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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MARC ANTHONY
CHAPTER VIIAntony'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.
The Civil War between Caesar and Pompey, in which
Antony Acted as Caesar’s Chief Lieutenant.
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