[-43-] The ensuing year the Romans had two sets of magistrates, contrary to custom, and a mighty conflict was engendered.  The people of the city had chosen as consuls Caesar and Publius Servilius, together with praetors, and everything else according to law:  the party in Thessalonica had made no such preparations although they had by some accounts about two hundred of the senate and the consuls and had appropriated a small piece of land for divinations to the end that their proceedings might seem to take place under a certain form of law.  Wherefore they regarded the people and the entire city as present there (the reason being that the consuls had not introduced the lex curiata), and they employed those same officials as formerly, only changing their names and calling some proconsuls, others propraetors, and others pro-quaestors.  For they were very careful about ancestral customs even though they had raised their arms against their country and abandoned their native shores, and were anxious to perform all necessary acts not merely with a view to temporary demands or contrary to the exact wording of the ordinances.  It is quite time that nominally these officials ruled the two parties, but in reality it was Pompey and Caesar who were supreme, bearing, for the sake of good repute, the legal titles,—­one that of consul and the other that of proconsul,—­and doing not what the magistrates allowed but whatever they themselves pleased.

[-44-] Under these conditions, with the government divided in twain, Pompey wintered in Thessalonica and did not keep a very careful guard of the coast.  He did not think that Caesar had yet arrived in Italy from Spain, and even if he were there he did not suspect that his rival, in winter, at least, would venture to cross the Ionian sea.  Caesar was in Brundusium, waiting for spring, but when he ascertained that Pompey was some distance off and that Epirus just opposite was rather heedlessly guarded, he seized the opportunity of the war to attack him while in a state of relaxation.  When the winter was about half gone he set out with a portion of his army,—­there were not enough ships to carry them all across at once,—­escaped the attention of Marcus Bibulus to whom the guarding of the sea had been committed, and crossed to the so-called Ceraunian Headlands, a point in the confines of Epirus, near the opening of the Ionian gulf.  Having reached there before it became noised abroad that he would sail at all, he despatched the ships to Brundusium for the rest:  but Bibulus damaged them on the return voyage and actually took some in tow, so that Caesar learned by experience that he had enjoyed a more fortunate than prudent voyage.