Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician

by Anthony Everitt

In June 47 Tullia took the long and uncomfortable journey south to visit her father.

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.

Caesar was in a hurry, for his first, urgent priority on regaining Italy was to meet his soldiers and quash the still simmering mutiny.

lictors,

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].

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.

Terentia’s defense against the charges, if she had one, cannot now be reconstructed.

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.

Catilinarian conspiracy,

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.

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 conti...

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. ...

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.

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.

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.

The Republican armies had been defeated and the war appeared to be over.

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 free 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.

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.

The impact of this event on Roman opinion was enormous; indeed, it has echoed down the ages.

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 ...

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...

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.

But how would Cicero be able to speak his mind without getting into trouble with the authorities?

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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 soci...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

In addition, there were plenty of invitations to dinner. He began to accept them, fairly indiscriminately. He was happy to dine with the enemy.

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.

The government was alarmed at the growth of conspicuous expenditure in Rome and passed sumptuary laws to control it.

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 public mood was unsettled. There were complaints about the amount of blood shed at the Games and the soldiery, annoyed by the extravagance, rioted.

The Forum of Julius, which had been under construction on the far side of the Senate House at Caesar’s expense since 54, was officially opened.

Controversially, a gold statue of Cleopatra was erected next to one of Venus, whose temple was one of the Forum’s key features. About this time the Egyptian queen appeared in Rome in person with her court and her brother and co-Pharaoh, the thirteen-year-old Ptolemy XIV. Her motives for leaving her kingdom for what turned out to be an eighteen-month stay were probably mixed.

She and Caesar no doubt wanted to continue their affair, but she also knew that her throne depended on her lover and the favor of Rome’s ruling class. Egypt was the last great imperial prize for the all-conquering Republic, and the danger of annexation was real. Cleopatra was prepared to devote all her personal charms to maintaining her country’s independence.

In the past, the Senate had been more or less a gentleman’s club, with a few New Men like Marius or Cicero added to the mixture from time to time.

Caesar, wisely acknowledging the multicultural composition of both the Empire and the city of Rome itself, resumed the old custom of opening citizenship and power to defeated and annexed peoples. More radically, he enlarged the Senate, recruiting from the provinces and the Italian communities.