallus, another
irreconcilable, passed the night in the senate-house, that he might be in
his place at dawn. Cato and Favonius were again at their posts. The
familiar cry was raised that the signs of the sky were unfavorable. The
excuse had ceased to be legal. The tribunes ordered the voting to go
forward. The last resource was then tried. A riot began, but to no
purpose. The aristocrats and their clients were beaten back, and the
several commands were ratified. As the people were dispersing, their
opponents rallied back, filled the Forum, and were voting Caesar's recall,
when Pompey came on them and swept them out. Gallus was carried off
covered with blood; and, to prevent further question, the vote for Caesar
was taken a second time.

The immediate future was thus assured. Time had been obtained for the
completion of the work in Gaul. Pompey dedicated a new theatre, and
delighted the mob with games and races. Five hundred lions were consumed
in five days of combat. As a special novelty eighteen elephants were made
to fight with soldiers; and, as a yet more extraordinary phenomenon, the
sanguinary Roman spectators showed signs of compunction at their
sufferings. The poor beasts were quiet and harmless. When wounded with the
lances, they turned away, threw up their trunks, and trotted round the
circus, crying, as if in protest against wanton cruelty. The story went
that they were half human; that they had been seduced on board the African
transports by a promise that they should not be ill-used, and they were
supposed to be appealing to the gods.[23]Cicero alludes to the scene in
a letter to one of his friends. Mentioning Pompey's exhibitions with
evident contempt, he adds: "There remained the hunts, which lasted five
days. All say that they were very fine. But what pleasure can a sensible
person find in seeing a clumsy performer torn by a wild beast, or a noble
animal pierced with a hunting-spear? The last day was given to the
elephants; not interesting to me, however delightful to the rabble. A
certain pity was felt for them, as if the elephants had some affinity with
man." [24]

[1] _ To Atticus_, ii. 16.

[2] "Conservatores Reipublicae."--_Pro Sextio_.

[3] Mommsen.

[4] "Omnia sunt mea culpa commissa, qui ab his me amari putabam qui
    invidebant: eos non sequebar qui petebant."--_Ad Familiares_,
    xiv. 1. "Nullum est meum peccatum nisi quod iis credidi a quibus
    nefas putabam esse me decipi.... Intimus proximus familiarissimus
    quisque aut sibi pertimuit aut mihi invidit."--_Ad Quintum
    Fratrem_, i. 4.

[5] "Meministis tum, judices, corporibus civium Tiberim compleri, cloacas
    referciri, e foro spongiis effingi sanguinem.... Caedem tantam, tantos
    acervos corporum extruetos, nisi forte illo Cinnano atque Octaviano
    die, quis unquam in foro vidit?"--_Oratio prov P. Sextio_,
    xxxv. 36.

[6] _Ad Quirites post Reditum_.

[7] "Ejus vir Catilina."

[8] "Cum in Circo Flaminio non a tribuno plebis consul in concionem sed a
    latrone archipirata productus esset, primum processit qua auctoritate
    vir. Vini, somni, stupri plenus, madenti coma, gravibus oculis,
    fluentibus buccis, pressa voce et temulenta, quod in cives indemnatos
    esset animadversum, id sibi dixit gravis auctor vehementissime
    displicere."--_Post Reditum in Senatu_, 6.

[9] Cicero could never leave Gabinius and Piso alone. Again and again he
    returned upon them railing like a fishwife. In his oration for Sextius
    he scoffed at Gabinius's pomatum and curled hair, and taunted him with
    unmentionable sins; but he specially entertained himself with his
    description of Piso:

    "For Piso!" he said: "O gods, how unwashed, how stern he looked--a
    pillar of antiquity, like one of the old bearded consuls; his dress
    plain plebeian purple, his hair tangled, his brow a very pledge for
    the Commonwealth! Such solemnity in his eye, such wrinkling of his
    forehead, that you would have said the State was resting on his head
    like the sky on Atlas. Here we thought we had a refuge. Here was the
    man to oppose the filth of Gabinius; his very face would be enough.
    People congratulated us on having one friend to save us from the
    tribune. Alas! I was deceived," etc. etc.

    Piso afterward called Cicero to account in the Senate, and brought out
    a still more choice explosion of invectives. Beast, filth, polluted
    monster, and such like, were the lightest of the names which Cicero
    hurled back at one of the oldest members of the Roman aristocracy. A
    single specimen may serve to illustrate the cataract of nastiness
    which he poured alike on Piso and Clodius and Gabinius: "When all the
    good were hiding themselves in tears," he said to Piso, "when the
    temples were groaning and the very houses in the city were mourning
    (over my exile), you, heartless madman that you are, took up the cause
    of that pernicious animal, that clotted mass of incests and civil
    blood, of villanies intended and impurity of crimes committed[he was
    alluding to Clodius, who was in the Senate probably listening to him].
    Need I speak of your feasting, your laughter, and handshakings--your
    drunken orgies with the filthy companions of your potations? Who in
    those days saw you ever sober, or doing anything that a citizen need
    not be ashamed of? While your colleague's house was sounding with
    songs and cymbals, and he himself was dancing naked at a supper-party
    ["cumque ipse nudus in convivio saltaret,"] you, you coarse glutton,
    with less taste for music, were lying in a stew of Greek boys and wine
    in a feast of the Centaurs and Lapithae, where one cannot say whether
    you drank most, or vomited most, or spilt most."--_In L.
    Pisonem_,10. The manners of the times do not excuse language of
    this kind, for there was probably not another member of the Senate
    who indulged in it. If Cicero was disliked and despised, he had his
    own tongue to thank for it.

[10] _To Atticus_, iv. 2.

[11] _To Atticus_, iv. 3.

[12] For the details of this story see Dion Cassius, lib. xxxix. capp.
    12-16. Compare _Cicero ad Familiares_, lib. i. Epist. 1-2.
    Curious subterranean influences seem to have been at work to save the
    Senate from the infamy of restoring Ptolemy. Verses were discovered in
    the Sibylline Books directing that if an Egyptian king came to Rome as
    a suppliant, he was to be entertained hospitably, but was to have no
    active help. Perhaps Cicero was concerned in this.

[13] _Ad Quintum Fratrem_, ii. 3.

[14] "Tito Annio devota et constituta hostia esse videtur."--_De
    Haruspicum responsis_.

[15] Ibid.

[16] "Otium cum dignitate."

[17] Abridged from the _Oratio pro Sextio_.

[18] "Me germanum asinum fuisse." Perhaps "own brother to an ass" would be
    a more proper rendering.

[19] _To Atticus_, iv. 5.

[20] Clodius.

[21] Here follows much about himself and his own merits.

[22] To Lentulus Spinther, _Ad Familiares_, i. 9. The length of this
    remarkable letter obliges me to give but an imperfect summary of it.
    The letter itself should be studied carefully by those who would
    understand Cicero's conduct.

[23] Dion Cassius.

[24] _Ad Familiares_, vii. 1.




CHAPTER XVI.


[Sidenote: B.C. 56.]
While Caesar was struggling with the Senate for leave to complete the
conquest of Gaul, fresh work was preparing for him there. Young Publius
Crassus, before he went to Italy, had wintered with the seventh legion in
Brittany. The Breton tribes had nominally made their submission, and
Crassus had desired them to supply his commissariat. They had given
hostages for their good behavior, and most of them were ready to obey. The
Veneti, the most important of the coast clans, refused. They induced the
rest to join them. They seized the Roman officers whom Crassus had sent
among them, and they then offered to exchange their prisoners for their
countrymen whom the Romans held in pledge. The legions might be
irresistible on land; but the Veneti believed that their position was
impregnable to an attack on the land side. Their homes were on the Bay of
Quiberon and on the creeks and estuaries between the mouth of the Loire
and Brest. Their villages were built on promontories, cut off at high tide
from the mainland, approachable only by water, and not by water except in
shallow vessels of small draught which could be grounded safely on the
mud. The population were sailors and fishermen. They were ingenious and
industrious, and they carried on a considerable trade in the Bay of Biscay
and in the British Channel. They had ships capable of facing the heavy
seas which rolled in from the Atlantic, flat-bottomed, with high bow and
stern, built solidly of oak, with timbers a foot thick, fastened with
large iron nails. They had iron chains for cables. Their sails--either
because sailcloth was scarce, or because they thought canvas too weak for
the strain of the winter storms--were manufactured out of leather. Such
vessels were unwieldy, but had been found available for voyages even to
Britain. Their crews were accustomed to handle them, and knew all the
rocks and shoals and currents of the intricate and difficult harbors. They
looked on the Romans as mere landsmen, and naturally enough they supposed
that they had as little to fear from an attack by water as from the shore.
At the worst they could take to their ships and find a refuge in the
islands.

Crassus, when he went to Rome, carried the report to Caesar of the revolt
of the Veneti, and Caesar felt that unless they were promptly punished,
all Gaul might be again in flame. They had broken faith. They had
imprisoned Roman officers who had gone on a peaceful mission among them.
It was necessary to teach a people so restless, so hardly conquered, and
so impatient of foreign dominion, that there was no situation which the
Roman arm was unable to reach.

While the Lucca conference was going on, a fleet of Roman galleys was
built by his order in the Loire. Rowers, seamen, and pilots were brought
across from Marseilles. When the season was sufficiently advanced for
active operations, Caesar came himself and rejoined his army. Titus
Labienus was sent with three legions to Treves to check the Germans on the
Rhine, and prevent disturbances among the Belgae. Titurius Sabinus, with
three more, was stationed in Normandy. To Brittany Caesar went in person
to reduce the rebellious Veneti. The weather was too unsettled for his
fleet to be able as yet to join him. Without its help he found the problem
as difficult as the Veneti expected. Each village required a siege; when
it was reduced, the inhabitants took to their boats, and defied him again
in a new position. Many weeks were thus fruitlessly wasted. The fine
weather at length set in. The galleys from the Loire came out, accompanied
by others from Rochelle and the mouth of the Garonne. The command at sea
was given to Decimus Brutus, a cousin of the afterward famous Marcus, a
clever, able, and so far loyal officer.

The Veneti had collected every ship that they or their allies possessed to
defend themselves. They had 220 sail in all--a force, considering its
character, extremely formidable. Their vessels were too strong to be run
down. The galleys carried turrets; but the bows and sterns of the Veneti
were still too lofty to be reached effectively by the Roman javelins. The
Romans had the advantage in speed; but that was all. They too, however,
had their ingenuities. They had studied the construction of the Breton
ships. They had provided sickles with long handles, with which they
proposed to catch the halyards which held the weight of the heavy leather
sails. It was not difficult to do, if, as is probable, the halyards were
made fast, not to the mast, but to the gunwale. Sweeping rapidly alongside
they could easily cut them; the sails would fall, and the vessels would be
unmanageable.

A sea battle of this singular kind was thus fought off the eastern
promontory of the Bay of Quiberon, Caesar and his army looking on from the
shore. The sickles answered well; ship after ship was disabled; the
galleys closed with them, and they were taken by boarding. The Veneti then
tried to retreat; but a calm came on, and they could not move. The fight
lasted from ten in the morning till sunset, when the entire Breton fleet
was taken or sunk.

After this defeat the Veneti gave up the struggle. Their ships were all
gone. Their best men were on board, and had been killed. They had no power
of resistance left. Caesar was constitutionally lenient, and admired
rather than resented a valiant fight for freedom. But the Veneti had been
treacherous. They had laid hands on the sacred persons of Roman
ambassadors, and he considered it expedient on this one occasion to use
severity. The council who had contrived the insurrection were put to
death. The rest of the tribe were treated as the Aduatuci had been, and
were sold into slavery.

Sabinus, meanwhile, had been in difficulties in Normandy. The people there
had risen and killed their chiefs, who tried to keep them quiet; vagabonds
from other parts had joined them, and Sabinus, who wanted enterprise,
allowed the disturbances to become dangerous. He ended them at last,
however, successfully, and Caesar would not allow his caution to be
blamed. During the same months, Publius Crassus had made a brilliant
campaign in Aquitaine. The Aquitani had not long before overthrown two
Roman armies. Determined not to submit to Caesar, they had allied
themselves with the Spaniards of the Pyrenees, and had officers among them
who had been trained by Sertorius. Crassus stormed their camp with a skill
and courage which called out Caesar's highest approbation, and completely
subdued the whole country.

In all France there now remained only a few unimportant tribes on the
coast between Calais and the Scheldt which had not formally submitted. The
summer being nearly over, Caesar contented himself with a hasty survey of
their frontier. The weather broke up earlier than usual, and the troops
were redistributed in their quarters. Again there had been a year of
unbroken success. The Romans were masters of Gaul, and the admirable care
of their commander had preserved the numbers in his legions almost
undiminished. The smallness of the loss with which all these wonders were
accomplished is perhaps the most extraordinary feature of the story. Not
till a year later is there any notice of fresh recruits being brought from
Italy.

The winter which followed brought with it another of the dangerous waves
of German immigration. The powerful Suevi, a nation of warriors who
cultivated no lands, who wore no clothes but a deer or sheep skin, who
lived by hunting and pasture, despised the restraints of stationary life,
and roved at pleasure into their neighbors' territories, were pressing on
the weaker tribes and forcing them down into the Low Countries. The
Belgians, hoping for their help against the Romans, had invited these
tribes over the Rhine; and, untaught by the fate of Ariovistus, they were
crossing over and collecting in enormous numbers above the junction of the
Rhine and the Meuse. Into a half-peopled country, large portions of which
are lying waste, it might be barbarous to forbid an immigration of
harmless and persecuted strangers; but if these Germans were persecuted,
they were certainly not harmless; they had come at the instance of the
party in Gaul which was determined to resist the Roman conquest, and
unless the conquest was to be abandoned, necessity required that the
immigration must be prohibited. When the advance of spring allowed the
troops to move, Caesar called a council of Gallic chiefs. He said nothing
of the information which had reached him respecting their correspondence
with these new invaders, but with his usual swiftness of decision he made
up his mind to act without waiting for disaffection to show itself. He
advanced at once to the Ardennes, where he was met by envoys from the
German camp. They said that they had been expelled from their country, and
had come to Gaul in search of a home; they did not wish to quarrel with
the Romans; if Caesar would protect them and give them lands, they
promised to be useful to him; if he refused their alliance, they declared
that they would defend themselves. They had fled before the Sueves, for
the Sueves were the first nation in the world; the immortal gods were not
a match for the Sueves; but they were afraid of no one else, and Caesar
might choose whether he would have them for friends or foes.

Caesar replied that they must not stay in Gaul. There were no unoccupied
lands in Gaul which could receive so vast a multitude. The Ubii[1] on
their own side of the Rhine were allies of the Romans; the Ubii, he was
willing to undertake, would provide for them; meanwhile they must go back;
he would listen to no other conditions. The envoys departed with their
answer, begging Caesar to advance no farther till he had again heard from
them. This could not be granted. The interval would be employed in
communicating with the Gauls. Caesar pushed on, crossed the Meuse at
Maestricht, and descended the river to Venloo, where he was but twelve
miles distant from the German head-quarters. Again messengers came, asking
for time--time, at least, till they could learn whether the Ubii would
receive them. If the Ubii were favorable, they said that they were ready
to go; but they could not decide without a knowledge of what was to become
of them. They asked for a respite, if only for three days.

Three days meant only leisure to collect their scattered detachments, that
they might make a better fight. Caesar gave them twenty-four hours.

The two armies were so near that their front lines were in sight of each
other. Caesar had given orders to his officers not to meddle with the
Germans. But the Germans, being undisciplined and hot-blooded, were less
easy to be restrained. A large body of them flung themselves on the Roman
advanced guard, and drove it in with considerable loss; seventy-four Roman
knights fell, and two Aquitanian noblemen, brothers, serving under Caesar,
were killed in defending each other.

Caesar was not sorry for an excuse to refuse further parley. The Germans
were now scattered. In a day or two they would be united again. He knew
the effect which would be produced on the restless minds of the Gauls by
the news of a reverse however slight; and if he delayed longer, he feared
that the country might be on fire in his rear. On the morning which
followed the first action, the principal German chiefs appeared to
apologize and to ask for a truce. They had come in of their own accord.
They had not applied for a safe conduct, and war had been begun by their
own people. They were detained as prisoners; and, marching rapidly over
the short space which divided the camps, Caesar flung himself on the
unfortunate people when they were entirely unprepared for the attack.
Their chiefs were gone. They were lying about in confusion beside their
wagons, women and children dispersed among the men; hundreds of thousands
of human creatures, ignorant where to turn for orders, and uncertain
whether to fight or fly. In this condition the legions burst in on them,
furious at what they called the treachery of the previous day, and
merciless in their vengeance. The poor Germans stood bravely defending
themselves as they could; but the sight of their women flying in shrieking
crowds, pursued by the Roman horse, was too much for them, and the whole
host were soon rushing in despairing wreck down the narrowing isthmus
between the Meuse and the Rhine. They came to the junction at last, and
then they could go no further. Multitudes were slaughtered; multitudes
threw themselves into the water and were drowned. Caesar, who was not
given to exaggeration, says that their original number was 430,000. The
only survivors, of whom any clear record remains, were the detachments who
were absent from the battle, and the few chiefs who had come into Caesar's
camp and continued with him at their own request from fear of being
murdered by the Gauls.

This affair was much spoken of at the time, as well it might be. Questions
were raised upon it in the Senate. Cato insisted that Caesar had massacred
a defenceless people in a time of truce, that he had broken the law of
nations, and that he ought to be given up to the Germans. The sweeping off
the earth in such a manner of a quarter of a million human creatures, even
in those unscrupulous times, could not be heard of without a shudder. The
irritation in the Senate can hardly be taken as disinterested. Men who had
intrigued with Ariovistus for Caesar's destruction, needed not to be
credited with feelings of pure humanity when they made the most of the
opportunity. But an opportunity had undoubtedly been offered them. The
rights of war have their limits. No living man in ordinary circumstances
recognized those limits more than Caesar did. No commander was more
habitually merciful in victory. In this case the limits had been
ruthlessly exceeded. The Germans were not indeed defending their own
country; they were the invaders of another; but they were a fine brave
race, overtaken by fate when doing no more than their forefathers had done
for unknown generations. The excuse for their extermination was simply
this: that Caesar had undertaken the conquest of Gaul for the defence of
Italy. A powerful party among the Gauls themselves were content to be
annexed to the Roman Empire. The patriots looked to the Germans to help
them in driving out the Romans. The Germanizing of Gaul would lead with
certainty to fresh invasions of Italy; and it seemed permissible, and even
necessary, to put a stop to these immigrations once for all, and to show
Gauls and Germans equally that they were not to be.

It was not enough to have driven the Germans out of Gaul. Caesar respected
their character. He admired their abstinence from wine, their courage,
their frugal habits, and their pure morality. But their virtues made them
only more dangerous; and he desired to show them that the Roman arm was
long and could reach them even in their own homes. Parties of the late
invaders had returned over the Rhine, and were protected by the Sigambri
in Westphalia. Caesar had demanded their surrender, and the Sigambri had
answered that Roman authority did not reach across the river; if Caesar
forbade Germans to cross into Gaul, the Germans would not allow the Romans
to dictate to them in their own country. The Ubii were growing anxious.
They were threatened by the Sueves for deserting the national cause. They
begged Caesar to show himself among them, though his stay might be but
short, as a proof that he had power and will to protect them; and they
offered him boats and barges to carry his army over. Caesar decided to go,
but to go with more ostentation. The object was to impress the German
imagination; and boats and barges which might not always be obtainable
would, if they seemed essential, diminish the effect. The legions were
skilled workmen, able to turn their hand to anything. He determined to
make a bridge, and he chose Bonn for the site of it. The river was broad,
deep, and rapid. The materials were still standing in the forest; yet in
ten days from the first stroke that was delivered by an axe, a bridge had
been made standing firmly on rows of piles with a road over it forty feet
wide. A strong guard was left at each end. Caesar marched across with the
legions, and from all sides deputations from the astonished people poured
in to beg for peace. The Sigambri had fled to their woods. The Suevi fell
back into the Thuringian forests. He burnt the villages of the Sigambri,
to leave the print of his presence. He paid the Ubii a long visit; and
after remaining eighteen days beyond the river, he considered that his
purpose had been gained, and he returned to Gaul, destroying the bridge
behind him.

It was now about the beginning of August. A few weeks only of possible
fine weather remained. Gaul was quiet, not a tribe was stirring. The
people were stunned by Caesar's extraordinary performances. West of the
channel which washed the shores of the Belgae lay an island where the
enemies of Rome had found shelter, and from which help had been sent to
the rebellious Bretons. Caesar, the most skilful and prudent of generals,
was yet adventurous as a knight-errant. There was still time for a short
expedition into Britain. As yet nothing was known of that country, save
the white cliffs which could be seen from Calais; Roman merchants
occasionally touched there, but they had never ventured into the interior;
they could give no information as to the size of the island, the qualities
of the harbors, the character or habits of the inhabitants. Complete
ignorance of such near neighbors was undesirable and inconvenient; and
Caesar wished to look at them with his own eyes. The fleet which had been
used in the war with the Veneti was sent round into the channel. He
directed Caius Volusenus, an officer whom he could trust, to take a galley
and make a survey of the opposite coast, and he himself followed to
Boulogne, where his vessels were waiting for him. The gathering of the
flotilla and its object had been reported to Britain, and envoys from
various tribes were waiting there with offers of hostages and humble
protestations. Caesar received them graciously, and sent back with them a
Gaul, named Commius, whom he had made chief of the Atrebates, to tell the
people that he was coming over as a friend, and that they had nothing to
fear.

Volusenus returned after five days' absence, having been unable to gather
anything of importance. The ships which had come in were able only to take
across two legions, probably at less than their full complement--or at
most ten thousand men; but for Caesar's present purpose these were
sufficient. Leaving Sabinus and Cotta in charge of the rest of the army,
he sailed on a calm evening, and was off Dover in the morning. The cliffs
were lined with painted warriors, and hung so close over the water that if
he attempted to land there stones and lances could reach the boats from
the edge of the precipice. He called his officers about him while his
fleet collected, and said a few encouraging words to them; he then moved
up the coast with the tide, apparently as far as Walmer or Deal. Here the
beach was open and the water deep near the land. The Britons had followed
by the brow of the cliff, scrambling along with their cars and horses. The
shore was covered with them, and they evidently meant to fight. The
transports anchored where the water was still up to the men's shoulders.
They were encumbered with their arms, and did not like the look of what
was before them. Seeing them hesitate, Caesar sent his armed galleys
filled with archers and crossbow-men to clear the approach; and as the
legionaries still hesitated, an officer who carried the eagle of the 10th
leapt into the sea and bade his comrades follow if they wished to save
their standard. They sprang overboard with a general cheer. The Britons
rode their horses into the waves to meet them; and for a few minutes the
Romans could make no progress. Boats came to their help, which kept back
the most active of their opponents, and once on land they were in their
own element. The Britons galloped off, and Caesar had no cavalry.

A camp was then formed. Some of the ships were left at anchor, others were
brought on shore, and were hauled up to the usual high-water mark. Commius
came in with deputations, and peace was satisfactorily arranged. All went
well till the fourth day, when the full moon brought the spring tide, of
which the Romans had no experience and had not provided for it. Heavy
weather came up along with it. The galleys on the beach were floated off;
the transports at anchor parted their cables; some were driven on shore,
some out into the channel. Caesar was in real anxiety. He had no means of
procuring a second fleet. He had made no preparations for wintering in
Britain. The legions had come light, without tents or baggage, as he meant
to stay no longer than he had done in Germany, two or three weeks at most.
Skill and energy repaired the damage. The vessels which had gone astray
were recovered. Those which were least injured were repaired with the
materials of the rest. Twelve only were lost, the others were made
seaworthy.

The Britons, as Caesar expected, had taken heart at the disaster. They
broke their agreement, and fell upon his outposts. Seeing the small number
of Romans, they collected in force, in the hope that if they could destroy
the first comers no more such unwelcome visitors would ever arrive to
trouble them. A sharp action taught them their mistake; and after many of
the poor creatures had been killed, they brought in hostages, and again
begged for peace. The equinox was now coming on. The weather was again
threatening. Postponing, therefore, further inquiries into the nature of
the British and their country, Caesar used the first favorable
opportunity, and returned, without further adventure, to Boulogne. The
legions were distributed among the Belgae; and Caesar himself, who could
have no rest, hastened over the Alps, to deal with other disturbances
which had broken out in Illyria.

[Sidenote: B.C. 54.]
The bridge over the Rhine and the invasion of a country so remote that it
was scarcely believed to exist, roused the enthusiasm at Rome beyond the
point which it had hitherto reached. The Roman populace was accustomed to
victories, but these were portents like the achievements of the old
demigods. The humbled Senate voted twenty days of thanksgiving; and
faction, controlled by Pompey, was obliged to be silent.

The Illyrian troubles were composed without fighting, and the interval of
winter was spent in preparations for a renewal of the expedition into
Britain on a larger scale. Orders had been left with the officers in
command to prepare as many transports as the time would allow, broader and
lower in the side for greater convenience in loading and unloading. In
April, Caesar returned. He visited the different stations, and he found
that his expert legionaries, working incessantly, had built six hundred
transports and twenty-eight armed galleys. All these were finished and
ready to be launched. He directed that they should collect at Boulogne as
before; and in the interval he paid a visit to the north of Gaul, where
there were rumors of fresh correspondence with the Germans. Danger, if
danger there was, was threatened by the Treveri, a powerful tribe still
unbroken on the Moselle. Caesar, however, had contrived to attach the
leading chiefs to the Roman interest. He found nothing to alarm him, and
once more went down to the sea. In his first venture he had been
embarrassed by want of cavalry. He was by this time personally acquainted
with the most influential of the Gallic nobles. He had requested them to
attend him into Britain with their mounted retinues, both for service in
the field, and that he might keep these restless chiefs under his eye.
Among the rest he had not overlooked the Aeduan prince, Dumnorix, whose
intrigues had brought the Helvetii out of Switzerland, and whose treachery
had created difficulty and nearly disaster in the first campaign. Dumnorix
had not forgotten his ambition. He had affected penitence, and he had been
treated with kindness. He had availed himself of the favor which had been
shown to him to pretend to his countrymen that Caesar had promised him the
chieftainship. He had petitioned earnestly to be excused from accompanying
the expedition, and, Caesar having for this reason probably the more
insisted upon it, he had persuaded the other chiefs that Caesar meant to
destroy them, and that if they went to Britain they would never return.
These whisperings were reported to Caesar. Dumnorix had come to Boulogne
with the rest, and he ordered him to be watched. A long westerly wind had
prevented Caesar from embarking as soon as he had wished. The weather
changed at last, and the troops were ordered on board. Dumnorix slipped
away in the confusion with a party of Aeduan horse, and it was now certain
that he had sinister intentions. The embarkation was suspended. A
detachment of cavalry was sent in pursuit, with directions to bring
Dumnorix back dead or alive. Dumnorix resisted, and was killed.

No disturbance followed on his death. The remaining chiefs were loyal, or
wished to appear loyal, and further delay was unnecessary. Labienus, whom
Caesar thoroughly trusted, remained behind with three legions and two
thousand horse to watch over Gaul; and on a fine summer evening, with a
light air from the south, Caesar sailed at sunset on the 20th of July. He
had five legions with him. He had as many cavalry as he had left with
Labienus. His flotilla, swollen by volunteers, amounted to eight hundred
vessels, small and great. At sunrise they were in midchannel, lying in a
dead calm, with the cliffs of Britain plainly visible on their left