as a leader and tactician.  What terms Caesar was forced to make to secure his support we do not know.  Gossip said that the price was sixty million sesterces,[134] or more than two and a half million dollars.  He was undoubtedly in great straits.  The immense sums which he had spent in celebrating funeral games in honor of his father had probably left him a bankrupt, and large amounts of money were paid for political services during the last years of the republic.  Naturally proof of the transaction cannot be had, and even Velleius Paterculus, in his savage arraignment of Curio,[135] does not feel convinced of the truth of the story, but the tale is probable.

It was high time for Caesar to provide himself with an agent in Rome.  The month of March was near at hand, when the long-awaited discussion of his provinces would come up in the senate.  His political future, and his rights as a citizen, depended upon his success in blocking the efforts of the senate to take his provinces from him before the end of the year, when he could step from the proconsulship to the consulship.  An interval of even a month in private life between the two offices would be all that his enemies would need for bringing political charges against him that would effect his ruin.  His displacement before the end of the year must be prevented, therefore, at all hazards.  To this task Curio addressed himself, and with surpassing adroitness.  He did not come out at once as Caesar’s champion.  His function was to hold the scales true between Caesar and Pompey, to protect the Commonwealth against the overweening ambition and threatening policy of both men.  He supported the proposal that Caesar should be called upon to surrender his army, but coupled with it the demand that Pompey also should be required to give up his troops and his proconsulship.  The fairness of his plan appealed to the masses, who would not tolerate a favor to Pompey at Caesar’s expense.  It won over even a majority of the senate.  The cleverness of his policy was clearly shown at a critical meeting of the senate in December of the year 50 B.C.  Appian tells us the story:[136] “In the senate the opinion of each member was asked, and Claudius craftily divided the question and took the votes separately, thus:  ‘Shall Pompey be deprived of his command?’ The majority voted against the latter proposition, and it was decreed that successors to Caesar should be sent.  Then Curio put the question whether both should lay down their commands, and twenty-two voted in the negative, while three hundred and seventy went back to the opinion of Curio in order to avoid civil discord.  Then Claudius dismissed the senate, exclaiming:  ‘Enjoy your victory and have Caesar for a master!’” The senate’s action was vetoed, and therefore had no legal value, but it put Caesar and Curio in the right and Pompey’ s partisans in the wrong.

As a part of his policy of defending Caesar by calling attention to the exceptional position and the extra-constitutional course of Pompey, Curio offset the Conservative attacks on Caesar by public speeches fiercely arraigning Pompey for what he had done during his consulship, five years before.  When we recall Curio’s biting wit and sarcasm, and the unpopularity of Pompey’s high-handed methods of that year, we shall appreciate the effectiveness of this flank attack.