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History of Julius Caesar by Jacob Abbott CHAPTER III.
ADVANCEMENT TO THE CONSULSHIP.
From this time, which was about sixty-seven years before the birth of Christ, Caesar
remained for nine years generally at Rome, engaged there in a constant struggle for
power.
He was successful in these efforts, rising all the time from one position of influence
and honor to another, until he became altogether the most prominent and powerful
man in the city.
A great many incidents are recorded, as attending these contests, which illustrate
in a very striking manner the strange mixture of rude violence and legal
formality by which Rome was in those days governed.
Many of the most important offices of the state depended upon the votes of the
people; and as the people had very little opportunity to become acquainted with the
real merits of the case in respect to
questions of government, they gave their votes very much according to the personal
popularity of the candidate.
Public men had very little moral principle in those days, and they would accordingly
resort to any means whatever to procure this personal popularity.
They who wanted office were accustomed to bribe influential men among the people to
support them, sometimes by promising them subordinate offices, and sometimes by the
direct donation of sums of money; and they
would try to please the mass of the people, who were too numerous to be paid with
offices or with gold, by shows and spectacles, and entertainments of every
kind which they would provide for their amusement.
This practice seems to us very absurd; and we wonder that the Roman people should
tolerate it, since it is evident that the means for defraying these expenses must
come, ultimately, in some way or other, from them.
And yet, absurd as it seems, this sort of policy is not wholly disused even in our
day.
The operas and the theaters, and other similar establishments in France, are
sustained, in part, by the government; and the liberality and efficiency with which
this is done, forms, in some degree, the
basis of the popularity of each succeeding administration.
The plan is better systematized and regulated in our day, but it is, in its
nature, substantially the same.
In fact, furnishing amusements for the people, and also providing supplies for
their wants, as well as affording them protection, were considered the legitimate
objects of government in those days.
It is very different at the present time, and especially in this country.
The whole community are now united in the desire to confine the functions of
government within the narrowest possible limits, such as to include only the
preservation of public order and public safety.
The people prefer to supply their own wants and to provide their own enjoyments, rather
than to invest government with the power to do it for them, knowing very well that, on
the latter plan, the burdens they will have
to bear, though concealed for a time, must be doubled in the end.
It must not be forgotten, however, that there were some reasons in the days of the
Romans for providing public amusements for the people on an extended scale which do
not exist now.
They had very few facilities then for the private and separate enjoyments of home, so
that they were much more inclined than the people of this country are now to seek
pleasure abroad and in public.
The climate, too, mild and genial nearly all the year, favored this.
Then they were not interested, as men are now, in the pursuits and avocations of
private industry.
The people of Rome were not a community of merchants, manufacturers, and citizens,
enriching themselves, and adding to the comforts and enjoyments of the rest of
mankind by the products of their labor.
They were supported, in a great measure, by the proceeds of the tribute of foreign
provinces, and by the plunder taken by the generals in the name of the state in
foreign wars.
From the same source, too--foreign conquest--captives were brought home, to be
trained as gladiators to amuse them with their combats, and statues and paintings to
ornament the public buildings of the city.
In the same manner, large quantities of corn, which had been taken in the
provinces, were often distributed at Rome.
And sometimes even land itself, in large tracts, which had been confiscated by the
state, or otherwise taken from the original possessors, was divided among the people.
The laws enacted from time to time for this purpose were called Agrarian laws; and the
phrase afterward passed into a sort of proverb, inasmuch as plans proposed in
modern times for conciliating the favor of
the populace by sharing among them property belonging to the state or to the rich, are
designated by the name of Agrarianism.
Thus Rome was a city supported, in a great measure, by the fruits of its conquests,
that is, in a certain sense, by plunder.
It was a vast community most efficiently and admirably organized for this purpose;
and yet it would not be perfectly just to designate the people simply as a band of
robbers.
They rendered, in some sense, an equivalent for what they took, in establishing and
enforcing a certain organization of society throughout the world, and in preserving a
sort of public order and peace.
They built cities, they constructed aqueducts and roads; they formed harbors,
and protected them by piers and by castles; they protected commerce, and cultivated the
arts, and encouraged literature, and
enforced a general quiet and peace among mankind, allowing of no violence or war
except what they themselves created.
Thus they governed the world, and they felt, as all governors of mankind always
do, fully entitled to supply themselves with the comforts and conveniences of life,
in consideration of the service which they thus rendered.
Of course, it was to be expected that they would sometimes quarrel among themselves
about the spoils.
Ambitious men were always arising, eager to obtain opportunities to make fresh
conquests, and to bring home new supplies, and those who were most successful in
making the results of their conquests
available in adding to the wealth and to the public enjoyments of the city, would,
of course, be most popular with the voters.
Hence extortion in the provinces, and the most profuse and lavish expenditure in the
city, became the policy which every great man must pursue to rise to power.
Caesar entered into this policy with his whole soul, founding all his hopes of
success upon the favor of the populace.
Of course, he had many rivals and opponents among the patrician ranks, and in the
Senate, and they often impeded and thwarted his plans and measures for a time, though
he always triumphed in the end.
One of the first offices of importance to which he attained was that of quaestor, as
it was called, which office called him away from Rome into the province of Spain,
making him the second in command there.
The officer first in command in the province was, in this instance, a praetor.
During his absence in Spain, Caesar replenished in some degree his exhausted
finances, but he soon became very much discontented with so subordinate a
position.
His discontent was greatly increased by his coming unexpectedly, one day, at a city
then called Hades--the present Cadiz--upon a statue of Alexander, which adorned one of
the public edifices there.
Alexander died when he was only about thirty years of age, having before that
period made himself master of the world.
Caesar was himself now about thirty-five years of age, and it made him very sad to
reflect that, though he had lived five years longer than Alexander, he had yet
accomplished so little.
He was thus far only the second in a province, while he burned with an
insatiable ambition to be the first in Rome.
The reflection made him so uneasy that he left his post before his time expired, and
went back to Rome, forming, on the way, desperate projects for getting power there.
His rivals and enemies accused him of various schemes, more or less violent and
treasonable in their nature, but how justly it is not now possible to ascertain.
They alleged that one of his plans was to join some of the neighboring colonies,
whose inhabitants wished to be admitted to the freedom of the city, and, making common
cause with them, to raise an armed force and take possession of Rome.
It was said that, to prevent the accomplishment of this design, an army
which they had raised for the purpose of an expedition against the Cilician pirates was
detained from its march, and that Caesar,
seeing that the government were on their guard against him, abandoned the plan.
They also charged him with having formed, after this, a plan within the city for
assassinating the senators in the senate house, and then usurping, with his fellow-
conspirators, the supreme power.
Crassus, who was a man of vast wealth and a great friend of Caesar's, was associated
with him in this plot, and was to have been made dictator if it had succeeded.
But, notwithstanding the brilliant prize with which Caesar attempted to allure
Crassus to the enterprise, his courage failed him when the time for action
arrived.
Courage and enterprise, in fact, ought not to be expected of the rich; they are the
virtues of poverty.
Though the Senate were thus jealous and suspicious of Caesar, and were charging him
continually with these criminal designs, the people were on his side; and the more
he was hated by the great, the more
strongly he became intrenched in the popular favor.
They chose him aedile.
The aedile had the charge of the public edifices of the city, and of the games
spectacles, and shows which were exhibited in them.
Caesar entered with great zeal into the discharge of the duties of this office.
He made arrangements for the entertainment of the people on the most magnificent
scale, and made great additions and improvements to the public buildings,
constructing porticoes and piazzas around
the areas where his gladiatorial shows and the combats with wild beasts were to be
exhibited.
He provided gladiators in such numbers, and organized and arranged them in such a
manner, ostensibly for their training, that his enemies among the nobility pretended to
believe that he was intending to use them
as an armed force against the government of the city.
They accordingly made laws limiting and restricting the number of the gladiators to
be employed.
Caesar then exhibited his shows on the reduced scale which the new laws required,
taking care that the people should understand to whom the responsibility for
this reduction in the scale of their pleasures belonged.
They, of course, murmured against the Senate, and Caesar stood higher in their
favor than ever.
He was getting, however, by these means, very deeply involved in debt; and, in order
partly to retrieve his fortunes in this respect, he made an attempt to have Egypt
assigned to him as a province.
Egypt was then an immensely rich and fertile country.
It had, however, never been a Roman province.
It was an independent kingdom, in alliance with the Romans, and Caesar's proposal that
it should be assigned to him as a province appeared very extraordinary.
His pretext was, that the people of Egypt had recently deposed and expelled their
king, and that, consequently, the Romans might properly take possession of it.
The Senate, however, resisted this plan, either from jealousy of Caesar or from a
sense of justice to Egypt; and, after a violent contest, Caesar found himself
compelled to give up the design.
He felt, however, a strong degree of resentment against the patrician party who
had thus thwarted his designs.
Accordingly, in order to avenge himself upon them, he one night replaced certain
statues and trophies of Marius in the Capitol, which had been taken down by order
of Sylla when he returned to power.
Marius, as will be recollected, had been the great champion of the popular party,
and the enemy of the patricians; and, at the time of his down-fall, all the
memorials of his power and greatness had
been every where removed from Rome, and among them these statues and trophies,
which had been erected in the Capitol in commemoration of some former victories, and
had remained there until Sylla's triumph, when they were taken down and destroyed.
Caesar now ordered new ones to be made, far more magnificent than before.
They were made secretly, and put up in the night.
His office as aedile gave him the necessary authority.
The next morning, when the people saw these splendid monuments of their great favorite
restored, the whole city was animated with excitement and joy.
The patricians, on the other hand, were filled with vexation and rage.
"Here is a single officer," said they, "who is attempting to restore, by his individual
authority, what has been formally abolished by a decree of the Senate.
He is trying to see how much we will bear.
If he finds that we will submit to this, he will attempt bolder measures still."
They accordingly commenced a movement to have the statues and trophies taken down
again, but the people rallied in vast numbers in defense of them.
They made the Capitol ring with their shouts of applause; and the Senate, finding
their power insufficient to cope with so great a force, gave up the point, and
Caesar gained the day.
Caesar had married another wife after the death of Cornelia.
Her name was Pompeia, He divorced Pompeia about this time, under very extraordinary
circumstances.
Among the other strange religious ceremonies and celebrations which were
observed in those days, was one called the celebration of the mysteries of the Good
Goddess.
This celebration was held by females alone, every thing masculine being most carefully
excluded.
Even the pictures of men, if there were any upon the walls of the house where the
assembly was held, were covered.
The persons engaged spent the night together in music and dancing and various
secret ceremonies, half pleasure, half worship, according to the ideas and customs
of the time.
The mysteries of the Good Goddess were to be celebrated one night at Caesar's house,
he himself having, of course, withdrawn.
In the middle of the night, the whole company in one of the apartments were
thrown into consternation at finding that one of their number was a man.
He had a smooth and youthful-looking face, and was very perfectly disguised in the
dress of a female.
He proved to be a certain Clodius, a very base and dissolute young man, though of
great wealth and high connections.
He had been admitted by a female slave of Pompeia's, whom he had succeeded in
bribing. It was suspected that it was with Pompeia's
concurrence.
At any rate, Caesar immediately divorced his wife.
The Senate ordered an inquiry into the affair, and, after the other members of the
household had given their testimony, Caesar himself was called upon, but he had nothing
to say.
He knew nothing about it.
They asked him, then, why he had divorced Pompeia, unless he had some evidence for
believing her guilty, He replied, that a wife of Caesar must not only be without
crime, but without suspicion.
Clodius was a very desperate and lawless character, and his subsequent history
shows, in a striking point of view, the degree of violence and disorder which
reigned in those times.
He became involved in a bitter contention with another citizen whose name was Milo,
and each, gaining as many adherents as he could, at length drew almost the whole city
into their quarrel.
Whenever they went out, they were attended with armed bands, which were continually in
danger of coming into collision. The collision at last came, quite a battle
was fought, and Clodius was killed.
This made the difficulty worse than it was before.
Parties were formed, and violent disputes arose on the question of bringing Milo to
trial for the alleged ***.
He was brought to trial at last, but so great was the public excitement, that the
consuls for the time surrounded and filled the whole Forum with armed men while the
trial was proceeding, to ensure the safety of the court.
In fact, violence mingled itself continually, in those times, with almost
all public proceedings, whenever any special combination of circumstances
occurred to awaken unusual excitement.
At one time, when Caesar was in office, a very dangerous conspiracy was brought to
light, which was headed by the notorious Catiline.
It was directed chiefly against the Senate and the higher departments of the
government; it contemplated, in fact, their utter destruction, and the establishment of
an entirely new government on the ruins of the existing constitution.
Caesar was himself accused of a participation in this plot.
When it was discovered, Catiline himself fled; some of the other conspirators were,
however, arrested, and there was a long and very excited debate in the Senate on the
question of their punishment.
Some were for death.
Caesar, however, very earnestly opposed this plan, recommending, instead, the
confiscation of the estates of the conspirators, and their imprisonment in
some of the distant cities of Italy.
The dispute grew very warm, Caesar urging his point with great perseverance and
determination, and with a degree of violence which threatened seriously to
obstruct the proceedings, when a body of
armed men, a sort of guard of honor stationed there, gathered around him, and
threatened him with their swords. Quite a scene of disorder and terror
ensued.
Some of the senators arose hastily and fled from the vicinity of Caesar's seat to avoid
the danger.
Others, more courageous, or more devoted in their attachment to him, gathered around
him to protect him, as far as they could, by interposing their bodies between his
person and the weapons of his assailants.
Caesar soon left the Senate, and for a long time would return to it no more.
Although Caesar was all this time, on the whole, rising in influence and power, there
were still fluctuations in his fortune, and the tide sometimes, for a short period,
went strongly against him.
He was at one time, when greatly involved in debt, and embarrassed in all his
affairs, a candidate for a very high office, that of Pontifex Maximus, or
sovereign pontiff.
The office of the pontifex was originally that of building and keeping custody of the
bridges of the city, the name being derived from the Latin word pons, which signifies
bridge.
To this, however, had afterward been added the care of the temples, and finally the
regulation and control of the ceremonies of religion, so that it came in the end to be
an office of the highest dignity and honor.
Caesar made the most desperate efforts to secure his election, resorting to such
measures, expending such sums, and involving himself in debt to such an
extreme, that, if he failed, he would be irretrievably ruined.
His mother, sympathizing with him in his anxiety, kissed him when he went away from
the house on the morning of the election, and bade hem farewell with tears.
He told her that he should come home that night the pontiff, or he should never come
home at all. He succeeded in gaining the election.
At one time Caesar was actually deposed from a high office which he held, by a
decree of the Senate.
He determined to disregard this decree, and go on in the discharge of his office as
usual.
But the Senate, whose ascendency was now, for some reason, once more established,
prepared to prevent him by force of arms.
Caesar, finding that he was not sustained, gave up the contest, put off his robes of
office, and went home. Two days afterward a reaction occurred.
A mass of the populace came together to his house, and offered their assistance to
restore his rights and vindicate his honor.
Caesar, however, contrary to what every one would have expected of him, exerted his
influence to calm and quiet the mob, and then sent them away, remaining himself in
private as before.
The Senate had been alarmed at the first outbreak of the tumult, and a meeting had
been suddenly convened to consider what measures to adopt in such a crisis.
When, however, they found that Caesar had himself interposed, and by his own personal
influence had saved the city from the danger which threatened it, they were so
strongly impressed with a sense of his
forbearance and generosity, that they sent for him to come to the senate house, and,
after formally expressing their thanks, they canceled their former vote, and
restored him to his office again.
This change in the action of the Senate does not, however, necessarily indicate so
great a change of individual sentiment as one might at first imagine.
There was, undoubtedly, a large minority who were averse to his being deposed in the
first instance but, being outvoted, the decree of deposition was passed.
Others were, perhaps, more or less doubtful.
Caesar's generous forbearance in refusing the offered aid of the populace carried
over a number of these sufficient to shift the majority, and thus the action of the
body was reversed.
It is in this way that the sudden and apparently total changes in the action of
deliberative assemblies which often take place, and which would otherwise, in some
cases, be almost incredible, are to be explained.
After this, Caesar became involved in another difficulty, in consequence of the
appearance of some definite and positive evidence that he was connected with
Catiline in his famous conspiracy.
One of the senators said that Catiline himself had informed him that Caesar was
one of the accomplices of the plot.
Another witness, named Vettius, laid an information against Caesar before a Roman
magistrate, and offered to produce Caesar's handwriting in proof of his participation
in the conspirator's designs Caesar was
very much incensed, and his manner of vindicating himself from these serious
charges was as singular as many of his other deeds.
He arrested Vettius, and sentenced him to pay a heavy fine, and to be imprisoned; and
he contrived also to expose him, in the course of the proceedings, to the mob in
the Forum, who were always ready to espouse
Caesar's cause, and who, on this occasion, beat Vettius so unmercifully, that he
barely escaped with his life.
The magistrate, too, was thrown into prison for having dared to take an information
against a superior officer.
At last Caesar became so much involved in debt, through the boundless extravagance of
his expenditures, that something must be done to replenish his exhausted finances.
He had, however, by this time, risen so high in official influence and power, that
he succeeded in having Spain assigned to him as his province, and he began to make
preparations to proceed to it.
His creditors, however, interposed, unwilling to let him go without giving them
security.
In this dilemma, Caesar succeeded in making an arrangement with Crassus, who has
already been spoken of as a man of unbounded wealth and great ambition, but
not possessed of any considerable degree of intellectual power.
Crassus consented to give the necessary security, with an understanding that Caesar
was to repay him by exerting his political influence in his favor.
So soon as this arrangement was made, Caesar set off in a sudden and private
manner, as if he expected that otherwise some new difficulty would intervene.
He went to Spain by land, passing through Switzerland on the way.
He stopped with his attendants one night at a very insignificant village of shepherds'
huts among the mountains.
Struck with the poverty and worthlessness of all they saw in this wretched hamlet,
Caesar's friends were wondering whether the jealousy, rivalry, and ambition which
reigned among men every where else in the
world could find any footing there, when Caesar told them that, for his part, he
should rather choose to be first in such a village as that than the second at Rome.
The story has been repeated a thousand times, and told to every successive
generation now for nearly twenty centuries, as an illustration of the peculiar type and
character of the ambition which controls such a soul as that of Caesar.
Caesar was very successful in the administration of his province; that is to
say, he returned in a short time with considerable military glory, and with money
enough to pay all his debts, and famish him with means for fresh electioneering.
He now felt strong enough to aspire to the office of consul, which was the highest
office of the Roman state.
When the line of kings had been deposed, the Romans had vested the supreme
magistracy in the hands of two consuls, who were chosen annually in a general election,
the formalities of which were all very carefully arranged.
The current of popular opinion was, of course, in Caesar's favor, but he had many
powerful rivals and enemies among the great, who, however, hated and opposed each
other as well as him.
There was at that time a very bitter feud between Pompey and Crassus, each of them
struggling for power against the efforts of the other.
Pompey possessed great influence through his splendid abilities and his military
renown. Crassus, as has already been stated, was
powerful through his wealth.
Caesar, who had some influence with them both, now conceived the bold design of
reconciling them, and then of availing himself of their united aid in
accomplishing his own particular ends.
He succeeded perfectly well in this management.
He represented to them that, by contending against each other, they only exhausted
their own powers, and strengthened the arms of their common enemies.
He proposed to them to unite with one another and with him, and thus make common
cause to promote their common interest and advancement.
They willingly acceded to this plan, and a triple league was accordingly formed, in
which they each bound themselves to promote, by every means in his power, the
political elevation of the others, and not
to take any public step or adopt any measures without the concurrence of the
three.
Caesar faithfully observed the obligations of this league so long as he could use his
two associates to promote his own ends, and then he abandoned it.
Having, however, completed this arrangement, he was now prepared to push
vigorously his claims to be elected consul.
He associated with his own name that of Lucceius, who was a man of great wealth,
and who agreed to defray the expenses of the election for the sake of the honor of
being consul with Caesar.
Caesar's enemies, however, knowing that they probably could not prevent his
election, determined to concentrate their strength in the effort to prevent his
having the colleague he desired.
They made choice, therefore, of a certain Bibulus as their candidate.
Bibulus had always been a political opponent of Caesar's, and they thought
that, by associating him with Caesar in the supreme magistracy, the pride and ambition
of their great adversary might be held somewhat in check.
They accordingly made a contribution among themselves to enable Bibulus to expend as
much money in bribery as Lucceius, and the canvass went on.
It resulted in the election of Caesar and Bibulus.
They entered upon the duties of their office; but Caesar, almost entirely
disregarding his colleague, began to assume the whole power, and proposed and carried
measure after measure of the most
extraordinary character, all aiming at the gratification of the populace.
He was at first opposed violently both by Bibulus and by many leading members of the
Senate, especially by Cato, a stern and inflexible patriot, whom neither fear of
danger nor hope of reward could move from what he regarded his duty.
But Caesar was now getting strong enough to put down the opposition which he
encountered with out much scruple as to the means.
He ordered Cato on one occasion to be arrested in the Senate and sent to prison.
Another influential member of the Senate rose and was going out with him.
Caesar asked him where he was going.
He said he was going with Cato. He would rather, he said, be with Cato in
prison, than in the Senate with Caesar.
Caesar treated Bibulus also with so much neglect, and assumed so entirely the whole
control of the consular power, to the utter exclusion of his colleague, that Bibulus at
last, completely discouraged and chagrined,
abandoned all pretension to official authority, retired to his house, and shut
himself up in perfect seclusion, leaving Caesar to his own way.
It was customary among the Romans, in their historical and narrative writings, to
designate the successive years, not by a numerical date as with us, but by the names
of the consuls who held office in them.
Thus, in the time of Caesar's consulship, the phrase would have been, "In the year of
Caesar and Bibulus, consuls," according to the ordinary usage; but the wags of the
city, in order to make sport of the
assumptions of Caesar and the insignificance of Bibulus, used to say, "In
the year of Julius and Caesar, consuls," rejecting the name of Bibulus altogether,
and taking the two names of Caesar to make out the necessary duality.