Cicero (40 page)

Apart from such sour wisecracks, Cicero had little to say about all this legislation, at least in the extant correspondence. (There are no long runs of letters from this period.) He was silent in the Senate and his attendance record does not survive. His general disenchantment, though, can be deduced from a letter to a friend towards the end of the year. He wrote: “I used to sit in the poop, you see, with the helm in my hands. But now I hardly have a place in the bilge.”

In order to be able to govern effectively, Caesar assembled a personal cabinet drawn from trusted lieutenants of his in Gaul, who worked alongside the official magistrates. He also seems to have laid the foundations of what eventually became the imperial civil service. Balbus was one of its key members and spent much of his time drafting decrees. Every now and then Cicero's name was borrowed without prior consultation as having proposed an edict. “Don't think I am joking,” he remarked. “Let me tell you I have had letters delivered to me from monarchs at the other end of the earth thanking me for my motion to give them the royal title, when I for my part was unaware of their existence, let alone of their elevation to royalty.”

For anyone with eyes to see, the old, level arena where equal competitors
could contend had disappeared. Members of the ruling class who had survived the civil war were no longer genuinely elected to office but became functionaries whose
imperium
was not theirs but was on loan from the Dictator.

For all his active social life, it would be wrong to regard the Cicero of these years as merely a dilettante and socialite. The creative and organizational energies he had once devoted to politics and the law were still running strongly and sought an outlet. He became very active in persuading Caesar to pardon leading opponents who were still in exile. Paradoxically, although he was profoundly out of sympathy with the new regime, his personal relations with Caesar had never been warmer. After the Dictator's death, he admitted that “for some reason he was extraordinarily patient where I was concerned.”

The busy head of state enjoyed Cicero's sense of humor and received daily reports of his latest sallies, even if some of them were at his expense. Different cultures have different senses of humor. Cicero specialized in the brutal put-down, as when he met a man with three ugly daughters and quoted the verse “Apollo never meant him to beget.” At one trial a young man accused of having given his father a poisoned cake said he wanted to give Cicero a piece of his mind. Cicero replied: “I would prefer that to a piece of your cake.” Only a few of Cicero's jokes still raise a smile, but his contemporaries delighted in them.

Cicero told his friend Paetus in July 46:

In December one of the Dictator's staff published a collection of these assiduously collected witticisms.

Cicero tirelessly exploited his Caesarian connections on behalf of defeated
optimates
. His motives for using his good offices in this way were predictably mixed. The unpatronizing tone and thoughtfulness of his correspondence with those he was helping suggest that natural kindliness was one of them. However, he would have been less than human not to take pleasure in offering a valuable service to the grandees who had scorned the New Man from Arpinum. He wanted to show them that, however much they criticized him, he bore no malice and was more than willing to help them.

By far the most important factor driving Cicero, though, was the hope that after all, at the eleventh hour and defying all probability, the “mixed constitution” for which he had argued in
On the State
and which had been Rome's glory might be reinstated. Working closely with the Dictator on reconciliation was an essential precondition if the new political order was to be truly inclusive.

For Quintus Ligarius, a former opponent of whom the Dictator had a poor opinion, Cicero offered a personal plea, as he described in a letter to him: “On November 26 [46], at your brothers' request, I paid Caesar a morning visit. I had to put up with all the humiliating and wearisome preliminaries of obtaining admission and interview. Your brothers and relations knelt at his feet, while I spoke in terms appropriate to your case and circumstances.”
The meeting appeared to go well, but Caesar reserved an announcement of his decision for a more public occasion: while he was genuinely unvindictive, he did not want his clemency to be hidden under a bushel. So, according to an anecdote in Plutarch, Cicero agreed to speak in Ligarius's defense at a formal hearing in the Forum. Caesar, who was presiding, was apparently so moved by what he heard, especially when Cicero touched on the battle of Pharsalus, that his body shook and he dropped the papers in his hand. Ligarius was duly acquitted and allowed to come back to Italy. Some scholars have discounted the story, but it is plausible enough as an instance of adept news management.

The most distinguished surviving Republican for whom Cicero spoke was Marcus Claudius Marcellus, the Consul for 51, a steady but not diehard opponent of Caesar who had retired to the island of Lesbos after Pharsalus. When the matter of his recall was raised at a Senate meeting, the Senate rose to its feet
en masse
to plead for clemency. Caesar, after complaining of Marcellus's “acerbity,” suddenly and unexpectedly gave
way. Cicero was delighted to see “some semblance of reviving constitutional freedom.”
The story ended sadly, for Marcellus was murdered by a friend at a dinner party before returning home.

The decision to pardon Marcellus persuaded the orator to break his long silence in the Senate. He delivered a brilliant speech of thanks, which reached the boundary of flattery but did not quite cross it. With psychological acuteness, he appealed to the Dictator's desire for glory. Caesar had recently said in reference to a reported plot against him: “Whether for nature or for glory I have lived long enough.” This was unacceptable, Cicero argued: Caesar was the only person who could reunite past enemies and bring back Rome's traditional institutions—the rule of law, the freedom of the Senate, in a word everything that Cicero meant to convey by his slogan “harmony of the classes.” The Dictator should legislate a constitutional settlement that would outlast him. Cicero was not being inconsistent here: in
On the State
, published six years previously, he had been explicit that on occasion a Dictator was needed to restore order.

It is interesting to observe from the tone of Cicero's correspondence at this time that he did not suffer the agonizing doubts of the early months of the civil war. He had come to a settled view which he maintained without great mental or emotional anxiety, until it became clear that the Dictator either would not or could not live up to his expectations.

Cicero's book on Cato was published towards the end of the year and attracted much attention. Although it argued that Cato had been an exemplar of all that was best in Roman culture, this was apparently not good enough for its dedicatee, Brutus, who went on to produce his own eulogy. The appearance of Cicero's
Cato
probably undid any good that might have been achieved by the Marcellus speech. Caesar was enraged. It was not just that he objected to the canonization of a man whom he regarded as a blundering reactionary. More seriously, it was a reminder that, to Cicero and the political class for which he stood, reform and renewal meant returning to a failed model of governance rather than inventing a new one. He was so upset that he asked Hirtius to write a refutation. (It was a flop, which Cicero delightedly asked Atticus to distribute as widely as possible, on the grounds that it could only further enhance Cato's reputation.)

In due course, the Dictator regained his equanimity. The following summer he praised Cicero's writing style and commented wryly that reading
and rereading his
Cato
improved his powers of expression, whereas after reading Brutus's account he began to fancy himself as a writer. The political damage of all this furor about Cato called for his personal attention. Caesar composed his own rebuttal, the
Anti-Cato
(also lost). The pamphlet drew an unflattering portrait of a drunkard and miser. Cicero himself was complimented for his oratory but indirectly criticized as a political weathercock. This lack of moderation disturbed opinion in Rome and cast some doubt on the genuineness of Caesar's clemency. For the first time since the civil war began he had incautiously allowed it to be seen that an offense had wounded him personally.

The
Anti-Cato
was written while Caesar was on the march again, for it turned out that despite his African victory the civil war was not quite over after all. Having escaped from Thapsus, Pompey's two sons, Cnaeus and Sextus, went to Spain, where they raised the standard of rebellion again. Caesar appointed commanders to manage the campaign against them, but they made little headway. In November 46 he decided that the situation required his personal attention and he suddenly left Rome for the battlefront. It was to be the final confrontation.

Young Quintus joined Caesar's army and Marcus, nervous of approaching his father directly and working through Atticus, sought permission to go too. And while he was asking for favors, he would also be grateful for a decent allowance. The second request presented no great difficulty, but Cicero told his son that, as for going to Spain, it was enough for the family to have abandoned one side without joining the other. He warned him that he might not enjoy being in the shade of his older and more influential cousin. Although his father did not formally refuse to give his permission, Marcus was a docile boy and no more is heard of the project.

The exchange was a reminder that some thought needed to be given to the twenty-year-old's future. He had practical rather than academic abilities and had inherited little of his father's literary talent. Nevertheless, in the following year it was decided that he should continue his studies in Athens. He seems not to have been the most diligent of students. In a handful of letters to Tiro from 44, he apologized for being a dilatory correspondent and promised to work harder. He wanted the freedman to put in a good word for him with his father and be his “publicity agent.” He also dropped a hint about his “meager allowance” and asked Tiro to get a
clerk sent out to him, preferably a Greek. “I waste a lot of time copying out my notes.”
On Cicero's explicit instructions, Marcus dropped the company of Gorgias, a rhetorician who was encouraging the young man to overspend and to drink too much, and began to study with a distinguished Aristotelian philosopher. Marcus was good-natured, lazy and fond of a good time. He was too much in awe of his father to stand up to him directly and had the diffidence of the child who knows he is not a favorite.

Cicero now made a disastrous move in his personal life. In 46 he at last found the wife he had been looking for, but his selection, a wealthy teenage ward of his, Publilia, was unfortunate. Terentia, sniping from the sidelines, accused him of an old man's infatuation. Cicero did not help his case by responding to criticism with a tasteless joke. When someone reproached him on the eve of the wedding for marrying a mere girl, he retorted: “She'll be a woman tomorrow.”

Little is known about Cicero's relations with the opposite sex. He claims that he made a point of not being promiscuous in his youth and seems to have endured separations from Terentia even early on in their marriage with equanimity. Accounts of the political support she gave him during his Consulship suggest a businesslike relationship and strong mutual loyalty. What remains of their correspondence was written when they were both middle-aged and conveys little more than routine affection.

The only woman with whom Cicero's emotions seem to have been powerfully engaged was Tullia. This was noticed by his contemporaries. In an age when political invective made a great deal out of opponents' sexual peccadilloes, the only serious (but completely unconvincing) charge against him was that he had committed incest with his daughter.

Although Roman upper-class women had considerable social freedom and could sometimes exert political influence behind the scenes, it was a male world and the socially conservative Cicero mainly enjoyed the company of men. There is mention of one elderly woman friend, although unfortunately there is very little information about her. This was Caerullia, who was ten or more years older than Cicero and had philosophical interests. They were very close towards the end of his life and their correspondence (now lost) was said to have been somewhat risqué.

Tiro disagreed with Terentia about Cicero's motives for marrying Publilia. Many years later he claimed that friends and relatives pressed
Cicero to make the match in order to settle his large debts. The only comment Cicero has left behind was matter-of-fact and says more about Terentia than Publilia. He wrote to a friend:

A month or two after the marriage Cicero was struck by the most terrible blow he had ever experienced in his life. For the first time since his exile his mental equilibrium was threatened. Tullia died.