THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MARC ANTHONY

 

CHAPTER VII

Antony's Service with Caesar in Gaul,

and his Tribuneship in Rome which was Interrupted by the Outbreak of Civil War.

54-49 BC

 

At the time when Antony took up his new work in Gaul, Caesar’s popularity, as has been said, was very great greater than Pompey’s. Cato might angrily call him a blackguard and a butcher; but these were not the sentiments of the general public, whose feelings for him were like those of their fathers for his uncle Marius. Pompey in Asia Minor might have overthrown kings and princes by the score, but he had never been confronted with such perils as Caesar had faced, nor had he brought such wonderful new lands and unknown peoples under Roman sway.

Cicero, basking in the apparently warm friendship of the popular idol, voiced the opinion of the country when he said in the Senate : “He has striven on glorious battlefields with fierce tribes and mighty hosts, while others he has terrified, checked, tamed, and taught to obey the command of the Roman People; over lands and countries with which no book, no traveler, no report had acquainted us, Caesar has led the way for our soldiers; and now at last he has brought us this consummation, that our empire extends to the uttermost limits of the earth, so that beyond those Alpine peaks which Providence has thrown up to be a rampart for Italy, as far as the extremest verge of the outer Ocean, there is nothing left for us to fear”. This oration was one of Cicero's most magnificent, and as the rolling sentences fell from his lips his eyes and those of the senators were wet with tears of patriotic pride.

Antony’s admiration for his new chief, and his eager desire to please him, are not to be wondered at; for Caesar's quick intellect, his tireless energy, his clever administration of the new lands, his brilliant generalship, and his unexpected supremacy in so many fields, had, from a bad beginning, raised him now immeasurably above his fellow men, while, at the same time, his weaknesses, especially in regard to women, made him not unpleasantly human in the view of his young admirer. Caesar was at this time forty-eight years of age, and was, to his great annoyance, fast becoming bald; but he was still a very handsome man, whose whimsical smile and dark, penetrating eyes few women could resist. Antony, aged twenty-nine, was also having his successes in this respect; for his handsome face, much improved by the removal of his beard, his tremendous physical strength, and the bold and rather swashbucklering manner he was now cultivating, made him very attractive to the other sex. When Caesar marched into a city his soldiers used to sing a ribald ditty, the first line of which “Citizens, look after your wives: we are bringing in our bald-headed old adulterer!” And though history does not tell us what they sang of their chief’s lusty lieutenant, the fact is on record, as has already been said, that they made many a jest about his various affairs of the heart. A pretty couple!—and yet these two, the ruthless master and the loyal servant, were soon to shake the world to its foundations.

It must be remembered, of course, that Roman society was at this period hopelessly immoral, and that the treatment of women was callous in the extreme. An absurd incident occurred in about this year which well illustrates the indifference felt for the ties of matrimony even in old-fashioned aristocratic circles; and, strange to say, the chief actor in the comedy was none other than the austere Cato. The second wife of that odd personage was a young lady named Marcia, daughter of Marcus Philippus, who had been Consul in 56 BC; but by his first wife, Atilia, Cato had a grown-up daughter, Porcia, who was married to the ex-Consul, Bibulus, Caesar’s former antagonist, whom she had already presented with two children. A great friend of Cato's family was Hortensius, the wealthy conservative orator who has already entered these pages as the defender of Verres against Cicero: he was now a man of nearly sixty, and happening at the moment to be a widower in search of a new wife, he had cast a covetous eye upon this Porcia, Cato’s daughter, in spite of the fact that she was already married to Bibulus. He therefore asked Cato for her hand, giving as his reasons the fact that she was obviously likely to bring a lot of children into the world, that Bibulus, who was not a wealthy man, could ill afford them, that he, Hortensius, on the contrary, was rich and wanted children, and that, anyway, he would very much like to use Porcia as a fair plot of land to bear fruit for him, and thus to unite his race with that of Cato. He added that if Bibulus would not part with Porcia for good and all, he might at least consent to lend her to him for a few years on the understanding that Hortensius would hand her back after she had produced two or three little Hortensii.

Cato answered gravely that, much as he loved Hortensius, he really could not ask Bibulus to hand Porcia over; and thereupon Hortensius made the alternative proposal that Cato should give him his own wife, Marcia, instead. It was true, he admitted, that the fact that Marcia was then with child by Cato made the change of husbands a little awkward; but he said that when the baby was born he would adopt it, since Cato did not really need any more children, and that he would then try to have some children of his own by Marcia, after which he would be quite willing to return her to Cato. Cato replied that Marcia’s father, Philippus, ought to be consulted; and they therefore sent for him, and at once received his consent. Marcia was then divorced and married to Hortensius, Cato being the best man at the wedding; and I may add that when the elderly bridegroom died, six years later, Cato remarried Marcia, while, on the death of Bibulus, Porcia married her cousin Brutus, the son of Servilia and Caesar.

The customary matrimonial bargaining of which this is an instance, presently led Caesar to make a proposal to Pompey that a new alliance of this kind should be effected between them to replace that broken by the death of his daughter Julia, Pompey's wife. Caesar’s elder sister, another Julia, had been married to a certain Atius Balbus, by whom she had a daughter, Atia, who had been married first to Caius Octavius, a widower, who had died in 58 BC, leaving a daughter, Octavia, by his first wife, and a son, Octavian, by Atia; and, secondly, to Marcus Philippus, the above-mentioned father of Cato's wife, Marcia. Octavianus, now generally called Octavian, played an important part in the later drama of Antony’s life, and was afterwards the Emperor Augustus, while Octavia, his half-sister, was ultimately married to Antony; but at the time with which we are now dealing, she had recently been married to Caius Marcellus, a rising politician. Caesar now suggested that this Octavia, his niece's stepdaughter, should be divorced from Marcellus and married to Pompey in place of the late Julia; and that Pompey’s daughter by an earlier marriage, who was betrothed to Faustus Sulla, son of the great Sulla, should be released from this proposed union and should be married to Caesar, who, for this purpose, would divorce his own wife, Calpurnia. Pompey, however, did not take kindly to the suggestion, and deeply offended Caesar by refusing to consider it, and by marrying his daughter to Sulla forthwith. To Caesar it was as though Pompey had refused an offer of alliance, and had expressed his preference for a definite independence and rivalry.

 Antony’s first year with Caesar was passed in a series of hard campaigns forced upon the Romans by the various revolts in Gaul; and although we have no details of his movements at this time, it is to be supposed that he was kept exceedingly busy by his greatly harassed chief. Then, in the summer of 53 BC, the most appalling news from the East reached Rome and struck dismay into the whole Empire’s heart. The financier Crassus had crossed the Euphrates and had advanced towards Parthia in the spring; but near Carrhae (Haran), in northern Mesopotamia, half way between Syria and Armenia, he had been overwhelmed by the enemy, his army had been almost annihilated, his son, Publius Crassus, had been killed, and in the frenzied negotiations with the victors which had followed, he himself had been treacherously murdered, and his severed head sent in triumph to the court of the King of Parthia.

The result of this disaster was that the public began to be troubled also about the fate of the Roman armies under Caesar. If the barbarians of the Orient could so utterly outwit a cautious man like Crassus and destroy the magnificent troops under his quite capable command, the Gauls and Germans might do the same with Caesar and his forces. At any rate, they said, Caesar seemed to be barely holding his own. They were no longer delirious about his annexation of Gaul: they doubted now whether he had ever properly subdued it, and they began to wonder if he really were the superman they had supposed him to be. After all, Pompey’s victories had produced pretty permanent results, and there had been no need to go on fighting and refighting over the territories he had conquered. It seemed that Pompey was the better man, and now that Crassus was dead the public began to turn to him as the most trustworthy leader of the nation. Pompey responded by showing a renewed interest in events and a fresh access of energy; and so as to dismiss from his mind the depression which had followed the death of Julia, he decided to marry again, the lady of his choice being Cornelia, daughter of Metellus Scipio and widow of the younger Crassus, recently killed in the Parthian disaster, who must have been enormously wealthy. Plutarch describes her as a very well-educated young woman, who played the guitar, was rather good at geometry, and regularly attended lectures on philosophy, but “had not become in the least unamiable or pretentious as sometimes young women do when they take up such studies”. She was pretty, too; but people said that she was far too young for Pompey, who, they thought, looked somewhat undignified, crowned with garlands, at the wedding, and joking with his youthful bride.

The elections for the Consulships and other important offices for the coming year 52 BC were now at hand, and amongst the candidates for the Praetorship was Clodius, The Beauty, who had been dropped by Caesar, but was still the most outstanding mob-leader in Rome. From his headquarters in Gaul Caesar was watching the movements of political events in the capital with anxious eyes, and some of the vast wealth which he had acquired was being spent by his agents in secretly maintaining his interests there against those of Pompey, who, though outwardly his friend and colleague, seemed now to be his rival. During the past year Caesar had come to place very great confidence in Antony, and at this juncture he decided to send him home to Rome to stand for the Quaestorship, so that he might begin a political career which, as it advanced, would become more and more valuable to his patron.

Antony therefore returned to the metropolis, and very soon was in the thick of the disorders and riots incidental to the elections, nor was it long before he discovered that Caesar’s most dangerous enemy was his former friend Clodius, who was thirsting for revenge on the leader who had repudiated him. Any enemy of Caesar was Antony’s enemy, too, and one day in the Forum, in the heat of some forgotten riot, the ardent young man drew his sword and rushed at Clodius, intending to kill him. Clodius, however, managed to escape, and that is all we know of the incident, except that Cicero, always the deadly enemy of Clodius, appears to have commended Antony for his action, calling him “a most noble and gallant young man”, and Antony seems to have told Cicero that since he, Cicero, was now so friendly to Caesar, Antony would have been glad of the opportunity to serve him at the same time that he served Caesar, by killing their common enemy. Thereafter Cicero was wont to tell people how much he liked this handsome young admirer of his dear friend Caesar; but Antony’s feelings towards the orator do not seem to have carried him beyond the instructions he had received from Caesar—namely, to avoid offending the pompous old wind-bag.

Antony was duly elected Quaestor, and therewith returned to Gaul; and shortly afterwards, in January 52 BC, Clodius met at the hands of Milo the end he had so recently escaped at those of Antony. Milo, it will be recalled, was a man of aristocratic sympathies who had organized a gang of roughs to oppose those under the orders of Clodius; and for a long time now these two firebrands had each been looking for an opportunity to kill the other, their endless fights often making the streets of Rome unsafe for law-abiding citizens. Clodius was far and away the more popular of the two, and had the sympathy of the rabble; but history has taken such an unfavorable view of his character that it is hard to find anything good to say of him. I have already pointed out, however, that he was at any rate a brave and adventurous leader, and was certainly not the startling specimen of the intermediate sex which his once girlish face might lead us to suppose him to have been. Caesar had thought very highly of him at first, and had trusted him as he was now trusting Antony, only dropping him when his riotous behavior had passed all bounds; and it must be admitted that the retaining of so shrewd a master’s favor, even for a few years, says more for his character than history can deny.

His death occurred in this wise. Milo was riding with his wife and a large escort along the Appian Way, bound for his house in Lanuvium (Lavigna), a day's march south of Rome, when, near Bovillae, about half-way, he encountered Clodius and a smaller company riding towards the capital. As they passed each other they exchanged no more than the customary scowls and oaths, but one of Milo’s retainers managed to slip in, unseen, amongst the hostile party, and stabbed Clodius in the back with his dagger. The dying man was carried into a wayside inn, and for some moments Milo hesitated as to what should be done; but presently realizing that in any event he would be accused of the murder, he led his followers into the house for the purpose of finishing his opponent off. The reckless "Beauty", however, had already breathed his passionate last, so it seems, and Milo’s own hands were not, therefore, stained with his blood.

The corpse was carried to Rome, and its arrival produced such a wild outburst of anger on the part of the mob against the conservative party which Milo represented that on all sides the members of the latter were murdered: any well-dressed person, in fact, who chanced to be encountered, was attacked and killed for an aristocrat. The body of Clodius was then placed on the rostra in the Forum, after which it was carried to the Senate-house, where the frenzied mob heaped up a great pyre of chairs and benches, and, setting fire thereto, consumed not only the corpse but the entire building and the houses around as well. Milo himself, after making a brief appearance in public, went into hiding, and for several days the rioting continued, the people demanding that Pompey, or else Caesar, should be made Dictator and that Milo and his conservative supporters should be punished.

When some sort of order had been restored he was formally brought to trial, and Cicero was asked by the aristocratic party to undertake his defence, which he consented to do in view of the fact that both Caesar and Pompey—whom not for anything would he offend—had long ago become tired of the lawless behavior of Clodius, and could hardly disapprove of Milo’s action. The orator, however, was not at his best, for, in spite of the presence of large bodies of soldiers, he was naturally nervous of the mob; and, in fact he seems to have found it difficult to rake up anything very culpable about Clodius except his pugnacity and quarrelsomeness. Thus, although Cicero worked himself up to an emotional climax, and ended by saying that he was choked with sobs and could speak no more, Milo was found guilty and exiled to Massilia (Marseilles). Cicero afterwards wrote up his speech into a splendid oration, and sent a copy to the exile; but it so differed from the feeble defence actually delivered at the trial that Milo was constrained to remark: “It is just as well that Cicero did not succeed in delivering this harangue, or I should never have known the taste of these excellent mullets of Massilia!”

Meanwhile, Antony was sharing the fresh troubles which were crowding upon Caesar owing to the revolt led by Vercingetorix, a Gallic prince whose father had been at one time the paramount chief of the whole country. It must have been at just about the time when Clodius was killed that the rebellion broke out; and Caesar, who was in northern Italy was obliged to cross the Alps with his army in mid-winter in order to relieve the garrisons cut off by the rising. But having done this he took the city of Avaricum (Bourges) by storm, leaving less than eight hundred persons alive out of a population of forty thousand. At Gergovia however, he was repulsed, and after a period of the greatest anxiety, when his annihilation seemed imminent, he at last got the upper hand and bottled Vercingetorix up in the hill-fortress of Alesia, not far from Dijon.

But soon a Gallic army of nearly a quarter of a million men came to their leader’s relief, and Caesar was obliged to face about to meet them. A terrific battle ensued in which we catch a glimpse of Antony fighting with desperate courage, and keeping up the spirits of his men in a situation of the extremest peril; but at last the day ended in a complete Roman victory and an awful slaughter of the enemy, and thereafter the heroic Vercingetorix surrendered. He came riding out of Alesia fully armed, and having dismounted m front of Caesar, laid his weapons down, removed his armor, and silently seated himself at the conqueror's feet, after which he was sent as a prisoner to Rome.

During the remainder of the year 52 and part of 51 BC further revolts had to be suppressed, and Caesar, having been unnerved by the dangers through which he had passed, now behaved with pitilessness in ending the rebellion. He caused the captured chief of one tribe to be flogged to death in the presence of the legions; at the surrender of another city he cut off the right hands of all the prisoners; and elsewhere he acted with a severity which at last cowed the whole country into sullen submission, and so, to some extent, justified itself; that is, of course, if we care to employ the ethically questionable argument that mercilessness to the few, being sometimes productive of a terrorized quiescence which saves the lives of the many, is more humane in the end than a leniency of which foolish advantage may be taken.

The almost ceaseless fighting and slaughter in Gaul since Caesar had first descended upon that country in 58 BC leaves upon the mind a picture so savage that we are inclined to forget that these campaigns had also their more civilized aspect. Caesar was a man of great culture, and whenever his military duties permitted him to settle down for a while at one of his head­quarters, the vast wealth which was now flowing into his private coffers enabled him to live in magnificent state. The men whom he gathered about him were, many of them, not merely soldiers but well-known representatives of the progressive and intellectual section of high Roman society—persons that is to say, of refinement and education, if not of strict morals, and the company assembled around his table was often brilliant. Caesar himself was as fastidious a scholar and man of letters as he was a finicking man of fashion. He spoke a very perfect Latin, and had a most polished style of writing which, by the way, he was now employing in preparing his famous De Bello Gallico, a work written to vindicate himself before his critics in Rome, who had begun to think that only by luck had he escaped the fate of Crassus. He enjoyed the society of authors and men of learning, so long as they were also men of the world, and he was usually ready to find a post near him for anybody recommended to him as a person of distinction in this respect.

Among his officers there were Plancus, an eloquent and witty young man, who had made a name for himself at the Roman Bar; Trebonius, who later collected and published the witticisms of Cicero; Matius, who translated the Iliad into Latin verse; Hirtius, the historian, of whom we shall hear later, as Consul and military leader opposed to Antony; Quintus, Cicero’s brother, who was something of a poet and playwright; Balbus, a great patron of literature and philosophy; and so on. Antony himself, too, if not intellectual, was a fine speaker, and a man of taste, who had received a particularly good education, and had, from his youth up, moved in the best society in Rome, wherein at this period it was the fashion to be a connoisseur of works of art and a judge of Greek and Latin literature; and the fact that in later life he was the leader of a group of men who believed themselves to represent the last word in the material refinements of civilization, indicates that already he was not out of place in the sparkling entourage of this many-sided ruler of Gaul.

Caesar was very particular in the choice of the men who surrounded him, and since he was primarily a statesman, an administrator, and an intellectual, and only as it were by chance a soldier, he demanded a high standard of brains and accomplishments in the members of his suite. His generals might sometimes be chosen for their sterling military abilities alone, but his intimate companions, even here in Gaul, were selected in consideration of much wider qualities, of which some of the essentials were an up-to-date education and culture, a sort of social elegance, a knowledge of the world, a progressive and democratic vision linked to, but unfettered by, an aristocratic ideal, and, especially, a certain audaciousness and high courage. It is sometimes said that he merely gathered a crew of fashionable reprobates around him; but this was the opinion only of the old conservatives who could not distinguish between unconventional views and criminality, nor between courage and effrontery.

Curio, for instance, was a man of fashion who was regarded as a shocking libertine; but we have seen him with drawn sword gallantly defending Caesar in the Senate-house, and his stout little heart won him a place in the great man’s affections. Dolabella, who shortly after this time married Cicero’s already twice married daughter Tullia, and was now beginning to enjoy Caesar’s particular regard, was an elegant young man whose profligacy greatly troubled his father-in-law; but, as will be seen later, his reckless bravery cannot be denied. Caelius, another fashionable young intellectual, who was closely attached to Caesar though this was a little later—was not only a wit, a brilliant speaker, an inimitable dancer, and one of the best-dressed men in the country: he was also almost idiotically brave, and was never so happy as when he was in peril of his life.

It was this courageousness in Antony, likewise, which together with his abilities endeared him to Caesar. He came to Gaul with a great reputation for bravery in the field, and in many a battle in that country he had shown his heroism. Yet in this regard, as in what may be called his drawing-room accomplishments, he was at this time but one of the brilliant group of well-dressed, well-groomed, pleasure-loving, licentious, adventurous men of culture and fashion, who heroically followed their heroic leader over the mountains and through the plains and forests of rebellious Gaul, enduring hardship like the toughest veterans. He differed from the others chiefly in respect of his Herculean strength, his mighty muscles, and a kind of studied roughness with which he concealed the sensitiveness of his nature. He was the bull-dog amongst the poodles; but even the poodles in this unique company of adventurers knew how to fight and how to die gallantly. Antony's trouble was that he drank too much, and was inclined to become noisy; but the influences of Caesar, who, like many men of genius, found all the stimulants he required in his own active thoughts and keen feelings, no doubt kept him in order.

In his province of Gaul, Caesar was, of course, like a king. His power was absolute. But in Rome, as has been said already, there were doubts now about his super-eminence, and greater reliance was placed upon Pompey. The disorders in the city which had followed the death of Clodius had been so serious that the law-abiding citizens, both republicans and democrats, demanded some kind of dictatorship; and presently Pompey was invited to act in that capacity. Sulla, however, had made the very word Dictator objectionable, and Cato therefore proposed that Pompey should be given dictatorial powers under the name of Sole Consul; and to this everybody agreed. His appointment, naturally, was very distasteful to Caesar, who, after his long autocracy in his province, was not prepared to play second-fiddle to any man; and it was a bitter thought to him that he himself was not regarded in Rome as the nation’s one hope.

Now that he had at last completed the conquest of Gaul he had expected to come back to the capital in such a blaze of popularity that he would be able to effect the union of the republicans and democrats under his leadership. That was the chief reason why he had shown such friendship to Cicero of late, he being one of the leading representatives of the aristocratic party. But in this he had overlooked the fact that the conservatives always thought of him as a ‘dangerous’ man, a demagogue, who had once been mixed up in the Catiline affair, and had been the former patron of the fire-eating Clodius. It was to Pompey that cautious people turned. And now Pompey had forestalled him, and was himself playing up to the aristocrats so successfully that a real coalition under his leadership was almost an accomplished fact. For the first time in several years Cato, the recognized leader of the republicans, was showing marked friendliness to Pompey, and was constantly warning him to beware of Caesar, for he had apparently fallen under the spell of Caesar, and, in the event of an open rupture between the two great men, was more likely to back the Gallic autocrat than the Roman. Thus, Pompey, it seems to me, felt that it would be best to get him out of the way by offering him a provincial governorship, and bringing pressure to bear on him to accept it. It was with this purpose in view, I think, that he ingeniously caused a law to be passed that ex-Consuls and other high officials eligible for provincial governorships, who had passed more than five years without taking up such offices, should be obliged to do so when a vacancy had to be filled. Now Bibulus, the son-in-law of Cato, was also due for a province, but there was only the choice of Syria and Cilicia at the moment, the latter being the country which formed the south-east corner of Asia Minor, adjoining Syria; and, as luck would have it, when lots were drawn, Syria fell to Bibulus, and Cicero had to be told to take the other much less interesting province, to which the island of Cyprus was appended. He did not at all relish the thought of leaving Rome and making his residence at Tarsus, the Cilician capital, but the great inducement offered him was that he stood a very good chance of making a fortune out of the usual perquisites of a governor, and just now he was sorely in need of money. He was not sorry, moreover, to have the opportunity of separating himself for a while from his wife, Terentia, a hard, imperious, and, what was worse, pious woman to whom he had been married for some twenty-six years and who failed to make his home attractive to him now that his beloved daughter Tullia was grown up and gone. His son Marcus, though only about fourteen years of age, he took with him, however, and also his brother Quintus, who had recently been serving with Caesar in Gaul.

During the summer of the year 51 BC Pompey felt himself to be strong enough to clip Caesar’s wings, and through his agency proposals were made in the Senate that the conqueror of Gaul should be recalled when his five years term of office expired in March of the coming year, 50 BC. Caesar, on his part, hoped to prolong his command until 49 BC, and then to get himself elected Consul for the second time for the year 48 BC, that is to say after the ten years required by law had elapsed since his first Consulship; but Pompey, now definitely bent on retaining his own supremacy by forcing his rival into private life, secretly took all the necessary steps to deprive Caesar of his Gallic province in the spring, although publicly professing friendliness to him.

When he was asked in the Senate, however, what he would do if Caesar insisted on remaining at the head of his army beyond that date, he revealed his thoughts by replying: “What should I do if my son boxed my ears?”—by which he implied that such an act on the part of Caesar, whom he regarded as a younger and less important man than himself, would seem to him to be like an impudent declaration of war. And when Cato stated that if Caesar desired the Consulship he should be made to disband his army and come to Rome as a private citizen to canvass votes in the usual way, Pompey shrugged his shoulders, but made no reply, thus indicating that he accepted Cato’s opinion as being constitutionally

At this dangerous juncture the plucky little Curio made up his mind to take a hand in Caesar’s interest, and, for that purpose, managed to get himself elected as one of the Tribunes of the People for the year 50 BC. It is usually said that he was bribed by Caesar to espouse his cause, and it is true that Caesar, out of his great wealth, had recently discharged all Curio's debts; but this was not necessarily more than a friendly act towards the man who had once saved his life, and the accusation of direct bribery cannot be proved. Curio, it will be remembered, had once been romantically attached to Antony; but all that sort of abnormality was as much a thing of the past as it was in the case of Caesar himself.

Curio had recently married Fulvia, the widow of the murdered Clodius, a turbulent, masculine, ambitious woman, as hard as nails, the daughter of a certain Fulvius Bambalio of Tusculum (Frascati), a hill-town near Rome which was also the native home of Cato. By Clodius she had a young daughter, Clodia, who was afterwards the first wife of Octavianus, Caesar’s grand-nephew; and seems likely that she was already anxious for her new husband to be on good terms with the great man whose friendship her late lamented Clodius had unfortunately lost, and it may have been on her advice that Curio now took the daring step on Caesar’s behalf, which jeopardized his relations with Pompey.

By skilful handling of the problem of Caesar’s future, he managed to get the whole discussion postponed beyond the date in the spring of 50 BC when the conqueror of Gaul was supposed to lay down his command; and having succeeded thus in obtaining breathing-space, he made the alternative proposal either that Caesar should be left for the time being at the head of his army or else that both Caesar and Pompey should resign their offices and should together become private citizens once more, on an equal footing. The public had become very apprehensive of the rivalry between the two men, and, dreading the possibility of a quarrel which would lead to civil war, they welcomed Curio’s suggestion with enthusiasm, congratulating him on his pluck in daring to make such a proposal. After his speech in which he had done so, they escorted him to his house in the greatest excitement, throwing flowers before him, and hailing him as a hero, which, indeed, he was, for the thought of resigning office was likely to infuriate Pompey just now when he felt that Caesar had lost public favor and had left the road to his own lifelong supremacy easy to tread. Thereafter, with increasing audacity, he attacked Pompey in speech after speech, declaring that he, Pompey, had no right to call Caesar’s behavior in not disbanding his army unconstitutional, when Pompey himself had broken every law by allowing himself to be made Sole Consul at the same time that he was governor of Spain, an office which he still improperly filled without residing in that province.

Pompey, indeed, had light-heartedly overridden the laws in many respects. There was a law, for example, that no public speech should be made in favor of a man awaiting his trial; and yet a certain official, who was in this situation, had been praised by him in that manner, and this was so flagrant an illegality that Cato, the invariable stickler, had ostentatiously put his fingers in his ears and had refused to listen, in spite of his desire at this time to be friendly with the speaker. On other occasions, too, Pompey had attempted to interfere with the course of justice where friends of his were concerned; for his consciousness of his power had made him impatient of restraint, and, anyhow, it was a characteristic of his nature to act on the impulse of the moment without following a preconsidered line of action. Not even Caesar, he thought, could prevent him doing whatever he chose, and on one occasion he declared that he only had to stamp his foot and in an instant there would be an invincible army at his command.

But when Curio thus requested him to lay aside all this power which he had misused, he was staggered, and did not know what to answer. He concentrated his attention, however, on the elections at the end of the summer for the magistracies of the following year, 49 BC; and, hearing that Caesar was supporting the candidature of one of his generals, Galba, for the Consulate, he put two candidates into the field to oppose this man, while for the other posts he had his nominees ready to contest the seats with Caesar’s men.

Curio’s Tribuneship would end a few days before the close of 50 BC, and Caesar therefore decided to invite Antony to stand for that office so that he might carry on Curio’s good work. For this purpose he sent him back to Rome, and soon he was once more in the thick of the political battle. The townspeople, who had not seen him for three years, and then only for a short time, were delighted with him. His eloquence, his splendid physique, his manliness, his reputation for bravery, and withal, his complete absence of conceit and his indifference to social barriers and distinctions, endeared him to the crowd; and he was without difficulty elected as one of the Tribunes of the People for 49 BC, though Galba and Caesar's other candidates for office were defeated, Pompey’s men being triumphant all along the line. He then successfully stood for the additional office of Augur, that is to say the directorship of the board of priests who studied the official auspices; after which it is to be supposed that he went back to Caesar in Cisalpine Gaul to take his instructions from him, returning to Rome in December to be ready to assume office.

The close of the year 50 BC was a period of extreme excitement in Rome, for Pompey’s success at these elections in defeating nearly all Caesar’s nominees caused him to lose his head, and to feel that his rival in the north had no chance against him. Early in December, Caius Marcellus, who was one of the Consuls for that year, made a violent speech in the Senate in which he denounced Caesar as having designs on the peace of the State, and proposed that Pompey should be given supreme military command at home to defend the city in case Caesar should raise a revolution rather than give up his army; but when the measure went before the Comitia, Curio bravely used his right as Tribune of the People, and placed his veto on it. Thereupon Marcellus went off with a band of excited young aristocrats to Naples, where Pompey was staying, to offer him this command in spite of the veto. A week or two later Curio's Tribuneship expired, and he at once set out for Caesar's headquarters, leaving Antony to face the music in the capital.

Then came the news that Pompey had accepted the command, and, though deprecating war, had set out to place himself at the head of the available troops; and at this, Antony made use of his sacrosanctity as a Tribune to denounce Pompey and all his works. He knew now that civil war could hardly be prevented, and that although the mob was on Caesar’s side, all the rest of the people in the city were for Pompey; he knew that in the event of a sudden outbreak of hostilities his Tribuneship would be annulled, and he would be arrested and probably executed; yet he could not hear his beloved Caesar traduced by speaker after speaker in all public meetings without making some reply. Furiously he urged the crowds to stand by Caesar and not to give their support to Pompey, who was no democrat but an aristocrat, if ever there was one; but only the rabble would listen to him.

Meanwhile Cicero had just returned to Rome, having completed his short term as governor of Cilicia. He came back bursting with self-satisfaction, as well he might, indeed, for he had not only governed his province in a most exemplary manner, but he had managed to make a little fortune out of it and yet had kept within the law. Apart from this matter of money—and in regard to money it may be said that Cicero was never intrinsically, but always speciously, honorable—the government of his province had certainly been both correct and wise; and history would have praised him for it in unqualified terms had he not himself spoilt the picture by daubing it over with the glaring colors of his own vanity. With the aid of his brother Quintus, who had learnt soldiering under Caesar in Gaul, he had inflicted sharp punishment upon some hill-tribes notorious for brigandage; and at the close of this little punitive expedition he had allowed his soldiers to confer on him the title of Imperator, which was only applied to victorious generals after very great victories; and thereupon he wrote home asking that he might be decreed an official Triumph on his return to Rome. In his mind’s eye he saw himself driving in state through the streets of Rome, hailed as a conqueror by the populace; and he was bitterly hurt when Cato told him that he was asking too much. “Cato has been disgustingly unfriendly to me”, he complained to his mend Atticus; “he bears testimony to the purity of my life, my justice, kindliness, and integrity, which are self-evident, but refuses what I asked for!”

In regard to the political situation, the development of which had been reported to him in Cilicia and on his journey home, he was extremely worried; for it seemed to him now that Caesar was likely to be the loser in the coming struggle, and Pompey the winner. It was most unfortunate for him; for he had been expressing such unbounded admiration for Caesar in recent years, and had accepted money from him, but had been by no means careful to flatter Pompey. The apparent mistake, however, must now be rectified; and thus we find him declaring in his letters: “My regard for Pompey increases every day of my life”, and “I am heart and soul for Pompey”. But when he arrived in Rome, and realized that he would be forced soon to make his choice of sides, he was terribly perplexed; nor were matters helped by a letter he received from Caesar, advising him to go back to Greece and keep out of the mess altogether: he pretended to be indignant at the suggestion, but he was too afraid of Pompey even to do this. Moreover, he could not make up his mind how to treat Antony, who, as Caesar’s defender in Rome, had managed to gain the support of the mob but had incurred the bitter enmity of the Pompeians and the aristocrats. Not so long ago he, Cicero, had been telling people what a fine young man Antony was: how was he going to laugh that off?

The attitude of Pompey and Caesar, meanwhile, is tragically clear. For years Pompey had watched his rival’s movements with troubled eyes, but so long as Caesar's daughter, Julia, had been alive there had been a tie between the two men which could not be broken.

Since her death, however, and since Caesar’s loss of popularity in Rome owing to the troubles in Gaul, Pompey had come to feel that he himself was destined to be all his days the sole ruler of his country; and he had become so accustomed to the thought, so used to autocratic power, that now the demands of Caesar to be allowed to retain his command of his army and his province until he could exchange them for a second Consulship, seemed an outrageous piece of impertinence. What was Caesar, after all, but an adventurer who, as the nephew of the great Marius, would use this democratic lever to overthrow the constitution? Pompey had always thought of him as unscrupulous and not quite a gentleman, a man of brains and culture but of little honor; and he dreaded to think of the fate of his country in such hands. Was he, Pompey the Great, to go into retirement, and to leave Rome to the mercy of such a man? Would it not be better to fight it out, now that the home forces were at his disposal, and the bulk of the citizens with him? It was inconceivable that Caesar could be victorious in the struggle.

At this period Pompey was fifty-six years of age, but time had dealt kindly with him, and he was still a handsome man, of buoyant, light-hearted character, and of kingly manners, he was what is called ‘a great gentleman’, the soul of honor; a man, too, whose romantic passion for Julia, and whose overwhelming sorrow after her death, had won him the sympathy of thousands of sentimental hearts. Unlike Caesar he could count the number of his adulteries; but, like him, he was temperate in regard to food and drink. Caesar had been guilty in Gaul of great cruelty, and had ruthlessly slaughtered his enemies; but Pompey was usually humane to a fault, and had on many occasions spared the lives of those who expected death at his hands. Nor had he appeared to seek the greatness which fate thrust upon him; and once when a new command was offered to him he had been heard to cry out: “Am I never to end my labors, nor escape from this offensive greatness, so that I can live quietly in the country with my wife?—I wish I were an unknown man!”. Yet, having attained autocratic power without conscious effort, he could not brook a rival, and certainly not one who, like Caesar, had schemed and fought and almost worn himself out, impelled by a burning ambition to be what the casual Pompey now was—the first man in Rome.

Caesar was Pompey’s junior, being now fifty-two years of age. Like his rival, he was dignified, regal, and always courteous and polite; but he was infinitely harder, more stern, more purposeful. People could easily tell what Pompey was thinking, but they could not keep abreast of Caesar's quick intellect, nor know from the expression of his thin-lipped mouth and his dark, inscrutable eyes what was going on in that tremendous head of his. His polished, incisive language, his keen and sometimes cruel wit, his intellectual brilliance, were in marked contrast to Pompey’s rather easy-going manner of speaking. At a later date, when a certain young politician had opposed some of his measures, Caesar quietly told him that he would put him to death if any more were heard of his dissent; “and this, you know, young man”, he said, “is more disagreeable for me to say than to do”. The grim remark was characteristic. Yet he could be very forgiving and graciously lenient, and his anger was not easily aroused; even now, in fact, at this crisis of his career, he felt no bitterness against those who were slandering him in Rome and pretending that he was a public enemy. He did not hate Pompey: he rather admired him.

He was staying at this time at Ravenna, in the south-east corner of Cisalpine Gaul; and from there he now dispatched Curio with a letter to the Senate and another to the Comitia, saying in the latter that, in order to avoid hostilities, he would be willing to resign his command and become a private citizen again if Pompey would do likewise. Even then he did not believe that war could not be avoided, and he was prepared to make every possible concession. But when Curio, after racing to Rome at top speed, presented these letters, there was a concerted attempt to prevent their being read, and neither Curio nor Antony could at first make themselves heard, though in the end Antony managed to obtain a hearing for Caesar’s messages. A decree was then drawn up by the Pompeians that Caesar should be given until July the first to lay down his command, and that if he then refused to do so war should be declared upon him; but here Antony intervened in the Comitia, and, reckless with anger at this insult to his chief, and heedless of the consequences to himself, placed his tribunitial veto upon the bill. It was one of the great crises of his career, and his action in obstructing this decree at the risk of his life was not forgotten by his grateful chief.

Cicero now made an attempt to effect a compromise. He proposed that Caesar should be allowed to retain his command in his province and to stand for the Consulship without coming to Rome, and that, in the event of his being elected, Pompey should spend the year in his Spanish province; but Cato and the conservatives would not listen to these moderate counsels, and proposed that Antony should be deposed from the Tribuneship. Nevertheless, the exasperated young man boldly went to the Senate-house and repeated to the sullen senators Caesar’s offer to disarm if Pompey would do likewise; but the Consuls for that year, refusing to listen, rudely ordered him to leave the assembly, and thereat Antony lost his temper, hurled execrations at them, and stormed out of the building like one possessed, as Appian says, “predicting war, massacre, prescription, banishment, confiscation, and various other impending horrors, and invoking terrible curses”. He and Curio then disguised themselves, and, procuring a carnage, fled from the city by night, galloping off on the road to Ravenna to tell Caesar that the sacrosanctity of the Tribuneship had been violated, the tribunitial veto disregarded and an hope of peace destroyed.

“It was you, you, Marc Antony”, declared Cicero in later years, “who gave Caesar the principal pretext for war; for what else did he allege except that the power of interposition by the veto had been ignored, the privileges of the Tribunes taken away, and Antony’s rights denied by the Senate? The cause of the war was you! The fact is recorded in history, is handed down by men's memories, and our most ultimate posterity in the most distant ages will never forget it. Yon were the origin of that war. Do you, Senators, grieve for the soldiers slain?—it is Antony who slew them! Do you regret your lost comrades?—it is Antony who deprived you of them! Everything which then happened we must attribute wholly to Antony”.

When Caesar heard what had happened—it was then the middle of January, 49 BC—he sent orders to his legions in Gaul to come to his support immediately, and, taking with him the troops available at Ravenna, he set out to march upon Rome. As he crossed the little river Rubicon which separated his province of Cisalpine Gaul from Italy, he exclaimed “The die is cast!” and, with Antony, his gallant kinsman, by his side, he set his face towards the capital.

 

CHAPTER VIII

The Civil War between Caesar and Pompey, in which Antony Acted as Caesar’s Chief Lieutenant.

49-48 B.C.