– he proposed acceptance, but by this point, Caesar and his partisans were unable to trust Pompey also to hold his end of the bargain and give up his command if Caesar did so first. When two legions were transferred from Caesar's Gallic armies to Italy, on the pretext of use against Parthia (a threat that did not materialise), Caesar's trust in Pompey was shaken again. At the elections, Caesar supported Servius Sulpicius Galba and Lucius Cornelius Lentulus Crus: elected were Gaius Claudius Marcellus (homonymous cousin of the consul of 50 BC) and Crus, who quickly defected from Caesar's cause. As consul Gaius Claudius Marcellus started military preparations with the clear purpose of opposing Caesar's triumphal return and with Caesar unable to trust Pompey or his loose Catonian allies to hold to his word and vice versa, neither side wanted to make concessions in fear that the other would not reciprocate. Moreover, each side was confident that it held the superior position, expecting the other to give way. By January 49 BC, this spiralled into a civil war that neither side, Cato's partisans excepted, seemed to have wanted. Evaluation The alliance was clearly successful in winning short-term political advantage for its members in Caesar's consulship of 59 BC. However, over the following years, it broke down: "cooperation was shaky and the disenchantment of former supporters proved.. to be debilitating". Moreover, its very success triggered "the coalescence of aristocratic groups in opposition" with greatly lessened success in the later half of the 50s. Overall, the alliance was "never entirely stable" and was marked by periods of renewal followed by a return to rivalries between the three members. The goals sought together were broadly opportunistic and self-interested. The alliance, however, was part of the thinking that went into the creation of the Second Triumvirate a few decades later. The formation of the three-way alliance "has been seen as a momentous milestone in the crippling of republican institutions" since ancient times. The ancient historian Gaius Asinius Pollio chose to start his history of the civil wars with its formation; other historians, including Ronald Syme in Roman Revolution (1939), have taken a similar tact, viewing it as "the end of the free state". For example, Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg in the Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic (2014), wrote: Others disagree. Erich Gruen, for example, writes "the union of political cliques in 59 was an