In April of 56 BC, Julius Caesar met Marcus Licinius Crassus at Ravenna and Pompey the Great at Luca, modern Lucca in Tuscany, and the three men renewed the First Triumvirate by dividing up Rome's consulships and armies for the next five years.
By the spring of 56 the alliance was close to breaking. Publius Clodius Pulcher's street gangs had made Pompey afraid to walk through Rome, Pompey believed Crassus was backing a plot against his life, and Cicero, just back from exile, moved to reopen Caesar's land law of 59. Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus was running for the consulship of 55 on a promise to take Caesar's legions away. Caesar couldn't enter Rome without losing his command, so he stayed inside his province and invited his partners north. Plutarch and Appian say more than 200 senators followed them there, though those numbers may be exaggerated, and Cicero, our only witness from the time, describes them as two separate meetings.
Over the next year Rome made the deal legal. Cicero gave his speech On the Consular Provinces arguing that Caesar should keep Gaul, the Senate voted to pay Caesar's legions, Pompey and Crassus were elected consuls for 55 under an interrex, the Lex Trebonia gave them Spain and Syria for five years, and the Lex Pompeia Licinia extended Caesar's command by five more. I follow Ronald Syme in reading Luca as the moment Rome's biggest decisions moved outside its institutions, and I give Erich Gruen's case against that reading too, so you can weigh them yourself.
Fall of the Republic series:
Tiberius Gracchus • Marius • The Social War • Sulla • Spartacus • The Men Who Bought the Republic • Pompey • Julius Caesar • The Secret Deal That Ended the Roman Republic (you are here) • The Day Rome's Elections Stopped Mattering • The Last Stand of the Roman Republic • The Ides of March • Cicero • The Pattern: How Republics Really Die
Next: The Day Rome's Elections Stopped Mattering. From the election of 55 BC to 52 BC, the year the Senate made Pompey consul with no colleague at all.
The Money, Borders, Power framework primer is episode 115.
CHAPTERS
00:00 The deal at Luca, April 56 BC
01:42 Welcome back
04:00 How Caesar nearly lost his command
06:08 Clodius, Cicero's exile, and Pompey's grain command
09:07 Egypt, an oracle, and the alliance cracking
11:06 Cicero and Domitius go after Caesar
12:54 Ravenna and Luca: the Senate comes north
15:46 What was decided, and how Cicero backed down
18:59 The laws of 55 BC make the deal legal
20:22 Why Luca changed where Rome's decisions were made
Sources: Cicero, Letters to Friends 1.9 (to Lentulus Spinther), Letters to Atticus 4.5, Letters to His Brother Quintus 2.3 and 2.5, and On the Consular Provinces; Plutarch, Lives of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus; Appian, Civil Wars 2.17; Suetonius, The Deified Julius 24; Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book 39. Modern: Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (1939); Erich Gruen, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (1974).
