The news of the unconstitutional step taken by Marcellus and Pompey reached Rome December 19 or 20.  Curio’s work as tribune was done, and on the twenty-first of the month he set out for the North to join his leader.  The senate would be called together by the new consuls on January 1, and since, before the reform in the calendar, December had only twenty-nine days, there were left only eight days for Curio to reach Caesar’s head-quarters, lay the situation before him, and return to the city with his reply.  Ravenna, where Caesar had his head-quarters, was two hundred and forty miles from Rome.  He covered the distance, apparently, in three days, spent perhaps two days with Caesar, and was back in Rome again for the meeting of the senate on the morning of January 1.  Consequently, he travelled at the rate of seventy-five or eighty miles a day, twice the rate of the ordinary Roman courier.

We cannot regret too keenly the fact that we have no account of Curio’s meeting with Caesar, and his recital to Caesar of the course of events in Rome.  In drawing up the document which was prepared at this conference, Caesar must have been largely influenced by the intimate knowledge which Curio had of conditions in the capital, and of the temper of the senate.  It was an ultimatum, and, when Curio presented it to the senate, that body accepted the challenge, and called upon Caesar to lay down his command on a specified date or be declared a public enemy.  Caesar replied by crossing the border of his province and occupying one town after another in northern Italy in rapid succession.  All this had been agreed upon in the meeting between Curio and Caesar, and Velleius Paterculus[139] is probably right in putting the responsibility for the war largely on the shoulders of Curio, who, as he says, brought to naught the fair terms of peace which Caesar was ready to propose and Pompey to accept.  The whole situation points to the conclusion that Caesar did not desire war, and was not prepared for it.  Had he anticipated its immediate outbreak, he would scarcely have let it arise when he had only one legion with him on the border, while his other ten legions were a long distance away.

From the outset Curio took an active part in the war which he had done so much to bring about, and it was an appropriate thing that the closing events in his life should have been recorded for us by his great patron, Caesar, in his narrative of the Civil War.  On the 18th or 19th of January, within ten days of the crossing of the Rubicon, we hear of his being sent with a body of troops to occupy Iguvium,[140] and a month later he is in charge of one of the investing camps before the stronghold of Corfinium.[141] With the fall of Corfinium, on the 21st of February, Caesar’s rapid march southward began, which swept the Pompeians out of Italy within a month and gave Caesar complete control of the peninsula.  In that brilliant campaign Curio undoubtedly took an active part, for at the