Cicero (23 page)

Cicero was not enjoying the situation in which he found himself. His efforts to keep in favor with all sides meant that he had to behave with unaccustomed
circumspection and keep his emotions—and his tongue—under control. The only advantage that accrued from his support for the land bill and his growing closeness to Pompey was popularity in an unexpected quarter: as he wrote to Atticus, “those conspirators of the wine table, our goateed young bloods.”
Curio, Caelius and other budding
populares
were pleased with him. He was cheered at the Games and gladiatorial shows “without a single wolf whistle.” Otherwise he took what consolation he could in spending more time with his family and in literary pursuits.

Increasingly aware of the need to bolster his fading influence, Cicero decided that more propaganda about his Consulship was called for. He produced an epic in three books, furnished with all the apparatus of gods and muses. Of another work, he told Atticus that he “had used up the entire perfume cabinet of Isocrates [a famous Greek orator] along with all his pupils' scent boxes and some of Aristotle's rouge too.” His tone of voice is ironic, as if he knew perfectly well that what he was doing was not to be taken too seriously. Nor was it: Cicero's readers ridiculed his literary pretensions and had a good laugh at his expense.

At the end of January 60, Cicero let Atticus know of his unhappiness.

Later in the same letter he hinted that even family life was not all it might be. Apart from Terentia's futile jealousy of Clodia, there were worries about his brother, Quintus. For most of his life Quintus was overshadowed by his more celebrated older brother, and every now and again he kicked against his lot and revealed a sore and irascible inferiority complex.
He had been Praetor in 62 and in the following year went out to govern the province of Asia. Cicero was anxious for him and hoped that Atticus might accompany him to exert a moderating influence. He was afraid that Quintus's behavior might damage his own interests, for Cicero tended, maddeningly for his brother, to regard both of them as a single political entity.

Quintus chose this moment to pick a quarrel with Atticus. Its cause is unknown. Perhaps Quintus sensed Atticus's and his brother's lack of confidence in him, or perhaps there was some dispute with his wife, Pomponia, Atticus's sister (heralding the marital difficulties of later years). In any event, Cicero was dismayed that two of the people closest to him were suddenly on bad terms. He did his best to pacify Atticus: “I trusted and indeed convinced myself that … a frank talk or even the mere meeting and sight of one another would set all to rights between you. I need not tell you, for you already know, what a kindly, amiable chap my brother is, how impressionable he is both in taking offense and laying it aside.”

Quintus's performance as governor threatened to realize his brother's worst fears. He had two men found guilty of killing their father sewn up in a sack and drowned—the traditional Roman penalty. When an important provincial named Zeuxis was tried for murdering his mother, Quintus decided to display his evenhandedness by meting out the same punishment—despite the fact that Zeuxis had been acquitted. Zeuxis wisely made himself scarce and, although cross, the new governor then changed his mind, writing him a friendly letter and inviting him to return. On another occasion Quintus ordered one of his lieutenants to burn two embezzlers alive and threatened to have a Roman
eques
“suffocated one day in smoke, to the applause of the province.” When criticized, he said that he had only been joking. His anxious relatives must have raised their eyebrows at his sense of humor.

Another of Quintus's weaknesses (according to Cicero) long outlasted his governorship. While outwardly decisive, he relied a great deal on the advice of those around him, and he preferred to listen to his slaves than to his social equals. His favorite was a certain Statius whom he soon freed and kept as a personal assistant and adviser for many years. Cicero could not stand him and resented his (as he saw it, thoroughly un-Roman) influence over his brother.

Partly as thanks for the election pamphlet of a few years earlier and
partly as a kind of insurance policy, Cicero wrote Quintus a long letter, in effect an essay, on the duties of governorship and, while sugaring the pill, spoke his mind; his brother had to learn to control his temper.

In any case, perhaps because of the good advice of his brother, Quintus seems to have settled down and remained at his post until 59, an unusually long assignment. For all his faults, he was an honest and sophisticated man, who read Plato and Xenophon, spoke Greek fluently and even wrote tragedies in his spare time.

Back in Rome an uneasy interval was dragging on. After the defeat of the land-distribution bill, Pompey, disgruntled and moody, was considering his position. Meanwhile, in what is now Portugal and northwest Spain, Caesar was winning a lively little war against some rebellious tribes. It was not clear what Clodius's ambitions were, and where they might or might not lead, but he was busy building political support. The Senate was in a defensive and obstructionist mode.

By June of the year 60 Caesar had returned from Spain with a new reputation for generalship. Despite opposition from Cato and his friends, he was duly elected Consul for the next year. His colleague was Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, an obstinate and not very astute conservative.

It may have been at this point that Caesar began to look beyond his policy of harrying the
optimates
as occasion arose and to think seriously of ways to break their power permanently. In any case, in the months before taking office, he took stock of the general situation. He saw that there were four senior personalities: himself, Pompey, Crassus and Cicero, each of whom was alienated in one way or another from the political process and unable to achieve his aims. Would it be possible, he wondered, to bring them together in a partnership that would bypass the obstructionist Cato and the Senate? A
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summer gave way to autumn, he began to assemble a deal that would give them what they wanted. Pompey's needs took priority; it was becoming urgent to settle his soldiers and confirm the arrangements he had made in Asia Minor. This was not just a question of satisfying the vanity of a great commander; it was in the public interest, although his opponents would not see it, to ensure that discontented and unemployed veterans were not allowed to add to social confusion in the countryside and in the city of Rome. And the prosperity and stability of the Empire depended on the pacification of the eastern provinces after
years of war, massacre and destruction. Crassus was at loggerheads with the Senate too. The tax farmers were still waiting for a decision about their contracts. The problem would be to find a way of persuading him and Pompey to patch up their poor personal relations.

Then there was Cicero. Although his influence was in decline he still had an extensive network of clients and friends; he was at the height of his powers as an orator and could swing opinion; and he was the ablest politician on the right, a moderate who stood for social and political reconciliation. It is possible that at this stage Caesar had not altogether despaired of a consensual solution to the difficulties facing the Republic. Cicero might have a useful contribution to make; at the very least he would give any pact a degree of respectability—something that would appeal to Pompey.

Finally there were Caesar's own claims. If his forthcoming Consulship was to be a radical and reforming one, which he intended it to be, it would arouse great animosity and it would be essential to protect his personal position once it was over. This could be managed only if he obtained the governorship of a major province—better still, a province where he could further develop his military career. He was the junior partner of the quartet and doubtless perceived that his long-term future would be assured only if he could create the circumstances which would allow him to raise himself and his reputation to a level with that of Pompey.

In December Caesar quickly came to an understanding with Pompey, thoroughly disillusioned with the
optimates
, and, once he had been secured, sounded out the other two. Crassus presented no insuperable difficulties and sometime in the early new year he joined the alliance. The basic proposition was that all three would promise to take no political action of which one of them disapproved. Once Consul, Caesar would put through a land-reform act and get the eastern settlement confirmed, revise the tax farmers' contracts and arrange a five-year provincial command for himself. For all these measures he would receive Pompey's and Crassus's support.

Cicero, however, was a tougher nut to crack. He was approached towards the end of December and for a time could not make up his mind how to react. The go-between was a millionaire businessman from Gades in Spain, Lucius Cornelius Balbus, who had received Roman citizenship about ten years previously. Caesar had come across him during his recent governorship and brought him to Rome, where he acted as his confidential
agent. He and an
eques
, Caius Oppius, became the subtle and ingenious fixers Caesar used to promote his interests during his frequent absences from the capital during the coming years. They wrote letters and published pamphlets. On good terms with all the leading politicians of the day, they wheedled and cajoled, or when necessary threatened, enemies and influential neutrals. They did favors and called them in later as and when the need arose. They were fiercely loyal to their employer.

Balbus told Cicero that Caesar would like him to support the land-reform bill with which he intended to launch his Consulship; in return Caesar would follow his and Pompey's advice in all things and try to draw Pompey and Crassus together. Cicero gave the proposition serious thought. The alliance would bring him closer to Pompey and would secure his position from his critics—and especially from Clodius, who had not forgotten his part in the Good Goddess trial: the word was that as soon as he won public office he would prosecute Cicero for the execution of the conspirators.

Then some lines from the poem on his Consulship came to Cicero's mind, in which the muse of epic poetry, Calliope, appears to him and gives him some advice:

Nobody else had taken the book very seriously, but, as he pointed out to Atticus, for Cicero the passage reminded him of his duty. A
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he thought about what he had written, it struck him how it was essentially a celebration of traditional, aristocratic values. They were where his deepest feelings lay, even if the Patricians of his day cold-shouldered him. His decision not to join the Caesarian alliance was at bottom an emotional one. It was beyond his imagination that the established order could not be saved.

Caesar, Pompey and Crassus went ahead without Cicero and sealed their secret agreement. With their money, their influence, their access to military force and their ruthlessness, they were in a position to act more or less as they wished. They could control the results of elections and arrange special commands or postings almost at will. A cabal was now in command
of affairs, which was willing and able to bypass the Senate. When a later contemporary, Caius Asinius Pollio, wrote one of the first histories of the period, it was no accident that he opened his narrative with this alliance, which signaled the bankruptcy of the old order.

Caesar's success as a politician sprang not only from his capacity for rigorous analysis of a given situation and for decisive action but also from his charm and attention to detail. So, when softening up Pompey, he had appealed to the great man's vanity by getting the Senate to let him wear his triumphal insignia, including the special embroidered purple gown, at public shows. Few people saw the steel behind his agreeable, good-humored manners. He knew how to make himself liked by all and sundry. He was scrupulously polite: once when he was served asparagus dressed with myrrh instead of olive oil, he ate it without objecting and told off his friends when they objected to the dish (because it tasted bitter and was vulgarly expensive). “If you didn't like it, you didn't need to eat it. But if one reflects on one's host's lack of breeding it merely shows one is ill-bred oneself.” His attitude towards money was strategic: it was not so much that he wanted it for himself, he sought it as a fund into which his friends and soldiers could dip, often providing them with cheap or interest-free loans. He was always giving people presents, whether or not they asked for them.

From his youth Caesar took a dandyish care of his appearance, once adding wrist-length sleeves to his purple-striped Senatorial tunic and wearing his belt fashionably loose. His dinner parties and entertainments were legendary; in Plutarch's phrase, he was known and admired for a “certain splendour in his life-style.” Cicero observed: “When I notice how carefully arranged his hair is and when I watch him adjusting the parting with one finger, I cannot imagine that this man could conceive of such a wicked thing as to destroy the Roman constitution.”

In January 59, the new Consul moved with speed, introducing his land-reform bill designed to resettle Pompey's soldiers. He was determined to proceed legally if at all possible. The legislation had been very carefully framed to avoid giving needless offense, and Senators could find little to say against it. After he had read the text aloud, Caesar said he was ready to make any improvements that might be suggested. But Cato was having none of it: he tried to talk the proposal out by filibustering until sunset, when Senate meetings automatically closed.