as the senate refused
him permission to announce himself as a candidate for the consular
election in absence, he without hesitation abandoned the honour
of the triumph. For years the democracy had striven to raise
one of its partisans to the possession of the supreme magistracy,
that by way of this bridge it might attain a military power of its own.
It had long been clear to discerning men of all shades that the strife
of parties could not be settled by civil conflict, but only
by military power; but the course of the coalition between
the democracy and the powerful military chiefs, through which the rule
of the senate had been terminated, showed with inexorable clearness
that every such alliance ultimately issued in a subordination
of the civil under the military elements, and that the popular party,
if it would really rule, must not ally itself with generals
properly foreign and even hostile to it, but must make generals
of its own leaders themselves. The attempts made with this view
to carry the election of Catilina as consul, and to gain a military
support in Spain or Egypt, had failed; now a possibility presented
itself of procuring for their most important man the consulship
and the consular province in the usual constitutional way,
and of rendering themselves independent of their dubious and dangerous
ally Pompeius by the establishment, if we may so speak, of a home
power in their own democratic household.

Second Coalition of Pompeius, Crassus, and Caesar

But the more the democracy could not but desire to open up
for itself this path, which offered not so much the most favourable
as the only prospect of real successes, the more certainly it
might reckon on the resolute resistance of its political opponents.
Everything depended on whom it found opposed to it in this matter.
The aristocracy isolated was not formidable; but it had just been
rendered evident in the Catilinarian affair that it could certainly
still exert some influence, where it was more or less openly
supported by the men of material interests and by the adherents
of Pompeius. It had several times frustrated Catilina's candidature
for the consulship, and that it would attempt the like against
Caesar was sufficiently certain. But, even though Caesar should
perhaps be chosen in spite of it, his election alone did not suffice.
He needed at least some years of undisturbed working out of Italy,
in order to gain a firm military position; and the n