Cicero

3

THE FORUM AND THE FRAY

The Birth of an Orator: 81–77 BC

Almost all the main incidents in Cicero’s career unfolded in a space hardly larger than two football fields, a square in the center of Rome. This was the Forum, where advocates addressed juries and politicians the People. In contemporary British terms, it combined the functions of Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, the City of London and a shopping mall. All the personal services of urban life could be found there, from food stores to rent boys.

Rome itself had a profound impact on a teenager who had spent his early years in a small provincial town. It was by far the largest city in the ancient world. Time-travelers from the present day who had only the gift of sight would be at home in a townscape recognizably like the ancient cities of the Maghreb—say, Marrakesh or Fez or the casbah of Algiers. But if they could hear and understand Latin, they would quickly realize that Rome was a city without any of the public facilities which today we take for granted (except for the water supply, channeled into the city on aqueducts and underground sewers). Life was lived in the daylight hours. There was no street lighting: when night fell, the only illumination came from individual torches carried by pedestrians or their servants. Most Romans found it safer to be indoors in the evening.

Town planning was an art in its infancy and Rome had no wide thoroughfares or avenues. It was a web of lanes and alleys. Cicero referred to the city as “planted in mountains and deep valleys, its garrets hanging up above, its roads far from good, merely narrow byways.” An urban district was, in effect, defined by a single street running through it. (The Latin word vicus meant both a quarter and a street.) The law required it to be at least five meters wide. At the end of each one there was a crossroads from which other roads and quarters led off. These central streets were the only ones that strangers were wise to visit. They were public spaces, but the urban hinterland beyond was essentially private and outside state control.

Different quarters specialized in particular industries or trades. So, for example, leather goods—books and sandals—could be found in the Argiletum. The Subura was known for its lowlife and brothels. The Aventine Hill, with its temple of Minerva, goddess of wisdom and the arts and sciences, on the summit, was an artists’ quarter, like the Left Bank in Paris or London’s Soho. Many playwrights and actors were based there, as was a community of poets. A self-help corporation of artists who lived and worked on the Aventine afforded a degree of mutual protection in what were, then as now, precarious professions. This was also a part of the city that attracted social misfits and victims of exclusion: foreigners, widows and prostitutes.

Rome was seriously overcrowded and, in an attempt to solve the chronic housing problem, blocks of apartments or insulae (literally, “islands”) were constructed. These high-rise buildings, usually with shops on the ground floor, had about five or six stories and could be as tall as twenty meters. They were usually jerry-built and frequently collapsed. Other risks that citizens, and especially the poor, faced were fires and periodic floods when the Tiber overflowed its banks. The state took little or no interest in such events and the only social intervention it made was to insure and subsidize the corn supply. Anything might happen to urban Romans, but at least they would not starve.

Cicero was to become a landlord and developer, once he had made his fortune and become a man of means; he wrote to Atticus with that combination of insouciance and greed that has marked the upper-class rentier throughout the ages: “Two of my shops have collapsed and the others are showing cracks, so that even the mice have moved elsewhere, to say nothing of the tenants. Other people call this a disaster, I don’t even call it a nuisance.… Heavens above, how utterly trivial such things appear to me! However, there is a building scheme under way … which should turn this loss into a source of profit.”

The smartest addresses were on the Palatine and Velia Hills, although the pressure on space was so great that the mansions of the rich were built on tiny plots of land with minuscule gardens. In his heyday Cicero was hugely proud to own one of the largest houses on the Palatine. Two winding streets, Victory Rise (Clivus Victoriae) and Palatine Rise (Clivus Palatinus), could accommodate carriages and led up from the valley below, from the Forum and the hurly-burly of urban life.

Although the Romans were a practical people, they believed that the foundation of a built community was a sacred act. The city’s boundary, the pomoerium, was holy and inviolable. According to legend, this was a furrow which a plow drawn by a white heifer and ox had traced at the time of Rome’s foundation and it was forbidden to cross it. Entrance was restricted to the gates or ianua where the plow had been lifted. Soldiers were denied access and became civilians when they came inside the ritual enclosure. Likewise burials were not allowed inside the pomoerium.

The Forum was the city’s political, commercial and legal heart, but it was also its spiritual center, a space even more sacred than the city itself. A rectangular piazza, approaching 200 meters long by 75 meters wide, and flagged with stones, it lay in what had once been a marsh between the hills of the Capitol, the citadel where the great Temple of Jupiter stood, and the Palatine. Today it is a jumble of grass and stone rubble, where a few lucky pillars survive to recall the days of ancient Rome. However, with imagination and a guidebook, it is not very difficult to reconstruct in the mind’s eye the scene as it was when the young Cicero presented his first case as a counsel for the defense in 81 BC.

At one end, from 78 BC, the tall facade of the national archive, the Tabularium, lined the cliff of the Capitol. In front, from the point of view of an observer facing it, stood the Temple of Concord (Concordia) and on its left the Temple of Saturn with its large forecourt, which functioned as the State Treasury. Religion and daily life were not separated in the Roman mind and temples were regularly used for business and state purposes.

On the right, the Senate House and the Assembly Ground (Comitium) provided the setting for political activity. A Speakers’ Platform stood on the outer edge of the Comitium. It was decorated with ships’ prows captured in a sea battle in 338 and their name in Latin, Rostra, was applied to the platform as a whole.

The long sides of the square were bordered by two colonnaded halls, the Basilica Fulvia Aemilia and the Basilica Sempronia. Maintained and refurbished by the great families that had had them built, they contained shops and meeting rooms. Farther down just past the Basilica Sempronia, the Temple of Castor and Pollux (or Temple of the Castors) stood on a high podium under which were two rows of moneylenders’ booths—the nearest equivalents to modern banks. The building, which had a large speaker’s platform in front of the temple porch, also served as a political meeting place and the Senate was often convened there. Nearby, judicial proceedings were held at the Tribunal Aurelium, a stone dais surrounded by steps from the top of which Cicero was to harangue juries. Cases were conducted out-of-doors in various parts of the Forum and advocates had to speak in rain or shine, summer heat or winter cold.

Underneath the flagstones of the square itself was (and still is) a network of underground tunnels. These were where gladiators waited before emerging to fight in a temporary wooden arena where various kinds of spectacle were staged during festivals and on holidays.

The Forum was closed at its far end by a group of religious buildings—among them the circular Temple of Vesta, goddess of the hearth. Here an eternal flame was tended by a team of six free-born women dedicated to chastity, the Vestal Virgins, who lived in a large house beyond the Temple. They were appointed between the ages of six and ten and served for thirty years. If they broke their vows (happily, a rare event), they were buried alive outside the pomoerium, and their lovers were whipped to death on the Assembly Ground. The Vestal Virgins were symbolically married to the Chief Pontiff (pontifex maximus, a title later expropriated by the pope).

The Chief Pontiff chaired the highest religious council, the College of Pontiffs, and was responsible for the organization of the state religion. The College in turn was in charge of the calendar and decided the dates of festivals and public holidays. It also kept a record of the principal events of each year, the Annals. Overall, its task was to regulate the relations between gods and men. The Chief Pontiff lived next door to the Vestal Virgins in the State House (domus publica). Nearby was the somewhat extravagantly named Palace (regia), a poky little structure built centuries before, when kings still ruled the city. It contained a variety of sacred objects and housed the Annals and the official calendar.

Politics in the late Republic was grounded in a profound sense of what it was to be a Roman, a commitment to the mos maiorum, ancestral customs. This sense was, quite literally, embodied in the Forum’s layout and structures. There was hardly a spot that had not been the scene of some great event in the city’s legendary past as well as more recent, historical times.

At the center of the Forum a low wall surrounded a water hole near a cluster of three plants: a vine, a fig tree and an olive bush. This was the Pool of Curtius, where in Rome’s early years a chasm had suddenly appeared. The prophetic Sibylline Books, an antique collection of oracular utterances in Greek hexameters which the Romans consulted in times of national crisis, advised that the gap in the ground would close only when it received what the Roman people valued most highly. From that day forward the earth would produce an abundance of what it had taken in. People threw cakes and silver into the hole, but it stayed open. Then a young cavalryman, one Marcus Curtius, told the Senate that he had worked out the answer to the riddle: it was its soldiers’ courage that Rome held most dear. Fully armed astride his warhorse, he galloped down into the chasm and the crowd hurled animals, precious fabrics and other valuables after him. Finally, the earth closed. According to another version, Curtius was an enemy Sabine whose horse drowned in what was then a swamp. The most plausible (and least exotic) account claimed that a Consul named Curtius fenced the Pool off and consecrated it after the area had been struck by lightning. But for the average Roman, the historical truth was neither here nor there. What mattered was that the Pool was a holy emblem of the city’s past.

Beside the Basilica Fulvia Aemilia stood a little shrine to Venus Cloacina, just above the spot where a great subterranean drain, the Cloaca Maxima, ran beneath the Forum (the Cloaca survives to this day). Here in the dim past Roman and Sabine soldiers, about to do battle, had laid down their arms and purified themselves with sprigs of myrtle: they had quarreled after the Romans, facing a population crisis, had kidnapped some women of the neighboring Sabine tribe to provide themselves with more wives. A few yards away was the Navel of the city (umbilicus Romae); this was considered to be the center of the city and the point at which the living world was in contact, through a deep cleft in the ground, with the underworld. The site that combined the historical and the sacred at their most vital was the Black Stone (niger lapis) next to the Assembly Ground. This was a sanctuary of great antiquity dedicated to the god Vulcan and nearby was the legendary site of the assassination of Rome’s founder, Romulus.

Plan of the Roman Forum, Cicero’s workplace as a lawyer, as it was from the mid-second to the mid-first century BC. The positioning of buildings indicated by broken lines is different from that of the present day. Trials were held in the open air with the presiding judge on a platform and jury seated nearby.

Speculative plan of the Senate House. The presiding Consul chaired meetings from the dais opposite the main door. Former Consuls sat in the front rows.

A reconstruction of the main features of the Roman Forum in Cicero’s day. It was crowded with statues, an altar here and a shrine there, historical paintings near the Assembly Ground, a stone lawyers’ platform, and the impedimenta of temporary stands and notice boards.

It was not only the Forum that was sacred but also most of the activities that were conducted there. Political and indeed private life was governed by a web of religious rules and procedures, predictions and omens. Religion was not so much a set of personal beliefs as precisely laid-down ways of living in harmony with the expectations of the gods. In fact, by the end of the Republic educated men believed less in the literal truth of the apparatus of religious doctrine than in a vaguer notion of the validity of tradition.

The basic proposition was that no human enterprise could be undertaken without divine sanction. This applied to domestic households as well as to state affairs. The gods worked through natural phenomena to reveal their wishes or intentions. Signs included the flight or songs of birds, the activities of animals and thunder and lightning. It was also possible to attach significance to words or phrases casually spoken.

The College of Augurs had the sole right of interpreting the auspices. (Like the College of Pontiffs, it comprised leading personalities of the Roman establishment and Cicero became a member towards the end of his career.) An Augur would mark off a rectangular space, called a templum (the origin of the word “temple”), from which he would conduct his observations. In some places permanent templa were identified, one of which was on the citadel on the Capitol Hill. Signs from the east (usually on the Augur’s left) were held to be favorable and those from the west unfavorable. In addition, Etruscan soothsayers, or haruspices, were often called to Rome to explain apparently supernatural events and gave judgments based on an examination of the entrails of sacrificed animals.

Sanctity permeated the annual calendar, which controlled political and legal processes according to a religious framework. The calendar was divided into twelve columns and each day was marked with an F or an N, depending on whether it was fastus or nefastus—lucky or unlucky, lawful or unlawful. On the former days, business could be conducted, the law courts could sit, farmers could begin plowing or harvesting crops. Especially fortunate days were marked with a C (for comitialis), which meant that popular assemblies could meet. Some days were thought to be so unlucky that it was not even permissible to hold religious ceremonies: these included the days following the Kalends (first of a month), Nones (the ninth day before the Ides), the Ides (the thirteenth or fifteenth of the month) and the anniversaries of national disasters.

If a day was nefastus, the gods frowned on human exertion (although one was allowed to continue a task already started). An added complication was that some days were partly lucky and partly unlucky. According to a stone-carved calendar discovered at Antium, 109 days were nefasti, 192 comitiales, and 11 were mixed. The Roman year was also punctuated by numerous festivals or public holidays (some of which were one-time events caused, say, by the need to expiate some offense or sacrilege). For certain public holidays the dates were not fixed until the last minute by the priests and officeholders who managed the calendar.

The interfusion of church and state gave plenty of leeway for manipulation and chicanery by the colleges and by politicians. Julius Caesar’s colleague during his first Consulship, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, tried to invalidate all Caesar’s legislation by withdrawing to his house to “scrutinize the heavens,” a step that theoretically brought all political activity to a halt. Popular assemblies were sometimes prevented from meeting by the simple expedient of declaring nefastus the day when they were to be called.

Public and religious ceremonies were conducted according to precise forms of words and any mistake by the officiant was held to be so unlucky that the entire ritual had to be repeated. Men in public life did their best to avoid accidental events or actions from being seen as unlucky. On a famous occasion during the civil war, Caesar tripped when disembarking from a ship on the shores of Africa and fell flat on his face. With his talent for improvisation, he spread out his arms and embraced the earth as a symbol of conquest. By quick thinking he turned a terrible omen of failure into one of victory.

Cicero came to know the Forum well during his student years. But then, alarmed by the turbulent reigns of Marius and Sulla, he stayed clear of public life. During the latter part of the 80s, he read and wrote, studied literature and philosophy and improved his knowledge and practice of public speaking. His aim was “not (as most do) to learn my trade in the Forum, but so far as possible to enter the Forum already trained.” Other ambitious young upper-class Romans were trying their hands as advocates in their early twenties, building political support and generally getting noticed; but for the time being Cicero was mostly silent and invisible.

In the summer of 81 the proscription came to an end, and life began to return to normal. Sulla turned his attention to political reform. His basic idea was to prevent the dominance of two classes of politician who, he believed, had come near to destroying the Republic. The first was the radical Tribune, like the Gracchus brothers with their dangerous obsession with land reform. The second was the powerful general willing to lead his loyal army on Rome—in other words, someone very like himself. He was determined to stop another Sulla from expropriating the state.

He increased the powers and size of the depleted Senate. Between 300 and 400 new members were appointed. He also raised the quota of Quaestors and introduced the rule that they became Senators ex officio. In order to prevent inexperienced young men from gaining power too early, he set strict age limits for officeholders. Although there were scandalous exceptions, this was the basic pattern to which the younger generation, including Cicero and Caesar, had to conform.

Tribunes lost much of their authority: their right to present legislation to the General Assembly, thus bypassing the Senate, was withdrawn. More seriously, they were debarred from holding any other public office. The Tribuneship could no longer fast-forward a political career.

New rules were introduced to control elected officials abroad. The Senate allocated provincial appointments and was expected to ensure that the most dangerously ambitious politicians were kept from the most sensitive governorships. Postings were usually to be for one year only and a new treason law regulated governors’ behavior. They were not allowed to start wars without permission, leave their provinces or take their troops into someone else’s. With a few spectacular exceptions, governors adhered to these rules.

Cicero warmly approved of Sulla’s ends but not his means; he believed that the Dictator had won “a disreputable victory in a reputable cause.” He was greatly relieved when order was restored. It meant not only that the constitution had survived but that at long last it was safe to return to the Forum and launch his career at the bar. He was twenty-five years old.

We do not know how the inexperienced advocate won his first briefs. Almost certainly his family’s clientela network was put to work and cases were found that for one reason or another were unattractive to more senior lawyers. His first extant speech dates from 81; it was a defense of a certain Publius Quinctius, who had become embroiled in a complicated dispute with his dead brother’s business partner about the ownership of a cattle farm in Transalpine Gaul. Cicero was noticed as a promising newcomer; but while his voice was powerful, it was harsh and untrained and he strained it from overuse.

All his life he suffered from first-night nerves. He acknowledged:

Personally, I am always very nervous when I begin to speak. Every time I make a speech I feel I am submitting to judgment, not only about my ability but my character and honor. I am afraid of seeming either to promise more than I can perform, which suggests complete irresponsibility, or to perform less than I can, which suggests bad faith and indifference.

On at least one occasion he is known to have broken down completely. He would work up and polish his speeches after delivery and publish them in a form which may sometimes have been substantially different from the original versions. A few times he published speeches that had never been delivered at all.

Malicious critics drew an unkinder picture. A contemporary attack on Cicero’s method in 43 (as reported, perhaps invented, by an imperial historian) is knockabout invective and not to be taken too seriously, but it has a ring of truth.

Why, you always come to the courts trembling, as if you were about to fight as a gladiator, and after uttering a few words in a meek and half-dead voice you take your leave.… Do you think anyone is ignorant of the fact that you never delivered those wonderful orations of yours that you have published but wrote them all out afterwards, like craftsmen who mold generals and cavalry leaders out of clay?

In 80 the case arose that made Cicero’s reputation. He must have hesitated before taking it on, for it touched on corruption in the Dictator’s entourage. Famous legal names had declined to have anything to do with it, fearful of Sulla’s well-known vengefulness. It took some courage for the timid young orator to accept the brief.

His client was one Sextus Roscius, who was accused of having murdered his father. It was the first trial of a capital offense since the proscription. The story Cicero presented to the jury threw a sharp light on the impact that high events in the capital had had on the lives of ordinary people. Roscius’s father, a well-to-do farmer, had paid a visit to Rome during the previous summer or autumn. One night, walking back from a dinner party, he was set upon and killed near some public baths. His son, meantime, was at their home at Ameria, a hill town to the north of Rome, looking after the family estate.

A long-standing feud existed between the victim and two fellow Amerians. According to Cicero, one of the pair happened to be in Rome and immediately sent a messenger to the other with the news of Roscius’s father’s death. This man passed the information to Chrysogonus, a powerful freedman and favorite of Sulla, then encamped with his army a hundred miles north of Ameria. A simple but effective plot was devised to get hold of the substantial Roscius estate.

The proscription lists had been closed on June 1, 81 BC, but Chrysogonus arranged for Roscius’s father’s name to be entered on it retrospectively, despite the fact that he was a well-known conservative. AS a result, all his property was confiscated and publicly auctioned. Although valued at 6,000,000 sesterces, it was knocked down to Chrysogonus for a trifling 2,000 sesterces. AS his share of the spoils, one of the Amerians was given some of Roscius’s father’s land. The remainder went to Chrysogonus, who appointed the other Amerian as his agent and business manager.

The affair caused a great deal of bad blood in Ameria, where Roscius’s father had been a respected figure, and a civic delegation was dispatched to Sulla to lay a complaint. One of the alleged conspirators was appointed to the group and he made sure that it failed to obtain a personal audience with the Dictator. Instead, the Amerians met Chrysogonus, who gave them the assurances they asked for: he would have Roscius’s father’s name removed from the proscription list and would help the son to regain possession of the dead man’s estate.

This bought the conspirators some time, but obviously their promises would have to be delivered sooner or later—and seen to be delivered. If young Roscius were somehow to come by a nasty accident in the meantime, the problem would be solved. This would not be difficult, for he was now isolated, penniless and vulnerable. After more than one attempt on his life, he realized it would be sensible to leave town and he made his way south to the comparative safety of Rome.

Foiled, Chrysogonus and his partners in crime decided on a bold course of action. In fact, if they wanted to preserve their gains, they had little other choice. Father and son had been on poor terms (even Cicero acknowledged this) and it was arranged for the young man to be accused of parricide. This was among the most serious offenses in the charge book and was one of the few crimes to attract the death penalty under Roman law. The method of execution was extremely unpleasant. An ancient legal authority described what took place: “According to the custom of our ancestors it was established that the parricide should be beaten with blood-red rods, sewn in a leather sack together with a dog [an animal despised by Greeks and Romans], a cock [like the parricide devoid of all feelings of affection], a viper [whose mother was supposed to die when it was born], and an ape [a caricature of a man], and the sack thrown into the depths of the sea or a river.”

It is difficult to judge how convincing the case against Roscius was. AS with all Cicero’s speeches at the bar, the arguments of the other side have not survived—sometimes (albeit not on this occasion) even the verdict is lost. Taken as a whole, the story Cicero tells is internally consistent. The likeliest explanation of the murder is either that Roscius was the victim of a late-night mugging, plausible enough in a city without police and street lighting, which his enemies in Ameria then opportunistically exploited—or alternatively that they arranged his assassination themselves.

Cicero’s speech appears to have been soundly based on meticulous research, but its dramatic effect derived more from its daring structure than from the evidence. He opened with a refutation of the charge of parricide. Then he shifted gear and took the offensive: his aim was to destroy the character of the two Amerians and pin the murder charge on them. Finally, and one can only imagine the gasps of surprise around the courtroom, he launched into a full-frontal assault on the Dictator’s favorite, Chrysogonus and the un-Roman excesses of his lifestyle. He, the argument went, was the real villain of the piece.

“He comes down from his mansion on the Palatine Hill,” Cicero intoned with a measured flourish before swooping in for the kill. “For his enjoyment he owns a delightful country place in the suburbs as well as some fine farms close to the city. His home is crammed with costly gold, silver and copper Corinthian and Delian dishes, including that famous pressure cooker which he recently bought at auction at so high a price that when people heard the bids called they thought a landed estate was up for sale. And that is not all. How much embossed silver, carpets and coverlets, pictures, statues, marble do you think he owns? AS much, of course, as he could pile up in one house, taken from many famous families during this age of riot and pillage.” Cicero was nothing if not a genius at character assassination. “And just look at the man himself,” he concluded, “gentlemen of the jury. You see how, with his elegantly styled hair and reeking with perfume, he floats around the Forum, an ex-slave surrounded by a crowd of citizens of Rome, you see how superior he feels himself to be to everyone else, that he alone is wealthy and powerful.”

The court burst into loud applause and Roscius was acquitted. (Unfortunately, the future fate of the players in the drama is unknown.) Cicero had scored a brilliant victory and in one bound joined the front rank of Roman orators. However, the achievement was not without risk.

Cicero insisted that he was not attacking Sulla, who (he claimed) knew nothing about the case, but it was hard to read the speech other than as a critique of the regime. The Dictator was in a position to take revenge on an impertinent young advocate if he wanted to do so. Soon after Cicero compounded the offense by taking on another case with political overtones, that of a woman from Arretium who challenged Sulla’s withdrawal of her Roman citizenship.

In any event, the Dictator took no action against Cicero. Perhaps he could not be bothered to intervene in a minor matter of this kind; he was beginning to lose interest in the exercise of power and withdrew into private life in the following year.

The chief result of Cicero’s defense of Roscius was a flood of briefs. In the months that followed he brought a rapid succession of cases to court—as he recalled, “smelling somewhat of midnight oil.” He was soon suffering severely from overwork.

He did, however, make time to find a wife. This would help him stabilize and enhance his finances and, if he chose well, extend his political connections. It seems that in or around 79, at the age of twenty-seven, Cicero married Terentia. Apparently much younger than he was, she came from a wealthy, perhaps aristocratic family and brought with her a dowry of 480,000 sesterces. This was a substantial fortune, well beyond the sum of 400,000 sesterces required for entry into the equestrian order. She owned woods and pastureland, probably near Cicero’s villa at Tusculum. Little is known about her background, except that her half-sister, Fabia, was a Vestal Virgin. She had a strong character, as Plutarch observed: “Terentia was never at any time a shrinking type of woman; she was bold and energetic by nature, ambitious, and, as Cicero says himself, was more inclined to take a part in his public life than to share with him any of her domestic responsibilities.”

The traditional Roman wedding was a splendid affair designed to dramatize the bride’s transfer from the protection of her father’s household gods to those of her husband. Originally, this literally meant that she passed from the authority of her father to her husband, but at the end of the Republic women achieved a greater degree of independence, and the bride remained formally in the care of a guardian from her blood family. In the event of financial and other disagreements, this meant that her interests were more easily protected. Divorce was easy, frequent and often consensual, although husbands were obliged to repay their wives’ dowries.

The bride was dressed at home in a white tunic, gathered by a special belt which her husband would later have to untie. Over this she wore a flame-colored veil. Her hair was carefully dressed with pads of artificial hair into six tufts and held together by ribbons. The groom went to her father’s house and, taking her right hand in his, confirmed his vow of fidelity. An animal (usually a ewe or a pig) was sacrificed in the atrium or a nearby shrine and an Augur was appointed to examine the entrails and declare the auspices favorable. The couple exchanged vows after this and the marriage was complete. A wedding banquet, attended by the two families, concluded with a ritual attempt to drag the bride from her mother’s arms in a pretended abduction.

A procession was then formed which led the bride to her husband’s house, holding the symbols of housewifely duty, a spindle and distaff. She took the hand of a child whose parents were living, while another child, waving a hawthorn torch, walked in front to clear the way. All those in the procession laughed and made obscene jokes at the happy couple’s expense.

When the bride arrived at her new home, she smeared the front door with oil and lard and decorated it with strands of wool. Her husband, who had already arrived, was waiting inside and asked for her praenomen or first name. Because Roman women did not have one and were called only by their family name, she replied in a set phrase: “Wherever you are Caius, I will be Caia.” She was then lifted over the threshold. The husband undid the girdle of his wife’s tunic, at which point the guests discreetly withdrew. On the following morning she dressed in the traditional costume of married women and made a sacrifice to her new household gods.

By the late Republic this complicated ritual had lost its appeal for sophisticated Romans and could be replaced by a much simpler ceremony, much as today many people marry in a registry office. The man asked the woman if she wished to become the mistress of a household (materfamilias), to which she answered yes. In turn, she asked him if he wished to become paterfamilias, and on his saying he did the couple became husband and wife.

Just as the exact date of Cicero’s marriage to Terentia is uncertain, so the style of their wedding is unknown. Perhaps the young provincial, the New Man from Arpinum with his feeling for the Roman past and his eagerness to be socially accepted, opted for tradition. On the other hand the skeptical Philhellene might well have resisted meaningless flummery. Unfortunately, there is not a scintilla of hard evidence pointing in one direction or the other. By the same token, the birth date of their first child, Tullia, is unknown. Although she came to be the apple of her father’s eye, the arrival of a girl was no great cause for celebration or even notice in a male-oriented society. She was born probably in 75 or 76 but possibly earlier.

In 79 Cicero went abroad with a group of friends for an extended tour of the eastern Mediterranean and, as it would appear that the wedding took place that year, left his wife behind. Romans seldom took their wives with them on foreign trips. Cicero’s emotional life was still centered on the male friendships he had made in his student years.

On the face of it, Cicero’s decision to leave Rome just when his career had taken off was mysterious. People whispered that he was afraid of reprisals from Sulla, or perhaps more plausibly Chrysogonus, because of Roscius’s acquittal. But on balance this seems unlikely. Having completed his work of reform, Sulla was now approaching retirement; reliving his debauched youth, he survived, if Plutarch is to be believed, only for a few more disreputably entertaining months.

Cicero’s true motive for his foreign travels was the need to recover his health, which suddenly collapsed. Physically he was not robust. He was thin and underweight and had such a poor digestion that he could manage to swallow only something light at the end of the day. Success had come at a high price and he needed time to recoup his forces. Such in any case was his own explanation and there is little reason to doubt it. He recalled:

I was at that time very slender and not strong in body, with a long, thin neck; and such a constitution and appearance, if combined with hard work and strain on the lungs, were thought to be almost life-threatening. Those who loved me were all the more alarmed, in that I always spoke without pause or variation, using all the strength of my voice and the effort of my whole body. When friends and doctors begged me to give up speaking in the courts, I felt I would run any risk rather than abandon my hope of fame as a speaker. I thought that by a more restrained and moderate use of the voice and a different way of speaking I could both avoid the danger and acquire more variety in my style; and the reason for my going to Asia was to change my method of speaking. And so, when I had two years’ experience of taking cases and my name was already well-known in the Forum, I left Rome.

If recuperation was the primary reason for his travels, he also grasped the chance to deepen his professional training. For all his years of study, Cicero was unsatisfied with his technique; he lacked ease of delivery and his oratorical effects were sometimes strained and artificial. He visited various celebrated or fashionable teachers of rhetoric and, never forgetting what he saw as the moral dimension of rhetoric, also spent time on fundamental philosophical studies.

His brother Quintus, a small, choleric man, and his much younger cousin Lucius Cicero, son of the uncle whose early death cut short a promising career, went with him on this classical equivalent of an eighteenth-century grand tour. Two former fellow students, Titus Pomponius Atticus and Marcus Pupius Piso, were welcome additions to a congenial party. They spent six months in Athens and did a good deal of sightseeing.

Not long after their arrival the group was initiated into the secret religious mysteries of Eleusis, a few miles from Athens, which must have come as a shock to Romans brought up to see religion as a set of rules and social rituals. The mysteries were at the heart of a festival of purification and fertility; those taking part witnessed some kind of spiritual reenactment of death and rebirth, involving a descent into the underworld and a vision of the future life. Cicero was profoundly stirred by the experience and believed that of all Athenian contributions to civilization, these transcendental ceremonies were the greatest. Writing near the end of his life in his book On Law, he claimed: “we have learned from them the beginnings of life and have gained the power not only to live happily but also to die with a better hope.”

But what really interested him was Greek philosophy and, as he saw it, its essential interconnection with the art of public speaking. His book On Supreme Good and Evil (De finibus), written more than three decades later, is a series of philosophical dialogues, one of which recalls his stay in Athens. The speakers are the companions of his grand tour and the setting is the Academy, the grove of olive trees containing a gymnasium or exercise ground where Plato had taught and which became a kind of university for the study of philosophy and rhetoric. In the morning the young men attend a class given by the head of the Academy, Antiochus of Ascalon, and in the afternoon they take a stroll in the gardens to enjoy the quiet calm of the place.

According to Plutarch, Cicero “planned that, if he were finally deprived of the chance of following a public career, he would retire to Athens, away from the law and politics, and spend his life here in the quiet pursuit of philosophy.” In fact, although from time to time over the years he was indeed forced into periods of retirement, this never happened. But if he did not go to Athens he made Athens come to him. At his house at Tusculum he would later re-create the Academy, with halls and walks for intellectual debate and meditation, and build a version of Aristotle’s base in Athens, the Lyceum.

In the autumn of 79, Cicero left Athens for Asia Minor. In Rhodes, he sat briefly at the feet of a well-known Stoic philosopher and historian, Posidonius. More important, he consulted a distinguished rhetorician, Apollonius Molon, whom he had heard twice in Rome and whose style was rather more restrained than that of his florid rivals on the Asian mainland. He provided the technical retraining Cicero needed. Molon was, Cicero later recalled,

not only a pleader in real cases [as distinct from theoretical exercises] and an admirable writer but excellent as a judge and critic of faults and a very wise teacher and adviser.… And so I came home after two years not only more experienced but almost another man; the excessive strain of voice had gone, my style had so to speak simmered down, my lungs were stronger and I was not so thin.

In 78 news came of Sulla’s death and any residual anxieties Cicero may have had for his personal safety disappeared. In two years he would be old enough, under the new rules, to put a foot on the first rung of the political ladder and run for Quaestor. He was determined to stand at the earliest legal opportunity. If elected he would hold office the following year, when he would be thirty. By 77 he was back in Rome rebuilding his legal career in the Forum and planning his first political campaign.