What should have been a pleasant exercise equipping Longhaired Gaul with the trappings of a Roman province had instead been dogged by the growing certainty that Caesar, who had done so much for Rome, was not going to be allowed to don his laurels in peace. What Pompey the Great had gotten away with all his life was not to be accorded to Caesar, thanks to a maleficent little group of senators who called themselves the boni the "good men" and had vowed to accord nothing to Caesar: to tear Caesar down and ruin him, strike all his laws from the tablets and send him into permanent exile. Led by Bibulus, with that yapping cur Cato working constantly behind the scenes to stiffen their resolve when it wavered, the boni had made Caesar's life a perpetual struggle for survival. Of course he understood every reason why; what he couldn't manage to grasp was the mind-set of the boni, which seemed to him so utterly stupid that it beggared understanding. No use in telling himself, either, that if only he had relented a little in his compulsion to show up their ridiculous inadequacies, they might perhaps have been less determined to tear him down. Caesar had a temper, and Caesar did not suffer fools gladly. Bibulus. He had been the start of it, at Lucullus's siege of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos, thirty-three years ago. Bibulus. So small and so soaked in malice that Caesar had lifted him bodily on to the top of a high closet, laughed at him and made him a figure of fun to their fellows. Lucullus. Lucullus the commander at Mitylene. Who implied that Caesar had obtained a fleet of ships from the decrepit old King of Bithynia by prostituting himself an accusation the boni had revived years later and used in the Forum Romanum as part of their political smear campaign.