HKB
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:--
It was in the month of March that, according to custom, the retiring consuls took possession of the government of provinces.[808] It is, consequently, very probable that the law of Vatinius, published, as we have seen, in 695, was voted towards the latter days of the month of February in that same year, and that the proconsulship given to Cæsar was to begin from the day of the promulgation of that law. Nothing would have prevented him, indeed, from shortening the time of his magistracy, and seizing, before the termination of his curule functions, the military command or imperium, as Crassus did in 699, who started for Syria without waiting for the end of his consulship. Supposing, then, which is not impossible, that the whole year of Cæsar’s consulship was included in his proconsulship,[809] the five first years of his command would date from 695, and end on the 1st of January, 700. The oration on the Consular Provinces proves that it was so understood. The time when it was pronounced (July or August, 698) was that of the assignment of the provinces destined for the consuls who were to quit office eighteen months after--that is, in 700--and when the question of superseding Cæsar was agitated. The first quinquennium of his command terminated, therefore, in December, 699, and, consequently, the second in December, 704. Such was the system of the Senate, naturally much inclined to shorten the duration of the proconsulship of Gaul.[810] Accordingly, Hirtius informs us that, in 703, the Gauls knew that Cæsar had but one summer, that of 704, to pass in Gaul.[811] Dio Cassius says similarly that Cæsar’s power was to end with the year 704.[812] According to Appian, the Consul Claudius Marcellus proposed, at the beginning of 704, to name a successor to Cæsar, whose powers were on the eve of expiring.[813] On the other hand, Cicero relates in one of his letters that Pompey seemed to be of the same opinion as the Senate, to require the return of the proconsul on the Ides of the November of 704. At the end of that same year, the great orator expresses, in the following terms, his own opinion on the subject of the claim raised by Cæsar to dispensation from coming to Rome to solicit the consulship: “What, then? must we have regard for a man who will keep his army after the day fixed by the law?”[814] Some time afterwards, apostrophising Cæsar in a letter to Atticus,[815] he exclaims: “You have kept, during ten years, a province of which you have procured the continuance, not by the sovereign will of the Senate, but by your intrigues and your acts of violence. You have overpassed the term fixed, by your ambition, and not by the law.... You retain your army longer than the people has ordained and than it is the people’s will.” On another hand, a passage of Suetonius says, in a very formal manner, that Cæsar intended to offer himself as candidate in 705, to exercise the consulship in 706, when he would have completed the time of his proconsulship.[816] Lastly the Senate so evidently regards the beginning of the year 705 as the obligatory termination of Cæsar’s command, that, in the month of January, it declares him the enemy of the Republic, because he is still at the head of his soldiers, and decrees extreme measures against him.[817]