Free Julius Caesar by Ernle Bradford

against him. The senators had remembered their duty and had been recalled by Cato to an old Roman sense of what was right. Caesar appealed to the tribunes of the people to use their veto , but none would support him, and there was a riot. Hearing the uproar, some of Cicero’s armed guards who were stationed outside rushed in to see if their master was in danger. “They unsheathed their swords,” says Suetonius, “and threatened Caesar with death unless he ceased his opposition [to the motion].” Most of the senators near him fled from the scene; only a few of his friends huddled round him and covered him protectively with their togas. For the first time in his life Caesar came near to death in the Roman senate, and he was sufficiently impressed by the experience to stay away from the senate house for the rest of the year. He, whose rise had been occasioned by preying on the passions of the Romans, now had a firsthand knowledge of them. It was not an experience any man would ever be likely to forget—unless over a long period of time he had become possessed by overweening arrogance.
     
     

 
    8
     
    The Praetor and a Scandal
     
    DESPITE the tumult with which the senate meeting had ended, Caesar had nevertheless achieved a great deal by his speech urging a life sentence, rather than death, for the conspirators. The people now had him firmly fixed in their minds as a merciful man and, despite his breeding, not one of the hard and implacable aristocrats of the senate. Besides, hardly had the arrested conspirators been executed than some of the senators began to have qualms about what had been done and, after the elections, two of the new tribunes began to speak out against the death sentences. It was as Caesar had foreseen; whatever his motives had been, he had better understood the feelings of the Roman people than such die-hards as Cato. The two men would hate each other all their lives; indeed, Caesar would continue to hate Cato even after the latter’s death. The whole Catiline conspiracy came to an end when Catiline himself fell fighting against the government troops early in 62. His story has been told by the historian Sallust, and he appears in Roman history as a dark and malevolent figure. Whether he was any worse than those who had once supported him and then abandoned him is a matter for doubt.
    Caesar showed his long memory early in January that year when he mounted an attack in the senate on the “most venerated of Romans,” Catulus, for the latter’s neglect in failing to restore the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. The whole story need not concern us here, but it reveals something more of Caesar’s nature: he made a bad enemy. Cato was the next to feel his animosity and, in what seems from this distance in time a storm in the political teacup, Caesar managed to see that he was humiliated and had to take refuge in one of the temples for safety. As praetor, Caesar was always conscious not only of his dignitas, that essential ingredient of the Roman aristocrat’s life, but of the powers that he now enjoyed, and would act sharply in defense of his position. A Roman knight Vettius, who may at one time have been part of the Catiline conspiracy, but who had certainly turned informer and may even have been in the pay of Cicero, produced a long list of others who had been involved in the plot. He gave this to the president of the special court which dealt with such matters, adding that he had other names yet to furnish—and among them was Caesar’s. Another one of the known friends of Cicero, a senator Quintus Curius, said publicly that he had information from Catiline that Caesar was involved. Against Vettius, Caesar had fairly easy redress, denying the accusation in the senate and calling Cicero as a witness that he, Caesar, had early passed on to him all the information that he had acquired about the conspiracy. It was easy, because of Caesar’s distinguished position, to deal with a man like Vettius: