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

by Anthony Everitt

It did not take long for panic to ensue. Members of the public, stampeding from the theater and its environs, shouted: “Run! Bolt your doors. Bolt your doors.”

Brutus and those with him tried their best to calm the crowds in the Forum, but there was little they could do and so they climbed up the Capitoline Hill, where they could beat off any attackers. They were able to catch their breath and plan their next move.

Slowly the public mood quieted, as it became clear that no further deaths were taking place and that there would be no looting.

In the afternoon Brutus came down into the Forum to address the People. Before he did so, arrangements were made to ensure that a suitably friendly audience was recruited. This did not prove difficult, for much of the urban population was unemployed and attendance could be bought.

Despite the fact that many of those in the Forum had been bribed, they lacked the courage to show their approval of what had been done. There was still a widespread mood of shock and uncertainty.

In their speeches, Brutus and Cassius avoided triumphalism.

They said they had acted from disinterested motives. They had no intention of seizing power, for their only aim was to preserve their freedom and independence.

The two years that followed Caesar’s assassination are the best documented in Roman history.

Even so, the actors in the story do not always betray their motives. The press of events was so confusing that even when they were sure of what they wanted they often had no idea how best to achieve it.

Brutus, Cassius and the other conspirators were much criticized at the time—and have been in the two millennia that have followed—for laying no plans for the aftermath of the assassination.

The Dictator had maintained, if only in form, the constitutional proprieties and Brutus and his friends judged that, once he had been removed, nobody would seriously try to prevent the Republic from slipping back into gear.

A great deal hung on how Antony behaved. It was a question of character and here opinions varied. Cicero’s assessment was much the same as it had been when he had had to prise the teenage rebel out of Curio’s life: he was an unscrupulous and immoral rascal.

Against Cassius’s advice, Brutus had refused to have Antony killed. By implication, he must have judged that Antony was unlikely to seek to step into the Dictator’s shoes.

Now in his late thirties, Antony was a handsome man, built like a bull and, according to Cicero, “as strong as a gladiator.” He was sexually promiscuous and hard drinking and retained the taste he had acquired as a young man for bad company: actors and prostitutes. A good soldier, he was popular with his men. He could summon up great resources of stamina and energy, but only when occasion demanded.

In all likelihood, Antony genuinely endorsed a return to constitutional methods and, if he had a future career path in mind, might have found in Pompey a safer model than in Caesar.

Two important groups felt very differently. For the moment they were powerless because leaderless, but their minds were set on revenge and they waited for their opportunity.

Second, the aides and civil servants whom the Dictator had hired had lost their jobs. They were able and dedicated. At their head were Balbus and Oppius: everything they had been working for would be lost forever if they could not find a way of subverting the newly restored Republic.

By contrast, Cicero was thrilled by the dramatic turn of events. A hurried note he wrote to one of the conspirators probably refers to the assassination. “Congratulations. For myself, I am delighted. You can count on my affection and active concern for your interests. I hope I have your affection and want to hear what you are doing and what is going on.”

Realizing that his life was not in danger, Antony spent the night taking steps to secure his position. Lepidus led his legion from the island in the Tiber into the city and secured the Forum.

Antony also met with Balbus and the following year’s designated Consul, the gourmet and writer Hirtius. The former argued, unsurprisingly, for the severest measures against the assassins, the latter for caution.

On March 16 Brutus addressed a large gathering at the Capitol, but he made little impression. He was a plain, unemotional speaker and his performance more than justified Cicero’s low opinion of the Attic style of oratory.

The conspirators stayed away from the Senate on the following day, although they were invited to attend. Die-hard Caesarians were a minority, but a lively debate started as to whether to declare Caesar a tyrant and give immunity to the assassins.

Antony interrupted and went straight to the point. He ruled that if Caesar was condemned, it followed that his appointments would be illegal. Was this what the Senate wanted?

Privately Cicero would have much preferred to have drawn a line under the past and agreed on a new start. But with veterans surrounding the meeting and Senators fearful of losing their offices and provincial commands, that was out of the question. So he spoke strongly in favor of Antony’s proposal.

One of the important results of the Senate’s ruling was the protection it gave to the leading conspirators. In addition to deciding the Consulships for the coming three years, Caesar had allocated provincial governorships.

AS the Senate was about to break up, a noisy discussion broke out over Caesar’s will. His father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, was asked not to announce its contents or conduct a public funeral for fear of disturbances.

When published, the will inflamed opinion on the street, for it bequeathed Caesar’s gardens on the far side of the Tiber as a public park and left 300 sesterces to every Roman citizen. Popular with the masses, it was not calculated to please Antony, for it also disclosed that the chief heir to the Dictator’s fortune was Caius Octavius, his eighteen-year-old grandnephew.

The funeral on March 20 promised to be a very grand affair on the Field of Mars and was to be preceded by speeches in the Forum before the bier. Brutus and the other conspirators foresaw trouble and locked themselves in their houses.

In the Forum, an ivory couch stood on the Speakers’ Platform, draped in an embroidered gold-and-purple pall. In front a temporary chapel had been erected, modeled on the Temple of Venus in Caesar’s new Forum.

Antony, in his capacity as mourner, friend and kinsman (his mother was a member of the Julius clan) of the dead Dictator, delivered the funeral oration.

Appian, writing in the second century AD, has it that Antony spoke with passion about the dead man’s achievements and criticized the recent amnesty for the assassins.

Standing close to the bier as though he were on stage, he hitched up his toga to free his hands. He bent over the body and, swept by emotion, pulled off Caesar’s gown, bloodstained and torn, and waved it about on a pole.

It is possible that in their memory of this extraordinary day people mixed up the contents of Antony’s opening presentation and the dirges.

The climax came when a wax effigy of Caesar (the corpse itself was lying out of sight on the bier) was lifted up. It was turned around in all directions by a mechanical device and twenty-three wounds could be seen, on every part of the body and on the face.

It is hard to believe that whoever designed the funeral ceremony was unaware of the effect it was likely to have. If Antony was not responsible, it must have been Caesar’s family, perhaps advised by his clever aides, Balbus and Oppius.

The conspirators realized it was impossible for them to remain in Rome and withdrew to their country estates. This left Antony master of the situation.

This was a misjudgment of the situation, for the Consul was still intent on securing his power base. To this end he used Caesar’s papers for his own purposes, forging documents to reward his supporters and enrich himself.

In some ways Cicero found himself in the same uncomfortable position that he had been in at the beginning of the civil war. This time, though, he had absolutely no doubt whose side he was on and had no intention of putting himself forward as mediator again.

Cicero kept restlessly on the move from one villa to another, often sleeping in one place for only one night. He wrote to Atticus almost every day.

Marcus was getting on reasonably well in Athens. Atticus, presumably in Greece, was helping out with his cash flow. The boy was poor at keeping in touch, but when in June he did eventually write home his father was pleased to see that his literary style showed signs of improvement.

Balbus and Hirtius took care to keep in touch with Cicero. He received a very civil letter from Antony asking him to agree to the recall of one of Clodius’s followers from exile; this unpleasant reminder of the past annoyed him, but he made no objection.

Cicero noted the hurried departure of Cleopatra from Rome. “The Queen’s flight does not distress me,” he wrote coolly. Well endowed with regal ways, Cleopatra appears not to have been a popular figure in Rome, and the death of her protector meant that there was nothing left to keep her in Italy.

Towards the end of April Caesar’s youthful heir arrived in Italy. Octavian had been born during Cicero’s Consulship in 63 and came from a respectable provincial family in the country town of Velitrae in the Alban Hills south of Rome.

Octavian grew up to be a short, slight, attractive young man with curly yellowish hair and clear, bright eyes. A weakness in his left leg sometimes gave him the appearance of having a limp.

In 45, despite being in a state of semiconvalescence after a serious illness, Octavian had followed Caesar to Spain, where he was fighting the last campaign of the civil war.

After the battle of Munda, Octavian had been sent to the coastal town of Apollonia, across the Adriatic Sea in Macedonia. Caesar wanted him on the Parthian campaign and told him to wait there with the assembled legions until he joined them.

When the terrible news arrived in Apollonia, Octavian’s first nervous instinct was to stay with the army, whose senior officers offered to look after him. But his mother and stepfather suggested that it would be safer if he came quietly and without fuss to Rome.

In taking these actions, Octavian was publicly asserting himself as the Dictator’s political, not merely personal, heir. He felt able to do so because he realized that Antony’s compromise settlement with the Senate did not take the feelings of the army into full account. It was a remarkably bold step and calls for explanation. IS it reasonable to believe that an inexperienced teenager would have seized the initiative in this way without prompting?

The long-term plan, shadowy in outline at this stage and not publicly emphasized, would be to turn the tables on the conspirators and take revenge for the assassination.

On his journey north from Brundisium, Octavian was welcomed by large numbers of people, many of them soldiers or the Dictator’s former slaves and freedmen.