Tribunician protection and veto · 护民官保护与否决
reported-in-source
Caesar presents the threatened tribunes and their flight as central to the crisis; Russell explains the office’s sacrosanctity, auxilium and veto in political practice.
Evidence limit: Caesar’s defence of tribunician rights is a partisan account of the 49 crisis, not a judicial ruling on every action.
bc 1.5
Julius Caesar. The Civil Wars. Peskett, Arthur George, translator. London, UK: William Heinemann; New York, NY, 1914.
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For these reasons everything is done in hurry and confusion. Caesar’s friends are allowed no time to inform him, nor are the tribunes given any opportunity of protesting against the peril that threatened them, nor even of retaining, by the exercise of their veto, the most fundamental of their rights, which L. Sulla had left them, but within the limit of seven days they are compelled to take measures for their own safety, whereas the most turbulent of the tribunes in earlier times had been wont to regard with apprehension the conclusion of at least eight months of administration. Recourse is had to that extreme and ultimate decree of the senate which had never previously been resorted to except when the city was at the point of destruction and all despaired of safety through the audacity of malefactors: The consuls, the praetors, the tribunes, and all the proconsular who are near the city shall take measures that the state incur no harm. These resolutions are recorded by decree of the senate on January 7. So on the first five days on which a meeting of the senate could be held after the date on which Lentulus entered on his consulship, except two election days, decrees of the severest and harshest character are passed affecting Caesar’s imperial command and those highly important officials, the tribunes of the people. The tribunes at once flee from the city and betake themselves to Caesar. He was at that time at Ravenna and was awaiting a reply to his very lenient demands, in the hope that by some sense of equity a peaceable conclusion might be reached.
Context before
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All these speakers encounter opposition and are confronted with speeches from the consul, from Scipio, and from Cato. Cato is goaded on by his old quarrels with Caesar and vexation at his defeat. Lentulus is moved by the greatness of his debts, by the prospect of a military command and a province, and by the lavish bribes of rulers claiming the title of king, and boasts among his friends that he will prove a second Sulla to whom shall fall the supreme command. Scipio is stimulated by the same hope of a province and of armies, which he thinks that kinship will entitle him to share with Pompeius; also by the dread of the law courts, by the flattery of certain powerful men who had then great influence in public affairs and in the law courts, and by his own and their ostentatious character. Pompeius, urged on by Caesar’s enemies and by his desire that no one should be on the same level of authority with himself, had completely withdrawn himself from Caesar’s friendship and become reconciled with their common enemies, most of whom he had himself imposed upon Caesar at the time of their connexion by marriage. Stirred, too, by the discredit attaching to his diversion of two legions from their route by Asia and Syria and his appropriation of them for his own power and supremacy, he was eager that the issue should be brought to the arbitrament of war.
Context after
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On the following days the senate meets outside the city. Pompeius carries out the policy which he had indicated by the mouth of Scipio. He commends the manly consistency of the senate, and sets forth the strength of his forces, showing that he has ten legions ready to hand, and, moreover, that he had ascertained for certain that the troops were ill-disposed to Caesar and could not be persuaded to defend or follow him. Other matters are at once referred to the senate—that a levy should be held throughout Italy, that Faustus Sulla should he at once sent into Mauritania, and that a grant of money should be made to Pompeius from the treasury. A motion is also proposed that King Juba should be styled Ally and Friend. But Marcellus refuses to allow this for the present. The tribune Philippus vetoes the motion about Faustus. On the other matters decrees of the senate are recorded in writing. The provinces, two consular, the rest praetorian, are decreed to private persons. Syria falls to Scipio, Gallia to L. Domitius; Philippus and Cotta are passed over by private arrangement, nor are their lots cast into the urn. To the rest of the provinces praetors are sent. Nor do they wait, as had been the habit in previous years, for a motion to be brought before the people about their imperial command; but, wearing the scarlet military cloak, they leave Rome after offering the usual vows. The consuls quit the city, a thing which had never previously happened, and private persons have lictors in the city and the Capitol, contrary to all the precedents of the past. Levies are held throughout Italy, arms are requisitioned, sums of money are exacted from the municipal towns and carried off from the temples, and all divine and human rights are thrown into confusion.
Amy Russell, “The Tribunate of the Plebs: Between Compromise and Revolution,” in Arena and Prag (2022), p. 260. Publisher record