a leader in order successfully to attack a government discredited by failure at home and abroad. With the return of Pompey Pompey as consul. 684. from Spain their opportunity came, Pompey, who understood politics as little as Marius, was anxious to obtain a triumph, the consulship for the next year (70), and as the natural consequence of this an important command in the East. The opposition wanted his name and support, and a bargain was soon struck. Pompey and with him Marcus Licinius Crassus, the real conqueror of Spartacus, were elected consuls, almost in the presence of their troops, which lay encamped outside the gates in readiness to assist at the triumph and ovation granted to their respective leaders. Pompey lost no time in performing his part of the agreement. The tribunes regained their prerogatives.[1] The “perpetual courts” (quaestiones perpetuae) were taken out of the hands of the senatorial judices, who had outdone the equestrian order in scandalous corruption,[2] and finally the censors, the first since 86 B.C., purged the senate of the more worthless and disreputable of Sulla's partisans.[3] The victory was complete; but for the future its chief significance lay in the clearness with which it showed that the final decision in matters political lay with neither of the two great parties in Rome, but with the holder of the military authority. The tribunes ceased to be political leaders and became lieutenants of the military commanders, and the change was fatal to the dignity of politics in the city. Men became conscious of the unreality of the old constitutional controversies, indifferent to the questions which agitated the forum and the curia, and contemptuously ready to alter or disregard the constitution itself when it stood in the way of interests nearer to their hearts.
When his consulship ended, Pompey impatiently awaited at the hands of the politicians he had befriended the further Gabinian and Manilian laws. 684-87. 687, 688. gift of a foreign command. He declined an ordinary province, and from the end of 70 to 67 he remained at Rome in a somewhat affectedly dignified seclusion.[4] But in 67 and 66 the laws of Gabinius and Manilius gave him all and more than all that he expected (see Pompey). By the former he obtained the sole command for three years against the Mediterranean pirates.[5] He was to have supreme authority over all Roman magistrates in the provinces throughout the Mediterranean and over the coasts for 50 miles inland. Fifteen legati, all of praetorian rank, were assigned to him, with two hundred ships, and as many troops as he thought desirable. The Manilian law transferred from Lucullus and Glabrio to Pompey the conduct of the Mithradatic War in Asia, and with it the entire control of Roman policy and interests in the East.[6] The unrepublican character of the position thus granted to Pompey, and the dangers of the precedent established, were clearly enough pointed out by such moderate men as Q. Lutatius Catulus, the “father of the senate,” and by the orator Hortensius—but in vain. Both laws were supported, not only by the tribunes and the populace, but by the whole influence of the publicani and negotiatores, whose interests in the East were at stake.
Pompey left Rome in 67. In a marvellously short space of time he freed the Mediterranean from the Cilician pirates and established Roman authority in Cilicia itself. He then crushed Mithradates, added Syria to the list of Roman provinces, and led the Roman legions to the Euphrates and the Caspian, leaving no power capable of disputing with Rome the sovereignty 687, 692. Caesar. 684. of western Asia.[7] He did not return to Italy till towards the end of 62. The interval was marked in Rome by the rise to political importance of Caesar and Cicero, and by Catiline's attempt at revolution. As the nephew of Marius and the son-in-law of Cinna, Caesar possessed a strong hereditary claim to the leadership of the popular and Marian party.[8] He had already taken part in the agitation for the restoration of the tribunate; he had supported the Manilian law; and, when Pompey's withdrawal left the field clear for other competitors, he stepped at once into the front rank on the popular side.[9] He took upon himself, as their nearest representative, the task of clearing the memory and avenging the wrongs of the great popular leaders, Marius, Cinna and Saturninus. He publicly reminded the people of Marius's services, and set up again upon the Capitol the trophies of the Cimbric War. He endeavoured to bring to justice, not only the ringleaders in Sulla's bloody work of proscription, but even the murderers of Saturninus, and vehemently pleaded the cause of the children of the proscribed. While thus carrying on in genuine Roman fashion the feud of his family, he attracted the sympathies of the Italians by his efforts to procure the Roman franchise for the Latin communities beyond the Po, and won the affections of the populace in Rome and its immediate neighbourhood by the splendour of the 689. games which he gave as curule aedile (65), and by his lavish expenditure upon the improvement of the Appian Way. But these measures were with him only means to the further end of creating for himself a position such as that which Pompey had already won; and this ulterior aim he pursued with an audacious indifference to constitutional forms and usages. His coalition with Crassus, soon after Pompey's departure, secured him an ally whose colossal wealth and wide financial connexions were of inestimable value, and whose vanity and inferiority of intellect rendered him a willing tool. 689. 691. The story of his attempted coup d'état in January 65 is probably false,[10] but it is evident that by the beginning of 63 he was bent on reaping the reward of his exertions by obtaining from the people an extraordinary command abroad, which should secure his position before Pompey's return; and the agrarian law proposed early that year by the tribune P. Servilius Rullus had for its object the creation, in favour of Caesar and Crassus, of a commission with powers so wide as to place its members almost on a level with Pompey himself.[11] It was at this moment when all seemed going well, that Caesar's hopes were dashed to the ground by Catiline's desperate outbreak, which not only discredited every one connected with the popular party, but directed the suspicions of the well-to-do classes against Caesar himself, as a possible accomplice in Catiline's revolutionary schemes.[12]
The same wave of indignation and suspicion which for the moment checked Caesar's rise carried Marcus Tullius Cicero to Cicero. the height of his fortunes. Cicero, as a politician, has been equally misjudged by friends and foes. That he was deficient in courage, that he was vain, and that he attempted the impossible, may be admitted at once. But he was neither a brilliant and unscrupulous adventurer nor an aimless trimmer, nor yet a devoted champion merely of senatorial
- ↑ The exact provisions of Pompey's law are nowhere given; Livy, Epit. xcvii., “tribuniciam potestatem restituerunt.” Cf. Vell. ii. 30. A lex Aurelia, in 75, had already repealed the law disqualifying a tribune for further office; Cic. Corn. fr. 78.
- ↑ This was the work of L. Aurelius Cotta, praetor in this year. The judices were to be taken in equal proportions from senators, equites and tribuni aerarii. For the latter and for the law generally, see Lange, R. Alt. iii. 1935 Greenidge, Legal Procedure of Cicero's Time, pp. 443 sqq.; and article Aerarium. Compare also Cicero's language, In Verr., Act. i. 1. The prosecution of Verres shortly preceded the lex Aurelia.
- ↑ Livy, Epit. xcviii. Sixty-four senators were expelled. Cf. Plut. Pomp. 22.
- ↑ Vell. ii. 31; Plut. Pomp. 23.
- ↑ Plut. Pomp. 25; Dio xxxvi. 6; Livy, Epit. c.
- ↑ Cic. Pro Lege Manilia; Dio xxxvi. 25; Plut. Pomp. 30.
- ↑ See Pompey and Mithradates.
- ↑ For his early life, see Caesar.
- ↑ Prof. Beesly has vainly endeavoured to show that Catiline and not Caesar was the popular leader from 67 to 63. That this is the inference intentionally conveyed by Sallust, in order to screen Caesar, is true, but the inference is a false one.
- ↑ The story is so told by Suetonius, Jul. 8. In Sallust, Cat. 18, it appears as an intrigue originating with Catiline, and Caesar's name is omitted.
- ↑ Cic. Agr. ii. 6, 15, “nihil aliud actum nisi ut decem reges constituerentur.”
- ↑ That Caesar and Crassus had supported Catiline for the consulship in 65 is certain, and they were suspected naturally enough of favouring his designs in 63, but their complicity is in the highest degree improbable.
