Cicero

by Anthony Everitt

  In June 47 Tullia took the long and uncomfortable journey south to visit her father. He was touched and delighted, even if her presence made him feel guilty. “Her own courage, thoughtfulness and affection,” he wrote to Atticus, “far from giving me the pleasure I ought to take in such a paragon of daughters, grieve me beyond measure when I consider the unhappy lot in which so admirable a nature is cast, not through any misconduct of hers but by grave fault on my part.” In the absence of cash, Cicero begged Atticus to gather up his movables—plate, furniture, fabrics—and hide them away somewhere; they could be sold later as minimal provision for his children.

  By now Cicero was desperate to leave Brundisium. He wrote to Antony, to Balbus and to Oppius, and finally he appealed to Atticus: “I must ask you to get me out of here. Any punishment is better than staying on in this place.” At long last, in August he received a letter directly from Caesar, who had emerged from his Egyptian imbroglio. It was “quite a handsome one,” he conceded to Terentia. We may assume that it indicated a pardon for Cicero, or at least the prospect of one, and Caesar seems to have proposed a meeting on his return to Italy. Athough welcome, this created yet another dilemma. Should he go to meet the returning victor halfway or wait where he was? He took the latter option, perhaps because it seemed less like a decision.

  Caesar was in a hurry, for his first, urgent priority on regaining Italy was to meet his soldiers and quash the still simmering mutiny. In early October 47 he landed at Tarentum and made a detour to Brundisium, where Cicero was nervously waiting on the road outside the town, ashamed to be testing his personal status in front of so many witnesses. He stood alone ahead of other dignitaries. AS soon as he saw him Caesar dismounted from his horse and embraced him. Then, in signal evidence of favor, he walked along with him and they talked in private for a considerable distance. The content of their conversation is not known, but from what happened next it can be surmised that Cicero received permission to live or go wherever he wanted. He was probably also allowed to dismiss his lictors, much to his relief, for they had become an embarrassingly visible reminder of a time when Cicero counted for something in the world.

  Cicero set out for home at once, after dashing off a note to Terentia. It was curt to the point of rudeness. “Kindly see that everything is ready. I may have a number of people with me and shall probably make a fairly long stay there [Tusculum]. If there is no tub in the bathroom, get one put in; likewise whatever else is necessary for health and subsistence. Good-bye.” If she detected a decisive coolness between the lines, she was not wrong. Soon after his return, Cicero divorced her. The marriage, which ended in 46, had lasted more than thirty years.

  His complaints, as itemized by Plutarch, were chiefly thoughtlessness and financial mismanagement. Also, she did not trouble to go to meet him at Brundisium in all the months of his exile there, and, when Tullia did, she failed to provide her daughter with a proper escort and enough money for her expenses. Finally, she had stripped Cicero’s house of its contents and incurred a large number of debts. These faults do not quite justify Cicero’s sudden determination to get rid of Terentia. AS a rule, his emotions were changeable and he had forgiven Quintus and his nephew for seemingly far greater crimes. However, for whatever reason, he was now implacable.

  Terentia’s defense against the charges, if she had one, cannot now be reconstructed. But it is clear that Cicero was not good at handling money, or at least that his finances were insecure: as his affairs went from bad to worse during the civil war, she might well have tried to protect what she could of the family’s or of her own fortune. She was a strong-minded woman and perhaps felt she had to take decisive action if something were to be saved from the wreckage.

  Even if Cicero was entirely in the right, the episode leaves an unpleasant aftertaste, suggesting a surprising emotional coldness at the heart of his domestic life. One is left wondering what Tullia and Marcus made of their mother’s being sent away. AS for Terentia, she was tough enough to rebuild her life. She later remarried: she is reported to have chosen Caius Sallustius Crispus—the historian Sallust, whose books include, ironically, a study of the Catilinarian conspiracy, the occasion of her first husband’s greatest triumph. For his part, Cicero did not intend to remain single and discussed possible new wives with Atticus, though he made no immediate choice.

  Caesar’s successes had not in fact decided the outcome of the war. The Italy to which he returned after an absence of a year and a half was in crisis. Antony, armed with a Final Act, had put down Dolabella’s insurrectionary debt campaign by storming the Forum with troops, an operation that led to a bloodbath with 800 citizens dead. He lost all political credibility and Caesar dropped him for the next two years. Curiously, though, Caesar retained his confidence in Dolabella and on his arrival in Rome further tightened the constraints on creditors.

  The veterans waiting in Campania presented a much more serious challenge. They had had their fill of fighting and were agitating to be demobilized with their arrears paid up in full. The state was approaching bankruptcy and Caesar did not have the money to settle the account. In any case, he needed every sesterce he could lay his hands on to continue the war against the Republicans in Africa. A succession of senior figures had made the pilgrimage from Rome to parley with the veterans and been chased out of the camp. Finally Caesar promised a hefty bonus, but to no avail. The soldiers began to move on Rome. Their general had no choice but to confront them in person. He put on a bravura performance and called their bluff. He addressed them icily as “civilians,” as if they had already discharged themselves by their actions. Of course, he would let them go, he said. He would pay them later, once he had won the African campaign—with other soldiers.

  The veterans’ defiance collapsed. It had not occurred to them that they would simply be dismissed. AS Caesar well knew, most of them loved and trusted him and for all their grievances could not bear the thought that he no longer needed them and would turn them away. The mood of the meeting was transformed. Men crowded up to the speaker’s dais, begging Caesar to change his mind and take them to Africa after all. With simulated reluctance he allowed himself to be won over.

  After making some essential administrative arrangements in Rome, Caesar left the city for Africa in December 47. Once more he would be fighting a winter campaign against superior forces, for Cato and the Republicans had mustered ten legions. Also, despite the fact that it was a scandalous thing to encourage foreigners to fight against Romans, they had allied themselves with King Juba of Mauritania, who brought four legions with him. Rome was left on tenterhooks again. For once, Cicero reacted calmly to uncertainty. While waiting for news, he stayed in Rome to be near his friends. He wrote to a correspondent: “I think the victory of either will amount to pretty much the same thing.”

  In April 46 Caesar won a decisive victory at Thapsus, despite the fact that at the outset of the battle he suffered from what sounds like an epileptic fit. The author of the history of the campaign, who was probably an officer on Caesar’s staff, referred to it as “his usual malady.” Caesar’s hectic and energetic life was catching up with him, and these attacks increased in frequency in his remaining years. He then marched on the North African port of Utica, where Cato and the few remaining Republican forces were based. It would be a great propaganda coup if he could extend his clemency to this obdurate upholder of Republican values. Cato understood this too and was determined to prevent him.

  The Republican armies had been defeated and the war appeared to be over. All who wanted to leave by ship were allowed to do so, but Cato refused to let a delegation be sent to sue for peace. “I decline to be under an obligation to the tyrant for his illegal acts,” he said. “He is acting against the law when he pardons people over whom he has no authority, as if he owned them.”

  A few nights later, after a bath and supper, there was some pleasant conversation over wine. Among the topics discussed was a paradox from Stoic philosophy: whatever his circumstances, the good man is f
ree and only the bad man is a slave. Cato spoke so vehemently in favor of this proposition that his listeners guessed his intention. He then retired to bed and read Plato’s Phaedo, the famous dialogue on the nature of death and the immortality of the soul. His son had removed his sword from his room, much to Cato’s anger. He was so upset when he noticed its absence that he hit a slave on the mouth and hurt his hand. When the weapon was brought back, he said: “Now I am my own master.” He took up his book again, which he read through twice before falling into an unusually deep sleep. In the morning he asked for news and dozed.

  Then, when he was alone, he stabbed himself in the stomach, but, owing to his now inflamed hand, failed to strike home. He fell off his bed and knocked over a geometrical abacus standing nearby, which clattered to the floor, making a loud noise. His son and the servants ran in and found Cato unconscious, covered with blood and with his bowels protruding from his stomach. A doctor tried to replace them and sew up the wound. Cato came to and realized what was happening. He pushed the doctor away, tore open the incision and pulled his bowels out again, after which he soon died. He was 48 years old.

  The impact of this event on Roman opinion was enormous; indeed, it has echoed down the ages. A century later the poet Lucan saw in the dead constitutionalist a pattern of heroic virtue, which he summed up with a famous epigram in Pharsalia, his epic on the civil war: “The gods favored the winning side, but Cato the one that lost” (Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni).

  Cato’s suicide was extremely damaging to Caesar’s reputation. At the beginning of the civil war, many educated Romans saw the struggle between Pompey and Caesar as no more than a competition between two overmighty generals and chose sides according to their personal and political loyalties. Inevitably, one or other of them would win. While some regarded Caesar’s whole career as a conspiracy against the state, the less pessimistic assumed that once hostilities were over political life would resume more or less as normal. There might be a bloodbath and a proscription. There would be pain and personal tragedies, but, as with Sulla, the constitution would eventually be restored in some broadly recognizable form. It would be the victor’s duty to ensure that this was done.

  Although it began to look over time as if this might not, after all, be the final outcome, it was still possible at this stage to give Caesar the benefit of the doubt. So all-embracing and deeply rooted was the idea of the constitution’s permanence that it took a year or two before suspicions of his revolutionary intentions hardened into certainty that the days of the Republic were over for good. In the meantime Cato’s final act of defiance, his deliberate rejection of Caesar’s tyranny and by extension of all political servitude, harshly dramatized half-spoken fears.

  Cicero was greatly moved by Cato’s death. He had found him an unbearable nuisance who bore no little responsibility for the slide into civil war. But his suicide burned away the inessentials of his character, leaving him as the symbol of pure principles and of a lost time for which he mourned. In May 46, shortly after the news from Utica had arrived in Rome, he was brooding on the possibility, indeed the desirability, of writing some kind of panegyric for the martyr, much more dangerous dead than alive. Brutus, whom Caesar had forgiven for fighting against him at Pharsalus and who was serving this year as governor of Italian Gaul, had been close to Cato and had given Cicero the idea. (They were now on good terms, the Cyprus moneylending scandal having been forgotten or forgiven.)

  But how would Cicero be able to speak his mind without getting into trouble with the authorities? “It’s a problem for Archimedes,” he told Atticus. However, he was determined to find a solution and spent much of the summer at Tusculum writing his encomium, which he finished by August. The work has not survived, but it seems to have praised Cato’s strength of character and pointed out how he had predicted the political crisis, fought to prevent it and laid down his life so that he did not have to witness its consequences.

  The Rome that Cicero found on return from Brundisium was a very different place from the one he had left, and in many ways he found that he was a stranger there. Politics had become the possession of a regime, not an establishment, and there was no role for him, unless he were somehow to create a new one. Many familiar faces were missing—dead, in exile or still fighting in distant corners of the empire. They had been largely replaced by the “underworld,” some of them members of the Catullan and Clodian counterculture of the early 60s and 50s, who had always rejected the old solid Roman virtues of duty and loyalty to tradition.

  Cicero, now sixty years old, an old man in Roman eyes, had to find another way of leading his life. Depressed as he was, he still had reserves of energy and of social zest, and he set about making new friends. One of these was Marcus Terentius Varro, a distinguished and encyclopedic scholar. Varro had fought in the first Spanish campaign against Caesar, but after Pharsalus he had abandoned the Republican cause and was appointed to run a new project Caesar was planning, the creation of Rome’s first public library. The two men had not previously been close, and while Cicero admired his work, he did not think much of Varro’s prose style. They came together because of their mutual isolation: the surviving optimates despised them for coming to terms with the enemy and the victors classed them among the defeated. “As for our present times,” Cicero judged, “if our friends had won the day they would have acted very immoderately. They were infuriated with us.” The two agreed that the way out, or at least the way forward, was to concentrate on their writing. In April 46 Cicero advised Varro: “Like the learned men of old, we must serve the state in our libraries, if we cannot in the Senate House and Forum, and pursue our researches into custom and law.”

  Cicero enjoyed the necessary solitude of a writer’s life and spent a good deal of time in his country villas, mainly at Tusculum, from where he made frequent forays to Rome, and later at Astura, which he loved for its remoteness. However, he was psychologically unable to devote himself entirely to decorous retirement. So although there was little legal work for him in Rome, he started giving private classes in public speaking to senior personalities in the government. “I have set up as schoolmaster, as it were, now that the courts are abolished and my forensic kingdom lost.” Cicero was exaggerating somewhat: although it may well be that the legal system was suspended from time to time during the civil war, it still functioned and indeed was reformed by Caesar. (The civil code was revised and simplified and jury membership altered.) In any event Cicero felt that teaching public speaking was good for his health since he had given up his rhetorical exercises; also, his oratorical talent would wither without practice.

  In addition, there were plenty of invitations to dinner. He began to accept them, fairly indiscriminately. He was happy to dine with the enemy. Leading figures in the government were on cordial terms and Balbus and Oppius were unvaryingly attentive and thoughtful. He confessed to his friend Lucius Papirius Paetus: “Hirtius [a close colleague of Caesar’s who wrote the last chapter of The Conquest of Gaul, which its preoccupied author had left unfinished] and Dolabella are my pupils in oratory but my masters in gastronomy. I expect you have heard, if all news travels to Naples, that they practice making speeches in my house, and I practice dining at theirs.”

  Cicero kept company he would once have thought unacceptable. At one meal he was surprised to see that the guests included Antony’s mistress Cytheris, who, against the rules of etiquette, was given a couch rather than a chair. Writing on the spot while waiting for the food, he noted to a friend: “I assure you I had no idea she would be there.” He held some dinner parties of his own. “I even had the audacity to give a dinner to Hirtius (think of it!)—no peacock though. At that meal nothing proved beyond my cook’s powers of imitation except the hot sauce.”

  The government was alarmed at the growth of conspicuous expenditure in Rome and passed sumptuary laws to control it. The most expensive foods were banned and, as a result, chefs began to experiment with innovative vegetarian recipes. This put a stra
in on Cicero’s digestion, as he confessed ruefully to a friend in winter 46:

  Our bons vivants, in their efforts to bring into fashion products of the soil exempted under the statute, make the most appetizing dishes out of fungi, potherbs and grasses of all sorts. Happening on some of these at an inaugural dinner at Lentulus’s house, I was seized with a violent diarrhea, which has only today begun (I think) to check its flow. So: oysters and eels I used to resist well enough, but here I lie caught in the nets of mesdames Turnip and Mallow! Well, I shall be more careful in future.

  Caesar returned from Africa towards the end of July 46. His first weeks were spent organizing four Triumphs, which took place in late September and lasted an unheard-of eleven days. They marked his victories in Gaul and Egypt and over Pharnaces in Asia Minor and Juba in Africa. The number of enemies killed, excluding citizens, was claimed to be 1,992,000. Money to the value of 65,000 talents was carried in the parade. Games and shows were also staged. AS a personal tribute Caesar promoted a gladiatorial display in memory of his still much-missed daughter, Julia, and a public banquet with 22,000 tables. It was ill omened to triumph over Roman citizens and Pharsalus was passed by in silence, but the crowds showed their disapproval of painted representations of the deaths of the Republican leaders in Africa: Cato was depicted tearing himself apart like a wild animal. There were groans as the images passed along the streets. The all-conquering war leader had not yet registered how long a shadow Cato was to cast. Another incident alarmed superstitious Romans: the axle on Caesar’s chariot broke just opposite, of all places, the Temple of Fortune. AS atonement for the portent, he climbed the steps of the Capitol on his knees.