By the late Republic this complicated ritual had lost its appeal for sophisticated Romans and could be replaced by a much simpler ceremony, much as today many people marry in a registry office. The man asked the woman if she wished to become the mistress of a household (materfamilias), to which she answered yes. In turn, she asked him if he wished to become paterfamilias, and on his saying he did the couple became husband and wife.
Just as the exact date of Cicero’s marriage to Terentia is uncertain, so the style of their wedding is unknown. Perhaps the young provincial, the New Man from Arpinum with his feeling for the Roman past and his eagerness to be socially accepted, opted for tradition. On the other hand the skeptical Philhellene might well have resisted meaningless flummery. Unfortunately, there is not a scintilla of hard evidence pointing in one direction or the other. By the same token, the birth date of their first child, Tullia, is unknown. Although she came to be the apple of her father’s eye, the arrival of a girl was no great cause for celebration or even notice in a male-oriented society. She was born probably in 75 or 76 but possibly earlier.
In 79 Cicero went abroad with a group of friends for an extended tour of the eastern Mediterranean and, as it would appear that the wedding took place that year, left his wife behind. Romans seldom took their wives with them on foreign trips. Cicero’s emotional life was still centered on the male friendships he had made in his student years.
On the face of it, Cicero’s decision to leave Rome just when his career had taken off was mysterious. People whispered that he was afraid of reprisals from Sulla, or perhaps more plausibly Chrysogonus, because of Roscius’s acquittal. But on balance this seems unlikely. Having completed his work of reform, Sulla was now approaching retirement; reliving his debauched youth, he survived, if Plutarch is to be believed, only for a few more disreputably entertaining months.
Cicero’s true motive for his foreign travels was the need to recover his health, which suddenly collapsed. Physically he was not robust. He was thin and underweight and had such a poor digestion that he could manage to swallow only something light at the end of the day. Success had come at a high price and he needed time to recoup his forces. Such in any case was his own explanation and there is little reason to doubt it. He recalled:
I was at that time very slender and not strong in body, with a long, thin neck; and such a constitution and appearance, if combined with hard work and strain on the lungs, were thought to be almost life-threatening. Those who loved me were all the more alarmed, in that I always spoke without pause or variation, using all the strength of my voice and the effort of my whole body. When friends and doctors begged me to give up speaking in the courts, I felt I would run any risk rather than abandon my hope of fame as a speaker. I thought that by a more restrained and moderate use of the voice and a different way of speaking I could both avoid the danger and acquire more variety in my style; and the reason for my going to Asia was to change my method of speaking. And so, when I had two years’ experience of taking cases and my name was already well-known in the Forum, I left Rome.
If recuperation was the primary reason for his travels, he also grasped the chance to deepen his professional training. For all his years of study, Cicero was unsatisfied with his technique; he lacked ease of delivery and his oratorical effects were sometimes strained and artificial. He visited various celebrated or fashionable teachers of rhetoric and, never forgetting what he saw as the moral dimension of rhetoric, also spent time on fundamental philosophical studies.
His brother Quintus, a small, choleric man, and his much younger cousin Lucius Cicero, son of the uncle whose early death cut short a promising career, went with him on this classical equivalent of an eighteenth-century grand tour. Two former fellow students, Titus Pomponius Atticus and Marcus Pupius Piso, were welcome additions to a congenial party. They spent six months in Athens and did a good deal of sightseeing.
Not long after their arrival the group was initiated into the secret religious mysteries of Eleusis, a few miles from Athens, which must have come as a shock to Romans brought up to see religion as a set of rules and social rituals. The mysteries were at the heart of a festival of purification and fertility; those taking part witnessed some kind of spiritual reenactment of death and rebirth, involving a descent into the underworld and a vision of the future life. Cicero was profoundly stirred by the experience and believed that of all Athenian contributions to civilization, these transcendental ceremonies were the greatest. Writing near the end of his life in his book On Law, he claimed: “we have learned from them the beginnings of life and have gained the power not only to live happily but also to die with a better hope.”
But what really interested him was Greek philosophy and, as he saw it, its essential interconnection with the art of public speaking. His book On Supreme Good and Evil (De finibus), written more than three decades later, is a series of philosophical dialogues, one of which recalls his stay in Athens. The speakers are the companions of his grand tour and the setting is the Academy, the grove of olive trees containing a gymnasium or exercise ground where Plato had taught and which became a kind of university for the study of philosophy and rhetoric. In the morning the young men attend a class given by the head of the Academy, Antiochus of Ascalon, and in the afternoon they take a stroll in the gardens to enjoy the quiet calm of the place.
According to Plutarch, Cicero “planned that, if he were finally deprived of the chance of following a public career, he would retire to Athens, away from the law and politics, and spend his life here in the quiet pursuit of philosophy.” In fact, although from time to time over the years he was indeed forced into periods of retirement, this never happened. But if he did not go to Athens he made Athens come to him. At his house at Tusculum he would later re-create the Academy, with halls and walks for intellectual debate and meditation, and build a version of Aristotle’s base in Athens, the Lyceum.
In the autumn of 79, Cicero left Athens for Asia Minor. In Rhodes, he sat briefly at the feet of a well-known Stoic philosopher and historian, Posidonius. More important, he consulted a distinguished rhetorician, Apollonius Molon, whom he had heard twice in Rome and whose style was rather more restrained than that of his florid rivals on the Asian mainland. He provided the technical retraining Cicero needed. Molon was, Cicero later recalled,
not only a pleader in real cases [as distinct from theoretical exercises] and an admirable writer but excellent as a judge and critic of faults and a very wise teacher and adviser.… And so I came home after two years not only more experienced but almost another man; the excessive strain of voice had gone, my style had so to speak simmered down, my lungs were stronger and I was not so thin.
In 78 news came of Sulla’s death and any residual anxieties Cicero may have had for his personal safety disappeared. In two years he would be old enough, under the new rules, to put a foot on the first rung of the political ladder and run for Quaestor. He was determined to stand at the earliest legal opportunity. If elected he would hold office the following year, when he would be thirty. By 77 he was back in Rome rebuilding his legal career in the Forum and planning his first political campaign.
4
POLITICS AND FOREIGN POSTINGS
Cicero Enters the Ring: 77–63 BC
During his childhood and youth Cicero had watched with horror as Rome set about dismantling itself. If he had a mission as an adult, it was to recall the Republic to order. The image that came to his mind when describing its constitution was of a musical concert.
Just as in the music of harps and flutes or in the voices of singers a certain harmony of the different tones must be maintained … so also a state is made harmonious by agreement among dissimilar elements. This is brought about by a fair and reasonable blending of the upper, middle and lower classes, just as if they were musical tones. What musicians call harmony in song is concord in a state.
These words were written late in life, but, even if his political thinking as a young man was not yet fully formed, C
icero’s experience of Roman politics and his philosophical explorations would already have confirmed his conservative cast of mind. It became his self-ordained duty to conduct the orchestra of all the classes and train it to play in tune again.
Cicero campaigned vigorously and won his election as Quaestor for 75 without apparent difficulty. It may be imagined that he and his family called in every favor and exploited every connection in order to ensure a good turnout. Doubtless many citizens of Arpinum took the trouble to travel to Rome to vote for their local boy. The fact that he was a New Man meant that the outcome would not have looked at all certain.
A Quaestor had no political or military authority. He and his colleagues assisted the Consuls by supervising the collection of taxes and authorizing payments. They were responsible for the management of the Treasury in the Temple of Saturn and had a small, permanent staff to conduct day-to-day business. Since Sulla’s recent reforms the really important feature of the post was that it gave the holder automatic membership in the Senate.
Some Quaestors were given foreign postings and Cicero was allocated one of the two Quaestorships based in Sicily, reporting directly to the governor. Wives did not accompany Romans on official business abroad, and so, once again, Terentia was left behind in Italy, where she doubtless spent much of her time with little Tullia.
With the decline of Italian agriculture and the provision of subsidized corn for the urban masses in the capital, Sicily was Rome’s most important provider of cereals and it was essential to ensure stability of its supply and price. The oldest of Rome’s provinces, the island had been won from the Carthaginians in 241 and, as tribute, its communities were required to export gratis 10 percent of their corn harvest to Rome. If more was needed, it could be acquired by compulsory purchase. It was the Quaestors’ job to calculate the price and the quantity of extra corn to be bought.
In carrying out this task Cicero showed a talent for competent and fair administration. To counteract an inflation of the corn price in Rome, he made an assessment of additional need and negotiated a fair rate with the suppliers. When the Sicilians received payment, he made sure that his office did not deduct the usual, but illegal, commission. This behavior made him very popular.
Cicero believed in honesty in public affairs, but it was also in his personal interest to win over local opinion. If his career was to progress, he would have to build up political support and his stay in Sicily was an excellent opportunity to expand his client list. Cicero won the backing of many equites, some of whom he represented in court in front of the governor. This class included Roman tax farmers and traders and also, since the enfranchisement of Italy and Sicily after the War of the Allies ten years earlier, local aristocracies across the peninsula. It was a substantial new constituency of Roman citizens, still largely untapped, and someone like Cicero whose roots were non-Roman and provincial was well placed to appeal to it. Although his ambition was to join the ruling elite in Rome, he never forgot where his political backing really lay—among the Italian middle classes.
In his leisure hours Cicero was an indefatigable tourist. Sicily had a long and colorful history: originally colonized by the Greek states during their heyday, it contained many wealthy and beautiful cities, with fine temples and works of art by great sculptors and painters. Carthage had dominated the west of the island for many years and, although that was now long in the past, something of the exotic character of her culture survived. Cicero’s headquarters were at Lilybaeum (now Marsala), a wealthy town at Sicily’s western extremity.
The Roman heritage attracted Cicero’s prime loyalty and his deepest feelings, but he was also fascinated by the legacy of other people’s pasts. He sought out and rediscovered the lost grave of Archimedes, the great scientist and geometer, a citizen of Syracuse who had been killed during the Roman siege more than one hundred years before. The exploit demonstrated detective skills and inquisitiveness which he put to good use in his legal career, and he recalled it with pride:
When I was Quaestor, I tracked down his grave; the Syracusans not only had no idea where it was, they denied it even existed. I found it surrounded and covered by brambles and thickets. I remembered that some lines of doggerel I had heard were inscribed on his tomb to the effect that a sphere and a cylinder had been placed on its top. So I took a good look around (for there are a lot of graves at the Agrigentine Gate cemetery) and noticed a small column rising a little way above some bushes, on which stood a sphere and a cylinder. I immediately told the Syracusans (some of their leading men were with me) that I thought I had found what I was looking for. Slaves were sent in with scythes to clear the ground and once a path had been opened up we approached the pedestal. About half the lines of the epigram were still legible although the rest had worn away. So, you see, one of the most celebrated cities of Greece, once upon a time a great seat of learning too, would have been ignorant of the grave of one of its most intellectually gifted citizens—had it not been for a man from Arpinum who pointed it out to them.
When Cicero’s Quaestorship came to an end in 74, he made his way back to Rome. He was feeling very pleased with himself. He had proved his worth as a public official. He had been able to practice and perfect his advocacy techniques in a more relaxed setting than the Forum. He had begun the process of attracting a political following. Above all, he seems to have had a good time. Nevertheless, the episode was a distraction from his true vocation and he avoided further foreign postings. For him, the real point of the Quaestorship was that it gave him entry to the Senate. After years of preparation the serious work of his life was, at last, beginning.
He told an amusing story against himself about an incident on his journey home, a reminder that his thirst for recognition was redeemed by an endearing sense of the ridiculous. “I was filled with the notion that the Roman People would fall over themselves to honor and promote me,” he recalled. He arrived at the seaside resort of Puteoli at the height of the tourist season and had his nose put out of joint when an acquaintance asked if he’d just come from Rome and what was the news. No, Cicero replied, he was on his way back from his province. “Of course,” said the man, “you’ve been in Africa.” No, Cicero observed huffily, Sicily.
Another member of the group, trying to show off his knowledge while smoothing over the misunderstanding, intervened. “Don’t you know that our friend was Quaestor in Syracuse?” With this final inaccuracy (for his headquarters in Lilybaeum had been at the other end of the island), Cicero gave up and decided to act as if he were a holidaymaker like everybody else and had gone only for the bathing.
On reflection he thought he had learned a useful lesson. “Once I had realized that the Roman People was rather deaf, but sharp-eyed, I stopped worrying about what the world heard about me. From that day on, I took care to be seen in person every day. I lived in the public eye and was always in the Forum. I would not allow my concierge, nor the lateness of the hour, to close the door on any visitor.” He trained himself to remember names and liked as far as possible to do without the services of a nomenclator, a slave with a good memory who accompanied a public figure when he went out and whispered in his ear the name of anyone important he was about to meet. Cicero made sure he knew exactly where well-known people lived, where they had their country houses, who their friends and neighbors were. On whatever road he happened to be traveling he could name the owners of the estates he was passing.
Cicero returned to Rome with a growing fortune, a wife and daughter and a bright future. He resumed the pattern of life common to all upper-class Romans of the period. Although he seldom troubled to describe the daily round in his correspondence, there is no reason to suppose that he deviated from the habits and conventions of his friends and peers.
The waking day lasted little longer than the hours of daylight. At dawn Cicero would have risen from his bed in a tiny, barely furnished bedroom and dressed. Traditionalists wore only a loincloth under their togas, but by the first century BC many also put on a tunic, no d
oubt especially during the winter months. The toga, a remarkably incommodious garment, was a large length of unbleached woolen cloth, cut in a rough circle as much as three meters in diameter. Putting it on was an art and the rich employed a trained slave to arrange its complicated folds. It was draped over the body in such a way that the right arm was free but the left covered. Drafty in winter and stickily hot in summer, it had few practical advantages to recommend it and took continual care and attention to keep in place. But, however uncomfortable, the toga was a Roman’s uniform and a powerful visual symbol of citizenship.
The day’s work began at once. Breakfast was a glass of water or, at most, bread dunked in wine and served with cheese, honey or olives. Cicero’s front door was opened to all comers but especially his clients or followers, who came to pay their respects and accompany him to the Forum when political or legal business took him there. Otherwise, the first half of the day was devoted to work in his study.
AS a rule Romans were clean-shaven. They paid a visit every day or so to a barber’s shop, a center of gossip and chatter, unless they owned a domestic slave who had the necessary skill with a razor. In the absence of soap, barbers used only water and considerable dexterity was required if the customer was to survive the experience without smarting eyes and cut skin. Young men delayed as long as possible before removing the down on their faces (as so often with the Romans, this was the occasion for a religious ceremony, the depositio barbae).
The afternoon was a time for a siesta or at least for winding down. There might be a public entertainment to attend; holidays were frequent and often marked by gladiatorial shows, chariot races, boxing matches or theatrical spectacles. Going to the public baths was the most important, or at least the most regular, of a Roman’s relaxations. These were similar to today’s Turkish baths, with steam rooms for washing and scraping the body, tepidaria for cooling off and cold plunges. The wealthy built small bathhouses in their own homes.
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