Caesar's First Triumvirate and consulship of 59 BC: HSC Ancient History

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to explain how Caesar, Pompey and Crassus formed an informal alliance in 60 BC to overcome separate blockages each faced in the Senate, how the marriage of Pompey to Caesar's daughter Julia cemented that pact, and how Caesar used his consulship of 59 BC (the agrarian laws, the ratification of Pompey's eastern settlement, tax relief for Crassus's publicani, and the lex Vatinia) to deliver on the deal, while also securing further allies through the tribune Clodius and his own marriage to Calpurnia.

The answer

Three blocked men, one deal: the formation of the pact in 60 BC

By 60 BC, three of Rome's most powerful men each had a demand the Senate had refused.

Pompey had returned from the East in 62 BC after defeating Mithridates VI of Pontus and reorganising the Roman provinces and client kingdoms there, and had disbanded his army as a show of good faith. The Senate, led by his old rival Lucullus and by Cato, refused for about three years to ratify his eastern settlement (the "Acta of Pompey") as a single package, and refused land for his veterans.

Crassus was the patron of the Roman company of publicani who held the tax contract for the province of Asia. Having overbid at auction, they sought a rebate on what they owed the treasury. Cato led the Senate in refusing, calling it an unjustified bailout of greedy contractors.

Caesar returned from his propraetorship in Further Spain in 60 BC wanting both a triumph and the consulship for 59 BC. Roman law required a candidate to register for the consulship in person inside the city, which would forfeit the right to a triumph (held only outside the pomerium, the city boundary); Cato blocked a special exemption. Caesar chose the consulship over the triumph.

Caesar saw that Pompey and Crassus, personal rivals since their stormy joint consulship of 70 BC, both needed a champion in the consulship who could overpower Cato's opposition. He brokered a reconciliation between them and struck an informal three-way pact: his votes and political muscle in exchange for Pompey's veteran support and Crassus's money.

The pact was sealed with a marriage: in 59 BC, during Caesar's consulship, Caesar broke his daughter Julia's existing betrothal to Quintus Servilius Caepio and married her to Pompey instead. By Plutarch's account the marriage, though arranged, became a genuine and affectionate one, giving the alliance a personal bond alongside its political and financial one.

The consulship of 59 BC: the agrarian law and Bibulus

Caesar and Bibulus, an optimate opposed to the pact, were elected consuls for 59 BC. Caesar dominated from the outset.

His first major bill, the lex Julia agraria, distributed public land to Pompey's veterans and to poorer urban citizens with three or more children, funded initially by state purchase using the wealth Pompey had brought back from the East. A second, harsher bill went further, dividing the ager Campanus, a large tract of profitable public land near Capua that earlier agrarian laws had deliberately left untouched because its rents helped fund the treasury. A commission of twenty (the vigintiviri) administered the distribution; Caesar pointedly declined a place on it himself, to appear less self-interested.

Cato filibustered the debate by speaking through an entire day. Caesar had him arrested and marched toward prison; when the Senate rose as a body and followed Cato out in protest, the backlash forced Caesar to have him quietly released.

Bibulus tried to block the bill in person and was driven from the Forum by Caesar's supporters, with his fasces (the bundles carried by his lictors, symbolising his authority) broken. He then withdrew to his house for the rest of the year and announced he was "watching the skies" (obnuntiatio) for unfavourable religious omens, a technicality that, if respected, would have invalidated any business conducted on the remaining assembly days.

Caesar and his allies simply ignored the announcement and kept legislating. The result was open mockery: contemporaries began joking, as Suetonius records (Divus Julius 20), that the year's business was done not in the consulship of "Bibulus and Caesar" but of "Julius and Caesar," naming the same man twice.

Delivering for Pompey and Crassus

Once the agrarian law had removed the main obstacle to majority support, Caesar used the same direct-to-the-people method to deliver the rest of the pact's demands in a single year.

For Pompey

the Senate's three-year refusal to ratify his eastern settlement was overridden; his arrangements for Pontus, Syria, Judaea and the client kingdoms were confirmed as a single package, and his veterans received their land under the same agrarian law.

For Crassus

the publicani who held the Asian tax contract received a one-third reduction in the sum owed to the treasury, resolving the dispute Cato had blocked for years.

For Caesar himself

the tribune Publius Vatinius put a law, the lex Vatinia, directly to the tribal assembly rather than letting the Senate fix Caesar's province in the ordinary way. It granted Caesar the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum for an unprecedented five years with an initial three legions. When the governor-designate of neighbouring Transalpine Gaul, Metellus Celer, died suddenly, the Senate itself, fearing the People would simply grant that province too if it did not act first, added Transalpine Gaul and a fourth legion by senatorial decree. The lex Sempronia of 123 BC had required the Senate to fix consular provinces before elections precisely to stop this kind of manipulation; Caesar's command sidestepped it entirely.

Securing further allies: Clodius and Calpurnia

Caesar used his consulship to build support beyond the pact itself.

Publius Clodius Pulcher, a patrician of the Claudian family and a bitter personal enemy of Cicero, wanted to stand for the tribunate of the plebs, an office open only to plebeians. Caesar, as pontifex maximus, presided over the procedure (a lex curiata) that let a plebeian family adopt Clodius, transferring him out of the patrician order. Elected tribune for 58 BC, Clodius repaid the favour immediately: he passed a law driving Cicero into exile and had Cato sent out of Rome to annex Cyprus, removing two of the pact's sharpest critics.

Calpurnia. In December 62 BC, Caesar had divorced his third wife, Pompeia, after the Bona Dea scandal (a religious festival for women only, which a man, Clodius, had allegedly infiltrated in disguise); Caesar had no evidence against Pompeia personally but divorced her anyway, reportedly saying "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion." In 59 BC he married his fourth wife, Calpurnia, daughter of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. Piso was elected consul for 58 BC, giving Caesar a reliable ally in the senior magistracy for the year after his own.

The alliance at a glance

Historiography

Adrian Goldsworthy (Caesar: The Life of a Colossus, 2006) treats the pact as pragmatic self-interest rather than the opening move of a plan for one-man rule: each man solved an immediate, unrelated problem, and the arrangement was informal and unstable from the start.

Erich Gruen (The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, 1974) cautions against reading the pact as a coherent "conspiracy" against the constitution, arguing that traditional Republican institutions and factional politics continued to operate around and after it.

Ronald Syme (The Roman Revolution, 1939) and Christian Meier (Caesar, 1982) place the events of 60-59 BC within a longer-run crisis of the Republic, in which personal alliances backed by armies and money had become more decisive than the Senate's authority, whatever any individual's immediate intentions.

How to read a source on this topic

Section III sources on this dot point typically include reconstructed inscriptions, edicts, letters or graffiti referring to the pact, the agrarian law, Bibulus's obstruction, or the lex Vatinia. Three reading habits.

First, separate ancient WRITTEN evidence (Suetonius, Plutarch, Cassius Dio, Appian, Cicero's letters) from later interpretation. Cicero's letters to Atticus from 59 BC are contemporary and give elite reaction as it happened; Suetonius and Plutarch wrote more than a century later, drawing on earlier accounts now lost.

Second, watch for perspective. Cicero disliked the pact and used the loaded word "regnum" (kingship); Caesar's own later writings (the Bellum Gallicum, begun after 58 BC) say almost nothing about 59 BC at all, since it did not suit the image he wanted to project.

Third, treat satirical or informal sources (Varro's Tricaranus, graffiti, jokes recorded by Suetonius) as evidence of PERCEPTION, not as a neutral record of fact; use them alongside more securely dated evidence rather than instead of it.