Cicero

by Anthony Everitt

  The young King of Cappadocia, Ariobarzanes, who styled himself “the Pious and Pro-Roman,” came to see the new Roman governor in a highly nervous state. He had recently inherited the throne after his father’s assassination and told Cicero that he had uncovered a plot against his own life. The idea was to install his brother, who would take an anti-Roman line. The Queen Mother was implicated and a semi-independent principality was on the point of open rebellion. Cicero advised him to take strong measures to punish the conspirators. But although Ariobarzanes asked for troops, none could be spared. It was agreed that the king could threaten their use, if necessary. AS SO often with young men, Cicero got on well with Ariobarzanes and when they were not talking politics they found time to discuss the differences between the Roman and Galatian systems of augury.

  Hearing that the Parthian force was some way off, Cicero led his army, which he now thought “tolerably well provided,” forward towards the Syrian frontier. His cavalry fought off a brief and probably exploratory Parthian incursion. By the time he arrived at the Syrian border he heard that Caius Cassius Longinus had beaten the enemy at Antioch on the other side of the Amanus Mountains. A dour character, Cassius, Marcus Junius Brutus’s brother-in-law, was a good soldier and had taken charge of Syria after disaster had befallen Crassus at Carrhae.

  Cicero learned that Bibulus had at last arrived in Syria. He later claimed (to some derision) that it had been his own presence close by that had emboldened Cassius to act. With the Parthian threat blunted at least for the time being, Cicero then led a punitive expedition against the Free Cilicians, mountain communities that had never fully acknowledged the rule of Rome. He did not take himself seriously as a general but knew that enough fighting to warrant a Triumph (or, as he called it lightheartedly, “a sprig of laurel”) would enhance his prestige in Rome.

  The brief campaign was a success. His soldiers hailed him in the field as imperator, or Commander-in-Chief, an honor given to a general for leading his army to victory in person, which its recipient could use after his name (as Cicero later did when writing to Caesar). From the account he gave Atticus, it looks as if the leading role was played by Pomptinus. “On October 13 we made a great slaughter of the enemy, carrying and burning places of great strength, Pomptinus coming up at night and myself in the morning. For a few days we were encamped near ISSUS in the very spot where Alexander, a considerably better general than either you or I, pitched his camp against Darius.” He was not altogether displeased to hear that Bibulus had attempted some fighting of his own on the Syrian side of the mountains, out of jealousy he suspected, and come to grief, losing an entire cohort.

  Cicero then moved against the well-defended Free Cilician fortress of Pindenissum and a full-scale siege ensued, which lasted some weeks. A moat was dug and a huge mound with a high siege tower and penthouses was erected. Siege artillery was deployed and many archers. Eventually, on or about December 17, the town fell with no Roman loss of life and all the plunder was handed over to the army. “A merry Saturnalia was had by all,” Cicero told Atticus, referring to the Christmas-like winter festival which took place at this time. The campaigning season now ended and the gratified and probably grateful imperator handed over his army to Quintus, who marched it away to winter quarters. Even if he was not awarded a Triumph, he could reasonably hope for a consolation prize, the lesser victory celebration called an Ovation.

  Cicero’s vow to govern evenhandedly was severely tested in the coming months. He had set out what he believed to be the principles of good administration in the letter of guidance he had sent his brother during his governorship of Asia from 61 to 59; we may conjecture that Quintus was watching closely to see if Cicero would live up to his own precepts.

  One of the most common complaints by provincials was the tax burden. Here Cicero had no sympathy with them, for in his view taxes were a payment for peace and tranquillity and for the rule of law. A more embarrassing problem, as Cicero well knew, was caused by the way public dues were collected. In the absence of a civil service, Rome sold the right to collect taxes to the highest bidder. Tax farmers often colluded with governors to make exorbitant profits. This was a subject where Cicero had to tread carefully, for he had built his career in part as a spokesman for businessmen and traders, and the local tax farmers were expecting favorable treatment.

  Cicero knew that some form of compromise would be necessary. He disguised his determination to see fair play by assiduous politeness. The tax farmers complained that people would not pay what they owed, and the provincials said that they could not. The governor insisted that debts must be settled, but he allowed plenty of time for repayment and set interest rates at the legal maximum (often breached) of 1 percent per month. The provincials found this to be fair. And the tax farmers were happy enough too, for they were now sure to get their money, even if at a lower rate of return than they had originally expected. To smooth the path, Cicero buttered them up, asking them to dinner parties and doing all he could to flatter their self-esteem. At the same time he did his best to keep his staff under control, somewhat to their annoyance as they had to forgo customary pickings. He also took venal local officials aside and persuaded them quietly to repay funds they had acquired illegally.

  Throughout his governorship he was never too busy to attend to developments in Rome. The optimates were pursuing their single, simple and disastrous policy of preventing Caesar from moving seamlessly from his Gallic posting to a second Consulship. They made repeated attempts to have the question of his successor discussed in the Senate, but these came to nothing, as they were invariably vetoed by one or more Tribunes in Caesar’s interest (and pay). Pompey let it be known that he felt it would be unfair to consider the question of Caesar’s replacement before March of the following year, the date when it would be legally permissible to do so. The disgruntled Faction, as Caesar nicknamed the optimates, had to settle for that. In an endless stream of letters Cicero pressed for compromise, but absence had weakened his influence. Caelius became Aedile in January 50, and concentrated on putting down fraud in the administration of the water supply (on which dry subject he published a well-received pamphlet). But he still found the time and energy to write to Cicero, who read his reports with mounting anxiety.

  AS often happens when cataclysm approaches, a fruitlessly busy inertia paralyzed the political community. Caelius wrote in February:

  Our Consuls are paragons of conscientiousness—to date they have not succeeded in getting a single decree through the Senate except about fixing the date of the Latin Festival.… The stagnation of everything here is indescribable. If I didn’t have a battle on with the shopkeepers and inspectors of conduits, a coma would have seized the community. Unless the Parthians liven you up a bit over there, we are as dead as dormice.

  Caelius had high expectations for his and Cicero’s mutual friend, Curio, who became a Tribune in 50. He stood for election on a fiercely anti-Caesar platform and even threatened to raise again the issue of the Campanian lands, which had landed Cicero in such trouble with Caesar a few years previously. His efforts, however, were ineffective. The reason for this became clear only later: Caesar was secretly negotiating with him to change sides in return for settling his colossal debts. Curio cleverly created a smoke screen to cover his shift of allegiance and, although he soon began defending Caesar’s interest, it was a while before anyone realized that he was taking instructions from Gaul.

  Military operations having been satisfactorily completed, Cicero turned his attention to administrative matters. Nothing that Appius could do or say surprised him, but he was greatly taken aback when he uncovered a financial scam that he eventually traced back to Marcus Brutus, the son of Servilia, Cato’s half-sister and at one time Caesar’s mistress. Brutus had a reputation for honesty and austerity. An intellectual devoted to Greek philosophy, he was, at thirty-four, the diametrical opposite of disreputable contemporaries such as Curio or Caelius. He modeled himself to some extent on his uncompromisingly virtuous
half-uncle, Cato, and like him did not believe in half-measures. Caesar (whom gossip wrongly whispered was his natural father) once said acutely of Brutus: “What he wants is hard to say, but when he wants it, he wants it badly.”

  Brutus had won the Quaestorship in 54 and served in Cilicia under Appius Claudius. Cicero was astonished to discover that this paragon of integrity, through some front men, had loaned a large sum of money to the town of Salamis in Cyprus at the extortionate interest rate of 4 percent a month (i.e., 60 percent compound interest over a year). That “very impecunious monarch” Deiotarus of Galatia was also in Brutus’s debt and finding it almost impossible to keep up his repayments. This was all the more shocking given that Senators were, in theory at least, barred from moneylending.

  When Brutus asked Cicero to help his agents enforce the debts, the governor’s first reaction was to refuse to use his public authority for private ends. He reminded Brutus of his decision to set a 1 percent interest rate for loans in Cilicia. Privately he found the situation very awkward. “I shall be sorry to have incurred his displeasure,” Cicero told Atticus in February, “but far sorrier to find that he is not the man I took him for.” Matters were not helped by Brutus’s unwillingness to give any ground. “He is apt in his letters to me to take a brusque, arrogant, ungracious tone even when asking a favor.”

  It was indeed a scandalous business: at one point Brutus’s people had used the cavalry to barricade the Senate of Salamis in their Senate House, as a result of which five Senators had starved to death. Cicero could not get the affair out of his mind and it dominated his correspondence with Atticus, at wearisome length. Atticus was a part of the problem, for he took Brutus’s side and, in a rare note of criticism of his friend, Cicero wrote: “My dearest Atticus, you have really cared too much for Brutus in this matter and not enough for me.”

  The quick passage of time saved Cicero from having to take definitive action and he bequeathed the problem to his successor. We can guess that the outcome was unsatisfactory for the Salaminians, for Brutus accompanied the succeeding governor as one of his deputies.

  With the waning of the Parthian threat, Marcus and young Quintus returned from Cappadocia and continued their education under a short-tempered tutor. In his father’s absence, marooned in the snowy Taurus Mountains with the army, young Quintus was proving a handful, but, his uncle told Atticus, “I shall keep him on a tighter rein.” It seems that the two got on badly and, to judge by later developments, efforts to discipline the teenager failed. On March 17, Cicero conducted the sixteen-year-old Quintus’s coming-of-age ceremony in his father’s absence.

  Separation had done little to improve the elder Quintus’s marriage. The quarrel at Arpinum had had deep roots and Quintus was now meditating on divorce from Pomponia, Atticus’s difficult sister. He confided this to his freedman, Statius, who went around saying that Cicero approved (perhaps he was getting his own back on Pomponia, who cordially disliked him for his closeness to her husband). Cicero was furious and assured Atticus that this was the last thing he wanted. “Let me say only one thing: so far from wishing the bond between us to be in any way relaxed, I should welcome as many and as intimate links with you as possible,” he wrote to Atticus, “though those of affection, and of the closest, exist already. AS for Quintus, I have often found that he is apt to speak rather harshly in these matters, and again I have often mollified his irritation. I think you know this. During this foreign trip or rather service of ours I have repeatedly seen him flare up and calm down again. What he may have written to Statius I cannot say. Whatever step he proposed to take in such a matter he ought not to have written to a freedman.”

  The impact of these marital difficulties was greatest on young Quintus, who was very close to his mother and seems to have taken her side. While he was away Cicero allowed him to open his father’s mail, in case it contained anything that needed urgent attention, and one day the boy stumbled on a reference to the possible divorce. He broke down in tears. His growing estrangement from his family in the coming years may have been partly caused by the difficulty of any talented boy growing up in the shadow of a famous relative, but perhaps a more pressing motive lay in what he saw as the ill treatment of a much-loved mother.

  A worried Cicero wrote to Atticus: “He does seem very fond of his mother, as he should be, and extraordinarily fond of you. But the boy’s nature, though gifted, is complex and I have plenty to do in guiding it.” With Cicero’s encouragement, Quintus played a part in helping to reconcile his parents. The divorce did not take place.

  Serious trouble was also brewing closer to home. In June 50 Cicero broached a highly sensitive topic with Atticus, writing in veiled terms and in Greek. Terentia had sent him out to Cilicia to see Cicero and his behavior had been strange. “There’s something else about which I must write to you en langue voilée, and you must lay your nose to the scent. From the confused and incoherent way he talked the other day, I formed the impression that my wife’s freedman (you know to whom I refer) has cooked the accounts regarding [a property purchase]. I am afraid that something—you’ll take my meaning. Please look into it.… I can’t put all I fear into words.” The implication is that his wife was somehow involved.

  The divorced Tullia had now settled on a new husband and she could hardly have made a more unsatisfactory choice. Her eye had fallen on a handsome young aristocrat, Publius Cornelius Lentulus Dolabella. A reckless and womanizing playboy, he was not at all the match Cicero had been hoping for.

  Tullia seems usually to have gotten her way with her indulgent father, and on this occasion he knew little of what was afoot until she and her mother presented him with a fait accompli. He made the best of a bad situation, although the marriage placed him in Appius Claudius’s bad books just when he thought he had gotten out of them. AS luck would have it, Dolabella was in the process of bringing Appius to trial on a treason charge. “Here I am in my province paying Appius all kinds of compliment, when out of the blue I find his prosecutor becoming my son-in-law!”

  In the summer of 50, much to his relief, Cicero had reached the end of his posting and set off for Rome, despite the brief threat of another Parthian invasion. On the journey home he had plenty of time to think about the political situation he was going to find on his return. He called at Rhodes and Athens and wrote an affectionate letter to his “darling and much-longed-for Terentia,” complimenting her on her letters to him, which “covered all items most carefully,” and asking her to come and meet him in Brundisium if her health allowed. He reached the port in late November at the same time as his wife arrived at the city gates: they met in the market square. The suspicions he had raised with Atticus had evidently been lulled, at least for the time being. He was also coming to terms with Tullia’s new husband, the playboy Dolabella. “We all find him charming, Tullia, Terentia, myself,” he told Atticus. “He is as clever and agreeable as you please. Other characteristics, of which you are aware, we must put up with.”

  Cicero was in no hurry to reach Rome and did not arrive there until early January 49. He would need to retain his governor’s imperium until he crossed the city boundary, if he were to be awarded a Triumph or an Ovation, and so he stayed at Pompey’s grand country house outside the capital, accompanied by his official guard of lictors, their axes now wreathed in laurel because of his title of imperator. Cicero was back where he felt he belonged, and he did not intend to be inactive.

  10

  “A STRANGE MADNESS”

  The Battle for the Republic: 50–48 BC

  In the great impending crisis Cicero cast himself in the role of a disinterested mediator and bent all his efforts towards reconciling the parties. Looking back a few weeks later, he told Tiro: “From the day I arrived in Rome all my views, words and actions were unceasingly directed towards peace. But a strange madness was abroad.”

  Caelius reported in June that “Pompey the Great’s digestion is now in such a poor way that he has trouble finding anything to suit him.” This may h
ave been the preliminary symptom of a serious illness that struck him down in the summer. For a time his life was thought to be in danger. Prayers were offered for him across Italy and when he recovered, festivals were staged in towns and cities in his honor. This led Pompey to believe that he would have overwhelming public support against Caesar in the event of a conflict. “I have only to stamp my foot on the ground anywhere in Italy and armies of infantry and armies of cavalry will rise up,” Plutarch reports him as saying. But his popularity was wide rather than deep, for most people preferred peace to war. When Pompey reemerged into public life he seemed to have lost some of his old energy. Cicero noticed his lack of spirit and wondered about his future health.

  Writing to Cicero in August 50, Caelius foresaw “great quarrels ahead in which strength and steel will be arbiters.” He claimed to be uncertain which way to jump; he had obligations to Caesar and his circle and, as for the optimates, he “loved the cause but hated the men.” Caelius was preparing to change sides and follow Curio onto Caesar’s payroll, but his relationship with Cicero does not seem to have suffered.

  The Senate ordered both Pompey and Caesar to contribute a legion each for an expeditionary force against the Parthians to avenge Crassus. Pompey ungenerously decided that his legion would be the one he had loaned to Caesar sometime before for his Gallic campaigns, which meant that Caesar would have to give up two. The officers sent to fetch these legions reported, so inaccurately that one has to wonder if they acted with conscious warmongering deceit, much disaffection and low morale among Caesar’s troops.