As the months passed, Caesar’s command came under attack after attack. Every time a senator tried to revoke the bill and deprive him of his command, a carefully deployed tribune would veto. ‘You know the routine,’ wrote one contemporary observer. ‘There will be a decision about Gaul. Somebody will come along with a veto. Then somebody else will stand up . . . So we shall have a long, elaborate charade.’37 As if by centrifugal force, the members of the Roman élite found themselves forced to take a stand on one side or another. A clique of Caesareans, young, ambitious and growing in numbers, believed that Caesar was the stronger, that reform of the republic and its corrupt, discredited senators was paramount and, above all, that greater political and financial rewards lay with him. Cato, meanwhile, rallied the traditional senators under the banner of defending the constitution of the republic. They came in their droves. Caesar’s unprecedented demands made it easy for Cato to present him as the would-be tyrant, as the man bent on destroying the republic, the man whose grotesque greed and ambition were driving him to seize power. But on the question of which side to take, there was one man who had yet to declare his hand.
Since his appointment to the sole consulship, Pompey’s behaviour towards his old ally had been highly ambivalent. In the last months of his office in 52 BC he had used his influence to support the bill of ten tribunes granting Caesar the special privilege of standing for the consulship in absentia. However, the warm overtures of the aristocratic constitutionalists, and their appointment of him to stand for the sole consulship, had persuaded him that the path to winning both power and respect did not lie exclusively with Caesar and his maverick ways. So when, after the death of Julia, Caesar offered Pompey his great-niece Octavia in marriage, Pompey turned him down flat.
The woman he eventually chose was beautiful, graceful and cultivated in literature, music, geometry and philosophy. The union caused quite a scandal because his new wife was half Pompey’s age. But in Cornelia, Pompey had found not just a woman to love, but also a place in high society, for the blood running in her veins could not have been bluer. She was the daughter of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Scipio, a scion of one of the great patrician families in Rome, a family that could boast among its forebears Publius Scipio, the slayer of Hannibal; a family now at the very heart of the senatorial establishment.
So while he was supposed to have been restoring order to the streets of Rome, Pompey had donned wedding garlands and married Cornelia. As if to spell out just how cosily he was now bedded down with the constitutionalists, in August 52 BC, once peace had returned to the streets of Rome, Pompey willingly gave up his sole consulship before his term of office had expired and invited his new father-in-law Metellus Scipio to join him as his consular colleague.38 The former gangster was now behaving like a pillar of republican respectability. Cato knew he had Pompey just where he wanted him. Now he went for the kill.
In a bid to drive an unmistakable wedge between Pompey and Caesar, an intense pressure offensive began. While the consuls of 51 BC attacked Caesar publicly in the Senate for holding on to his command, Cato worked on Pompey privately, playing to the general’s insecurity. Caesar was now a far more powerful man than Pompey, went his line of reasoning. Was Pompey the Great just going to sit back and watch his old ally return to Rome at the head of an army and tell everyone what to do? What right did Caesar have to dictate to us? No man’s dignity was greater than the republic. Cato’s sniping soon showed signs of paying off. In September 51 BC Pompey made an announcement. Caesar, he said, should give up his command in the spring of the following year and allow for a successor to be appointed. Pompey was pressed on the matter: what if one of Caesar’s tribunes vetoed the proposal? ‘... and supposing my son chooses to take his stick to me?’39 With these words, Pompey abandoned the comfort of the fence and severed all ties with Caesar.
Although the conservative politicians had now secured their strongman, it took a massive outpouring of love and support from the people to make Pompey feel like one. When he recovered from a serious illness while in Naples, Roman citizens up and down Italy rejoiced, in bouts of sacrificing and feasting. As he made his way back to Rome, Pompey was mobbed by people wearing garlands, carrying torches and pelting him with flowers. The effect of this enormous public celebration proved intoxicating, even blinding: ‘Pompey began to feel a kind of over-confidence in himself, which went far beyond considerations based on facts.’40
Pompey’s lack of a grasp on reality was now made worse. The Senate requested that both he and Caesar give up one legion from their commands to quell unrest on Rome’s eastern frontier in Parthia. As Caesar had borrowed an extra legion from the republic’s army, both legions were to come from Caesar’s army. The Senate’s request allowed him the opportunity to pose as a friend of peace, as the man who wanted to bring about a resolution to the crisis. With that in mind, Caesar willingly handed over both legions. When they arrived in Italy, one of their officers by the name of Appius belittled Caesar’s army and his achievements in Gaul. Pompey did not need any troops other than these two legions, he said. They were sufficient to handle the threat posed by Caesar. Pompey’s confidence was boosted even higher. He had easily built Caesar up, the great general thought to himself; now he could just as easily pull him down. When, later on, a senator, alarmed at Pompey’s lack of preparation, asked him with what legions he would defend the republic should Caesar march on Rome, Pompey serenely replied that there was nothing at all to worry about. ‘I have only to stamp my foot upon the ground,’ he said, ‘and there will rise up armies of infantry and armies of cavalry.’41
In mid-50 BC a dissolute ally of Caesar by the name of Marcus Caelius Rufus declared that the love affair between Pompey and Caesar was over.42 From the slave to the tax collector, from the beggar to the senator, there were now only two words on the lips of every Roman: civil war. And yet as both sides stepped ever closer to outright confrontation in the latter half of the year, the majority of the Senate wanted to pull back from the precipice. In November the senators voted by 370 to 22 for peace.43 But that meant only one thing: giving in to Caesar’s wishes. To Cato that was simply unconscionable.
The weakness of the Senate now served to stiffen the resolve of Cato and his closest allies, provoking even the arch-constitutionalists to actions with no legal authority. After the vote the consul of 50 BC Gaius Claudius Marcellus cried, ‘Have your way. Be slaves to Caesar!’ and stormed out of the Senate. He and his fellow consul then went to Pompey’s house on the outskirts of the city and, in a highly staged piece of melodrama, put a sword in his hand. With it they commanded him to take the field against Caesar in defence of the republic, and granted him both the legions stationed in Italy and the right to levy more. Pompey did his best to avoid appearing the aggressor, replying solemnly, ‘If there is no other way.’ In reality, though, he too now wanted war.44
On the first day of the new year 49 BC Caesar again presented himself as the advocate of peace, believing he had the Senate cowed. The newly elected tribune Mark Antony, Caesar’s mouthpiece in Rome, read out a letter from the proconsuclass="underline" for his many successes in Gaul, the Roman people had granted him the legal right to stand for office in absentia. While he expected that privilege to stand, he was prepared to lay down his arms on the one condition that Pompey did too.