It was essential for Cæsar to unite Pompey, who was wanting in firmness of character, more closely with his destinies; he gave him in marriage his daughter Julia, a young woman of twenty-three years of age, richly endowed with graces and intelligence, who had already been affianced to Servilius Cæpio. To compensate the latter, Pompey promised him his own daughter, though she also was engaged to another, to Faustus, the son of Sylla. Soon afterwards Cæsar espoused Calpurnia, the daughter of Lucius Piso.[1099] Cato protested energetically against these marriages, which he qualified as disgraceful traffics with the common weal.[1100] The nobles, and especially the two Curios, made themselves the echoes of this reprobation. Their party, nevertheless, did not neglect to strengthen themselves by such alliances. Doubtless, when Cato gave his daughter to Bibulus, it was for a political motive; and when he ceded his own wife to Hortensius,[1101] although the mother of three children, to take her back again when enriched by the death of her last husband, there was also an interest hardly honourable, which Cæsar subsequently unveiled in a book entitled _Anti-Cato_.[1102] The first care of the new consul was to establish the practice of publishing daily the acts of the Senate and those of the people, in order that public opinion might bear with all its weight upon the resolutions of the conscript fathers, whose deliberations had previously been often secret.[1103] The initiative taken by Cæsar from the commencement of his consulship, in questioning the senators on the projects of laws, is an evidence that he had the fasces before Bibulus. We know, in fact, that the consuls enjoyed this honour alternately for a month, and it was in the period when they were invested with the signs distinctive of power that they were permitted to ask the advice of the senators.[1104] [Sidenote: Agrarian Laws.] II. He proposed next, in the month of January, an agrarian law founded upon wise principles, and which respected all legitimate rights. The following were its principal provisions:-- Partition of all the free part of the _ager publicus_, except that of Campania and that of Volaterræ; the first excepted originally on account of its great fertility,[1105] and the second guaranteed to all those who had got it into their possession.[1106]--In case of insufficiency of territory, new acquisitions, by means either of money coming from Pompey’s conquests, or from the overplus of the public revenues.--Prohibition of all appropriation by force.--The nomination of twenty commissioners to preside at the distribution of the lands, with exclusion of the author of the proposal.--Estimate of private lands for sale, made according to the declaration at the last census, and not according to the valuation of the commissioners.--Obligation upon each senator to swear obedience to the law, and to engage never to propose anything contrary to it.