The Significance of Caesar's Consulship in 59 B. C

M OTUM EX METELLO CONSULE CIVICUM:1 we all know that Asinius Pollio dated the beginnings of the civil war from the year 60, when Caesar created the alliance we know as the first Triumvirate; and we obediently note the fact in passing. But we none the less tend to describe the events of the decade that followed in terms of normal Republican procedure, punctuated by acts of what are misleadingly called hooliganism, as though the Republic were flourishing in all its parts except for violent interruptions caused chiefly by Clodius and largely, for most of the time, cancelled in their effects by Milo's use of counter-force. But the truth went much deeper than this; Pollio knew the facts and lived through the times; he had sound reasons for the date he chose; he knew that Caesar's consulship had inaugurated the Republic's end in 59; that 49 was but a logical continuation of that consulship, and that the whole decade must be seen as one vast complex event, whose end was the end of the Republic. It is the significance of this year that I wish to consider in this article; for it gave the tone to all that followed; but first we must briefly consider Caesar's situation before he entered on his fateful office. We not unnaturally are apt to judge Caesar from the end and to foresee in all his earlier activity the shadow of his later greatness. Yet an observer in 60 B.C. might well have been excused for failing to divine in him one of Rome's greatest generals, a man determined to wield all power, and ruthless to achieve it, endowed with a genius which made his determination possible and dangerous. For in 60 Caesar could claim little of successful achievement except the chief priesthood, whose value for his ambitions was dubious at best. As aedile in 65 he had openly declared himself an opponent of the order established by Sulla by his deliberate association of himself with Marius;2 for the Marian party and ideas were still anathema in Roman politics,3 excluded as decisively as were the sons

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