UNIT I: ROMAN HISTORY

SECTION I: ANCIENT HISTORY

Period III: The Period of the Revolutions, 146-49 B.C.

(b) Pompey; Caesar; Cicero; the First Triumvirate; etc.

Overthrow of the Sullan Constitution (70 B.C.)

The Sullan system stood for nine years, and was then overthrown—as it had been established—by a successful soldier. It was the fortune of Cn. Pompeius, a favourite officer of Sulla, first of all to violate in his own person the fundamental principles of the constitution re-established by his old chief, and then to overturn it. In Spain the Marian governor Q. Sertorius (see SERTORIUS) had defeated one after another of the proconsuls sent out by the senate, and was already in 77 master of all Hither Spain. To meet the crisis, the senate itself took a step which was in fact the plainest possible confession that the system sanctioned afresh by Sulla was inadequate to the needs of the state. Pompey, who was not yet thirty, and had never held even the quaestorship, was sent out to Spain with proconsular authority. Still Sertorius held out, until in 73 he was foully murdered by his own officers. The native tribes who had loyally stood by him submitted, and Pompey early in 71 returned with his troops to Italy, where, during his absence in Spain, an event had occurred which had shown Roman society with startling plainness how near it stood to revolution. In 73 Spartacus, a Thracian slave, escaped with seventy others from a gladiators' training school at Capua. In an incredibly short time he found himself at the head of a numerous force of runaway slaves, outlaws, brigands, and impoverished peasants. By the end of 73 he had 70,000 men under his command, had twice defeated the Roman troops, and was master of southern Italy. In 72 he advanced on Rome, but, though he again routed the legions led against him by the consuls in person, he abandoned his scheme and established himself in the now desolate country near Thurii, already the natural home of brigandage. At length in 71 the praetor Crassus, who had been sent against him with no less than six legions, ended the war. Spartacus was defeated and slain in Apulia. In Rome itself the various classes and parties hostile to the Sullan system had, ever since Sulla's death in 78, been incessantly agitating for the repeal of his most obnoxious laws, and needed only a leader in order successfully to attack a government discredited by failure at home and abroad. With the return of Pompey from Spain their Pompey opportunity came.

Pompey as Consul

Pompey, who understood politics as little as consul, little as Marius, was anxious to obtain—what the senate was more than likely to refuse to give him, and what he was not legally entitled to—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 Crassus, the 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. The " perpetual courts" were taken out of the hands of the senatorial judices, who had outdone the equestrian order in scandalous corruption, and finally the censors, the first since 86 B.C., purged the senate of the more worthless and disreputable of Sulla's partisans. 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 recognition of this fact was fatal to the dignity of politics in the city. In proportion as the mass of the Roman community in Italy, and able aspirants to power, like Caesar, became conscious of the unreality of the old constitutional controversies, they became 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. Of this growing indifference to the traditional politics of the republic, against which Cicero struggled in vain, Pompey is an excellent example. He was absolutely without interest in them, except in so far as they led up to important military commands, and, though he was never revolutionary in intention, his own career, in its quiet defiance of all the established rules of the constitution, did almost more than the direct attacks of others to render the republic impossible.

Gabinian and Manilian Laws

When his consulship ended, Pompey impatiently awaited at the hands of the politicians he had befriended the further 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. But in 67 and 66 the laws of Gabinius and Manilius gave him all and more than all that he expected. The ravages of the pirates, encouraged in the first instance by the inactivity which had marked Roman policy in the East after 167, and by the absence of any effective Roman navy in the Mediterranean, had now risen to an intolerable height, and the spasmodic efforts made since 81 had done little to check them. The trade of the Mediterranean was paralysed, and even the coasts of Italy were not safe from their raids. Aulus Gabinius, a tribune, and a follower of Pompey, now proposed to the people to entrust Pompey with the sole command against the pirates. His command was to last for three years. 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. These powers were still further enlarged in the next year by the Manilian law, which 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. 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.

Caesar

Pompey left Rome in 67, and 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. When in 70 the removal of the restrictions placed upon the tribunate restored to the popular party their old weapons of attack, Caesar was already a marked man. In addition to his patrician birth, and his reputation for daring and ability, he possessed, as the nephew of Marius and the son-in-law of Cinna, a strong hereditary claim to the leadership of the popular and Marian party. 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. 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 games which he gave as curule aedile (65), and by his lavish expenditure upon the improvement of the Appian Way. But it is characteristic of Caesar and of his time that 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 a skill, and with an audacious indifference to constitutional forms and usages, unsurpassed even by Sulla. 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. The story of his attempted coup d'etat in January 65 is probably false, 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 vear by the tribune Rullus had for its real 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. 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.





Cicero

The same wave of indignation and suspicion which for the moment checked Caesar's rise carried Marcus Tullius Cicero to the height of his fortunes. Cicero, as a politician, has been equally misjudged by friends and foes, i 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 i champion merely of senatorial ascendency. He was a I representative man, with a numerous following, and a policy which was naturally suggested to him by the circumstances of his birth, connexions, and profession, and which, impracticable as it proved to be, was yet consistent, intelligible, and high-minded. Born at Arpinum, he cherished like all Arpinates the memory of his great fellow-townsman Marius, the friend of the Italians, the saviour of Italy, and the irreconcilable foe of Sulla and the nobles. A " municipal" himself, his chosen friends and his warmest supporters were found among the well-to-do classes in the Italian towns. Unpopular with the Roman aristocracy, who despised him as a "peregrinus," and with the Roman populace, he was the trusted leader of the Italian middle class, " the true Roman people," as he proudly styles them. It was they who carried his election for the consulship (63), who in 58 insisted on his recall from exile, and it was his influence with them which made Caesar so anxious to win him over in 49. He represented their antipathy alike to socialistic schemes and to aristocratic exclusiveness, and their old-fashioned simplicity of life in contrast with the cosmopolitan luxury of the capital.9 By birth, too, he belonged to the equestrian order, the foremost representatives of which were indeed still the publicani and negotiatores, but which since the enfranchisement of Italy included also the substantial burgesses of the Italian towns and the smaller " squires " of the country districts. With them, too, Cicero was at one in their dread of democratic excesses and their social and political jealousy of the " nobiles."10 Lastly, as a lawyer and a scholar, he was passionately attached to the ancient constitution. His political ideal was the natural outcome of these circumstances of his position. He advocated the maintenance of the old constitution, but not as it was understood by the extreme politicians of the right and left. The senate was to be the supreme directing council, but the senate of Cicero's dreams was not an oligarchic assemblage of nobles, but a body freely open to all citizens, and representing the worth of the community.12 The magistrates, while deferring to the senate's authority, were to be at once vigorous and public-spirited; and the assembly itself which elected the magistrates and passed the laws was to consist, not of the " mob of the forum," but of the true Roman people throughout Italy.13 For the realization of this ideal he looked, above all things, to the establishment of cordial relations between the senate and nobles in Rome and the great middle class of Italy represented by the equestrian order, between the capital and the country towns and districts. This was the "concordia ordinum," the "consensus Italiae," for which he laboured.14 He failed because his ideal was impracticable. The inveterate selfishness and exclusiveness of the nobles, the indifference of the Italians to constitutional questions, and their suspicious dislike of Roman politicians, above all the incompetency of the old machinery, even if reformed as he would have had it reformed, to govern the empire and control the proconsuls and the army, were insuperable obstacles in his way.

The Conspiracy of Cataline (63 B.C.)

Cicero's election to the consulship for 63 over the heads of Caesar's nominees, Antonius and Catiline, was mainly the work of the Italian middle class, already rendered uneasy both by the rumours which were rife of revolutionary schemes and of Caesar's boundless ambition, and by the numerous disquieting signs of disturbance noticeable in Italy. The new consul vigorously set himself to discharge the trust placed in him. He defeated the insidious proposals of Rullus for Caesar's aggrandizement, and assisted in quashing the prosecution of Rabirius. But with the consular elections in the autumn of 63 a fresh danger arose from a different quarter. The " conspiracy16 of Catiline " (see CATILINE) was not the work of the popular party, and still less was it an unselfish attempt at reform; L. Sergius Catilina himself was a patrician, who had held high office, and possessed considerable ability and courage; but he was bankrupt in character and in purse, and two successive defeats in the consular elections had rendered him desperate. To retrieve his broken fortunes by violence was a course which was only too readily suggested by the history of the last forty years, and materials for a conflagration abounded on all sides. The danger to be feared from his intrigues lay in the state of Italy, which made a revolt against society and the established government only too likely if once a leader presented himself, and it was such a revolt that Catiline endeavoured to organize. Bankrupt nobles like himself, Sullan veterans and the starving peasants whom they had dispossessed of their holdings, outlaws of every description, the slave population of Rome, and the wilder herdsmen-slaves of the Apulian pastures, were all enlisted under his banner, and attempts were even made to excite disaffection among the newly-conquered people of southern Gaul and the warlike tribes who still cherished the memory of Sertorius in Spain. In Etruria, the seat and centre of agrarian distress and discontent, a rising actually took place headed by a Sullan centurion, but the spread of the revolt was checked by Cicero's vigorous measures. Catiline fled from Rome, and died fighting with desperate courage at the head of his motley force of old soldiers, peasants, and slaves. His accomplices in Rome were arrested, and, after an unavailing protest from Caesar, the senate authorized the consuls summarily to put them to death.

The Catilinarian outbreak had been a blow to Caesar, whose schemes it interrupted, but to Cicero it brought, not only popularity and honour, but, as he believed, the realization of his political ideal. The senate and the equestrian order, the nobles of Rome and the middle class in the country, had made common cause in the face of a common danger; and the danger had been averted by the vigorous action of a consul sprung from the people, under the guidance of a united senate, and backed by the mass of good citizens.

Return of Pompey from Asia

But Pompey was now on his way home, and again as in 70 the political future seemed to depend on the attitude which the successful general would assume; Pompey himself looked simply to the attainment by the help of one political party or another of his immediate aims, which at present were the ratification of his arrangements in Asia and a grant of land for his troops. It was the impracticable jealousy of his personal rivals in the senate, aided by the versatility of Caesar, who presented himself not as his rival but as his ally, which drove Pompey once more, in spite of Cicero's efforts, into the camp of what was still nominally the popular party.

Coalition of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus (60 B.C.)

In 60, on Caesar's return from his propraetorship in Spain, the coalition was formed which is known by the somewhat misleading title of the first triumvirate. Pompey was ostensibly the head of this new alliance, and in return for the satisfaction of his own demands he undertook to support Caesar's candidature for the consulship. The wealth and influence of Crassus were enlisted in the same osause, but what he was to receive in exchange is not clear. Cicero was under no illusions as to the significance of this coalition. It scattered to the winds his dreams of a stable and conservative republic. Pompey, whom he had hoped to enlist as the champion of constitutional government, had been driven into the arms of Caesar. The union between the senate and the equestrian order had been dissolved, and the support of the publicani lost by an untimely quarrel over the price to be paid for collecting the taxes of Asia, and, to crown all, both his own personal safety and the authority of the senate were threatened by the openly avowed intentions of Catiline's friends to bring the consul of 63 to account ior his unconstitutional execution of Catiline's accomplices. His fears were fully justified by the results. The year 59 saw the republic powerless in the hands of three citizens. Caesar as consul procured the ratification of Pompey's acts in Asia, conciliated the publicani by granting them the relief refused by the senate, and carried an agrarian law of the new type, which provided for the purchase of lands for allotment at the cost of the treasury, and for the assignment of the rich "ager Campanus." But Caesar aimed at more than the carrying of an agrarian law in the teeth of the senate or any party victory in the forum.





Caesar's Command in Gaul

An important military command was essential to him, and he judged correctly enough that in the West there was work to be done which might enable him to win a position such as Pompey had achieved in the East. An obedient tribune was found, and by the lex Vatinia he was given for rive years the command of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum, to which was added by a decree of the senate Transalpine Gaul also. It was a command which not only opened to him a great military career, but enabled him, as the master of the valley of the Po, to keep an effective watch on the course of affairs in Italy.

Banishment and Recall of Cicero (58-57 B.C.)

Early the next year the attack upon himself which Cicero had foreseen was made. P. Clodius as tribune brought forward a law enacting that any one who had put a Roman citizen to death without trial by the people should be interdicted from fire and water. Cicero finding himself deserted even by Pompey left Rome in a panic, and by a second Clodian law he was declared to be outlawed. With Caesar away in his province, and Cicero banished, Clodius was for the time master in Rome. But, absolute as he was in the streets, and recklessly as he parodied the policy of the Gracchi by violent attacks on the senate, his tribunate merely illustrated the anarchy which now inevitably followed the withdrawal of a strong controlling hand. A reaction speedily followed. Pompey, bewildered and alarmed by Clodius's violence, at last bestirred himself. Cicero's recall was decreed by the senate, and early in August 57 in the comitia centuriata, to which his Italian supporters flocked in crowds, a law was passed revoking the sentence of outlawry passed upon him.

Renewal of the Coalition (56 B.C.)

Intoxicated by the acclamations which greeted him, and encouraged by Pompey's support, and by the salutary effects of Clodius's excesses, Cicero's hopes rose high, and a return to the days of 63 seemed not impossible. With indefatigable energy he strove to reconstruct a solid constitutional party, but only to fail once more. Pompey was irritated by the hostility of a powerful party in the senate, who thwarted his desires for a fresh command and even encouraged Clodius in insulting the conqueror of the East. Caesar became alarmed at the reports which reached him that the repeal of his agrarian law was threatened and that the feeling against the coalition was growing in strength; above all he was anxious for a renewal of his five years' command. He acted at once, and in the celebrated conference at Luca (56) the alliance of the three self-constituted rulers of Rome was renewed. Cicero succumbed to the inevitable and withdrew in despair from public life. Pompey and Crassus became consuls for 55. Caesar's command was renewed for another five years, and to each of his two allies important provinces were assigned for a similar period—Pompey receiving the two Spains and Airica, and Crassus Syria.1 The coalition now divided between them the control of the empire. For the future the question was, how long the coalition itself would last. Its duration proved to be short.

Death of Crassus (53 B.C.)

In 53 Crassus was defeated and slain by the Parthians at Carrhae, and in Rome the course of events slowly forced Pompey into an attitude of hostility to Caesar. The year 54 brought with it a renewal of the riotous anarchy which had disgraced Rome in 58-57. Conscious of its own helplessness, the senate, with the eager assent of all respectable citizens, dissuaded Pompey from leaving Italy. His provinces were left to his legates, and he himself remained at home to maintain order by the weight of his influence. It was a confession that the republic could not stand alone. But Pompey's mere presence proved insufficient. The anarchy and confusion grew worse, and even strict constitutionalists like Cicero talked of the necessity of investing Pompey with some extraordinary powers for the preservation of order.

Pompey Sole Consul (52 B.C.)

At last in 52 he was elected sole consul, and not only so, but his provincial command was prolonged for five years more, and fresh troops were assigned him. The rôle of "saviour of society" thus thrust upon Pompey was one which flattered his vanity, but it entailed consequences which it is probable he did not foresee, for it brought him into close alliance with the senate, and in the senate there was a powerful party who were resolved to force him into heading the attack they could not successfully make without him upon Caesar. It was known that the latter, whose command expired in March 49, but who in the ordinary course of things would not have been replaced by his successor until January 48, was anxious to be allowed to stand for his second consulship in the autumn of 49 without coming in person to Rome.

Proposed Recall of Caesar

His opponents in the senate were equally bent on bringing his command to an end at the legal time, and so obliging him to disband his troops and stand for the consulship as a private person, or, if he kept his command, on preventing his standing for the consulship. Through 51 and 50 the discussions in the senate and the negotiations with Caesar continued, but with no result. On 1st January 49 Caesar made a last offer of compromise. The senate replied by requiring him on pain of outlawry to disband his legions. Two tribunes who supported him were ejected from the senate house, and the magistrates with Pompey were authorized to take measures to protect the republic.

Caesar Crosses the Rubicon (49 B.C.)

Caesar hesitated no longer; he crossed the Rubicon and invaded Italy. The rapidity of his advance astounded and bewildered his foes. Pompey, followed by the consuls, by the majority of the senate and a long train of nobles, abandoned Italy as untenable, and crossed into Greece. At the end of March Caesar entered Rome as the master of Italy. The story of the civil war which followed, down to the victory at Munda in the spring of 45, has been told elsewhere. We are concerned here with the work which Caesar achieved in the brief intervals of rest allowed him during these stormy years, and with the place which his dictatorship holds in the history of Rome.


Footnotes

14 For this, the most lasting of Sulla's reforms, see Mommsen, ii,
359 ; Rein, Oriminal-Recht; Zumpt, Criminal-Prozess d. Homer.
15 For the Sertorian War, see Plutarch, Sertorius.
16 Pint., Pomp., 17; Livy, Epit, xci. For Pompey's earlier life, see POMPEY.
17 App., i. 116; Livy, Epit., xcv.; Plut., Crass., 8 sq.


The exact provisions of Pompey's law are nowhere given ; Livy, Epit., xcvii., "tribuniciam potestateni restituerunt." Cf. Velleius, ii. 30. A "lex Aurelia," in 75, had already repealed the law dis-qualifying 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 Madvig, Verf., i. 182, ii. 222 ; Lange, R. Alt, iii. 193. Com-pare also Cicero's language, In Verr., i. 1, 15. The prosecution of Verres shortly preceded the lex Aurelia.
Livy, Epit, xcviii. Sixty-four senators were expelled. Cf.
Prut., Pomp., 22 ; Cic. In Verr., i. 1, 15.

4 Velleius, ii. 31 ; Plut., Pomp., 23.
5 See the brilliant sketch by Mommsen, R. G., iii. 39 sq.

Prof. Beesly, in his essay on Catiline, 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.
Plut., Pomp., 25 ; Dio, xxxvi. 6 ; Livy, Epit, c.
Cic. Pro Lege Manilia ; Dio, xxxvi. 25 ; Plut., Pomp., 30.
Prof. Beesly, in his essay on Catiline, 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 Coesar's name is omitted.
Cic, Lex Agr., ii. 6, "nihil aliud actum nisi ut decern reges constituerentur."
That Caesar and Crassus had supported Catiline for the consulship in 65 is certain, and they were suspected naturally enough of favour-ing his designs in 63, but their complicity is in the highest degree improbable.
Mommsen is throughout unfair to Cicero, as also are Drumann
and Prof. Beesly. The best estimate of Cicero's political position known to the present writer is that given by Prof. Tyrrell in the Introduction to his edition of Cicero's Letters.
Cic. Ad Att., i. 191, "locupletes. . . noster exercitus."
6 Cic. Pro Sulla, 7 ; Sail., Cat., 31, "inquilinus urbis Romae."
See the De Petitione Consulatus, passim.
8 De Domo, 28 ; Pro Plancio, 97.
9 Cic. Pro Quinetio, 31 ; Pro Cluentio, 46, 153.
10 Cic. In Verr., ii. 73 ; De Pet. Cons., i. He shared with them
their dislike to Sulla, as the foe of their order; Pro Cluentio, 55.
11 De Rep., ii. 36 ; De Legg., iii. 12.
12 Pro Sestio, 65 ; De Legg., iii. 4.
13 Pro Sestio, 49. 14 Ad Att, i. 18.
15 For Catiline's conspiracy, see Sallust, Ca.tiline ; Cicero In Cati-linam; Plut., Cicero; Mommsen, R. G., iii. 164 sq. ; and especially C. John, Entstelmng d. Catilinarischen Verschxcbrung (Leipsic, 1876).


For the history of the next eighteen years, the most important ancient authority is Cicero in his letters and speeches.
Misleading, because the coalition was unofficial. The "trium-
virs" of 43 were actual magistrates, " mviri reipublicae constituendae
«ausa."
3 For the lex Julia Agraria and the lex Campana, see Dio Cass., xxxviii. 1; App., B. C, ii. 10; Suet., Cassar, 20; Cic. Ad Att., ii. 16, 18.
4 Suet., Cmsar, 22; Dio Cass., xxxviii. 8; App., B. C, ii. 13; Plut., Cies., 14.
Both laws were carried in the "comitia tributa." The first merely reaffirmed the right of appeal, as the law of Gaius Gracchus had done. The second declared Cicero to be already by his own act in leaving Rome "interdicted from fire and water,"—a procedure for which precedents could be quoted. Clodius was within the letter of the law.
Cicero's speech Pro Sestio gives expression to these feelings ; it contains a passionate appeal to all good citizens to rally round the old constitution. The acquittal of Sestius confirmed his hopes. See Ad Q. Fr., ii. 4.


A dictatorship was talked of in Rome; Plut., Pomp., 54 ; Cic. Ad Q. FT., iii. 8. Cicero himself anticipated Augustus in his picture of a " princeps civitatis" sketched in a lost book of the De Republica, written about this time, which was based upon his hopes of what
Pompey might prove to be ; Ad Att.. viii. 11 ; August., De Civ. Dei, v. 13. 3 Plut.,'56 ; App., B. C, ii. 24.
For the rights of the question involved in the controversy between Caesar and the senate, see Monimsen, Rechtsfrage zw. Cxsar und d.
Senat ; Guiraud, BeBiffêrend entre Cesar et le Sénat (Paris, 1878).
Cicero severely censures Pompey for abandoning Italy, but
strategically the move was justified by the fact that Pompey's strength
lay in the East, where his name was a power, and in his control of the
sea. Politically, however, it was a blunder, as it enabled Caesar to
pose as the defender of Italy.


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