I. CAESAR AND CLODIUS

It was clear from the moment of their election that the two consuls of 5 9 B.C. would be at loggerheads. The immediate issue, already foreseen in December, was a land law; Caesar was aiming to do as consul what the tribunes had failed to do in 63 and 60. Bibulus, on the other hand, was determined to resist it on behalf of Cato and the senatorial establishment. The familiar ideology of plebs and patres – explicit in Cicero’s statement of his position on this occasion – was now to be played out not as a conflict of tribunes and consuls but as a trial of strength between the consuls themselves.

Caesar’s attitude to the populace was made clear as soon as he entered office. From now on the Senate’s debates (and the proceedings of the people) were to be officially recorded and published, its business made accessible to the general citizen body. Helped, no doubt, by this publicity, Caesar went out of his way to be conciliatory to his opponents in the Senate. He chose Crassus, not Pompey, as the first consularis to be asked his opinion (not that the optimates would like that much better); he announced that in the alternate months when his colleague held the fasces his own official escort would be merely an orderly (his lictors to follow behind); and he assured the patres that he would bring in no legislation that was against their interests.

In particular, they would find that the proposed land law did not contain any of the features they had found so objectionable in Rullus’ bill four years earlier. To prove it, he went through the text clause by clause, inviting criticism and offering to delete anything the Senate did not like. The Campanian land was not to be touched; the scheme would bring desolate areas of Italy back into cultivation, and put Roman citizens back on the land instead of encouraging them to riot in the city; the commission administering the distribution was to number twenty men, of whom Caesar as the proposer could not be one; it was to buy property only from willing sellers, and only at the value fixed in the censors’ registration; and the money was available, thanks to Pompey’s conquests and the heroism of his soldiers, who deserved the fight to share in what their labours had made possible.