perversity
prevailing in the Pompeian camp, which we can only with difficulty meet.
The aggregate result of this campaign was corresponding.
Caesar's double aggressive movement, against Spain and against Sicily
and Africa, was successful, in the former case completely,
in the latter at least partially; while Pompeius' plan
of starving Italy was thwarted in the main by the taking away
of Sicily, and his general plan of campaign was frustrated completely
by the destruction of the Spanish army; and in Italy only
a very small portion of Caesar's defensive arrangements
had come to be applied. Notwithstanding the painfully-felt losses
in Africa and Illyria, Caesar came forth from this first year
of the war in the most decided and most decisive manner as victor.
Organizations in Macedonia
The Emigrants
If, however, nothing material was done from the east to obstruct Caesar
in the subjugation of the west, efforts at least were made towards
securing political and military consolidation there during the respite
so ignominiously obtained. The great rendezvous of the opponents
of Caesar was Macedonia. Thither Pompeius himself and the mass
of the emigrants from Brundisium resorted; thither came
the other refugees from the west: Marcus Cato from Sicily,
Lucius Domitius from Massilia but more especially a number
of the best officers and soldiers of the broken-up army of Spain,
with its generals Afranius and Varro at their head. In Italy
emigration gradually became among the aristocrats a question
not of honour merely but almost of fashion, and it obtained
a fresh impulse through the unfavourable accounts which arrived
regarding Caesar's position before Ilerda; not a few of the more
lukewarm partisans and the political trimmers went over by degrees,
and even Marcus Cicero at last persuaded himself that he did not
adequately discharge his duty as a citizen by writing a dissertatio
on concord. The senate of emigrants at Thessalonica, where the official
Rome pitched its interim abode, numbered nearly 200 members
including many venerable old men and almost all the consulars.
But emigrants indeed they were. This Roman Coblentz displayed
a pitiful spectacle in the high pretensions and paltry performances
of the genteel world of Rome, their unseasonable reminiscences
and still more unseasonable recriminations, their political
perversities and financial embarrassments. It was a matter
of comparatively slight moment that, while
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