Impending Miliatry Dictatorship of Pompeius

The work of Sulla was thus destroyed; but what the future order of things was to be, was a question raised rather than decided by that destruction.  The coalition, kept together solely by the common object of setting aside the work of restoration, dissolved of itself, if not formally, at any rate in reality, when that object was attained; while the question, to what quarter the preponderance of power was in the first instance to fall, seemed approaching an equally speedy and violent solution.  The armies of Pompeius and Crassus still lay before the gates of the city.  The former had indeed promised to disband his soldiers after his triumph (last day of Dec. 683); but he had at first omitted to do so, in order to let the revolution in the state be completed without hindrance under the pressure which the Spanish army in front of the capital exercised over the city and the senate—­a course, which in like manner applied to the army of Crassus.  This reason now existed no longer; but still the dissolution of the armies was postponed.  In the turn taken by matters it looked as if one of the two generals allied with the democracy would seize the military dictatorship and place oligarchs and democrats in the same chains.  And this one could only be Pompeius.  From the first Crassus had played a subordinate part in the coalition; he had been obliged to propose himself, and owed even his election to the consulship mainly to the proud intercession of Pompeius.  Far the stronger, Pompeius was evidently master of the situation; if he availed himself of it, it seemed as if he could not but become what the instinct of the multitude even now designated him—­the absolute ruler of the mightiest state in the civilized world.  Already the whole mass of the servile crowded around the future monarch.  Already his weaker opponents were seeking their last resource in a new coalition; Crassus, full of old and recent jealousy towards the younger rival who so thoroughly outstripped him, made approaches to the senate and attempted by unprecedented largesses to attach to himself the multitude of the capital—­as if the oligarchy which Crassus himself had helped to break down, and the ever ungrateful multitude, would have been able to afford any protection whatever against the veterans of the Spanish army.  For a moment it seemed as if the armies of Pompeius and Crassus would come to blows before the gates of the capital.

Retirement of Pompeius

But the democrats averted this catastrophe by their sagacity and their pliancy.  For their party too, as well as for the senate and Crassus, it was all-important that Pompeius should not seize the dictatorship; but with a truer discernment of their own weakness and of the character of their powerful opponent their leaders tried the method of conciliation.  Pompeius lacked no condition for grasping at the crown except the first of all—­proper kingly courage.