IV. Among the candidates was L. Lucceius. Cæsar was desirous of attaching to his cause this person, who was distinguished alike by his writings and his character,[1089] and who, possessed of vast wealth, had promised to make abundant use of it for their common profit, in order to command the majority of votes in the centuries. “The aristocratic faction,” says Suetonius, “on learning this arrangement, was seized with fear. They thought that there was nothing which Cæsar would not attempt in the exercise of the sovereign magistracy, if he had a colleague who agreed with him, and who would support all his designs.”[1090] The nobles, unable to eject him, resolved to give him Bibulus for a colleague, who had already been his colleague in the edileship and the prætorship, and had constantly shown himself his opponent. They all made a pecuniary contribution to influence the elections; Bibulus spent large sums,[1091] and the incorruptible Cato himself, who had solemnly sworn to impeach any one who should be guilty of bribery, contributed his quota, owning that for the interest of the State his principles must for once yield.[1092] Neither was Cicero more inflexible: some time before, he expressed to Atticus the necessity of purchasing the concurrence of the equestrian order.[1093] We can see how even the most honourable were swept along, by the force of events, in the current of a corrupt society.

By the force of public opinion, and by the support of the two men of greatest influence, Cæsar was elected consul unanimously, and conducted, according to custom, from the Campus Martius to his own house by an enthusiastic crowd of his fellow-citizens, and a vast number of senators.[1094]

If the party opposed to Cæsar had been unable to stand in the way of his becoming consul, it did not despair of preventing his playing the important part he had a right to expect as proconsul. To effect this, the Senate determined to evade the law of Caius Gracchus, which, to prevent the assignment of provinces from personal considerations, provided that it should take place before the comitia were held. The assembly, therefore, departing from the rule, assigned to Cæsar and his colleague, by an act of flagrant ill-will, the supervision of the public roads and forests; an office somewhat similar, it is true, to that of governor of a province.[1095] This humiliating appointment, proof as it was of a persevering hostility, wounded him deeply; but the duties of his new office imposed silence upon his resentments. Cæsar the consul would forget the wrongs done to Cæsar the man, and generously attempt a policy of conciliation.

CHAPTER V.
CONSULSHIP OF CÆSAR AND BIBULUS.
(695.)

Attempts at Conciliation.

I. CÆSAR has arrived at the first magistracy of the Republic. Consul with Bibulus at the age of forty-one, he has not yet acquired the just celebrity of Pompey, nor does he enjoy the treasures of Crassus, and yet his influence is perhaps greater than that of those two personages. Political influence, indeed, does not depend solely on military successes or on the possession of immense riches; it is acquired especially by a conduct always in accord with fixed convictions. Cæsar alone represents a principle. From the age of eighteen, he has faced the anger of Sylla and the hostility of the aristocracy, in order to plead unceasingly the grievances of the oppressed and the rights of the provinces.

So long as he is not in power, being exempt from responsibility, he walks invariably in the way he has traced, listens to no compromise, pursues unsparingly the adherents of the opposite party, and maintains his opinions energetically, at the risk of wounding his adversaries; but, once consul, he lays aside all resentment, and makes a loyal appeal to all who will rally round him; he declares to the Senate that he will not act without its concurrence, that he will propose nothing contrary to its prerogatives.[1096] He offers his colleague Bibulus a generous reconciliation, conjuring him, in the presence of the senators, to put a term to differences of opinion, the effects of which, already so much to be regretted during their common edileship and prætorship, would become fatal in their new position.[1097] He makes advances to Cicero, and, after sending Cornelius Balbus to him in his villa of Antium to assure him that he is ready to follow his counsels and those of Pompey, offers to take him as an associate in his labours.[1098]

Cæsar must have believed that these offers of co-operation would be embraced. In face of the perils of a society deeply agitated, he supposed that others had the same sentiments which animated himself. Love of the public good, and the consciousness of having entirely devoted himself to it, gave him that confidence without reserve in the patriotism of others which admits neither mean rivalries nor the calculations of selfishness: he was deceived. The Senate showed nothing but prejudices, Bibulus, but rancours, Cicero, but a false pride.

It was essential for Cæsar to unite Pompey, who was wanting in firmness of character, more closely with his destinies; he gave him in marriage his daughter Julia, a young woman of twenty-three years of age, richly endowed with graces and intelligence, who had already been affianced to Servilius Cæpio. To compensate the latter, Pompey promised him his own daughter, though she also was engaged to another, to Faustus, the son of Sylla. Soon afterwards Cæsar espoused Calpurnia, the daughter of Lucius Piso.[1099] Cato protested energetically against these marriages, which he qualified as disgraceful traffics with the common weal.[1100] The nobles, and especially the two Curios, made themselves the echoes of this reprobation. Their party, nevertheless, did not neglect to strengthen themselves by such alliances. Doubtless, when Cato gave his daughter to Bibulus, it was for a political motive; and when he ceded his own wife to Hortensius,[1101] although the mother of three children, to take her back again when enriched by the death of her last husband, there was also an interest hardly honourable, which Cæsar subsequently unveiled in a book entitled Anti-Cato.[1102]

The first care of the new consul was to establish the practice of publishing daily the acts of the Senate and those of the people, in order that public opinion might bear with all its weight upon the resolutions of the conscript fathers, whose deliberations had previously been often secret.[1103] The initiative taken by Cæsar from the commencement of his consulship, in questioning the senators on the projects of laws, is an evidence that he had the fasces before Bibulus. We know, in fact, that the consuls enjoyed this honour alternately for a month, and it was in the period when they were invested with the signs distinctive of power that they were permitted to ask the advice of the senators.[1104]