Cicero (28 page)

The agreement at Luca—especially the five-year commands—was to be kept a deep secret, at least for the time being, but it soon became clear that the alliance had hardened and that Pompey was back in Caesar's camp.

When Pompey eventually arrived in Sardinia, he looked up Quintus and warned him to rein in his brother's behavior, especially his attack on Caesar's land legislation. Quintus repeated the exchange that followed to Cicero: “Ah, just the man I want,”
“Very lucky our bumping into each
other. Unless you have a serious talk with Marcus, you're going to have to pay up on that guarantee you gave me on his behalf.” Beneath the joviality there was a new and unexpected steeliness. Pompey also sent Cicero a direct message, telling him not to take any action on the Campanian land.

Understanding at once that everything had changed, Cicero obeyed without demur and stayed away from the Senate in May when Caesar's legislation was scheduled to be discussed. A
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he told his brother: “On this question I am muzzled.” It soon became clear that more would be asked of him than silence: the First Triumvirate was going to demand his active support. To the general amazement, Cicero showed almost instantly that he was willing to provide it.

How was this volte-face to be explained? The simplest answer was that, after his brief rebellion, Cicero realized once and for all the futility of trying to maintain a freestanding political role. It was humiliating, but in the absence of effective political support from any other quarter he could see no alternative to capitulation to the First Triumvirate. But it was also true that indebtedness for a favor was a serious matter in ancient Rome; Cicero was under a heavy obligation to Caesar and Pompey for approving his return from exile, and acceding to their wishes was a way of repaying it. Finally, he remained bitter about his fellow Senators. If they would not let him into their circle, he would have to look elsewhere to maintain his position. Their flirtation with Clodius added insult to injury and made it all the more imperative that he did not remain isolated. By the end of May Cicero was helping to push through Senate proposals from Caesar which as recently as March he had called monstrous things. These engaged the Treasury to pay for four legions which Caesar had recruited without permission and on his own initiative and gave him leave to recruit ten subordinate commanders.

At the beginning of June the Senate discussed, as it was legally obliged to do, the allocation of provinces for 54. Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus was a candidate for the Consulship of 55, and if he won the election he would be ready for a post-Consular foreign posting in January 54. He had a large client list in Transalpine Gaul, currently under Caesar's control, and wanted to take over as its governor, for by then Caesar's five-year term would have ended. This was a serious threat: if Ahenobarbus was not halted in his tracks, Caesar would be unable to have his Gallic command extended, as had been agreed at Luca.

So Cicero was enlisted to give a major address on this subject. He spoke in extravagant praise of Caesar, who (he argued) should be allowed to complete the good work he had started. He would probably need an extension of only two years and, as it was what he wanted, it should not be ruled out by allowing his provinces to be allocated at this stage. The conquest of Long-haired Gaul was vital to Italy's security and, as Caesar was in winning form, there was no doubt that it would be accomplished expeditiously. When Atticus inquired why he had not as usual received an advance copy of the speech, Cicero wrote back contritely:

Cicero's frame of mind shifted uneasily from one mood to another, but at heart he was depressed. He could not help despising himself for doing Caesar's bidding. Now fifty years old, he felt that his political career was over. He confided to his brother: “These years of my life which ought to be passing in the plenitude of Senatorial dignity are spent in the hurly-burly of forensic practice or rendered tolerable by my studies at home.”

Over the next few years Caesar's gang of three made extensive use of Cicero's legal services as a number of friends trooped through the law courts under his care. One of them was Balbus, the rich Spaniard who had become Caesar's confidential agent and who was accused of having illegally acquired his Roman citizenship. Cicero's defense rested on the plausible proposition that the case was really intended as an indirect attack on the First Triumvirate. This was a fruitless exercise, he argued cogently, and the prosecution would be well advised to think again and let the matter drop. Cicero won the case and Balbus was acquitted.

After defending one of Pompey's supporters, Cicero complained to a friend that he was becoming disillusioned with the law. “I was weary of it even in the days when youth and ambition spurred me forward, and when
moreover I was at liberty to refuse a case I did not care for. But now life is simply not worth living.” His correspondence reveals his continuing uncertainty, even feelings of guilt, about his conduct. “After all, what could be more humiliating than our lives today, and especially mine?”
he confided to Atticus. “For you, though you are a political animal by nature, have not actually lost your freedom.… But so far as I am concerned, people think I have left my senses if I speak on politics as I ought, and a powerless prisoner if I say nothing. So how am I expected to feel?”

The judgment of history has been as harsh on Cicero as he was on himself. On the face of it, his decision to go along with the wishes of the First Triumvirate was weakly self-interested. It was certainly interpreted as being so. He was much criticized and all the old charges were exhumed—the laughable epic on his Consulship, the self-important letter to Pompey in 63 and the unmanly behavior during his exile.

But it is hard to see what else Cicero could have done if he was not to retire into silence and country living. This was not his most glorious hour, but he was taking the only action likely to keep him in the game. His own view that he was uniquely placed to mediate among the conflicting forces on the political scene was not entirely unreasonable. Although the First Triumvirate had reasserted its authority in no uncertain terms, he remained convinced that the alliance would not last forever. Caesar's military successes made it increasingly clear that he and Pompey were competitors. In the long run one of them would have to give ground and yield first place. Circumstances had compelled Cicero to execute a strategic retreat and, although he has been accused through the centuries of inconsistency, his tactical maneuvers did reflect a firm underlying position.

Two years later he wrote a long, reflective letter to an aristocratic friend, designed as a public rebuttal to his critics, in which he set out a comprehensive justification of his actions. He pointed out that in politics the means can vary from time to time while the end remains the same. “I believe in moving with the times,” he noted.

Disappointment in public affairs drove Cicero to make the most of the comforts of private life and the consolations of literature and philosophy. With Quintus away in Sardinia, he spent time superintending the rebuilding of both his and his brother's houses.

Now that the two boys, Marcus and Cicero's nephew Quintus, were nearing their teens, their schooling had to be thought of. Cicero hired the services of a well-known Greek grammarian and literary scholar, Tyrannio of Amisus, to teach them at home. While his own nine-year-old son was an ordinary child with no exceptional talents, Quintus, who was now eleven, was impressively precocious and, according to his uncle, was “getting on famously with his lessons.” Cicero was amused by his description of some wrangle between Terentia and his brother's wife, the endlessly difficult Pomponia. “Quintus (a very good boy),” he wrote to his brother in the spring of 56, “talked to me at length and in the nicest way about the disagreements between our two ladies. It was really most entertaining.”

Tyrannio also helped out with a reorganization of Cicero's library, much of which must have been dispersed or destroyed by Clodius's gangs during his exile. A couple of Atticus's library clerks were borrowed to help with “gluing and other operations.” The results delighted him. “Those shelves of yours are the last word in elegance, now that the labels have brightened up the volumes.”

In 55 Pompey and Crassus held their prearranged Consulships and there was even less for Cicero to do. A
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with politicians throughout the ages, when events compel them to spend more time with their families, he made the best of things. He wrote to Atticus:

Clodius was still being troublesome. A strange “rumbling and a noise,” perhaps an earth tremor, had been heard in a suburb of Rome. The Senate had referred the matter to the soothsayers, who pronounced that expiation should be offered to the gods for various offenses, including the profanation of hallowed sites and impiety in the conduct of an ancient sacrifice. Clodius ingeniously argued that the site in question was Cicero's house on the Palatine, which the College of Pontiffs had wrongly ruled never to have been consecrated at all. In a long harangue to the Senate, Cicero retorted that the mysterious sound had nothing to do with him but must be put down to Clodius's bad behavior. The house in question was not his at all but a completely different one, which Clodius had acquired after murdering its owner, and the sacrifice in question was, of course, that of the Good Goddess whose ceremonies Clodius had polluted.

Aware that his public image needed burnishing but sensing the public would not welcome any more self-praise from his own pen, Cicero tried to interest a respected historian, Lucius Lucceius, in writing a history of his Consulship, exile and return, the main purpose of which would be to expose the “perfidy, artifice and betrayal of which many were guilty towards me.”
He was candid about his expectations and asked Lucceius to write more enthusiastically than perhaps he felt. “Waive the laws of history for once. Do not scorn personal bias, if it urge you strongly in favor.” Lucceius agreed, although for some reason the book seems never to have appeared.

A high point of the year 55 was the grand opening of Pompey's splendid new theater on the Field of Mars. Construction had started in 59 and the project was designed to show off its founder's wealth and power. It was a statement in stone and mortar that he was Rome's leading citizen.

The program included spectacular plays and shows. Cicero was unamused, writing to a friend: “What pleasure is there in having a
Clytemnestra
with six hundred mules or a
Trojan Horse
with three thousand mixing bowls?”

There were also lavish gladiatorial displays. These contests in which criminals were thrown to wild animals were among the most notorious features of Roman culture. By Cicero's day they were becoming an exotic and sadistic entertainment, but as so often with Roman customs they originated in a profound sense of tradition. For centuries, contests of
hired fighters were held in honor of the glorious dead; blood flowed to slake the thirst of ancestors. It was no accident that they were usually staged in that sacred space, the Forum, with its magical fissures and chasms opening into the underworld. It was symbolically apt that gladiators waited in the subterranean tunnels beneath the pavement before coming up to fight. An ancient historian claimed that “the first gladiatorial show was given in Rome in the cattle market in the Consulship of Appius Claudius and Marcus Fulvius. It was given by Marcus and Decimus Brutus to honor their father's ashes at the funeral ceremony.”
For their descendants, today's Appius Claudius and Marcus Brutus, the violent deaths of armed men in the city's heart, its central square, in some vestigial but still resonant way, opened a lane to the land of the dead.

Some gladiators were slaves hired for the purpose (like the troupe trained by Atticus), others were condemned criminals. Many men enrolled as gladiators to buy themselves out of poverty. They were lodged in special barracks (one has been excavated in Pompeii). Life was tough, with whips, red-hot branding irons and iron fetters used to keep discipline.

However, successful gladiators were celebrities, like today's boxers and football stars. The gladiatorial ethos was so ingrained in the culture that in the following decade two allies, a Roman general and an African king, entered into a gladiatorial suicide pact after a lost battle. They fought a duel and when the Roman had killed his opponent he arranged for a slave to cut him down. We are told that children played gladiator games and young people discussed the form of leading fighters. Some were popular sex symbols: graffiti from the first century
AD
have been found on walls in Pompeii—one Thracian gladiator was “the maiden's prayer and delight” and “the doctor to cure girls.” Their images appeared on pots and dishes.