The Dictator (25 page)

The moment he heard that Caesar had invaded, he went straight to Pompey’s house on the Pincian hill to pledge his support. It was packed with the leaders of the war party—Cato, Ahenobarbus, the consuls Marcellinus and Lentulus: fifteen or twenty men in all. Pompey was enraged, and he was panicking. He was under the misapprehension that Caesar was advancing at full strength, with perhaps fifty thousand troops. In fact, that inveterate gambler had crossed the Rubicon with only a tenth of that number and was relying on the shock effect of his aggression. But Pompey did not yet know that, and so he decreed that the city should be abandoned. He was ordering every senator to leave Rome. Any who remained behind would be regarded as traitors. When Cicero demurred, arguing that this was a mad policy, Pompey turned on him: “And that includes you, Cicero!” This war would not be decided in Rome, he declared, or even in Italy—that was to play into Caesar’s hands. Instead it would be a world war, fought in Spain, Africa, the eastern Mediterranean and especially at sea. He would blockade Italy. He would starve the enemy into submission. Caesar would rule over a charnel house.

I shuddered at the kind of war intended,
wrote Cicero to Atticus,
savage and vast beyond what men yet envision.
Pompey’s personal hostility towards him was also a shock. He left Rome as ordered and withdrew to Formiae and brooded on what course to take. Officially he was placed in charge of sea defences and recruitment in northern Campania; practically he did nothing. Pompey sent him a cold reminder of his duties:
I strongly urge you, in view of your outstanding and unswerving patriotism, to make your way over to us, so that in concert we may bring aid and comfort to our afflicted country.

Around this time, Cicero wrote to me: I received the letter about three weeks after I learned of the outbreak of war.

From Cicero to his dear Tiro, greetings.

My existence and that of all honest men and the entire commonwealth hangs in the balance, as you may tell from the fact that we have left our homes and the mother city herself to plunder or burning. Swept along by some spirit of folly, forgetting the name he bears and the honours he has won, Caesar seized Ariminium, Pisaurum, Ancona and Arretium. So we abandoned Rome—how wisely or how courageously it is idle to argue. We have reached the point when we cannot survive unless some god or accident comes to our rescue. To add to my vexations, my son-in-law Dolabella is with Caesar.

I wanted you to be aware of these facts. Mind you don’t let them upset you and hinder your recovery. Since you could not be with me when I most needed your services and loyalty, make sure you do not hurry or be so foolish as to undertake the voyage either as an invalid or in winter.

I obeyed his instruction and thus I found myself following the collapse of the Roman Republic from my sick room—and in my memory, my illness and the madness being played out in Italy are forever merged in a single fevered nightmare. Pompey and his hastily assembled army headed to Brundisium to embark for Macedonia to begin their world war. Caesar chased after him to stop him. He tried to blockade the harbour. He failed. He watched the sails of Pompey’s troopships dwindle into the distance, then turned round and marched back the way he had come, towards Rome. His route along the Via Appia took him past Cicero’s door in Formiae.

Formiae, 29 March

From Cicero to his dear Tiro, greetings.

So I have seen the madman at last—for the first time in nine years, can one believe it? He appeared quite unchanged. A little harder, leaner, greyer, and more lined perhaps; but I fancy this life of brigandage suits him. Terentia, Tullia and Marcus are with me (they send their love, by the way).

What happened was this. All yesterday his legionaries were streaming past our door—a wild-looking lot, but they left us unmolested. We were just settling down to dinner when a commotion at the gate signalled the arrival of a column of mounted men. What an entourage, what an underworld! A grimmer group of desperadoes you have never seen! The man himself—if man he is: one starts to wonder—was alert and audacious and in a hurry. Is he a Roman general or is he Hannibal? “I could not pass so close without stopping for a moment to see you.” As if he was a country neighbour! To Terentia and Tullia he was most civil. He refused all hospitality (“I must press on”) and we went into my study to talk. We were quite alone. He came straight to the point. He was summoning a meeting of the Senate in four days’ time.

“On what authority?”

“This,” he said, and touched his sword. “Come along and work for peace.”

“At my own discretion?”

“Naturally. Who am I to lay down rules for you?”

“Well then, I shall say that the Senate should not give its approval if you plan to send your troops to Spain or Greece to fight the armies of the republic. And I shall have much to say in defence of Pompey.”

At this he protested that these were not the sort of things he wanted said.

“So I supposed,” I replied, “and that is just why I don’t want to be present. Either I must stay away or speak in that strain—and bring up much else besides which I could not possibly suppress if I was there.”

He became very cold. He said I was in effect passing judgement against him, and that if I was reluctant to come across to him, others would be too. He told me I should think the matter over and let him know. With that he got up to leave. “One last thing,” he said. “I should like your counsels, but if I cannot have them I shall take advice wherever I can, and I shall stop at nothing.”

On that note we parted. I don’t doubt our meeting has put him out of humour with me. It is becoming ever clearer that I cannot remain here much longer. I see no end to the mischief.

I did not know how to reply, and besides, I was frightened that any letter I sent would be intercepted, for Cicero had discovered that he was surrounded by Caesar’s spies. The boys’ tutor, Dionysius, for example, who had accompanied us to Cilicia, turned out to be an informant. So too, much more shockingly to Cicero, was his own nephew, young Quintus, who sought an interview with Caesar directly after his visit to Formiae and told him that his uncle was planning to defect to Pompey.

Caesar was at that time in Rome. He had pressed ahead with the plan he had outlined to Cicero and had summoned a meeting of the Senate. Hardly anyone attended: senators were abandoning Italy on almost every tide to join Pompey in Macedonia. But by an unbelievable stroke of incompetence, in his eagerness to flee, Pompey had forgotten to empty the treasury in the Temple of Saturn. Caesar went to seize it at the head of a cohort of troops. The tribune L. Caecilius Metellus barred the door and made a speech about the sanctity of the law, to which Caesar replied, “There is a time for laws and a time for arms. If you don’t like what is being done, save me your speeches and get out of the way.” And when Metellus still refused to move, Caesar said, “Get out of the way or I shall have you killed, and you know, young man, that I dislike saying this more than I would dislike doing it.” Metellus moved out of the way very swiftly after that.

Such was the man to whom Quintus betrayed his uncle. The first clue Cicero had about his treachery was a letter he received a few days later from Caesar, on his way now to fight Pompey’s forces in Spain.

En route to Massilia, 16 April

Caesar Imperator to Cicero Imperator.

I am troubled by certain reports and therefore I feel I ought to write and appeal to you in the name of our mutual goodwill not to take any hasty or imprudent step. You will be committing a grave offence against friendship. To hold aloof from civil quarrels is surely the most fitting course for a good, peace-loving man and a good citizen. Some who favoured that course were prevented from following it by fears for their safety. But you have the witness of my career and the judgement implied in our friendship. Weigh them well, and you will find no safer and no more honourable course than to keep aloof from all conflict.

Cicero told me afterwards that it was only when he read this letter that he knew for certain that he would have to take ship and join Pompey—“by rowing boat if necessary”—because to submit to such a crude and sinister threat would be intolerable to him. He summoned young Quintus to Formiae and gave him a furious dressing-down. But secretly he felt quite grateful to him, and persuaded his brother not to treat the young man too harshly. “What did he do, after all, except tell the truth about what was in my heart—something I had not had the courage to do when I met Caesar? Then when Caesar offered me a funk hole where I could sit out the rest of the war in safety while other men died for the cause of the republic, my duty suddenly became clear to me.”

In strictest confidence he sent me a cryptic message via Atticus and Curius that he was travelling
to that place where you and I were first visited by Milo and his gladiator, and if, when your health permits, you would care to join me there again, nothing would give me greater joy.

I knew at once that he was referring to Thessalonica, where Pompey’s army was now assembling. I had no desire to become involved in the civil war. It sounded highly dangerous to me. On the other hand, I was devoted to Cicero and I supported his decision. For all Pompey’s faults, he had shown himself in the end to be willing to obey the law: he had been given supreme power after the murder of Clodius and had then surrendered it; legality was on his side; it was Caesar, not he, who had invaded Italy and destroyed the republic.

My fever had passed. My health was restored. I, too, knew what I had to do. Accordingly, at the end of June, I said farewell to Curius, who had become a good friend, and set off to chance my fortunes in war.

I travelled by ship mostly—east across the Bay of Corinth and north along the Aegean coast. Curius had offered me one of his slaves as a manservant but I preferred to journey alone: having once been another man’s property myself, I was uneasy in the role of master. Gazing at that ancient tranquil landscape with its olive groves and goatherds, its temples and fishermen, one would never have guessed at the stupendous events now in train across the world. Only when we rounded a headland and came within sight of the harbour of Thessalonica did everything appear different. The approaches to the port were crammed with hundreds of troopships and supply vessels. One could almost have walked dry-footed from one side of the bay to the other. Inside the port, wherever one looked there were signs of war—soldiers, cavalry horses, wagons full of weapons and armour and tents, siege engines—and all that vast concourse of hangers-on who attend a great army mustering to fight.

I had no idea amid this chaos of where to find Cicero, but I remembered a man who might. Epiphanes didn’t recognise me at first, perhaps because I was wearing a toga and he had never thought of me as a Roman citizen. But when I reminded him of our past dealings, he cried out and seized my hand and pressed it to his heart. Judging by his jewelled rings and the hennaed slave girl pouting on his couch, he seemed to be prospering nicely from the war, although for my benefit he lamented it loudly. Cicero, he said, was back in the same villa he had occupied almost a decade before. “May the gods bring you a swift victory,” he called after me, “but not perhaps before we have done good business together.”

How odd it was to make that familiar walk again, to enter that unchanged house, and to find Cicero sitting in the courtyard on the same stone bench, staring into space with the same expression of utter dejection. He jumped up when he saw me, threw wide his arms and clasped me to him. “But you’re too thin!” he protested, feeling the boniness of my shoulders and ribs. “You’ll become ill again. We must fatten you up!”

He called to the others to come and see who was here, and from various directions came his son, Marcus, now a strapping, floppy-haired sixteen-year-old, wearing the toga of manhood; his nephew, Quintus, slightly sheepish as he must have known his uncle would have told me of his malicious blabbing; and finally Quintus senior, who smiled to see me but whose face quickly lapsed back into melancholy. Apart from young Marcus, who was training for the cavalry and loved spending his time around the soldiers, it was plainly an unhappy household.

“Everything about our strategy is wrong,” Cicero complained to me over dinner that evening. “We sit here doing nothing while Caesar rampages across Spain. Far too much notice is being taken of auguries, in my opinion—no doubt birds and entrails have their place in civilian government, but they sit badly with commanding an army. Sometimes I wonder if Pompey is quite the military genius he’s cracked up to be.”