POMPEY RECEIVED NEWS OF MITHRIDATES’S death while in Jericho, settling affairs in Judaea.1 The old king, who had encouraged the genocide of tens of thousands of Romans, crashed the Roman economy, and defeated or evaded two generations of Rome’s best commanders (including both Sulla and Pompey), ended up dying as the result of an assassination plot hatched by his own son Pharnaces. Romans, however, did not care how Mithridates had died—only that he was in fact dead. And when word of Mithridates’s death reached Rome, the city rejoiced with a ten-day-long festival of thanksgiving.
For some Romans, joy turned to worry as Pompey slowly made his way back to Italy. Pompey’s unparalleled military and political authority was tied specifically to the task of defeating Mithridates. With this enemy dead, and with Nepos’s attempt to extend Pompey’s command by empowering him to march against Catiline having failed, Pompey controlled a massive army without any clear legal authority to do so. It was impractical to expect any commander to dismiss an army while abroad, but some of Pompey’s activities in the winter and spring of 62 looked suspicious. As he made his way home, for instance, Pompey stopped in Mytilene, Ephesus, Rhodes, and Athens. Each city greeted him with well-choreographed celebrations of his achievements. These included a poetry competition in his honor in Mytilene and public performances by orators in Rhodes and philosophers in Athens. Pompey reciprocated with gifts to the cities and the performers—including a grant of 300,000 denarii to the city of Athens.2
Observers in Rome knew that this victory tour was a way to simultaneously celebrate what Pompey had accomplished and reinforce the ties that Pompey had built with his clients in the East. But they did not know what these steps meant for people in the capital. Were these celebrations of Pompey by provincials who were genuinely grateful for the peace he now brought and the benefactions he had given in the past? Or was Pompey instead reinforcing his support outside Rome as part of his preparations for an imminent civil war? Cicero, for one, had his suspicions. In a letter he composed in June of 62, Cicero indicated that people in Rome held out hope that, when Pompey landed in Italy, he would march on the city. Cicero then suggests, in typically Ciceronian fashion, that the appropriate thing for Pompey to do in the circumstances would be to extend congratulations to Cicero for saving the Republic. But, as Pompey drew nearer to Italy, Plutarch reports that rumors that Pompey “would straightway lead his army to the city” caused Crassus to flee with his children and his money “because he was truly afraid or rather, so it seems, because he wished to make the rumor seem trustworthy and make the ill-will [toward Pompey] harsher.”3
Pompey likely was aware of these rumors and the effect they were having on his popularity. Before he even arrived in Italy, he sent a letter to the Senate indicating he would return in peace. Then, when he arrived in the Italian port of Brundisium near the end of 62, Pompey dismissed his army without even waiting for a triumph. No author explains the extraordinary nature of Pompey’s decision better than Cassius Dio. Pompey, Dio writes, enjoyed “tremendous power both on sea and on land; he had supplied himself with vast wealth… he had made numerous rulers and kings his friends and he had kept practically all of the communities he governed happy… with these things he could have taken Italy and gained for himself all that Rome controlled… and yet he did not do this.” Instead, he called his army together when they disembarked, thanked them sincerely for all that they had been able to accomplish together, and gave them liberty to return to the towns from which they had come.4
Many in Rome reacted in the same way that Dio did more than two centuries later. Surprise that Pompey had decided not to follow Sulla’s example in marching on Rome gave way to elation as Pompey moved unarmed through Italy.5 Most ancient authors do not comment on the fact that Pompey’s decision, which earned such immediate praise, ended up being a horrible miscalculation. There were, after all, very good reasons that prominent commanders did not usually dismiss their armies immediately upon their return from fighting overseas. Even when a commander was too weak to imagine marching on Rome, his army offered leverage that ensured that both he and his soldiers would be treated fairly even by political opponents. And they needed to be treated fairly. Generals who had made arrangements for the dispensation of provinces or cities needed senatorial endorsement of those decisions. And very successful military leaders like Pompey also hoped to be able to reward their veterans’ service with gifts of land, something that the messy politics of land distribution made exceedingly difficult to manage. And yet, as Dio noted with great surprise, Pompey dismissed his army “without waiting for any vote to be passed by the Senate or the people and without concerning himself at all even about the use of these men in the triumph.”6 He understood, Dio continued, that Romans “held the careers of Marius and Sulla in abomination and he did not wish to cause them any fear, even for a few days, that they might undergo a similar experience.”
Whereas Sulla had marched on Rome because he did not trust the Republic to protect him or his interests, Pompey had unilaterally disarmed before the political debates over his triumph, his eastern settlements, the nature of his conquests, and the rewards for his veterans had even begun. Some of Pompey’s other actions in 62 suggest why he took this dramatic step. Although Pompey trusted the procedures of the Republic more than Sulla, he did not imagine that Rome had become the sort of system in which successful generals waited patiently for honors and recognition. But he also seems to have assumed that, given the magnitude of his accomplishments, no one would dare deny him the recognition and rewards he had earned. Indeed, although Pompey’s recent commands had derived from a combination of alliances with populist tribunes and the use of a sort of military blackmail, he apparently believed that his influence had become so overwhelming that he would be welcomed into the very center of the Roman social and political establishment. Even before he returned to Rome, Pompey had decided to divorce his wife Mucia, who was a member of the Caecilius Metellus family and the sister of the tribune Nepos. Ostensibly, Pompey had done this because he suspected she had committed adultery, but this had always been a political marriage. When Mucia had married Pompey in 79 BC, he was an ambitious young man looking to forge an alliance with one of the Republic’s most powerful families. In 62, however, Pompey was no longer a parvenu. He felt that he had outgrown the Metelli and saw the need in particular to distinguish himself from his brother-in-law Nepos. He was now Rome’s most influential figure and he wanted a marriage that would better match his status as Rome’s leading citizen.7
Pompey decided to replace the marriage alliance with the Metelli with one that would bind Cato to him. Cato had two nieces and Pompey proposed that he would marry one of them and Pompey’s son could marry the other. Pompey here may have been inspired by Sulla’s marriage alliance with the Metelli in the 80s, but Cato was not a Metellus. Instead of a mutually beneficial alliance, Cato “detected that this was a plot to corrupt him.”8 Cato had already built a coalition of senators opposed to Pompey,9 and Pompey had now unwittingly solidified Cato’s status as his most committed and principled opponent by offering the young senator the opportunity to ostentatiously reject a marriage alliance with Rome’s most powerful man.10
This was one of many rebuffs that Cato would deliver to Pompey in the coming months, but Cato was not Pompey’s only problem as he returned to the capital. Political life in the city ground to a halt from January of 61 until May because of a peculiar scandal that erupted when Publius Clodius, the son of the ex-consul Appius Claudius, was discovered at Julius Caesar’s house wearing women’s clothing and attending the religious rites of the Bona Dea, a religious ceremony from which all men were barred. This incident, which took place at the home of Rome’s chief priest, combined a serious act of sacrilege with the salacious suggestion of an adulterous affair between Caesar’s wife and Clodius. Both ordinary Romans and senators could not stop talking about Clodius and the particular developments of his trial, a series of distractions that prevented the Senate from taking up any of the measures Pompey needed it to address. And, without his army around him, Pompey lacked the leverage to redirect the Senate’s attention.11
In the meantime, Pompey’s influence eroded. Pompey declined to play a role in the prosecution of Clodius. When asked for his views, he muttered bromides about supporting the Senate and all of its decrees. No progress was made on finding land for Pompey’s veterans or on securing senatorial approval of his recent conquests and the other political arrangements he had made to settle the East. Pompey was accorded a triumph, which was held in September of 61 and which was the most spectacular celebration of its kind that Rome had ever seen.12 Pompey made sure that the event illustrated the sheer enormity of his achievements by listing all of the nations and regions he had conquered. In subsequent commemorations, Pompey even mentioned the revenue streams his conquests had opened for the Republic. But, as the Senate continued to delay action, Pompey decided that his other concerns would best wait until the new magistrates for the year 60 took office.13
Pompey had reasons to be optimistic. The two new consuls taking office in 60 were both men who had served under Pompey and had been friendly with him in the past. One, Pompey’s former legate, Afranius, owed his election to Pompey’s financial support. The other, Metellus Celer, was the older brother of Nepos and Pompey’s ex-wife Mucia. Although the Clodius trial had distracted the consuls and Senate for most of the first part of 61, Pompey’s spectacular triumph (and the subsequent commemorations of it) reminded Romans of his unparalleled successes—and, subtly, of the unresolved business from his expedition. With consuls who Pompey imagined would be friendly to him soon taking office, he clearly expected these outstanding issues to be quickly addressed.
Pompey again had miscalculated. Afranius quickly showed himself to be incompetent, and, following Pompey’s divorce from his sister Mucia, Celer had come to loathe the arrogant general.14 Celer found powerful allies in Cato and Lucullus (who remained angry that Pompey had replaced him as commander in the war with Mithridates). When Pompey began working with the tribune Flavius to advance a law giving land to his veterans, Celer blocked it. An even more significant confrontation occurred over Pompey’s eastern settlement. When these issues finally came under discussion in the Senate, Lucullus took the lead in blocking them, arguing that some of Pompey’s arrangements had undone agreements that Lucullus had previously made and that, therefore, every component of Pompey’s settlement of Asia Minor, Syria, and Judaea needed to be investigated and voted upon individually. Cato and Celer quickly voiced their approval for this approach as well.
Flavius then grouped the land distribution and eastern settlement together to try to force a vote on all of the measures at once, hoping that the consul might relent rather than antagonize Pompey’s tens of thousands of veterans. But Pompey’s veterans had long since scattered to their hometowns and posed no immediate threat. Celer called Flavius’s bluff and then attacked the tribune so aggressively that Flavius invoked tribunal sacrosanctity and had Celer put in prison. The situation soon became farcical. Refusing to back down, Celer ordered the Senate to assemble outside his cell. Flavius then put his tribune’s bench in front of the door of the prison to prevent anyone from entering. Celer responded by commanding workers to cut a hole in the wall of his cell so that he could preside over the Senate when it gathered outside. Pompey finally asked Flavius to back down. Pompey was reduced to petulantly proclaiming that Celer, Cato, and Lucullus were merely jealous while privately “repenting of having let his legions go so soon and placing himself under the power of his enemies.”15 All the while, the political fate of tens of millions in the Eastern Mediterranean and the economic futures of perhaps a hundred thousand Roman veterans remained in a limbo created by Pompey’s overconfidence, Celer’s and Lucullus’s personal grudges, and Cato’s desire to stymie anyone he decided deserved it.
Pompey was only the most prominent of a host of figures whose interests were stymied by Cato and his allies as the end of the 60s neared. In late 61, the equites who had won contracts to collect the first round of taxes after the establishment of peace in Asia Minor began complaining that the war damage in the region had depressed revenues so much that they would not be able to recover their costs. Crassus, who had likely loaned some of the money these businessmen had paid up front, encouraged his equestrian associates to ask that their contracts be canceled and their money refunded.16 Crassus then strongly backed their proposal. Cicero found the request “disgraceful” and “a confession of foolhardiness,” but he felt compelled to back it as well because, as the self-appointed champion of the equestrian order in the Senate, his own position would be compromised if he opposed it. Celer, who was consul-elect at the time of the Senate’s first meeting to discuss the issue, came out against the measure and Cato made it clear that he too opposed it, though there was not time for Cato to give the speech he had planned.
Once Celer took office, the measure to rework these contracts stalled, with Cato’s obstruction in particular drawing the ire of its backers. Cicero continued to acknowledge that the legislation was shameless, but he argued that it should nonetheless be endorsed so that the Senate could keep the good will of Roman equites. Though Cato had “the best of intentions and unimpeachable honesty,” Cicero wrote in June of 60, “he does harm to the Republic because the opinions he delivers belong in the Republic of Plato rather than amidst the filth [of the Republic] of Romulus.”17 Cato’s insistence on abstract principles of propriety, Cicero complained, had led the equites to essentially boycott the Senate. For Cicero, the breakdown in cooperation between the Senate and equites dented his personal prestige. For Crassus, who probably lost money and appeared politically impotent to his clients, Cato’s obstruction had both political and financial implications. Whereas Cicero was embarrassed, Crassus was angry.
Even as he and his allies blocked Cicero and Crassus on the tax contracts, Cato also started a fight with Caesar in 60. After his praetorship in 62, Caesar was assigned the governorship of Lusitania in Spain, a position that he clearly hoped to use as a stepping-stone to the consulship. Soon after Caesar arrived in his province, he provoked a conflict with Spanish tribes so that he might win a significant enough military victory to gain a triumph. Then, after he had defeated the tribes on the battlefield, Caesar left his province before his successor arrived so that he might first celebrate a triumph and then campaign for the consulship of the year 59 BC. Caesar returned to Italy in the spring of 60 to begin his campaign, but his haste had caused a problem. A triumphant general was not allowed to enter the city until the time of his triumph, but a candidate for the consulship had to declare his candidacy within the sacred limits of the city of Rome at the beginning of July. Caesar’s triumph could not be scheduled so quickly and he thus petitioned for an exception that would allow him to remain outside the city and declare his candidacy in absentia.18
Although most senators had no objection to Caesar’s proposal, Cato was resolutely opposed. Not only did Cato dislike Caesar, but his brother-in-law Bibulus also planned to run for consul. After Caesar had received most of the credit for the games the two men had jointly sponsored as aediles, Bibulus likely feared being outshone or outpolled by Caesar again. On the day that the Senate was to consider Caesar’s request, Cato began a filibuster that lasted for the entire senate meeting so that no vote could be taken. Caesar recognized that Cato’s obstruction would not end and elected to forgo the triumph so that he could campaign for consul. But, in a move that Cato surely backed, the consuls for 59 BC were given the “woods and pastures” of Italy as their province instead of a heavily garrisoned province like Gaul. This was a clear sign that some in the city wanted to prevent Caesar from getting control of an army in the event of his victory in the consular election. Then, when the electoral campaign began and Caesar forged an alliance with Lucius Lucceius, Suetonius reports, “even Cato did not deny that [electoral] bribery under such circumstances was for the good of the commonwealth.” Discarding his long-standing, principled opposition to such practices, Cato began spending money to try to buy votes for Bibulus.19
Caesar understood that Cato’s obstruction and hypocrisy had victimized so many people—Pompey, Crassus, Cicero, and more—that it offered Caesar the opportunity to build an exceptionally broad and powerful coalition of supporters. Cicero ultimately rebuffed Caesar’s invitation to join an alliance, so Pompey and Crassus became the two key figures in this coalition. The two men hated each other nearly as much as they hated Cato, but Caesar had strong relationships with both of them dating back many years. In the Senate, Caesar had been the most vocal supporter of Pompey’s commands against the pirates and against Mithridates. He had even been suspended from office because of the backing he had given to Nepos’s motion to recall Pompey to confront Catiline in 62 BC. Caesar also enjoyed such a strong relationship with Crassus that Crassus had loaned Caesar money so that he could pay off enough of his creditors to be allowed to depart Rome to assume his governorship in Spain in 61.20
Crassus and Pompey both brought their political partisans out to vote for Caesar. Caesar won election, but Bibulus polled second and became his colleague as consul. Caesar then understood that, if he wanted to accomplish anything as consul, he needed his alliance with Pompey and Crassus to endure for longer than the election campaign. If their bonds could be further solidified, the three men had the chance to sideline the obstructionists who had gridlocked the Senate for most of the past two years. Caesar therefore set out to end the feud between Crassus and Pompey. He knew that “without the aid of both… he could never come to any great power. If he made a friend of either of them alone, he would by that very fact have the other as his opponent and would meet with more failures through him than successes through the other.” According to Dio, Caesar’s great insight was that men like Pompey and Crassus would fight much harder to block their enemies than they would to help their friends. The only way to truly benefit from an alliance with the great general and the wealthy businessman was to reconcile them with one another and work together as a group.21 Caesar also understood how to explain to Pompey and Crassus that their rivalry had caused their individual political fortunes to stagnate because it only “increased the power of such men as Cicero, Catulus, and Cato, men whose influence would be nothing if Crassus and Pompey would only unite.”22
This process of reconciliation likely began before Caesar took office, continued in the first weeks he was in power, and was effectively concluded when Pompey married Caesar’s daughter Julia in the spring of 59. This wedding ended a remarkable process that had taken Pompey from a possible marriage alliance with Cato to a pact that bound him to Crassus and Caesar. What emerged out of the three men’s conversations was a working agreement that scholars have come to call the First Triumvirate.23 Though Romans just a few decades later would see in this agreement the beginning of the end of the Republic, this was an outcome that no one imagined at the time. Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus had not decided to overthrow the state. They had instead agreed simply that “they would do things in common on behalf of each other.”24 Each man would pursue his own objectives, asking the others for help when needed and providing it when asked. Each man also agreed not to actively take any steps that might impede the ambitions of the other two. That was it. But that was enough. Cato and the obstructionists could now be overpowered by the combination of Caesar’s political skills, Pompey’s devoted clients and veterans, and Crassus’s wealth whenever they tried to block initiatives that were important to a member of the alliance. These three individuals now could overcome the checks the Republic could place on their activities.
Part of the reason that the alliance succeeded was that Cato’s tactics in 61 and 60 had engendered tremendous frustration in nearly every segment of Roman society. Equites and their senatorial backers hoped to renegotiate Asian tax contracts, Pompey’s veterans looked for land to reward their service, and the most powerful men in Rome were tired of being rendered impotent by a high-minded but hypocritical philosopher-senator and his allies. Caesar understood this frustration. He recognized the longing Romans felt for someone to break the political gridlock and, perhaps more importantly, a growing willingness to tolerate unconventional political methods if they ensured that the Republic functioned. And now, with the alliance of Pompey and Crassus, Caesar had the resources to finally make things happen again in Rome.
The first major piece of legislation that Caesar sponsored as consul was a land law designed to move some population from the crowded capital, settle some of Pompey’s veterans, and return certain parts of Italy to cultivation. The new farms would be on land that belonged to the Roman state, but the fertile public lands in Campania would be exempt from distribution. Any additional land that was needed would be purchased from private property owners using funds from Pompey’s campaigns. Caesar also proposed the creation of a land commission. Unlike the small Gracchan land commissions headed by men who proposed the land law, Caesar’s commission would have twenty commissioners (including Crassus and Pompey), but, to avoid suspicion of corruption, Caesar would not take part in it.
The law offered a reasonable solution to what had seemed an intractable political problem. Caesar understood that he had the influence to force it through should that prove necessary, but he designed the law so perfectly that no one could raise a reasonable objection against it. Caesar also put the law up for discussion in the Senate in the most transparent way possible. He had the text read aloud and then called on each senator by name and asked him whether he had any criticism of the law or any clauses to which he had particular objections. Much to the chagrin of Cato and his associates, no one could find anything wrong with the text of the law. “They were particularly upset,” Dio writes, “that Caesar had crafted such a measure as would admit of no censure even while it weighed heavily” upon their personal interests.25
The senators did not yet understand it, but Caesar had baited the perfect trap. No senator spoke against the text of the law, but as had become customary, they began the process of delaying action on it. Cato again took the lead: “Even though he could find no fault with the measure, Cato nevertheless urged them generally to continue with the present system and to take no steps outside of it.”26 Cato had gone too far. Caesar threatened to haul him to prison, but, when Cato offered to go willingly, Caesar changed course. He let the conflict with Cato drop. Stealing a page from the playbook of rabble-rousing tribunes like Tiberius Gracchus, Caesar bypassed the Senate and had the measure put before the people for a vote. When the Senate complained that such things were not done, Caesar replied simply that he had given the Senate the opportunity to comment on the law and strike any provisions it found objectionable. Because no one found any such provisions, the people should now be free to decide on the matter themselves.
Caesar had learned from the frustrations of the past two groups of consuls. Cato and his associates could indeed shut down the Senate, but they had no direct power to stop a vote of the people. Caesar, as consul, had adopted the tactics that recent tribunes had used to get around senatorial obstruction: simply ignore the Senate and proceed.27 Ordinarily, such a maneuver might invite hostility, but Caesar had orchestrated the situation so well that any reasonable observer would agree that he had no choice but to take his measure directly to the people. Caesar had forced senators to show that they had no real objections to his law other than the facts that Caesar had proposed it and Pompey would benefit from it. Whatever Cato and his minions might say, the true intentions of the hostile senators were clear to all.
Caesar wisely used Pompey and Crassus to build support for his land reform among the people. Both men spoke in favor of it. Then, when it became clear that Caesar’s opponents might resort to violence to block a vote in the popular assembly, Pompey went so far as to indicate that, if force was used to stop passage of the law, he would be compelled to use force himself to secure its passage. Caesar’s strategic appeal to the two men not only honored them but also frightened opponents who saw that Caesar had the backing of two of Rome’s most influential figures.28
The senatorial obstruction of the past few years had made Romans unusually tolerant of forceful actions that brought results, but Caesar also understood the danger in appearing too heavy-handed. This led him to publicly appeal for Bibulus to either support the measure (an outcome that even Caesar would have known to be unlikely) or at least decline to obstruct the vote. But Bibulus was loyal to Cato and used three allied tribunes to delay the vote for as long as he could. When he ran out of reasons to delay it, Bibulus then declared the remainder of the year a sacred period in which no assemblies could be held or votes taken. Caesar simply ignored this absurd pronouncement and scheduled a vote. When the day came, Bibulus forced his way through the crowds and began speaking against the law. He was swarmed, the ceremonial axes carried by his consular bodyguard were broken, and the tribunes allied with him were beaten. Bibulus then fled and Caesar’s law was approved.
Caesar’s opponents could do no more than make symbolic acts of protest. On the following day, Bibulus appealed to the Senate to annul the law, but, intimidated by the popular enthusiasm for Caesar’s proposal, no one took up the motion. Bibulus then retreated to his house and did not leave again until the final day of his consular term. His only official actions for the rest of the year consisted of sending notices to Caesar before every subsequent vote he called indicating that the day was sacred and Caesar was committing a sacrilege by taking action on it. The tribunes allied with him followed Bibulus’s lead and refused to take part in any public business for the rest of the year.
Cato’s response was only slightly less pathetic. Caesar’s law contained a provision that required all members of the Senate to swear to uphold the law. This stipulation had, of course, been part of the land law that Saturninus had passed in 100 BC, and Metellus Numidicus’s failure to swear such an oath had led to his exile. Cato and Metellus Celer evoked this earlier incident of popular overreach and claimed that, like Metellus Numidicus, they would refuse to swear to uphold an objectionable law whose passage was clouded by violence. When the last day to take the oath without penalty arrived, however, both Cato and Celer broke down, perhaps, as Dio explains, “because it is human nature to utter promises and threats more easily than to actually carry them out… or because they were going to be punished for no purpose without helping the Republic at all with their obstinacy.”29
Caesar’s genius in crafting the land reform law allowed him to repay Pompey by rewarding the general’s veterans and provide benefits to a large number of Roman citizens not loyal to Pompey who would now look to Caesar as their primary benefactor. Caesar did the same thing with another measure that sought to offer some relief to the equestrian businessmen who were losing money on the contracts they had purchased for Asian taxes. This law, which lowered by one-third the obligations these men owed the Republic, passed a few weeks after the land law, probably in mid-April of 59. This gratified Crassus, but it also positioned Caesar as an advocate for the equites, a stance that partially undercut Cicero. Again, Cato was reduced to petulant passive aggressiveness. Although he did not object to the law itself, when he enforced it as praetor, Cato refused to mention that the law bore Caesar’s name.30
In May, Caesar advanced a third major law that ratified Pompey’s eastern settlements.31 This measure provided for a substantial reorganization of Roman provincial rule in much of Asia Minor, the establishment of the Roman province of Syria, and the confirmation of a number of pro-Roman sovereigns in command of territories in Asia Minor and Judaea. By ratifying the complicated relationships that Pompey had established with these clients, Caesar’s law solidified Pompey’s status as the most influential man in the Republic. It also validated the immense personal wealth that Pompey had built up through his eastern campaigns.
The law opened up substantial streams of revenue for the Republic, and Caesar decided to take advantage of these to settle more Romans on public land in Italy. The fertile Campanian public land exempted from Caesar’s earlier land reform was distributed to Roman families with three or more children at roughly the same time as the approval of the eastern settlement, a savvy move that enabled Caesar to substitute the revenue coming in from the East for the revenue lost from rents paid to the state on the Campanian land.32 And, of course, Caesar got the full credit for this law from those Romans who now settled on their new farms in Campania.
By May or early June, Caesar moved to take advantage of the popularity his laws had generated. Vatianus, the tribune with whom Caesar had most closely aligned, sponsored a law that gave Caesar a military command in the provinces of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum after his term as consul ended. This included control of three legions and the right to name all of his own military legates.33 This law represented the final tear in the web of obstruction that Cato and his allies had woven to thwart the ambitions of Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar. Instead of a meaningless command over the woodlands and trails of Italy, Caesar now had charge over two of the provinces to Italy’s north. Then, later in the year, Pompey sponsored a motion in the Senate to add the frontier province of Transalpine Gaul to Caesar’s command and give him an additional legion with which to campaign. Perhaps prompted by news that the Gallic tribe of the Helvetii were moving toward Roman territory, Pompey’s measure gave Caesar a unified command over both Gallic provinces. These moves clearly anticipated a campaign beyond the Roman frontiers. No one, however, could have imagined the scale and scope of what Caesar would actually do when he set out for Gaul in early 58.
In just a few months, Caesar succeeded in breaking through the senatorial gridlock that had slowed Roman political life in the later 60s. This enabled him to accomplish a great deal. He had distributed land to Pompey’s veterans and other landless Romans. He had legalized Pompey’s annexation of territory in Asia Minor and Syria as well as his political reorganization of Roman client kingdoms across the East. He had renegotiated the Asian tax contracts for Crassus’s equestrian associates. Most importantly, Caesar had set up the next spectacular stage in his career by securing a command in Gaul that gave him a large army and considerable latitude to use it as he wished. Caesar had done this by expertly deploying a blend of potent personal relationships, skillful political maneuvering, and the threat that obstruction or disruption might be met with violence. Other ambitious Romans quickly absorbed these lessons. By the time Caesar departed for Gaul, Rome was again facing the onset of political chaos. This time it was caused both by the example Caesar had set and by one of the few miscalculations that he made during his consulship.
Publius Clodius Pulcher stood at the center of the gathering storm. Clodius had already become a notorious figure after he was found wearing women’s clothes in Caesar’s house during the all-female rituals of the Bona Dea. Whereas Caesar had elected to divorce his wife on suspicions of adultery, he forgave Clodius for his role in the incident. Other senators, however, had denounced Clodius both during and after his trial. No one took greater pleasure in this than Cicero. Cicero not only attacked Clodius with great vigor but even delighted in telling friends about how totally his words had decimated Clodius in the Senate. Unfortunately for Cicero, this was another occasion when the orator had dramatically overestimated his own importance and the actual power of his words. Clodius was far from destroyed. Instead, he was invigorated and filled with a passion for vengeance.34
Although Clodius was the son of a consul and a member of a prominent patrician family, he recognized that the infamy he earned in the Bona Dea affair made it unlikely that he could build the sort of political career that his father and grandfather had enjoyed.35 But Clodius had other options. His ties to Crassus were close enough that Crassus decided to bribe jurors to secure Clodius’s acquittal. Caesar bore him no lasting animosity. Clodius also possessed both personal charisma and a rapidly growing crowd of supporters willing to use violence in support of his objectives. Instead of the scion of one of the most prominent patrician families, Clodius would remake himself into a rabble-rousing tribune of the plebs.
The only problem was that, as a patrician, Clodius was ineligible to run for this office. So, in 59, Clodius arranged to be adopted by the plebeian P. Fonteius. The move was as utterly transparent as it was absurd. Fonteius, Clodius’s new father, was actually younger than Clodius. Clodius also chose to violate the Roman custom of taking on the name of his new family. He instead merely changed his patrician clan name Claudius to the plebeian-sounding Clodius. Clodius then began looking for priestly endorsement of the adoption, as was required by Roman law.36
Caesar here made the most significant political mistake of his consulship. In March of 59, amid the extremely active first months of Caesar’s consulship, Cicero’s old consular colleague Antonius was put on trial. Cicero took up Antonius’s defense out of a sense of obligation for his help in the Catilinarian crisis. In his statements at the trial, Cicero got carried away and attacked the violence and intimidation with which Caesar and his allies now seemed to be dominating Roman politics.37 Caesar acted with uncharacteristic rashness. Usually, when someone behaved in a way that displeased him, Caesar avoided direct action. He often pardoned people for their offense, or, if he felt the need to retaliate, he did so by empowering intermediaries who could limit the offending party’s ability to do further damage. But in this case, perhaps frazzled by the challenges of the first months of his consulship and rumors of a plot to assassinate Pompey that also supposedly involved Cicero, Caesar and Pompey both overreacted.38 Cicero spoke against the consul in the morning. That afternoon, Caesar, acting in his position as pontifex maximus, presided over Clodius’s adoption and Pompey, who was an augur, officiated at the ceremony. Although the matter had not been presented to the comitia centuriata as it properly should have been, Caesar’s pontifical endorsement of it effectively cleared Clodius to stand for the tribunate.
Caesar and Pompey knew that Clodius had wanted revenge against Cicero ever since the orator aggressively attacked him during the Bona Dea scandal, and they suspected that the prospect of Clodius as a tribune would terrorize Cicero into silence. It did, but Pompey and Caesar soon realized that they had paid an enormous price to shut up the arrogant orator. Clodius was extremely charismatic, unpredictable, and loyal only to his own ambition. This made him both an unreliable partner and a potential source of trouble for the men who had recently pushed through laws that remade significant parts of Roman life. Pompey and Caesar tried to find ways to divert Clodius from his electoral campaign by offering to send him on embassies abroad. They also offered Cicero ways to get out of Rome. Caesar suggested that Cicero take a position as a legate in his army, and Pompey proposed that Cicero go on an embassy to Alexandria. None of it worked. Cicero refused to leave and Clodius merely became irritated. As the summer began, Clodius even intimated that he might make the power of Caesar and Pompey an issue in his campaign for tribune.
Clodius won election that summer and began his time in office with a spurt of legislation designed to boost his popularity. On January 4, 58, he introduced a package of laws designed to appeal to both the people and the Senate. It appealed to the people by creating a free grain dole for the urban population of Rome and attracted senators by limiting the power of censors, the magistrates who set senatorial membership as part of each Roman census. With both groups happy, the measure passed without any veto.39 Clodius then moved against Cicero. He proposed a measure that would exile any Roman who had put citizens to death without trial and tried to win the acquiescence of the consuls by pairing it with a provision shifting the commands allotted to them to more favorable provinces. Facing exile, Cicero withdrew from Rome. Clodius followed his departure with a law requiring that Cicero remain more than four hundred miles from the city. When a mob then attacked Cicero’s house on the Palatine, Clodius had the damaged building replaced with a shrine to Libertas (the divine personification of Freedom). This act simultaneously mocked Cicero’s claim of having saved the Republic from tyranny and prevented Cicero from rebuilding his home by making the plot of land sacred space.
Both ruthless and shrewd, Clodius understood how to keep Caesar, Pompey, and even Cato off balance while he pushed forward his agenda. Caesar, who was now campaigning in Gaul, could be held in check by the idea that all of his legislation as well as the law giving him his Gallic command could be voided if Clodius moved to recognize Bibulus’s prohibition on votes being taken. Pompey could be cowed both by rumors of assassination plots and by fears of unpopularity. And Clodius exploited Cato’s commitment to public service and his ambition by offering him a command to annex Cyprus. Behind all of this lurked Clodius’s remarkable ability to build and organize a powerful and violent network of supporters that could intimidate people at public assemblies and in the streets of the city.
Clodius’s emergence as the leader of an organized political mob would come to paralyze Roman political life for much of the rest of the decade. Clodius’s supporters were soon met by mobs organized by his rivals. The most notable of these was led by Milo, a figure whose violent supporters proved an effective match for those of Clodius. But Milo was far from the only person to imitate Clodius’s methods. These competing mobs and their leaders rapidly created a far deadlier culture of obstruction in the 50s than anything found in the 60s. Whereas Cato had used legislative tools to block the policy initiatives of his rivals in the Senate, Clodius and Milo used violence on the streets to effectively shut down large segments of the Republic.
The first signs of this troubling dynamic appeared in 57 when clashes involving partisans of Clodius and Milo effectively prevented the concilium plebis and Senate from meeting to decide on the possible return of Cicero. The measure only passed that August when it was put instead before the centuriate assembly, a body that did not usually vote on laws because its structure strongly privileged the votes of Rome’s wealthiest citizens. The situation became even worse as the year progressed. Opponents of Clodius used violence to delay the election for aedile, an office for which Clodius stood, because they hoped to put Clodius on trial before ascension to that office gave him immunity from prosecution. The situation became so tense that supporters of Milo physically occupied the Campus Martius for a number of days in mid-November to block allies of Clodius from announcing unfavorable omens that might prevent public business. Supporters of Clodius then broke up senate meetings in which Clodius’s violence was to be discussed.40
Things deteriorated further in 56. Clodius was elected aedile in January. He then put Milo on trial and began verbally attacking Pompey. Pompey became concerned enough that he first summoned supporters from the countryside in February and then, as spring approached, decided that he would run for consul for the year 55. In April, Pompey met with Caesar in the Tuscan city of Luca and, following on a separate agreement that Caesar had made with Crassus, the three men renewed their political alliance. They agreed that Pompey and Crassus would stand for the consulship of 55 and that Caesar, who had in the past several years conquered much of the territory that is now France, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, would have his command extended for a further five years so that he could consolidate the lands he had taken.
This was easier said than done. The consular election pitted Pompey and Crassus against L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, the brother-in-law of Cato, and such violence marred the campaign that the vote was delayed until after the start of the year 55. Pompey and Crassus won the long-delayed election only when Caesar’s troops returned to spend the winter in Italy. Although Caesar never threatened to use his forces to intervene in the campaign, the presence of an army commanded by an ally of Pompey and Crassus convinced their opponents that further disruptions would be unwise. The new consuls then extended Caesar’s command for an additional five years, again thwarting Cato’s attempts to block the measure. When their consular terms concluded at the end of 55, Crassus set off for Syria. He hoped to surpass both Pompey and Caesar by using this province as a platform to conquer the Parthian Empire, a massive kingdom that stretched from modern Pakistan to Iraq. Pompey was awarded a command in Spain, but he elected to delegate control of his army to deputies. He would instead stay just outside of the city of Rome in order to monitor the situation in the city.
Subsequent events proved the wisdom of Pompey’s decision. The election campaign to choose the consuls of 53 was so delayed by violence and bickering that voting did not occur until the summer of 53, leaving the state without consuls for most of that year. Their election came so late that the campaigns for the consuls seeking to serve in 52 had already begun at the time of the vote. Making matters worse, in May of 53, Crassus stumbled into an ambush outside of the city of Carrhae in northwest Mesopotamia, a site that now sits astride the modern border separating Turkey and Syria. Crassus was killed, along with perhaps thirty thousand of his soldiers. This not only destabilized Rome’s eastern frontier but, coming a few months after the death of Caesar’s daughter and Pompey’s wife Julia, it also dissolved the triumvirate. The alliance of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus had worked so well because none of them was powerful enough to prevail over the combined resources of the other two. With Crassus gone and the marriage alliance binding Caesar and Pompey now finished, there was nothing to prevent the two surviving partners from becoming rivals.
This did not happen immediately, however. Caesar initially remained in Gaul, consolidating his conquests and embarking on campaigns into Britain and across the Rhine into Germany in the later part of the 50s. As he did so, he sent to Rome annual commentaries that celebrated his achievements (or, in the case of his German campaign, concealed his failures), generated public recognition for the scope of his conquests, and generally enhanced the reputation he already had earned as a powerful and inspirational commander. To the Roman public, Caesar seemed a larger and more accomplished version of the character he had always been.41
Pompey, meanwhile, found himself thrust into a new role as a stabilizing force in Rome. He had already taken small steps in this direction in 57, when he calmed Rome after Cicero had pushed through a measure giving Pompey imperium to control a rapid increase in the price of grain in the capital. But the real catalyst for Pompey’s transformation into a pillar of the Republican establishment came in 52. In mid-53, the populist rivals Clodius and Milo both began campaigns for offices with terms to begin in 52. Violence between their followers prevented the elections from being held in 53 as custom dictated, and, as 52 began, they threatened to postpone the votes indefinitely. When the terms of the consuls for 53 ended, an interrex stepped in to perform their duties until consuls for 52 could be elected. Then, on January 18, supporters of Milo chanced upon Clodius while he was traveling the Appian Way outside of Rome. In the ensuing scuffle, they ended up killing Clodius as well as a number of his followers. Clodius’s funeral the following day degenerated into severe rioting. The crowd of mourners burned the senate house and began to publicly call for the immediate appointment of Milo’s rivals to the consulship or, failing this, the selection of Pompey as dictator.42
After the riot, the interrex moved quickly to have Pompey selected as sole consul for the year 52, a remarkable break with the Republican notion that all regular magistrates should have colleagues. Pompey had already been empowered by the Senate to raise troops to calm the violence following Clodius’s death, and the Senate consequently backed Pompey’s appointment as sole consul as well, though the historian Asconius suggests that many did so only because it was preferable to having Pompey taking power as dictator.43
During the remainder of 52, Pompey did what many must have regarded as impossible. Backed by the army he had raised, he stabilized the city and initiated a series of reforms designed to destroy the power of gang violence as a political tool. The centerpiece of this effort, a law that made prosecutions of those engaged in violence easier, led to the conviction of a number of people involved in the Appian Way battle that led to Clodius’s death. Pompey then presided over the election of a consular colleague for the rest of 52, saw to the extension of his own command in Spain, and oversaw the orderly election of magistrates for the year 51 with time enough to spare that they were able to take office when their terms began on January 1.
Pompey’s successes, however, only partially obscured the dangerous reality that 52 had revealed. The Republic now could only function when superintended by Rome’s most powerful man—and then only when he had military backing. Pompey did not govern like a dictator, of course, but the Republican system now effectively required the visible hand of a strongman to keep it from descending into repeated crises. Pompey was the pillar on which the Republic rested, even if no one at the time was willing to admit it.
This reality had another important implication. Pompey’s stabilizing of the Republic had transformed both his perception within Rome and his relationship with Caesar. Conservative figures such as Cato still did not exactly trust Pompey, but they understood the vital role that Pompey now played in ensuring regular elections and the orderly cycling of magistracies. A Republic protected by Pompey remained a Republic in which consuls, praetors, aediles, and quaestors could be elected, senators could enjoy honors, and leading men could use the same markers their ancestors had to measure their achievements.
Caesar offered Romans no such assurances. At some point in the winter of 53–52, Caesar made the first exploratory move for the next act in his political career. Although he still had two years remaining in his Gallic command, Caesar received legal sanction to stand for the consulship in absentia.44 Whatever Caesar initially planned to do with this authorization, events in Gaul interceded. A major Gallic revolt erupted in 52 and, though the capture of the stronghold of Alesia ended most of the danger, mop-up operations lasted into the campaigning season of 51. Caesar, who had by then conquered more territory than any Roman commander except Pompey, certainly wanted to get full credit for his achievements by seeing his Gallic wars through to a definitive conclusion.
This meant that Caesar wanted to stay in Gaul until the end of 51 and, perhaps, even try to remain on campaign into the year 50. The problem, however, was that the consuls of the year 51 were overtly hostile to Caesar and even suggested during that year that Caesar’s command should end in March of 50. Pompey argued against setting a firm date, but discussion of how and when to end Caesar’s Gallic command persisted until after the consular elections for the year 50, a fact that virtually ensured that Caesar would have to return to Rome holding no office.
By late September of 51, the question had become more pressing. The Senate began a series of debates about Caesar’s command, considering proposals that included the discharge of some of his soldiers and the designation of Transalpine Gaul as a province to be allotted to one of the consuls who served in 50. At this meeting, Pompey supported the idea that a discussion of who would take over Caesar’s provinces should begin after March 1 of 50. When he was questioned about whether Caesar should be permitted to be consul while commanding his Gallic army, Pompey indicated that such a thing was unthinkable by replying: “What if my son wishes to beat me with a stick?” This comment resonated loudly because it suggested that Caesar was Pompey’s inferior, that he would not dare to contravene the wishes of Rome’s leading citizen, and that, if he did, Pompey could easily beat his challenge back. Pompey was, yet again, implicitly reassuring senators that he would act to preserve the stability of the Republic in the unlikely event that Caesar chose to defy him.45
Pompey’s personalization of the collective problem of Caesar’s command offered the most striking evidence of how Roman politics had changed in the preceding years. Pompey was not alone in recognizing that, where once Rome’s republic had been governed by a collection of elites who collaborated to build broad political consensuses, now two powerful individuals shaped its political dynamics. Others also understood this, and they saw potential benefits that could come from exploiting the growing tensions between the two men. None did this more than the tribune Gaius Curio. Curio apparently had won election as a candidate who pledged to resist Caesar, but, after a measure to roll back some of Caesar’s land reforms in Campania failed to generate the attention he desired, Curio “began to speak for Caesar” and started advocating for positions that would help Caesar’s political position. Much like the tribunes in the 60s who tried to proactively build relationships with Pompey by proposing measures that favored him, Caesar likely had very little to do personally with Curio’s shift. This was instead an opportunistic act by a politically ambitious man who understood that one now made his mark in Rome by carving out a space beside one of the Republic’s titans.46
By the middle of 50, Curio had begun calling for both Caesar and Pompey to dismiss their armies at the same time. This was thoroughly impractical, because Pompey’s command still had years to run. But many in Rome nevertheless cheered the idea of a mutual disarmament that might spare the Republic an armed conflict. And Caesar, of course, particularly welcomed a measure that put him and Pompey on a sort of equal footing. Pompey, however, refused to yield. He instead proposed a sort of compromise through which Caesar’s command would end in November of 50, a date that made it possible for Caesar to run for consul in absentia during the summer and retain control of his army until just before he took office. This seemed reasonable on the surface, but, with elections now regularly postponed, no one could guarantee that the consular elections would actually take place in the summer of 50. Caesar, therefore, neither accepted this date nor placed himself forward as a candidate for consul, fearing, with some reason, that the election might be delayed until after he had dismissed his army. This would leave him open to prosecution if he did not hold an office or a command and, potentially, at risk of assassination if he lacked the protection of his army.47
The last senate meeting of 50 showed that the Republic lacked the capacity to stop the personal conflict between Caesar and Pompey. The Senate voted on three resolutions. One motion, which called on Pompey alone to dismiss his army, was defeated. Another motion, which ordered only Caesar to give up his command, was approved. But a third motion, which echoed Curio’s calls from earlier in the year that both men dismiss their forces, was endorsed by a 370–22 vote.48 The Senate and the people of Rome alike wanted both men to step back from conflict. Pompey refused to do so and ended any hope for a compromise by taking control of the forces in Italy.
The Senate and people of Rome were dragged along as Pompey prepared for a war they did not want. The incoming consuls for 49 pressed the Senate to appoint a successor for Caesar in Gaul and Illyricum and, when tribunes loyal to Caesar tried to veto the act in order to keep Caesar in command of the army there, the Senate passed an emergency decree. Fearing for their safety, the tribunes fled to Caesar. In this way, a decade that began with Caesar’s shattering of the Catonian political gridlock that had paralyzed the Republic ended with a Republic too weak to resist as two leaders marched it into civil war. The republican system no longer constrained the individual. Roman political life now consisted of a struggle among individuals seeking honor and power through the complete control of the city and the resources of its empire. And, for the first time since Sulla, it was clear that this was a fight to the death. No institutions existed that could protect the life or property of the loser. The final march from the Republic to the Empire had begun.