HKB
Dio Cassius informs us, Pompey did not dare to submit the difference to the people, knowing well that, if the people were taken for judge, Cæsar would gain the day.[804]
[Sidenote: The Question of Right between the Senate and Cæsar.]
V. It is here the place to examine at what period the power of Cæsar expired, and what was the pretext of the conflict which rose between him and the Senate.
Learned historians have long had this subject under consideration; they have devoted themselves to the most profound researches, and to the most ingenious suppositions, still without arriving at a completely satisfactory result,[805] which ought not to surprise us, inasmuch as Cicero himself found the question obscure.[806]
In virtue of a law of C. Sempronius Gracchus, named lex Sempronia, it had been decided that the Senate should designate, before the election of the consuls, the provinces they were to administer after quitting office. When Cæsar and Bibulus were elected, instead of provinces, the inspection of the public ways was given to them; but Cæsar, unwilling to suffer this affront, obtained, by a plebiscitum, on the motion of Vatinius, the government of Cisalpine Gaul for five years; the Senate added to it Transalpine Gaul, which then formed a separate province independent of the other.[807] In 699, the law Trebonia prolonged, for five more years, Cæsar’s command in Gaul. This command was therefore to last ten years; and, since Cæsar only entered upon his proconsular functions at the beginning of the year 696, it seems natural to infer that these ten years should reach to the 1st of January, 706. We, nevertheless, see that, at the end of 704, the Senate regarded Cæsar’s power as at an end. We then ask, on what ground that assembly supported the pretence that the ten years devolved to the proconsul were completed at that date. We consider the following to be the explanation:--