The Historians' History of the World 05

Cæsar’s suspension from his prætorship had only served to attach his party more closely to him; an incident soon occurred by which it was hoped to sow discord between them. P. Clodius, the corrupt accuser of Catiline, a turbulent intriguer like so many members of his house, had ingratiated himself with the people by his popular manners. This beardless youth, already alike notorious for his debts and his gallantries, had introduced himself into Cæsar’s house in female attire during the celebration of the rites of the Bona Dea, which should have been studiously guarded from male intrusion. A servant-maid discovered him and uttered a cry of alarm; the mysteries were hastily veiled and the intruder expelled; but the assembled matrons rushing hastily home revealed each to her husband the scandal and the sin. The nobles affected grave alarm; the pontiffs were summoned and consulted, and the people duly informed of the insult offered to the deity. As chief of the sacred college, Cæsar could not refrain from lending himself to the general clamour; but his position was delicate. On the one hand the presumed delinquent was an instrument of his own policy, while on the other his own honour and that of his wife Pompeia were compromised by the offence.[104] He disappointed everybody. He divorced his wife, not because she was guilty, but because “the wife of Cæsar,” as he said, “should be above suspicion.” But he refused to countenance the measures which the consuls took, by direction of the senate, for the conviction of the reputed culprit; and it may be suspected that the money with which Clodius bribed his judges was a loan negotiated with Crassus by Cæsar himself. Cicero for his part had been lukewarm in an affair, the barefaced hypocrisy of which he was perhaps too honourable to countenance; but, urged by his wife Terentia, a violent woman who meddled much in his affairs, and was jealous at the moment of a sister of the culprit, he clearly disproved his allegation of absence from the city, and thus embroiled himself, to no purpose, with an able and unscrupulous enemy. The senate believed their cause gained; the proofs indeed were decisive, and they had assigned at their own request a military guard to the judges to protect them from the anticipated violence of a Clodian mob; but to their consternation, on opening the urns, the votes for an acquittal were found to be thirty-one opposed to twenty-five. “You only demanded a guard, then,” exclaimed Catulus with bitter irony, “to secure the money you were to receive.” Cicero attributed to Crassus the scandal of this perversion of justice; the nobles sneered at the corruption of the knights, and the gulf which separated the two orders yawned more widely than ever.

THE RETURN OF POMPEY

[62-61 B.C.]