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.
Another weapon which he used freely was his unlimited right of veto as tribune. As early as April Caelius appreciated how successful these tactics would be, and he saw the dilemma in which they would put the Conservatives, for he writes to Cicero: "This is what I have to tell you: if they put pressure at every point on Curio, Caesar will defend his right to exercise the veto; if, as seems likely, they shrink [from overruling him], Caesar will stay [in his province] as long as he likes." The veto power was the weapon which he used against the senate at the meeting of that body on the first of December, to which reference has already been made. The elections in July had gone against Caesar. Two Conservatives had been returned as consuls. In the autumn the senate had found legal means of depriving Caesar of two of his legions. Talk of a compromise was dying down. Pompey, who had been desperately ill in the spring, had regained his strength. He had been exasperated by the savage attacks of Curio. Sensational stories of the movements of Caesar's troops in the North were whispered in the forum, and increased the tension. In the autumn, for instance, Caesar had occasion to pay a visit to the towns in northern Italy to thank them for their support of Mark Antony, his candidate for the tribunate, and the wild rumor flew to Rome that he had advanced four legions to Placentia,[137] that his march on the city had begun, and tumult and confusion followed. It was in these circumstances that the consul Marcellus moved in the senate that successors be sent to take over Caesar's provinces, but the motion was blocked by the veto of Curio, whereupon the consul cried out: "If I am prevented by the vote of the senate from taking steps for the public safety, I will take such steps on my own responsibility as consul." After saying this he darted out of the senate and proceeded to the suburbs with his colleague, where he presented a sword to Pompey, and said: "My colleague and I command you to march against Caesar in behalf of your country, and we give you for this purpose the army now at Capua, or in any other part of Italy, and whatever additional forces you choose to levy."[138] Curio had accomplished his purpose. He had shown that Pompey as well as Caesar was a menace to the state; he had prevented Caesar's recall; he had shown Antony, who was to succeed him in the tribunate, how to exasperate the senate into using coercive measures against his sacrosanct person as tribune and thus justify Caesar's course in the war, and he had goaded the Conservatives into taking the first overt step in the war by commissioning Pompey to begin a campaign against Caesar without any authorization from the senate or the people.
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 close of it Caesar gave him an independent commission for the occupation of Sicily and northern Africa. No more important command could have been given him, for Sicily and Africa were the granaries of Rome, and if the Pompeians continued to hold them, the Caesarians in Italy might be starved into submission. To this ill-fated campaign Caesar devotes the latter half of the second book of his Civil War. In the beginning of his account of it he remarks: "Showing at the outset a total contempt for the military strength of his opponent, Publius Attius Varus, Curio crossed over from Sicily, accompanied by only two of the four legions originally given him by Caesar, and by only five hundred cavalry."[142] The estimate which Caelius had made of him was true, after all, at least in military affairs. He was bold and impetuous, and lacked a settled policy. Where daring and rapidity of movement could accomplish his purpose, he succeeded, but he lacked patience in finding out the size and disposition of the enemy's forces and calmness of judgment in comparing his own strength with that of his foe. It was this weakness in his character as a military leader which led him to join battle with Varus and Juba's lieutenant, Saburra, without learning beforehand, as he might have done, that Juba, with a large army, was encamped not six miles in the rear of Saburra. Curio's men were surrounded by the enemy and cut down as they stood. His staff begged him to seek safety in flight, but, as Caesar writes,[143] "He answered without hesitation that, having lost the army which Caesar had entrusted to his charge, he would never return to look him in the face, and with that answer he died fighting."