The Consulship of Julius and Caesar — Caesar II: Rome on Credit
Rome, 59 BC, the day of the vote on the agrarian law. The Forum is full of people, many of them veterans. Into the crowd walks the consul Marcus Bibulus, the same man who once co-hosted the games with Caesar and now wants to block his colleague’s law. Suddenly someone in the crowd lifts a huge basket.
People are wounded, among them the tribunes who stood beside the consul. Bibulus, as Appian writes, bares his neck and shouts at them to strike: if he cannot persuade Caesar to act honestly, let his death be Caesar’s disgrace. His friends drag him out of the crowd against his will. How did it come to this? Let us go back a year.
In the summer of 60 BC Caesar does something that seemed impossible. He reconciles the two greatest men in Rome, who had loathed each other ever since their joint consulship: Pompey and Crassus. The pact has no legal form. Suetonius sums up its gist: nothing in the state may be done against the wishes of any of the three. According to Appian, the scholar Varro called it “a three-headed monster.” Historians would later choose the name “First Triumvirate.”
Plutarch notices a bitter irony: it was not the enmity of Caesar and Pompey that caused the civil wars, but their friendship. First they joined forces to overthrow the aristocracy, and only then did they fall out with each other.
Caesar becomes consul together with Bibulus, the candidate of the optimates. Suetonius claims that aristocrats contributed to Bibulus’s campaign, and even Cato, who despised bribes, admitted that in this situation bribery served the state. Caesar brings forward an agrarian law meant to give land to Pompey’s veterans and to citizens with three children. The Senate blocks it. So Caesar takes it straight to the people. You know the rest: out came the basket.
What he does next is sometimes underrated. Caesar’s first measure is an order that the proceedings of the Senate and of the popular assemblies be written down daily and published. Today we would call it transparency. From day one, Caesar knows that opinion is a weapon. The election itself was not easy for him: according to Suetonius, he joined forces with the wealthy Lucceius, who was to promise the voters money from his own pocket, until the aristocrats took fright and gave money of their own to Bibulus.
Bibulus shuts himself in his house for the rest of the year. He announces that he is watching the sky for bad omens, which under religious law should suspend the assemblies. Caesar ignores it. Roman wits date documents “in the consulship of Julius and Caesar,” as if there were no second consul. Suetonius quotes a little verse: something happened in Caesar’s year, not Bibulus’s; in Bibulus’s consulship I recall no deed at all.
The pact must be sealed. Caesar has one precious thing: his daughter Julia. She is betrothed to Servilius Caepio, but that does not matter. Julia marries Pompey, who is about thirty years older than she is. Caesar promises Caepio Pompey’s daughter instead. This marriage will prove stronger than anyone expected.
Caesar himself marries Calpurnia, daughter of Piso, whom he gets elected consul for the following year. Cato thunders in the Senate that the state is turning into a matchmaking agency and that power is being handed out through marriages. When Cato delays the debate, Caesar orders a lictor to remove him from the chamber and take him to prison, but quietly asks a tribune to free him, because the people follow Cato in silence (Suetonius, Plutarch). Only a handful of senators still attend Caesar’s sessions.
He makes friends elsewhere instead. The knights who farm the taxes of Asia have long been asking the Senate to reduce their obligations to the state, and the Senate always postpones the matter. Caesar, who wants nothing from the Senate, releases them from one third of their debt. According to Appian, the knights praise him to the skies for it. In this way he wins the support of a powerful, wealthy and grateful class.
Most important of all is his own reward. A consulship lasts a year, after which Caesar will be a private citizen, and his enemies are already preparing charges of breaking the law. There is only one way out: a post with an army. The Senate tries to brush him off by assigning the incoming consuls provinces that Suetonius calls woods and pastures. But the tribune Vatinius gets a law passed by the people under which Caesar receives Cisalpine Gaul and Illyria. The Senate, afraid that the people will hand him the rest as well, adds Transalpine Gaul.
March 58 BC. Caesar’s consulship has ended, but he has not yet left Rome. Clodius, who with his help has become tribune of the plebs, turns on Cicero. He accuses him of having put Catiline’s conspirators to death without trial. Cicero, who had pleaded so many other people’s cases, loses his head: he walks the streets in a soiled toga and begs passers-by, until at last he goes into exile. Clodius has his house torn down.
By the time Cicero leaves the city, Caesar has another matter on his hands. News arrives from the north.
The first order Caesar gives in Gaul is to destroy the bridge at Geneva. He has only one legion there, and the rest of the army is far away. According to the census Caesar found in the Helvetian camp, with their allies they numbered three hundred and sixty-eight thousand. Plutarch gives three hundred thousand, of whom one hundred and ninety thousand could fight. Historians consider both figures greatly exaggerated. Caesar was writing about his own war, and it suited him to make the enemy look large.
Caesar is almost forty-two. At that age Alexander had been in his grave for ten years. Caesar has not yet won a single great battle. Behind him he leaves debts, gossip and enemies waiting for him to lose his office. Ahead of him lie the bridge on the Rhône, hundreds of thousands of people on the move and a Gaul that Rome has never conquered. Remember Gades? Now Caesar has the chance he dreamed of there.
Before you follow him, piece together the road he has traveled, from the Rostra at his aunt’s funeral to the bridge over the Rhône.
In nine years he will stand on the bank of a stream smaller than the Rhône, and that stream will change everything. In fourteen years he will die in a meeting hall beside the Theatre of Pompey. In between lie Alesia, a war with his former son-in-law, Cleopatra and the dictatorship. Ahead of him is not a pirate crew but the whole Roman world. But that is a story for Caesar III.