Three Men Quietly Agree to Override the Senate
What happened
In 60 BCE, Julius Caesar brokered an informal, unofficial alliance with Pompey and Marcus Licinius Crassus, later called the First Triumvirate, though it held no legal or constitutional status and was arranged privately rather than voted on by any assembly. According to the biographer Suetonius, the three swore a pact to oppose any legislation any one of them disapproved of. Each man had a goal the Senate had been blocking: Pompey needed land grants for his veteran soldiers and ratification of his eastern settlements, blocked for years by the conservative senator Cato the Younger. Crassus, already Rome's wealthiest man, wanted relief for tax-collecting contractors who had overbid on Asian tax contracts and a military command to match Pompey's glory. Caesar, deeply in debt, wanted the consulship of 59 BCE and a substantial military command afterward. As consul, Caesar pushed an agrarian law through the popular assembly rather than the Senate, securing Pompey's veteran land and delivering what Crassus and Caesar himself needed in the same stroke. Caesar then took a five-year command in Gaul, which he used to conquer the region between 58 and 51 BCE.
Why it matters
No law changed and no institution was formally overturned. That is exactly why historians treat the deal itself, not any single vote or riot, as the moment the Republic's checks on individual ambition stopped working. Three men simply agreed in private to get what they each wanted and had the combined wealth, popularity, and military backing to make the Senate's objections irrelevant. The alliance lasted until Crassus's death at Carrhae in 53 BCE broke the balance between Caesar and Pompey, and it was the collapse of that same balance, not a wholly new dispute, that produced the civil war and Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BCE.
How we know
Suetonius's Life of the Deified Julius preserves the description of the private pact and its terms. The specific roadblocks each man faced, Cato's leadership of Senate opposition to Pompey's veteran settlements, Crassus's tax-contract losses, and Caesar's debts and need for a consulship, are corroborated across the ancient biographical tradition, including Plutarch's Lives of Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar, that later historians draw on.
Sources
- Donald L. Wasson, World History Encyclopedia. First Triumvirate · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Part of a timelineAncient Rome30 events · From a legendary fratricide on the Palatine Hill to a teenage emperor's quiet deposition twelve centuries later, told through the battles, plagues, and one bridge-crossing that ended a republic.View all →