EIGHTH COMMENTARY (CONTINUED)
50 BCE
Hirtius’ account of this last year in Gaul includes no material business there. The follow-on demonstrations of authority from 51 had been effective. At the end of the year, Caesar apportioned his army to maintain Roman authority whatever might come. Half the remaining troops were among the Belgae, the other half centrally positioned and, as it happened, among the Haedui. The Haedui had no real choice but to smile and accept the honor of hosting Rome’s finest soldiers. Bear in mind that the settlement in 52 of the great rebellion had let the Haedui off the hook for their betrayals and failings. The message to them was clear: resistance may or may not be futile, but it is certainly unprofitable. Cooperation was to be profitable. Rome did not always end its conquests with so flagrant a purchase of elite support, but there was almost always some element of reward for submission.
Caesar left Gaul at the usual season to find his future from headquarters in Cisalpine Gaul. His enemies had been busy.
The clearest step the established order took against Caesar this year was thinly veiled. Rome still wanted, several years after Crassus’ death, to prepare to fight the Parthians, and when a scare was promoted in May 50, Pompey and Caesar were each asked to supply a legion to hold in readiness for that purpose. But Pompey met that request by agreeing to supply the legion he had supposedly loaned to Caesar some time before. In other words, the request of one from each was effectively a move to strip two from Caesar. No surprise, when the legions reached Italy, there was no move to send them on to Parthia. Pompey kept them in Capua south of Rome, ready for when he would need them. If there was a plus for Caesar in this transfer, it lay in the attitude of those troops toward Pompey and Caesar. They respected Caesar; they knew they were supposed to respect Pompey.
Caesar had his own strength now, in the vast wealth plundered from Gaul during his time there. He was able to give Lucius Aemilius Paullus, running for consul in 50, nine million denarii, which finished funding the construction of the Basilica Aemilia in the Forum. Scribonius Curio had been a friend to all, but when Caesar paid off his 2.5 million denarii in debts in 50, he became a loyal supporter to Caesar (earning for his pains death in battle in Africa fighting for Caesar in 49). In March of 50, then as tribune, Curio vetoed any discussion of replacing Caesar. Not only were these two purchases important in themselves, but they also reminded many others of what was possible for those who supported Caesar. Long years back from the wars left Pompey without disposable wealth on this scale.
In the late spring, Pompey fell ill at Naples for several weeks, but he recovered to general rejoicing. Plutarch later would describe this as a moment of overbearing confidence for Pompey, quoting him as claiming that he could stamp his foot on the ground and Italy would pour forth whole armies to support him.
Caesar was well informed about Rome’s events and rumors, and during this summer sent his legate Mark Antony back to Rome to stand for election as augur and as tribune. He was successful in both campaigns, notably defeating the vehement anti-Caesarean Ahenobarbus in the contest for the augurate. But Caesar’s candidate for consul, Sulpicius Galba, was not successful. The successful ones were both bad news for Caesar: another Marcellus, brother of the one from 51, and Cornelius Lentulus Crus. Some suspected Caesar might have his hooks into Lentulus, but in fact his only support in 49 would come from three praetors (one of them was the Lepidus who would join the second triumvirate with Antony and Octavian) and the two tribunes, Antony and Cassius.
Crisis loomed over whether Caesar would be allowed to run for consul for the year 48 during the summer of 49 without giving up his troops and returning to the city. By August the word on the street was that Pompey had finally and firmly decided to oppose that permission and that Caesar had decisively refused to comply. Would he, the street asked, swoop back toward Rome to defend Curio and tribunal authority?
As the year ended, alarm grew. On 1 December, Cato proposed that both Caesar and Pompey should dismiss their armies and present themselves as citizens at Rome. That proposal sounded good to many and drew an overwhelming vote in the senate, but the consul Marcellus used senate procedure to prevent its actual passage and confirmation. Curio’s term as tribune ended on 9 December (as Antony and Cassius took office) and he fled for safety to join Caesar in Ravenna. Caesar’s forces were gathering: he now had three legions south of the Alps. Even the officially sacrosanct tribunes, however, might not feel safe much longer.
Caesar speaks for himself about this crisis in the opening pages of his commentaries on the civil war. What was anyone else thinking? We have a document that presents itself as a letter from Sallust to Caesar that some scholars date to this moment of crisis, offering Machiavellian advice. The oligarchs must be faced and broken. The Roman people must be remade by the admission of large numbers of new citizens. The old order could not go on.
In the first days of January, Curio returned to Rome with a letter from Caesar described by the Cassius Dio (41.1) thus:
As to the letter, it contained a list of all the benefits which Caesar had ever conferred upon the state and a defense of the charges which were brought against him. He promised to disband his legions and give up his office if Pompey would also do the same; for while the latter bore arms it was not right, he claimed, that he should be compelled to give up his and so be exposed to his enemies.
It was too late. The senate was unmoved. On January 7, they passed the senatus consultum ultimum, “the senate’s ultimate decree” granting the consuls virtually unrestricted authority to take whatever steps they judged necessary to defend the republic. Caesar was ordered to disband his army. Now it was time for the tribunes Antony and Cassius, powerless to help further, to flee to Caesar.
On the night of January 10, Caesar’s troops crossed the tiny river Rubicon that formed the boundary between home and abroad. Caesar’s colleague Asinius Pollio wrote an account of that night twenty years later, famously taken up a hundred years after Caesar by the poet Lucan (who hated him), and turned into the familiar and dramatic story of Caesar at the head of his troops pausing to reflect, then plunging across the stream on horseback to pursue his fortune. It was still later that other writers gave Caesar his famous line—“the die is cast!” The die was indeed cast, however little truth there is to the familiar story.1
IN THE CONSULSHIP OF AEMILIUS PAULLUS AND CLAUDIUS MARCELLUS THE LESSER
I know Caesar put together individual commentaries for individual years. I don’t think I need to do this, especially because the following year (the consulship of Paulus and Marcellus) has nothing of importance happening in Gaul. I’ve decided to write a bit more and attach it to this commentary so readers will know where Caesar and his army were at this time.
49. While Caesar was wintering in Belgium, he had this one purpose, to keep the nations there friendly and give none pretext or hope for taking up arms. He wanted nothing less than to have the need to fight a war pressed on him as he neared the time of his departure, to leave behind a war that all Gaul could readily take part in without immediate danger as he was leading his army away. And so he greeted all the nations respectfully, bestowed great gifts on their chiefs, and imposed no new burdens, thus keeping a Gaul wearied by so many defeats in battle the more easily at peace on better terms of obedience.
50. When winter ended, against his usual habit he made for Italy by the longest possible marches, to call on the municipalities and colonies to which he had commended the candidacy for the priesthood of his quaestor Mark Antony.2 He was glad to exert his influence on behalf of a man so close to him whom he had sent on ahead to declare his candidacy, especially against the plotting and power of a few men who wanted to uproot the influence Caesar had as he retired by defeating Antony. Though he heard on the way before reaching Italy that Antony had been made augur, he still thought the case no less strong for visiting the municipalities and colonies to thank them for offering their loyalty en masse to Antony, and at the same time to press his own candidacy for the office of the following year, especially because his enemies were boasting that Lentulus and Marcellus had been made consuls to strip Caesar of his honor and dignity, taking the consulship away from Servius Galba, though he had much more influential support but had been joined to Caesar by friendship and service as a legate.3
51. Caesar’s arrival was greeted by all the municipalities and colonies with unbelievable honor and love. This was the first time he came to them after the war with all Gaul. Nothing imaginable was left undone for the decoration of all the gates, roads, and places where Caesar would go. The whole population, including children, went out to meet him, victims were sacrificed everywhere, forums and temples were full of couches spread with covers, so you could anticipate the rejoicing of the universally admired triumph. Such was the great extravagance of the rich and the enthusiasm of the poorer folk.
52. When he had passed through all the regions of Gaul of the togas, he returned to the army at Nemetocenna with the greatest speed. Summoning the legions from all the winter quarters to Treveri territory, he went there himself to review the army.4 He put Labienus in command of Gaul of the togas, to encourage their support for his candidacy for the consulship. He himself set out on marches long enough to offer a healthy change of air. Once there, though he heard frequently that Labienus was being enticed by his own enemies and he was informed that the plotting of a few was seeking to use senatorial intervention to take away part of his army, he still believed none of what he heard about Labienus and could not be induced to act in any way against the authority of the senate. He judged that his case would be easily won through the free choice of the conscript fathers.
For Curio, a tribune of the people, had undertaken to defend the cause and reputation of Caesar and regularly promised the senate that if anyone suffered from fear of Caesar in arms while Pompey’s lording it over the forum with his own forces was itself a source of no little fear, then both could give up their weapons and dismiss their armies. With that the city would be free and autonomous. He did not merely promise this, but even tried to obtain a senatorial decree through voting. The consuls and Pompey’s friends succeeded in blocking that proposal and so dismissed the idea by delaying.
53. This was considerable evidence for the position of the senate as a whole, consistent with what they had done before. Marcellus in the preceding year, when he was impugning the standing of Caesar, violating the law of Pompey and Crassus, brought prematurely to the senate a bill on the provinces of Caesar, and when the debate was over Marcellus went to make a division, seeking every advantage for himself out of jealousy toward Caesar, but a crowded senate went entirely over to the other side. The spirit of Caesar’s enemies was not broken by this, but they were warned to come up with greater compulsions by which the senate could be made to approve what they had determined to do.
54. Then there was passed a decree of the senate to send one legion from Pompey and another from Caesar to the Parthian war. It was not at all unclear that the two legions were to be taken from only one of them. For Pompey contributed the first legion he had sent to Caesar, made up by a draft in Caesar’s province, as if it were from his own number. So Caesar, without any doubt as to his opponents’ intentions, gave the legion to Pompey and in his own name orders the fifteenth legion, which he had in nearer Gaul, to be handed over according to the senate’s decree.5 In its place he sends the thirteenth legion into Italy to watch the stations from which the fifteenth was removed. He assigns winter quarters to the army: Trebonius he places in Belgium with four legions, Fabius with the same number he moves to the Haedui. He thought Gaul would be safest if the Belgae, the bravest, and the Haedui, the most respected, were held in check by armies. He himself left for Italy.
55. When he arrives there, he learns that the two legions he had sent, which by the senate’s decree should have been sent to the Parthian war, had been handed over by the consul Marcellus to Pompey and kept in Italy. Though from this there was no doubt what was being planned against Caesar, still Caesar decided to endure everything as long as there was some hope left of legal debate rather than war. He makes his way . . . 6
1 I am grateful to Professor Robert Morstein-Marx for sharing unpublished work that shows we have no reason to think that getting across that bit of water was in any way dramatic. It was unmistakably important that Caesar began to move south with his army, but it was not (as most moderns claim) actually illegal. Much remained uncertain, but Caesar was still looking for a peaceable resolution to the crisis. The dreary breakdown of negotiations with Pompey and Pompey’s decision to flee Italy later in January 49 are what made civil war inevitable.
2 Antonius was elected to his priesthood in September 50.
3 I reproduce the baggy shapelessness of an 82-word sentence in 106 of my own.
4 This was a great show, well north toward the Rhine, designed to leave a lasting impression of the size and power of Roman armies.
5 Plutarch Pompey 56 says that Caesar gave the departing fifteenth legion such generous gifts that he knew they would remain loyal to him.
6 The last word, contendit, appears only in a few manuscripts, but is precious evidence that the text is broken off. Other scribes preferred to end with a complete sentence and so omitted the word. We end as the book stands late in 50 BCE, while Caesar’s own account of the civil war begins in the first days of 49. A few paragraphs are likely missing.