impressing the body of the Senate with his sweet reasonableness. From now on, however, he showed
how little he could be deflected from his course by shame or the pressure of public opinion. He affixed
to the bill a clause, associated with Saturninus, that required the senators to swear individually to uphold
it. Pompey and Crassus were induced to speak openly in its support and to promise to meet force with
force. Against Optimate tribunes and his consular colleague, Caesar invoked the violence of the mob and
Pompey's veterans. After the bill was passed, Caesar took all of his subsequent proposals directly to the
people. His other bills ratifying Pompey's eastern settlement, granting a concession to the tax-farmers,
recognizing the Egyptian king (who paid handsomely for the privilege), were passed without regard to
opposition. Bibulus had resort to religious obstruction of an unorthodox kind and on an unprecedented
scale: from his house he observed bad omens every day.
The intense opposition Caesar faced in passing measures that were addressed to real problems arose
from fear of the political power he would thereby acquire with the plebs, with the veterans, with the
equites, and with foreign potentates. Worse was still to come. The tribune Vatinius secured for him from
the people a five-year command in Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum: the first would enable him to keep a
threatening eye on Rome when not on campaign, while the second offered him the opportunity for glory
in forging the land route through the Balkans that Pompey's expansion of the eastern Empire now made
imperative. In the end, politics interfered with the rational expansion of Rome, and Caesar extended the
Empire north to the Channel and beyond. For his legislation, including the lex Vatinia, was vulnerable to
subsequent attack because of the way it had been passed, and Caesar was therefore eager to gain the
additional province of Gaul from the Senate. This he achieved through Pompey, whose continued
loyalty he had secured through a marriage alliance.
Caesar was well aware, however, that Pompey was an unreliable ally. Dependence on a junior, though it
had achieved its end, seemed to Pompey a humiliating position, which the scurrilous edicts of Bibulus
and the growing unpopularity of the three only aggravated. As time rendered less vulnerable what he had
gained from Caesar, his hankering for respectability, already demonstrated in 62, would reassert itself.
But for a while the malice of his enemies made him cling to the alliance which was, in fact, renewed in
56, just as Cato's brother-in-law was about to stand for the consulship. The presence of Caesar's troops
on leave in Rome ensured the election of Pompey and Crassus instead, and they promptly renewed
Caesar's command in both Gauls and secured for themselves the control of Spain and Syria for five years.