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CRASSUS ACCUSED OF TREASON

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game for a hunter of his calibre to meddle with.1 And so the consul of B.C. 63, with his usual prudence, refrained from accusing of high treason a man who could pull so many political strings, and had at his disposal such a command of money and influence. When the informer Tarquinius, in his examination before the Senate, began to give evidence incriminating Crassus, a curious scene occurred. Dozens of senators who owed Crassus money began to shout "False witness" with all the power of their lungs. Then Cicero, after glancing round the house and pondering on the situation, took the easiest way out of the position by remanding Tarquinius to prison, without permitting him to go on with his story. The charge was not allowed to be repeated, yet Sallust tells us that Crassus was so far from being grateful to Cicero that he ever afterwards regarded him as an enemy. Apparently he thought that the orator had been feeling the pulse of the Senate by producing such evidence, and had only drawn back from an open attack because he saw that he would not get the full support of his party if he persisted.

However much or however little Crassus had been implicated in the Catilinarian plot, this much is certain, that many people thought that he had known more about the business than he should, and that an additional stain was added in consequence to his already not unsmirched reputation. We are told that in the end of B.C. 63 he seriously thought of leaving Rome to preserve his personal safety, and provided ships to carry himself, his family, and his treasures out of Italy.

The reason why he did not actually depart was the unforeseen delay in the return of Pompey from the East. The conqueror of Mithradates had finished his military

The Romans used to tie a wisp of straw to the horns of a dangerous bull to warn the passer-by against him.

work in B.C. 63 by the conquest of Syria. He was expected back early in 62, just when Cicero's consulship had expired, and while the embers of the Catilinarian conspiracy were still smouldering, after the main conflagration had been quenched. If he had presented himself at this moment, he would have found the Democratic leaders in the deepest discredit and dismay, and foiled in all their plans to raise up a power in Italy that should be able to oppose him. But Pompey chose to linger in the East for the whole summer of B.C. 62, pacifying and portioning out provinces, conciliating allied princes, and founding new cities. He showed no signs of coming home, and merely sent ahead his foolish and talkative partisan Metellus Nepos, the man whose pranks gave Cicero so much trouble. It will be remembered that his demands were so unreasonable, and at the same time so vague, that Cicero and the Optimates ventured to oppose them, and Crassus had time to recover from his panic and to reconsider his situation. There can be no doubt that the follies of Metellus, who certainly exceeded the commission that had been given him, did his employer much harm and lessened his popularity.

Yet when, in the autumn of B.C. 62, Pompey at last announced that he was returning to Italy with his army at his back, both Democrats and Optimates were seriously alarmed. Externally his position was so much like that of Sulla in 82 that both parties had a suspicion that he would be tempted to repeat Sulla's rôle. Neither Crassus and Cæsar on the one side, nor Catulus and Cato on the other, felt their heads quite safe upon their shoulders. For each party knew that they had been intriguing against the great general in his absence, and supposed that he might resent their action in a very drastic fashion.

Nothing of the kind happened. With rare civic virtue

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THE RETURN OF POMPEY

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Pompey dismissed his army, and returned as a private person to Rome, expecting to receive from his fellowcitizens the praise and gratitude that he had so well earned. Instead, he found the Optimates captious and critical, and the Democrats far more concerned in the Catilinarian conspiracy and its results than in the newly accomplished conquest of the East. His simple and moderate requests-the confirmation of his administrative work in Asia and the provision of the rewards due to his victorious soldiery-were refused him. When he put forward his friend the Tribune Flavius to pass a plebiscitum for the grant of lands to the army of the East, it was defeated by the unexpected and immoral combination of the Optimates and the Populares.

The great object of Crassus at this time was to prevent at all costs the conclusion of an alliance between Pompey and the Senate, lest the combination of the two should reduce himself and his party to entire impotence. How he did it we learn from Cicero's letters. When Pompey first returned to the city, it would have been quite natural that the orator and he should have agreed to work together; they had been old friends and allies in earlier days, their political views were not dissimilar, and if Cicero was now the most moderate of Optimates, Pompey was certainly the least democratic of Democrats. If the orator could have persuaded his friends to treat the great general with courtesy and ordinary consideration, and to grant his very reasonable demands, it is probable that matters would have settled down without any further trouble. But Cicero was still swelling over with pride. at his successes in B.C. 63, and now thought himself quite as great a man as Pompey. His idea was to meet the proconsul with the phrase, "If you have saved the republic abroad, I have saved it at home." In his vanity he imagined that the crushing of Catiline's handful of

desperadoes was quite as great an achievement as the conquest of the East. He was ready to assume an almost patronising attitude to his old chief.

The wily Crassus resolved to estrange the two by tempting Cicero into a display of foolish pride which should disgust Pompey. He carried out his shameless plan at the first appearance of the great general to take his seat in the Senate. The occasion ought to have been utilised to welcome and compliment Pompey according to his deserts. But when the proceedings had been commenced, Crassus rose and began a fulsome and interminable harangue in praise of Cicero's consulship. Not only was the subject-matter stale, for Catiline had been put down a whole year before, but Crassus was the last man who should have launched out on such topics. He was known to resent bitterly all that the orator had done, and to be his secret enemy. However he began to declaim to the effect that "the preservation of his own life and liberty, his name and his fatherland, his wife and children, had all been the work of Cicero; that Rome had been saved from fire and sword was due to this great man alone," and so forth. Cicero fell into the trap with the greatest simplicity. Instead of suspecting all compliments from this most doubtful source, he arose to continue the debate in his own self-laudation. The opportunity for conciliating Pompey, by turning the discussion on to his great deeds in the East, and paying him his due meed of praise, quite escaped him. Instead, he proceeded to sound his own trumpet in the most autolatrous fashion. Writing to Atticus in complete unconsciousness of his own folly, he says that “now was the time for my well-turned periods, my flowers of rhetoric, my antitheses and figures. You know my wonted thunders: this day they were so loud that I think that you must have heard them even where you

CICERO AND POMPEY ESTRANGED

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are, in Epirus." 1 So having spoken at length of his own great doings, of the majesty of the Senate, the wickedness of the late conspiracy, and all his usual topics, he sat down, leaving Pompey unblessed. The general was not pleased: "intellexi hominem moveri," says Cicero, who had the best chance of knowing, for he was sitting next to him. He took the speech as a formal declaration that Cicero and his friends did not think much of his exertions in the East, and he was not far wrong.

Thus it came to pass that the shameless harangue of Crassus and the idiotic vanity of Cicero, which made him gorge the bait so greedily, began to destroy the chance that Pompey might enter into an alliance with the Optimate party, and become a defender of the constitution. His anger came to a head when at the instigation of his old enemy and rival, Lucullus, the Senate passed a decree that an elaborate inquiry should be made into all his doings in Asia before they were ratified. If anything was wanting to complete his discontent, it was the way in which his army was treated; the excuse made for denying its reward was that the treasury was empty—a manifest lie, for the enormous sums which had been paid in from his Asiatic spoils were still unexpended.

So the man who might, if he had been unscrupulous, have become tyrant of Rome, found himself flouted and set at nought, merely because he had behaved like a good citizen, and refrained from taking by violence that which was his due. He might have asked for anything that he liked while his army was still undisbanded. When he had dispersed it, Cicero's stupid friends refused to listen to his pleas and left him shamed before the eyes of his veterans.

While he stood involved in this bitter disappointment, 1 Ad Atticum, i. 13.

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