vengeance on
him. Caesar would have saved him by taking him with him to Gaul, as well
as his brother Quintus, who was one of his adjutants; but Cicero
refused. Caesar went off to Gaul the year after his consulship (58);
Pompeius and Crassus were left masters in Rome.

There were at the time incessant disorders in the city. The strife of
parties waxed bitter and furious. Fights between different political
clubs were of nightly occurrence. The ingenious Clodius had reorganized
the old associations of the workers into guilds of a more or less
political kind, and thus built up a machinery in every quarter of the
city which he handled with great adroitness at election times. Moreover,
he organized something like a voters' army of slaves and freedmen, which
turned out on his instructions, and lived on the free corn given out by
the State. Pompeius did nothing to cope with this state of things. He
fell, in fact, into a strange condition of indolence, and took hardly
any part in public affairs. The news of Caesar's victories in Gaul did
not rouse him, though Caesar's popularity increased daily and his own
declined.

Pompeius's sloth at this period is sometimes put down to his extreme
domestic happiness. Julia, his new wife, was but half his age, three and
twenty. She possessed a full measure of the irresistible charm of her
father; so long as she lived the bond between the Triumvirs was
unshakeable. But her husband's apparent indifference to public affairs
was due, in the main, to another reason; the one which explains so much
in Pompeius's action and inaction both at this time and later. He stood
aloof because he did not know what to do. The political tangle had
become a knot that must be cut. Pompeius was not the man to cut knots.
He let things slide.

[Illustration: A ROMAN VILLA ON THE COAST
Notice the roof garden]

Disorder grew and nothing was done to stop it. The Senate, alarmed by
Caesar's growing popularity--a fifteen days' festival was held in honour
of his victories in Gaul--began to attack his new land and other laws.
Pompeius did not trouble to defend them. Cicero had come back from
banishment and made alarmist speeches declaring that Caesar was aiming
at bringing the Republic to an end. Pompeius and Crassus quarrelled
again. Yet when Caesar called his friends to meet him at Lucca, where he
had gone into winter quarters (56), hardly any one in Rome refused to
go. Pompeius, despite his growing jealousy and