Book 3
1
Caesar as dictator presided over the elections, and Julius Caesar and P. Servilius were created consuls, this being the year in which the laws permitted Caesar to hold the consulship. On the conclusion of these proceedings, as credit throughout Italy was somewhat restricted and loans were not being repaid, he decided that arbitrators should be appointed to estimate the value of real and movable property as it had been before the war, and that the creditors should be paid on that basis. He considered that this was the most suitable method at once of removing or diminishing the fear of that general repudiation of debts which is apt to follow war and civil strife, and of maintaining the good faith of the debtors. Moreover, on motions brought before the people by the praetors and tribunes, he restored to their former rights persons who, in those critical times when Pompeius had kept in Rome a detachment of his troops as a bodyguard, had been convicted of bribery under the Pompeian law, and whose trials had been carried through, each in a single day, with one set of judges hearing the evidence and another voting on the issue. As these persons had offered themselves to him at the beginning of the civil war in case he should wish-to use their services in the war, he accounted them as having been actually in his service, since they had placed themselves at his disposal. For he had determined that they ought to be restored by a decision of the popular assembly rather than be supposed to be reinstated by his own act of kindness, his object being that he might not appear either ungrateful in the matter of returning a benefit, or too presumptuous in robbing the popular assembly of its right to confer a favour.
