At Lucca, Cæsar had been promised the consulate for the year 48. This aim attained and supported by his victorious army, with the prestige of his deeds and his superior intellect he could easily have overreached Pompey, who was no statesman. Cæsar would have organised the popular party, and completed in some form or other the work of a democratic monarchy which had been commenced by Gracchus and had failed in the unskilful hands of Marius; the achievement would have been more glorious for him if it had been accomplished without the aid of military force.
But the most enthusiastic of Pompey’s partisans now adopted a high tone. They declined to concur in any compromise or compact which involved danger to the republic; and at the beginning of the year 51 they threw down the gauntlet to Cæsar. M. Claudius motioned for the newly appointed consuls to be sent on the 1st of March in the year 49 to Cæsar’s two vicegerencies of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul. The party also demanded Cæsar’s disbandment of his army and maintained that his grant of citizen rights to the colonies which he had founded, was not legal. An inhabitant of Novum Comum, a town to which Cæsar had granted the Latin privilege, was struck with rods.
Cæsar’s followers showed the unreasonableness of these views and courses by references to Pompey’s position, and Pompey delayed doing anything or declaring himself. The debate on the business of the nomination was fixed for the 1st of March in the year 50. The union between Pompey and the aristocrats became closer and closer, and the time they lost was to the advantage of Cæsar.
[50-49 B.C.]
In the mean time he suppressed the rebellion of Vercingetorix, and Gaul began to calm down. To show his desire for peace, Cæsar followed the senate’s command to disband two legions, the one he had borrowed some years before from Pompey and the other which he had raised himself. He recompensed both before he dismissed them. However, the government did not keep to the agreement of sending them to the Euphrates, but retained them in the Campania for any emergency closer at hand. Cæsar also gained increasing ground at Rome, where clever agents worked for him, and he won an important victory through Curio, the plebeian tribune, a dissolute but talented and wide-awake man, whom he gained over to his side by paying his debts.[116] This ally maintained that what was due from Cæsar was also due from Pompey, and threatened to put his veto upon all one-sided courses against Cæsar.
The aristocrats hesitated, and in the meantime Cæsar arrived but without his army, at Ravenna, the most southern point of his province. Then Curio formulated his measure that Cæsar and Pompey should simultaneously resign their provinces and thus allay the fears of the Roman people. The plan was very well laid, and as the event showed, very cleverly arranged. The measure was put to the vote of the senate and to the astonishment of all concerned it resulted in 370 voting for the motion and twenty against it. It therefore seemed that there were only twenty in the senate upon whom Pompey could implicitly rely. “Then take Cæsar as your chief!” exclaimed the consul Marcellus in a rage as he closed the sitting.
Pompey’s party was in fact in a great strait; and Cæsar (probably at a high price) had attained what he wished. He had forced his adversaries to enter the list as insurrectionists. Pompey began raising troops without the necessary authority, whilst Cæsar, who was with a legion at Ravenna, sent the order to his assembled troops to disband without delay. He also despatched a letter to the senate, in which he offered to resign the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul, to reduce his ten legions to two, if he were allowed to retain these and the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul until the election of the consul for 48. This document was delivered to the senate by Curio. The tribunes Mark Antony and C. Cassius insisted on its being read aloud. The sitting was stormy, and the two consuls C. Claudius Marcellus, and L. Cornelius Lentulus made a point of Cæsar’s appearing as a private individual before the judicature.
In accordance with their views, the motion was carried for Cæsar to resign his province and to disband his army within a fixed time; his neglect to concur with this decree was to be considered high treason. In that case L. Domitius was nominated as his successor. This motion was passed on the 1st of January, 49, but the tribunes put their veto on it, and a great excitement prevailed in the city, into which Pompey had brought two legions. With this support the terrified senate, after expelling the dissentient tribunes from the curia, issued the decree which involved the declaration of war. The senate solemnly conjured the leaders, the officials supported by a military force in the city and its neighbourhood, to watch over the safety of the endangered state. The tribunes renewed their veto, but threatened by the soldiers of Pompey, against whom they were powerless, they fled from Rome and repaired to Cæsar’s headquarters. The decisive step was taken, the swords were unsheathed. Cæsar still remained with his single legion at Ravenna when the tribunes arrived in the character of fugitives. He had already carefully weighed the matter, and had conceived a clear decided course. He had his own army which had served him for ten years in danger and in victory. He knew every cohort, almost every soldier in his command; and every single man was devoted to the general who shared danger and honour with them all, and who had never deserted them in any strait. Moreover he had the Transpadian, or Romanised Gauls of the Po district, to whom he had granted full civic rights on his own authority; this however was the end of his resources.