Thirty-seven years before, as will be remembered, Saturninus, the violent promoter of an agrarian law, had, by the aid of a riot, obtained possession of the Capitol; the country had been declared in danger. The tribune perished in the struggle, and the senator C. Rabirius boasted of having killed him. Despite this long interval of time, Labienus accused Rabirius under an old law of perduellio, which did not leave to the guilty, like the law of treason, the power of voluntary exile, but, by declaring him a public enemy, authorised against him cruel and ignominious punishments.[944] This procedure provoked considerable agitation; the Senate, which felt the blow struck at its privileges, was unwilling to put any one to trial for the execution of an act authorised by itself. The people and the tribunes, on the contrary, insisted that the accused should be brought before a tribunal. Every passion was at work. Labienus claimed to avenge one of his uncles, massacred with Saturninus; and he had the audacity to expose in the Campus Martius the portrait of the factious tribune, forgetting the case of Sextus Titius, condemned, on a former occasion, for the mere fact of having preserved in his house the likeness of Saturninus.[945] The affair was brought, according to ancient usage, before the decemvirs. Cæsar, and his cousin Lucius Cæsar, were designated by the prætor to perform the functions of judges. The very violence of the accusation, compared with the eloquence of his defenders, Hortensius and Cicero, overthrew the charge of perduellio. Nevertheless, Rabirius, condemned, appealed to the people; but the animosity against him was so great that the fatal sentence was about to be irrevocably pronounced, when the prætor, Metellus Celer, devised a stratagem to arrest the course of justice; he carried away the standard planted at the Janiculum.[946] This battered flag formerly announced an invasion of the country round Rome. Immediately all deliberation ceased, and the people rushed to arms. The Romans were great formalists; and, moreover, as this custom left to the magistrates the power of dissolving at their will the comitia, they had the most cogent motives for preserving it; the assembly soon separated, and the affair was not taken up again. Cæsar, nevertheless, had hoped to attain his object. He did not demand the head of Rabirius, whom, when he was subsequently dictator, he treated with favour; he only wished to show to the Senate the strength of the popular party, and to warn it that henceforth it would no more be permitted, as in the time of the Gracchi, to sacrifice its adversaries in the name of the public safety.
If, on the one hand, Cæsar let no opportunity escape of branding the former regime, on the other he was the earnest advocate of the provinces, which vainly looked for justice and protection from Rome. He had, for example, the same year accused of peculation C. Calpurnius Piso, consul in 687, and afterwards governor of Transpadane Gaul, and brought him to trial for having arbitrarily caused an inhabitant of that country to be executed. The accused was acquitted through the influence of Cicero; but Cæsar had shown to the Transpadanes that he was ever the representative of their interests and their vigilant patron.
Cæsar Grand Pontiff (691).
IV. He soon received a brilliant proof of the popularity he enjoyed. The dignity of sovereign pontiff, one of the most important in the Republic, was for life, and gave great influence to the individual clothed with it, for religion mingled itself in all the public and private acts of the Romans.
Metellus Pius, sovereign pontiff, dying in 691, the most illustrious citizens, such as P. Servilius Isauricus, and Q. Lutatius Catulus, prince of the Senate, put themselves at the head of the ranks of candidates to replace him. Cæsar also solicited the office, and, desirous of proving himself worthy of it, he published, at this time doubtless, a very extensive treatise on the augural law, and another on astronomy, designed to make known in Italy the discoveries of the Alexandrian school.[947]
Servilius Isauricus and Catulus, relying on their antecedents, and on the esteem in which they were held, believed themselves the more sure of election, because, since Sylla, the people had not interfered in the nomination of grand pontiff, the college solely making the election. Labienus, to facilitate Cæsar’s access to this high dignity, obtained a plebiscitum restoring the nomination to the suffrages of the people. This manœuvre disconcerted the other competitors without discouraging them, and, as usual, they attempted to seduce the electors with money. All who held with the party of the nobles united against Cæsar, who combated solicitation by solicitation, and sustained the struggle by the aid of considerable loans; he knew how to interest in his success, according to Appian, both the poor that he had paid, and the rich from whom he borrowed.[948] Catulus, knowing Cæsar to be greatly in debt, and mistaking his character, offered him a large sum to desist. He answered him that he would borrow a much greater sum of him if he would support his candidature.[949]
At length the great day arrived which was to decide the future of Cæsar; when he started to present himself at the comitia, the most gloomy thoughts agitated his ardent mind, and calculating that if he should not succeed, his debts would constrain him perhaps to go into exile, he embraced his mother and said, “To-day thou wilt see me grand pontiff or a fugitive.”[950] The most brilliant success crowned his efforts, and what added to his joy was his obtaining more votes in the tribes of his adversaries than they had in all the tribes put together.[951]
Such a victory made the Senate fear whether Cæsar, strong in his ascendency over the people, might not proceed to the greatest excesses; but his conduct remained the same.
Hitherto he had inhabited a very moderate house, in the quarter called Suburra; nominated sovereign pontiff, he was lodged in a public building in the Via Sacra.[952] This new position necessarily obliged him, indeed, to a sumptuous life, if we may judge by the luxuriousness displayed at the reception of a simple pontiff, at which he assisted as king of the sacrifices, and of which Macrobius has preserved to us the curious details.[953] Moreover, he built himself a superb villa on the Lake of Nemi, near Aricia.
Catiline’s Conspiracy.