These cold-hearted
friends were to be tried and punished according to the degree of their
criminality. Cicero was the person pointed at in the last division.
Cicero's clear judgment had shown him too clearly what was likely to be
the result of a campaign conducted as he found it on his arrival, and he
had spoken his thoughts with sarcastic freedom. The noble lords came next
to a quarrel among themselves as to how the spoils of Caesar were to be
divided. Domitius Ahenobarbus, Lentulus Spinther, and Scipio were unable
to determine which of them was to succeed Caesar as Pontifex Maximus, and
which was to have his palace and gardens in Rome. The Roman oligarchy were
true to their character to the eve of their ruin. It was they, with their
idle luxury, their hunger for lands and office and preferment, who had
brought all this misery upon their country; and standing, as it were, at
the very bar of judgment, with the sentence of destruction about to be
pronounced upon them, their thoughts were still bent upon how to secure
the largest share of plunder for themselves.
The battle of Pharsalia was not the most severe, still less was it the
last, action of the war. But it acquired a special place in history,
because it was a battle fought by the Roman aristocracy in their own
persons in defence of their own supremacy.
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