[797] Cicero, Epist. ad Atticum, VI. 1.
[798] In speaking of Pompey’s party, Cicero exclaims: “Men who all, with the exception of a very small number, breathed nothing but pillage, and discourses such as made one tremble, the more as victory might convert them into reality: not a person of rank who was not crippled with debts: there was absolutely nothing beautiful except the cause which they served.” (Cicero, Epist. Familiar., VII. 8.)—“They all agree, and Crassipes with them, that yonder there are nothing but imprecations, but threats of hatred to the rich, of war against the municipia (admire their prudence!), but proscriptions in mass; they are nothing but Syllas; and you must see the tone of Lucceius, and all that train of Greeks, and that Theophanes! Yet this is the hope of the Republic! A Scipio, a Faustus, a Libo, with their troops of creditors at their heels, of what enormities are not such people capable? What excesses against their fellow-citizens will such conquerors refuse?” (Cicero, Epist. ad Atticum, IX. 11.)
[799] Cicero, Epist. ad Atticum, VI. 1.
[800] “The Salaminians sought to borrow money at Rome to pay their taxes, but, as the law Gabinia prohibited it, the friends of Brutus, who offered to lend it them at four per cent. a month, demanded a senatus-consultus for their safety, which Brutus obtained for them.” (Cicero, Epist. ad Atticum, V. 21.)
[801] Appian, Civil Wars, II. 25.
[802] Suetonius, Cæsar, 30.
[803] Cœlius to Cicero, Epist. Familiar., VIII. 14.
[804] Dio Cassius, XLI. 6.
[805] In our opinion, Professor A.W. Zumpt (Studia Romana, Berlin, 1859) is the only one who has cleared up this question; and we shall borrow of him the greatest part of his arguments. As to M. Th. Mommsen, in a special dissertation, entitled The Question of Right between Cæsar and the Senate, he proves that we must distinguish in the proconsulship between the provincia and the imperium. According to him, the provincia being given at the same time with the consulship, it could be taken possession of, according to the law Sempronia, only on the Calends of the month of January of the following year; the imperium, or military command, was added to it two months later, on the Calends of March. The provincia was given by a senatus-consultus, and counted from January to January; the imperium was given by a curiate law, and went from March to March: the imperium followed the rules of the military service; a year commenced was reputed finished, as for the campaigns of the soldiers, and thus the two first months of 705 might count for a complete year. The learned professor concludes that, if the Senate had the right to deprive Cæsar of his imperium, it could not take from him the command of the province before the end of the year 705, and that then Cæsar would find himself in the same position as all the proconsuls who, during the interval between the 1st of January, the commencement of their proconsulship, and the 1st of March, the time when they received the imperium, had the potestas, and not the military command. This system, we see, rests upon hypotheses which it is difficult to admit.
[806] “Erat autem obscuritas quædam.” (Cicero, Pro Marcello, 10.)