e he seems to have stayed
nearly two months, he wrote in December. He is easy, he says, about his
triumph unless Caesar should interfere--but he does not care much about
his triumph now. He is beginning to feel the wearisomeness of the
triumph; and indeed it was a time in which the utter hollowness of
triumphal pretensions must have made the idea odious to him. But to have
withdrawn would have been to have declared his own fears, his own
doubts, his own inferiority to the two men who were becoming declared as
the rival candidates for Roman power. We may imagine that at such a time
he would gladly have gone in quiet to his Roman mansion or to one of his
villas, ridding himself forever of the trouble of his lictors, his
fasces, and all the paraphernalia of imperatorial dignity; but a man
cannot rid himself of such appanages without showing that he has found
it necessary to do so. It was the theory of a triumph that the
victorious Imperator should come home hot (as it were) from the
battle-field, with all his martial satellites around him, and have
himself carried at once through Rome. It was barbaric and grand, as I
have said before, but it required the martial satellites. Tradition had
become law, and the Imperator intending to triumph could not dismiss his
military followers till the ceremony was over. In this way Cicero was
sadly hampered by his lictors when, on his landing at Brundisium, he
found that Italy was already preparing for her great civil war.

[Sidenote: B.C. 50, aetat. 57.]

Early in this year it had been again proposed in the Senate that Caesar
should give up his command. At this time the two Consuls, L. AEmilius
Paulus and C. Claudius Marcellus, were opposed to Caesar, as was also
Curio, who had been one of Cicero's young friends, and was now Tribune.
But two of these Caesar managed to buy by the payment of enormous bribes.
Curio was the more important of the two, and required the larger bribe.
The story comes to us from Appian,[119] but the modern reader will find
it efficiently told by Mommsen.[120] The Consul had fifteen hundred
talents, or about L500,000! The sum named as that given by Caesar to
Curio was something greater, because he was so deeply in debt! Bribes to
the amount of above a million of money, such as money is to us now,
bestowed upon two men for their support in the Senate! It was worth a
man's while to be a Consul or a Tribune in those days. But the money was
well earned--plunder, no