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Updated: June 6, 2025
Senators and the sons of senators; the heirs of the names and fortunes of the ancient Roman families; the leaders of society in Roman saloons, and the chiefs of the political party of the optimates in the Curia and Forum, were here present on the field; representatives in person and in principle of the traditions of Sylla, brought face to face with the representative of Marius.
I wish very much, and have long wished, to visit Alexandria, and at the same time to get away from here, where people are tired of me, and return when they have begun to feel my loss but at such a time and at the bidding of such statesmen! "I fear to face the men of Troy And Trojan matrons with their trailing robes." For what would my friends the Optimates say if there are such persons left?
Pompey had been nominally Proconsul in Spain since the year of his second Consulship, conjointly with Crassus, B.C. 55, but had remained in Rome and had taken upon himself the management of Roman affairs, considering himself to be the master of the irregular powers which the Triumvirate had created; and of this party was also Cicero, with Cato, Bibulus, Brutus, and all those who were proud to call themselves "optimates."
The support of the nobles was not a certainty. There had been a taint of popularity in some of Cicero's utterances, and the writer urges him to convince the consulars that he was at one with the Optimates, while at the same time aiming at the conciliation of the equestrian order. This was, in fact, to be Cicero's political position in the future.
How far personal ambition and how far a nobler ideal animated Saturninus no man can say. Those who condemn him must condemn Cromwell too. For the moment the power of the optimates seemed restored. The spectre of monarchy had made the men of riches coalesce with their old rivals the men of rank; and the mob, ungrateful for an unexecuted corn-law, chafed at Italian pretensions.
It was he who was called by the Optimates the "private dictator"; it was before him that Cicero prostrated himself in vain; against him were directed the sharpest sarcasms in the wall-placards of Bibulus, and the most envenomed arrows of the talk in the saloons of the opposition. This was only to be expected.
Having thus proved that, so far as he was concerned, he nourished no resentment against the persons of the optimates, or against their principles, so far as they were consistent with the future welfare of the Roman State, Caesar set himself again to the reorganization of the administration.
Most of the Optimates, indeed, came as emigrants of quality with great pretensions and small desire for fighting, so that they had to listen to bitter language from Sulla himself regarding the noble lords who wished to have themselves preserved for the good of the state and could not even be brought to arm their slaves.
A new sort of nobility, made up of both patricians and plebeians, whose families had longest held public offices, gradually arose. These were the optimates. The Senate became the principal executive body. It was recruited by the censors, principally from those who had held high stations and were upwards of thirty years old. One censor was required to be a plebeian.
In the following year the consulship was given to L. Aemilius Paulus who was chosen by the upper class, the Optimates and C. Terentius Varro, who was elected by the popular party for the purpose of taking the offensive. Varro precipitated a battle at Cannae, in Apulia, where the Romans suffered the most terrible defeat they had ever experienced.
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