It was in connection with this purpose that there first arose, apparently, the idea of conferring on Cæsar the title of king. It was said that an oracle of the Sibylline Books had declared that only a king could get the better of the Parthians in war. Such a designation was especially antagonistic to Roman political principles; personal rule was tolerated, but not divine right by family descent. Some preparations had been made for the introduction of this alien conception by the act of the Senate, according to which the title “Imperator,” associated directly with the name of Cæsar, should pass to his legal heir. The road to a succession being now marked out, the whole question of the title could not long be left undecided. Imperator was locally understood, but made no claim on subject races. To test popular feeling, Marcus Antonius offered the Imperator a diadem, the insignia of royalty. This was refused, but it was noted that the offer did not call forth the enthusiastic response that was anticipated, nor was Cæsar’s rejection of the symbol openly deplored. Still, the desire for some accommodation with the terms of the oracle was not abandoned. It seemed possible that in Rome Cæsar might bow to public opinion by employing only the title of Imperator, while in the provinces he could exercise royal powers and use the royal title. It was supposed that some arrangement of this sort would be made by a regular decree before he set out for the Parthian campaign. Opposition was bound to develop at this point from the convinced republicans in the Senate; they were strongly represented there, and Cæsar was responsible for their presence. He had gathered about him men of both parties, making a special effort by his generosity to win over some of the most convinced of the senatorial partisans who had followed Pompeius and had fought the victor to the end of the African campaign. But even Cæsar’s own appointees and adherents were by no means reconciled to the program which would openly do away with the republic; they wished it still to exist as an institution, and they had no wish to provide for the continuance of personal rule beyond the terms of Cæsar’s own life. The party of Pompeius was by no means inactive; they wrote freely as apologists for their own side, and they did not hesitate in their intrigues to hold up Cæsar as an ambitious autocrat guilty of cruelty on the battlefield, and now that peace was restored, using his claims to mask his aim to establish a tyranny. These views were found among the Senators. Cæsar either thought he was unassailable or reckoned on their gratitude as an obstacle which would separate their theory and their practice. This attitude was only one example of a general want of alertness that seemed to characterize the conqueror after the close of the Spanish campaign.