Chapter II: Events of the Year 697

[Sidenote: War against the Belgæ.]

I. Cæsar’s victories had awakened among the Gauls feelings of admiration, but also of distrust; they could not see without fear that it had required only six legions to scatter two invasions, each counting 100,000 combatants. There are successes which, by their very brilliancy, alarm even those who profit by them. Nearly all Gaul looks on with jealousy at events which prove the superiority of permanent armies over populations without military organization. A small number of experienced and disciplined soldiers, under the guidance of a great captain, make all the peoples tremble from the Rhine to the ocean, and even the islanders of Great Britain feel themselves unsafe against the attacks of the Roman power; the Belgæ especially, proud of having formerly alone repulsed the invasion of the Cimbri and the Teutones, feel their warlike instincts revive. Provocations which have come from the other side of the Straits increase their distrust; these picture to them the abode of the Roman army in Franche-Comté as a threat against the independence of the whole of Gaul. The greatest part of the peoples comprised between the Rhine, the Scheldt, the Ocean, and the Seine, agitate, combine, and assemble an army of 300,000 men.

Informed in Italy of these preparations, Cæsar raises two new legions, rejoins his army in Franche-Comté, and decides immediately on invading the country of the Belgæ. The first who present themselves on his road are the people of Champagne. Surprised by his sudden arrival, they submit, and even offer him subsidies and auxiliaries. Cæsar is able to add to his eight legions and his light troops the contingents from Rheims, and join them with those of Burgundy and Trèves. In spite of this augmentation of his forces, the enemy he has to combat is four times more numerous. To defeat them, he sends the Burgundians to make a diversion and ravage the territory of Beauvais, then he crosses the Aisne at Berry-au-Bac, and selects, behind the Miette, a marshy stream, a defensive position which he renders inexpugnable.

The Belgæ, whose army occupies, on the right bank of the Miette, an extent of twelve kilomètres, are powerless to force the position of the Romans, and fail in all their attempts to cross the Aisne at Pontavert. Soon, discouraged by the want of provisions, disputes among themselves, and the news that the Burgundians have just invaded the territory of Beauvais, they separate, because each, believing his own country threatened, thinks only of going to its defence. The Belgian league is thus dissolved almost without combat. Cæsar then hastens to chastise each people one after the other; he seizes in their turn Soissons and Breteuil, the principal citadels of the Soissonais and Beauvaisis, and arrives at Amiens.

But the coalitions of the peoples of the north succeed each other like the waves of the sea; after the Helvetii, the Germans; after the Germans, the people of the Beauvaisis; after them, the inhabitants of Hainault. These have assembled on the Sambre, and wait to be re-enforced by the peoples of German origin established in the neighbourhood of Namur. Cæsar then marches towards the Sambre by its left bank. When he arrives near the enemy concealed in the woods of the right bank, on the heights of Haumont, he unites six legions, places the two others in reserve with the baggage of the army, and, reaching the heights of Neuf-Mesnil, begins to fortify his camp; but hardly have the soldiers commenced their work, when the Belgæ debouch from all the issues of the forest, cross the shallow waters of the Sambre, scale the abrupt slopes, and fall upon the Romans, who, taken by surprise and unable to form their line of battle, range themselves without order under the first ensigns which offer themselves. The confusion is extreme; Cæsar is obliged, sword in hand, to throw himself into the thick of the fight. Nevertheless, the fortune of the battle is gradually restored; the centre and left wing have repulsed their assailants; the latter arrives to succour the right wing in its peril; the two legions of the rear-guard hasten to the field of battle; then victory decides for the Romans, and the peoples of Hainault are nearly annihilated. In this engagement the experience and valour of the old veteran soldiers save the Roman army from the impetuosity of the Belgæ. After this exploit, Cæsar marches towards Namur, in which the inhabitants of the whole country have shut themselves up on the news of the defeat of their allies, and he makes himself master of that place.

While he was completing the conquest of Belgic Gaul, one of his lieutenants, the young Publius Crassus, detached, after the battle of the Sambre, into Normandy and Brittany, reduced to submission the peoples of those provinces, so that at that time the greatest part of Gaul acknowledged the authority of the Republic: the effect of Cæsar’s victories was such that the Ubii, a German people from beyond the Rhine, established between the Maine and the Sieg, sent their congratulations to the conqueror with the offer of their services.

Before leaving for the Cisalpine, Cæsar sent a legion into the Valais, to chastise the inhabitants of those Alpine valleys, who, at the beginning of the year, had attacked in their march the two new legions on their way from Italy; it was his aim also to open easy communications with the Cisalpine by the Simplon and Saint-Bernard. But his lieutenant Galba, after a sanguinary battle, was obliged to retreat and take up his winter quarters in Savoy. Thus Cæsar’s designs could not be realised. It was reserved for another great man, nineteen centuries afterwards, to level that formidable barrier of the Alps.

[Sidenote: Return of Cicero.]

II. Let us now resume the account of events in Rome subsequent to the Calends of January, 697 (20th of December, 696). The consuls who entered upon their office were P. Cornelius Lentulus Spinther and Q. Cecilius Metellus Nepos; the first, a friend of Cicero; the second, favourable to Clodius from hatred to the celebrated orator who had offended him.[579]

Lentulus brought forward the question of the recall of the exile.[580] L. Aurelius Cotta, a man of esteem and of consular dignity, declared that the banishment of Cicero, pronounced in the sequel of extreme acts of violence, carried in itself the cause of its nullity; and that, therefore, there was no need of a law to revoke an act that was contrary to the laws.[581] Pompey combated the opinion of Cotta, and sustained that it was necessary that Cicero should owe his recall, not only to the authority of the Senate, but also to a vote of the people. Nothing further was proposed but to present a _plebiscitum_ to the comitia. Nobody opposed it, when Sextus Atilius, tribune of the people, demanded the adjournment,[582] and, by those dilatory manœuvres so familiar to the Romans, obliged the Senate to defer the presentation of the law to the 22nd of the same month. When the day arrived, the two parties prepared to support their opinion by force. Q. Fabricius, tribune of the people, favourable to Cicero, sought in the morning to gain possession of the rostra. Clodius was no longer tribune, but he continued to guide the populace. To the professional agitators in his pay he had joined a troop of gladiators, brought to Rome, by his brother Appius, for the funeral of one of his kinsmen.[583] The troop of Fabricius was easily put to the rout; a tribune, M. Cistius, had hardly presented himself, when he was driven away. Pompey had his toga covered with blood, and Quintus Cicero, whom he had brought with him to the Forum to speak to the people in favour of his brother, was obliged to hide himself; the gladiators rushed upon another tribune, P. Sextius, and left him for dead. “The struggle was so violent,” Cicero says, “that the corpses obstructed the Tiber and filled the sewers, and the Forum was inundated with blood to such a degree that it was found necessary to wash it with sponges. A tribune was killed, and the house of another was threatened with fire.”[584] The amazement was so great, that the question of the recall of the exile was again adjourned. It was thus by the sword that everything was decided in Rome in its disorder and abasement.

In fact, to obtain the recall of Cicero, the Senate saw itself obliged to oppose riot to riot, and to make use of P. Sextius, who had recovered from his wounds, as well as of Milo, who had organised, with military discipline, an armed band in condition to make head against the rioters.[585] At the same time, it hoped to intimidate the urban mob by bringing into Rome, from all parts of Italy,[586] the citizens upon whom it relied. In fine, the very men who had, two years before, engaged Bibulus to embarrass all Cæsar’s measures by observing the sky,[587] now prohibited, under pain of being considered as an enemy of the Republic,[588] those religious artifices which suspended all deliberations. The result was that the law of recall was passed.

Cicero re-entered Rome on the eve of the Nones of September (the 15th of August, 697), in the midst of the warmest demonstrations of joy. The Senate had thus at last triumphed over the factious opposition of Clodius; but it was not without great efforts, nor without frequently having had recourse on its own side to violence and arbitrary acts.

[Sidenote: Pompey is charged with the Supplying of Food.]

III. From the first moment of his return, Cicero gave all his care to augmenting the influence of Pompey and reconciling him with the Senate. The famine under which Italy suffered that year furnished him with the occasion. The populace rose suddenly, hurried first to a theatre, where games were celebrating, and afterwards to the Capitol, uttering threats of death and fire against the Senate, to which they attributed the public distress.[589] Before this, in July, at the time of the Apollinarian games,[590] a riot had occurred from the same motive.

Cicero, by his persuasive eloquence, calmed the irritated mob, and proposed to entrust to Pompey the care of provisioning, and to confer upon him for five years proconsular powers in Italy and out of Italy.[591] The senators, in their terror, adopted this measure immediately. It was, as at the time of the war of the pirates, to give to one man an excessive power _over all the earth_, according to the words of the decree. Fifteen lieutenants were associated with him, of whom Cicero was one.[592] But the creation of this new office did not put an end to the discontent of the multitude. Clodius tried to persuade the people that the famine was fictitious, and that the Senate had created it, in order to have a pretext for making Pompey master over everything.[593] He overlooked no occasion for stirring up troubles.

Although the Senate had given Cicero an indemnity of more than two millions of sestertii,[594] and decided that his house should be rebuilt in the same place, Clodius, who sought to prevent the rebuilding of it, came several times to blows with Milo, in struggles which resembled regular battles, their adherents carrying bucklers and swords. Every day witnessed a riot in the streets. Milo swore he would kill Clodius, and Cicero confessed at a later period that the victim and the arm which was to strike were pointed out beforehand.[595]

[Sidenote: Festivals to commemorate Cæsar’s Victories.]

IV. It was towards the end of the year 697 that the news of Cæsar’s prodigious successes against the Belgæ reached Rome; they excited there the warmest enthusiasm. As soon as the Senate was informed of them, it voted fifteen days of thanksgiving to celebrate them.[596] This number of days had never before been accorded to anybody. Marius had obtained five, and Pompey, when he had vanquished Mithridates, only ten. The decree of the Senate was expressed in more flattering terms than had ever been used for any general. Cicero himself took part in obtaining this high testimony of public gratitude.[597]

[Sidenote: Riots at Rome.]

V. In spite of these demonstrations, there continued to exist among a certain class a secret hatred against the conqueror of Gaul: in the month of December, 697, Rutilius Lupus, named tribune for the following year, proposed to revoke Cæsar’s laws, and to suspend the distribution of the lands in Campania;[598] he expatiated in accusations against that general and Pompey. The senators were silent; Cn. Marcellinus, the consul nominate, declared that in the absence of Pompey nothing could be decided. On another hand, Racilius, tribune of the people, rose to renew the old accusations against Clodius.[599] In order to baffle the designs of the latter, who aspired to the office of ædile, and who, once named, would have been inviolable, the consuls nominate proposed that the election of the judges should take place before that of the ædiles. Cato and Cassius opposed this. Cicero eagerly seized the opportunity of fulminating against Clodius; but the latter, who was prepared, defended himself at length, and during this time his adherents excited, by attacking Milo’s men, such an uproar on the steps of the Temple of Castor, where the Senate held its sitting, that the Forum became a new field of battle. The senators fled, and all projects of laws were abandoned.[600]

In the presence of these sanguinary collisions, the elections of ædiles and quæstors could not take place; moreover, Milo and Sextius, from feelings of personal vengeance, prevented the Consul Q. Metellus from convoking the comitia. As soon as the consul named a day of assembly, the two tribunes declared immediately that _they were observing the sky_; and, for fear that this cause of adjournment might not be sufficient, Milo established himself in the Campus Martius with his followers in arms. Metellus tried to hold the comitia by surprise,[601] and proceeded by night to the Campus Martius through bye streets; but he was well watched. Before he arrived at the place, he was met and recognised by Milo, who signified to him, in virtue of his tribunitial power, the _obnunciation_, that is, the declaration of a religious obstacle to the holding of the popular assemblies.[602] Thus ended the year 697.

During these inglorious struggles, in which both parties dishonoured themselves by acts of violence, Cæsar had, in two campaigns, saved Italy from the invasion of the barbarians, and vanquished the most warlike peoples of Gaul. Thus, at Rome, venality and anarchy prevailed; with the army, devotedness and glory. Then, as at certain epochs of our own revolution, we may say that the national honour had taken refuge under the flag.