ch is supported by
both Pompey and Caesar, or retire from the contest and enjoy himself at
his country villas, or boldly stay at Rome and oppose the law. Caesar
assures him that if he will come over to them, Caesar will be always true
to him and Pompey, and will do his best to bring Crassus into the same
frame of mind. Then he reckons up all the good things which would accrue
to him: "Closest friendship with Pompey--with Caesar also, should he wish
it; the making up of all quarrels with his enemies; popularity with the
people; ease for his old age, which was coming on him. But that
conclusion moves me to which I came in my third book."[238] Then he
repeats the lines given in the note below, which he had written,
probably this very year, in a poem composed in honor of his own
Consulship. The lines are not in themselves grand, but the spirit of
them is magnificent: "Stick to the good cause which in your early youth
you chose for yourself, and be true to the party you have made your
own." "Should I doubt when the muse herself has so written," he says,
alluding to the name of Calliope, given to this third book of his. Then
he adds a line of Homer, very excellent for the occasion:[239] "No
augury for the future can be better for you than that which bids you
serve your country." "But," he says, "we will talk of all that when you
come to me for the holidays. Your bath shall be ready for you: your
sister and mother shall be of the party." And so the doubts are settled.

Now came on the question of the Tribuneship of Clodius, in reference to
which I will quote a passage out of Middleton, because the phrase which
he uses exactly explains the purposes of Caesar and Pompey.

[Sidenote: B.C. 60, aetat. 47.]

"Clodius, who had been contriving all this while how to revenge himself
on Cicero, began now to give an opening to the scheme which he had
formed for that purpose. His project was to get himself chosen Tribune,
and in that office to drive him out of the city, by the publication of a
law which, by some stratagem or other, he hoped to obtrude on the
people. But as all Patricians were incapable of the Tribunate, by its
original institution so his first step was to make himself a Plebeian by
the pretence of an adoption into a Plebeian house, which could not yet
be done without the suffrage of the people. This case was wholly new,
and contrary to all the forms--wanting every condition, and serving none
of the ends which were requir