Cicero

6

PRETTY-BOY’S REVENGE

The Good Goddess Affair and the Return of Pompey: 62–58 BC

The Father of His Country believed that, thanks to him, the Republic was safe. There were, to be sure, troubles ahead. Pompey and his legions would soon return from Asia Minor and the victorious general would expect to play a leading role in the state; just conceivably, if given an excuse, he might act like Sulla, march on Rome and establish an autocracy. The populares had lost decisively with the defeat of Catilina, but the snake was only stunned. Caesar, who had been plotting against the Senatorial interest behind the scenes, was rising up the political ladder and, barring accidents, would be Consul in a few years’ time. It would be Cicero’s task, which he felt to be well within his abilities, to hold the balance between the competing parties.

Overelated by his Consulship, he refused to stop talking about it. His listeners soon grew tired of him. “One could not attend the Senate or a public meeting nor a session of the law courts without having to listen to endless repetitions of the story of Catilina and Lentulus,” Plutarch writes. “This unpleasing habit of his clung to him like fate.”

Cicero’s boastfulness was not simply an expression of conceit, although that played a part. Privately, he mocked himself for “a certain foolish vanity to which I am somewhat prone.” However, the prestige, or dignitas, which was the essential political and social attribute of a leading Roman rested on a combination of his own achievements and those of his ancestors. Cicero had only the former to maintain his status, and so he felt obliged to keep himself firmly and prominently in the public eye by ostentation and constant self-praise. He also encouraged his friends and acquaintances to write about him and his achievements.

Cicero’s position was not nearly so preeminent, nor so secure, as he supposed. AS it turned out, a reaction against him was under way even before his triumph ended. Pompey, who had been watching events from afar, saw in the military threat from Catilina an opportunity for his recall as the only man able to meet it. This would strengthen his position vis-à-vis the Senate, from which he expected trouble back in Rome. He asked his brother-in-law, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Nepos, who was a Tribune, to obtain a special command for him against Catilina and to do his best to remove the gloss from Cicero’s Consulship.

Metellus Nepos launched his attack on the last day of the year. It was the custom that, just before leaving office, Consuls gave a public account of their stewardship to the People gathered at the Assembly Ground in the Forum. Cicero was looking forward to his first major opportunity to publicize his record, but Metellus Nepos put a stop to the festivities. Accompanied by a fellow Tribune, he used his power of veto and refused to let Cicero speak. Seated on benches in front of the Speakers’ Platform, they told Cicero that he could only make the traditional oath on leaving office and then had to step down.

Cicero agreed to do as asked, but he was determined to have the last word. Instead of the usual formula, he improvised a new oath. He said: “I swear to you that I have saved my country and maintained her supremacy.” Later in the day he appealed to Metellus Nepos through intermediaries to soften his hostile attitude. Metellus Nepos replied that his hands were tied, for he could not go back on his public statement. He had insisted that someone “who had punished others without a hearing should not be given the right to speak himself.”

The message was sinister and unmistakable. Metellus Nepos, and so presumably Pompey, was in alliance with populares like Caesar. The Tribune went on to promote a bill commissioning Pompey to restore order in Italy, but by then Catilina was dead and his army destroyed. So another decree was laid before the People, allowing Pompey to stand for the Consulship in his absence. Caesar, now Praetor, was on hand to help and seated himself with Metellus Nepos on the platform in front of the Temple of the Castors in the Forum to superintend the vote.

AS expected, Cato, also a Tribune that year, entered a veto. But Metellus Nepos had assembled a troop of gladiators and other fighters, who were waiting in the side streets. He now unleashed them on the crowd, and most of the Senatorial party withdrew under a hail of blows—except, to no one’s surprise, for Cato, who obstinately held his ground until one of the Consuls, fearing for his safety, pulled him inside the Temple. Yet despite these strong-arm measures, there was too much opposition from the assembled crowd to proceed with the vote, and the proposal was abandoned.

The Senate sensed that Metellus Nepos had overplayed his hand and suspended both him and Caesar from their official functions. Caesar knew when to recognize defeat: he dismissed his lictors, changed out of his purple-edged toga and went home. However, with typical tactical brilliance, he quickly retrieved the situation. When noisy crowds shouted for his reinstatement, he went out into the Forum and persuaded them to disperse. It is hard to avoid wondering whether this was improvisation or a cleverly scripted piece of street theater. In any event, the Senate was so surprised and gratified by his good behavior that it pardoned him and he returned to his duties as Praetor. AS for Metellus Nepos, he made his way back to Pompey to report the failure of his mission.

Undaunted by the attempt to undermine him, the former Consul decided that he needed a new, more opulent house to match his prestige. Towards the end of 62, he purchased one of the grandest mansions in the city’s grandest quarter, the Palatine Hill, overlooking the Forum. It belonged, unsurprisingly, to Crassus. The house stood on a northeastern spur of the Palatine and had a magnificent view of the city. Its location could not have been more convenient; the Forum was only a few minutes’ walk—or litter ride—down Victory Rise. Cicero’s visitors and hangers-on did not have far to go to pay their morning calls. Space in the city center was in short supply and the house was one of the few with a substantial garden. It contained a fine walk of poplar trees together with an exercise ground (palaestra), which, following the Greek custom, was also used for philosophical debates.

The purchase price was high, some 3.5 million sesterces, and Cicero had to borrow heavily to find the money. It was awkward that just at this juncture he found himself short of ready cash. Part of his arrangement with Antonius, his fellow Consul, had been a large loan financed by Antonius’s expected profits as governor of Macedonia. He was also rumored to have negotiated another loan with a suspected conspirator, whom he had successfully defended on a bribery charge. Unfortunately, he found it difficult to get the cash out of Antonius and had to send a freedman to Macedonia to look after “our joint profits.”

Cicero greatly enjoyed buying houses—he called his collection of eight or so villas the “gems of Italy.” In addition to the palace on the Palatine, there was his family home in Carinae, which he had inherited from his father and now passed on to Quintus, and others in Argiletum and on the Aventine Hill, which were rented out and brought in an income of 80,000 sesterces. There was the family estate at Arpinum, and he owned two small farms near Naples and Pompeii (where he also had a house); he also acquired a number of small lodges or diversaria, which wealthy Romans used as private wayside stops along the main roads in the absence of comfortable hotels. Some of his properties he bought, but others were legacies or presents from clients he had represented in the courts.

He had his preferences. The house at Formiae, on the Campanian border about 50 miles north of Pompeii, was “not a villa—it is a public lounge.” AS ever, his pride and joy was the place at Tusculum, within easy reach of Rome, where he continued to spend money on improvements. Writing about another property (acquired towards the end of his life) on the tiny wooded peninsula of Astura on the coast near Antium, he observed to Atticus: “This district, let me tell you, is charming; at any rate it’s secluded and free from observers if one wants to do some writing. And yet, somehow or other, ‘home’s best’; so my feet are soon carrying me back to Tusculum. After all, I think one would soon get tired of the picture scenery of this scrap of wooded coast.”

Now that he no longer had official duties, Cicero kept himself busy as an advocate, but he also had to appear occasionally in court as a witness. One trial at which he gave evidence followed a sensational scandal that took place at the end of 62. He broke the alibi of the unruly young aristocrat Publius Clodius Pulcher, who was accused of sacrilege. Clodius was a member of the patrician Claudius family, although he used a popular version of the name. The Claudii had produced Consuls in every generation since the foundation of the Republic and over the centuries had built up a well-deserved reputation for high-handedness and violence. In one typical incident, a Claudius was leading a Roman fleet into battle. The sacred chickens refused to give a favorable omen by feeding on some corn that was put out for them. So Claudius had them flung into the sea, with the words: “If they won’t eat, then let them drink.”

Clodius possessed a full share of ancestral genes. When serving in Asia Minor during his youth, he had helped foment a mutiny against his commander and later got himself kidnapped by pirates. On his return to Rome he had unsuccessfully prosecuted Catilina on a charge of extortion—with no very serious intent, one guesses, other than to extort money from Catilina’s rich protector, Crassus. He had joined Cicero’s bodyguard in 63, perhaps as much for the fun of it as from political conviction. Now, as Quaestor-designate, he was on the point of starting his political career in earnest. At present he was known as little more than a young roisterer and it would be a year or two before he revealed himself as a serious and ruthless popularis.

The festival of the women’s deity, the Good Goddess, was celebrated in early December every year in the house of a senior government official. Secret mystical ceremonies in the presence of the Vestal Virgins took place which only women were permitted to attend. Little is known about them except that the most important rituals took place at night. Music was played and there was a sacrifice of some kind. The previous year it had been Cicero’s turn—or, more precisely, Terentia’s—and this time the ritual took place at the State House, Julius Caesar’s official residence as Chief Pontiff. Clodius, who had fallen for Caesar’s wife, Pompeia, decided to infiltrate the event in drag. He came dressed as a lute player but lost his way in the corridors of the house. He came across a maid who asked him his name. His masculine voice gave him away, and he ran off. The alarm was given and a search conducted until he was found hiding under a bed. Somehow he managed to escape. Most people thought he was lucky to have survived the incident without injury.

When Cicero wrote to Atticus about the affair, his excited amusement is palpable. “I imagine you have heard that P. Clodius, the son of Appius, was caught dressed up as a woman in C. Caesar’s house at the national sacrifice and that he owed his escape alive to the hands of a servant girl—a spectacular scandal. I am sure you will be deeply distressed!” It was, in fact, as Cicero knew, a serious business. Religious ritual accompanied almost every public event, and to breach it was unforgivable. Clodius would almost certainly face grave charges. Caesar himself was embarrassed and immediately divorced Pompeia, making the famous point that, whether or not she was innocent, his wife had to be above suspicion.

It is difficult to know what to make of the Good Goddess affair. AS far as one can tell, there were no political overtones. But a house crowded with visitors was hardly a convenient rendezvous point for clandestine lovers. Probably all that Clodius had in mind was a dare. It was exactly the kind of practical joke that would amuse Rome’s fashionable younger generation. These young men and women had plenty of money and were socially and sexually liberated. They turned their backs on the severe tradition of public duty. No longer defining themselves exclusively in terms of community—family, gens, patrician or noble status—and rebelling against authority, they lived for the moment.

Many of them had been sympathizers with Catilina (although for some reason Clodius had had little to do with the failed revolutionary) and, even if they had no time for politics now, they emerged later as supporters of Caesar during the civil war. Some became his key associates during his years of supreme power: able, unscrupulous and with huge debts to settle, they had no objection to aiding and abetting the death throes of the Republic, provided that Caesar paid them generously. Although most of them knew one another, they were not a coherent movement. Friendships were made and broken; cliques formed, melted away and re-formed. Respectable opinion deeply disapproved of them. The contemporary historian Sallust claimed they had a

passion for fornication, guzzling and other forms of sensuality. Men prostituted themselves like women, and women sold their chastity at every corner. To please their palates they ransacked land and sea. They went to bed before they needed sleep, and instead of waiting until they felt hungry, thirsty, cold or tired, they forestalled their bodies’ needs by self-indulgence. Such practices incited young men who had run through their property to have recourse to crime.

The great poet Caius Valerius Catullus, a member of Clodius’s circle, fell in love with the eldest of Clodius’s three sisters. After she threw him over, Catullus wrote memorably, with all the rage of discarded passion, of Clodia’s loose way of life. In a poem to Marcus Caelius Rufus, another of her lovers, he described her as loitering “at the crossroads and in the back streets / ready to toss off the ‘magnanimous’ sons of Rome.” She had a house on the fashionable Palatine Hill and gardens on the Tiber conveniently near a public bathing area, where she was accused of picking up young men. Clodia and her sisters were widely supposed to have slept with their brother and, although these kinds of accusations were part of the cut-and-thrust of political life, the rumors of incest were persistent and were confirmed under oath by one of their ex-husbands.

AS a bachelor Caelius lived in a block of apartments owned by Clodius, but eventually relations with his friend’s sister became strained. In 56 Clodia accused Caelius, who shared with Catullus the status of rejected lover, of attempting to poison her. Cicero successfully defended him with one of his most entertaining speeches, in which he gave a devastating exposé of the “Medea of the Palatine” or, in Caelius’s phrase, “that ten-cent Clytemnestra.”

Other members of the young circle included Mark Antony, grandson of the great orator of Cicero’s childhood and stepson of the conspirator Lentulus, and Caius Scribonius Curio. The two were close friends and, according to Cicero, lovers. Curio encouraged his young protégé to run up huge debts for which he stood surety. In one of the Philippics, the sequence of great speeches against Antony which Cicero gave nearly two decades later, this relationship is subjected to lively (perhaps overlively) scrutiny.

You [Mark Antony] assumed a man’s toga and at once turned it into a prostitute’s frock. At first you were a common rent boy; you charged a fixed fee, and a steep one at that. Curio soon turned up, though, and took you off the game. You were as firmly wedded to Curio as if he had given you a married woman’s dress. No boy bought for lust was ever as much in his master’s power as you were in Curio’s. How many times did his father throw you out of his house? How many times did he set watchmen to make sure you did not cross his front door? And yet under cover of night, driven by lust and money, you were let in through the roof tiles.

This sounds exaggerated, but Cicero should have known what he was talking about, for he was brought in as mediator and persuaded Curio’s father to pay off his son’s debts. Antony was barred from the house and for a while latched himself on to Clodius. Their relationship did not last, perhaps because Antony had an affair with Clodius’s wife, Fulvia, whom he was later to marry. Also he grew uneasy with Clodius’s extremist politics and the opposition they were arousing. Deciding it was time for a fresh start, he went to Greece for military training and to study public speaking.

In fact, although Cicero deeply disapproved of such goings-on, he knew many of the younger generation quite well. For a time he was friendly with Clodius, who had been a member of his consular bodyguard, until Terentia began to worry that he was attracted to Clodia. (It is hard to imagine a more implausible romance.) He became very fond of the brilliant but volatile Caelius, whom he first met in 66, when he took him on as an informal pupil to study public speaking. Caelius became a sharp-eyed observer of the Roman scene, delighted in gossip and had an excellent sense of humor; ten years on he kept Cicero, who would forgive a lot for a good joke, up-to-date on the latest events in the city when the reluctant elder statesman was in Asia Minor on a foreign posting.

Catullus knew Cicero too and respected him enough to write him a charming poem:

Silver-tongued among the sons of Rome,

the dead, the living and the yet unborn,

Catullus, least of poets, sends

Marcus Tullius his warmest thanks:

—as much the least of poets

as he a prince of lawyers.

It seems odd that Cicero was on such good terms with people whose behavior he found morally objectionable. The fact is that he liked young men and, as he grew older, took much pleasure in bringing them on, developing their talents and promoting their careers. He enjoyed the liveliness of their company. Caelius was the first in a succession of youthful friends—the last and trickiest of whom was to be Caesar’s adopted son, the young Octavian, later the Emperor Augustus.

None of this is to suggest that Cicero was homosexual. He explicitly disapproved of same-sex relationships. In an age when politicians hurled every conceivable accusation of sexual malpractice against their opponents, this charge was very seldom laid at his door. Apart from the probably abusive suggestion that he lost his virginity to an older classmate in his youth, the only direct piece of evidence on the matter is a flirtatiously erotic ode he penned to a young slave of his, Tiro. But this is best seen as a playful imitation of Greek love poetry.

The Senate was uncertain how to handle the Good Goddess scandal. A trial would only cause trouble and might ignite the populares, but it seemed that there was no alternative. A bill to set up a special tribunal was agreed on by the Senate and the proposal was then considered by the People. Cicero was there and described the scene: “When the day came for the bill to be put to the assembly under the terms of the Senatorial decree, there was a flocking together of our goateed young bloods, the whole Catilinarian gang with little Miss Curio at their head, to plead for its rejection. Clodius’s roughs had taken possession of the gangways.” It seems to have been impossible to take a vote and the matter went back to the Senate. Eventually, in July 61, a court was established, but on terms favorable to Clodius. Crassus, Catilina’s shadowy financier, happy as ever to make trouble for the Senate, came forward with funds to bribe the jurors.

Clodius pleaded that he could not have been the intruder, for he had been out of Rome at the Etruscan town of Interamna (where he wielded considerable political influence and, according to Cicero, employed gangs to harass the countryside). Terentia, still irritated by the visits she believed her husband to be paying Clodia, goaded Cicero to take the witness stand and break Clodius’s alibi by reporting that he had seen him in Rome on the day in question. The trial started well, the jury asked for a guard (which suggested honesty), and it looked as if it was an open-and-shut case. But then Crassus’s cash began to do its work.

Cicero reported to Atticus:

Inside a couple of days, with a single slave (an ex-gladiator at that) for go-between, [Crassus] settled the whole business—called them to his house, made promises, backed bills or paid cash down. On top of that (it’s really too shocking!), some jurors actually received a bonus in the form of assignations with certain ladies or introductions to youths of noble families. Yet even so, with the [optimates] making themselves very scarce, 25 jurors had the courage to take the risk, no small one, preferring to sacrifice their lives rather than the whole community. AS for the other 31, they were more worried about their empty purses than their empty reputations.

Clodius was acquitted, but he was a vindictive man and made up his mind to punish Cicero for having testified against him. For a while, though, nothing happened and Cicero could not help amusing himself at his expense. He liked to call him Pretty-Boy (making a play on his cognomen Pulcher, the Latin word for “beautiful”). There were a number of barbed exchanges at Senate meetings and elsewhere over the next year or so.

“You bought a mansion,” Clodius sneered.

“One might think he was saying I had bought a jury,” Cicero riposted.

On another occasion, the two men happened to be taking a candidate for political office down to the Forum together and entered into conversation. Clodius asked if Cicero was in the habit of giving Sicilians who were in his clientela seats at gladiatorial shows. Cicero said he was not.

“Ah,” replied Clodius. “But I’m a new patron of theirs and I’m going to institute the practice. But my sister, with all that free space at her disposal as an ex-Consul’s wife, only gives me one wretched foot.”

Unable to resist referring to the gossip about their relationship, Cicero remarked: “Oh, don’t grumble about one foot in your sister’s case. You can always hoist the other.”

This kind of jibe was not overlooked. AS SO often in his career, Cicero let his sense of humor do serious damage to his prospects.

Sometime towards the end of 62 or perhaps in early 61, Pompey returned to Italy after nearly six years of campaigning. He had swept the seas clear of pirates, the war against Mithridates, King of Pontus, had been won, and Syria from the Euphrates to the frontiers of Egypt had been annexed to the Empire. Trade with Asia Minor could now resume and money flooded back into Rome.

Pompey was an able rather than a great general, but he was an administrator of the first order. The campaign against Mithridates had been long and hard fought, for the king was a wily foe. Hostilities opened after he invaded Bithynia, a new Roman province, thirteen years previously. When Pompey arrived to take over command of the Roman forces in the east from his able predecessor, Lucullus, he found that final victory was close at hand. The groundwork had been done for him and he had only to stamp out the final flames of resistance. Pompey persuaded the King of Parthia to invade Armenia, which was ruled by an ally of Mithridates, while he himself marched into the enemy’s homeland, Pontus. With overwhelming superiority of numbers, the Romans won a crushing victory.

The indomitable old king tried to keep going, seized the territories of a treacherous son, raised fresh troops and meditated an invasion of Italy. But his much put-upon subjects had had enough and revolts ensued. The great game was finally over. Holed up inside a remote citadel, Mithridates tried to poison himself, without success thanks to the physical immunity he had laboriously built up, and was forced to get a slave to stab him.

After some mopping-up operations, Pompey marched south to deal with a civil war in Palestine and visited the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. He dreamed of advancing Roman arms to the Red Sea, but when the news of Mithridates’ death reached him he moved from military to organizational matters. His task was to reorder the eastern empire in such a way that its long-term security was assured. His settlement of the eastern provinces was so well judged that it was to remain in place mostly unchanged until the next century. A chain of directly governed Roman provinces was established along the Mediterranean seaboard, stretching from Pontus in the Black Sea to Syria in the south. Their eastern frontiers were protected by a series of quasi-independent kingdoms which were allowed to manage their internal affairs without interference but whose foreign policy was in Roman hands.

Pompey was only forty-four years old, but it must have seemed to him that there was little left in life for him to do. AS soon as he landed at Brundisium he disbanded his forces, much to everyone’s relief. The sight of the famous general traveling unarmed and in the company of only a few friends, “as if he were coming back from a foreign holiday” (as Plutarch put it), made a huge impression on public opinion. On his leisurely journey along the Via Appia to Rome, where he arrived in February, large crowds came out to watch him pass by.

He felt no need to establish a military autocracy, as some had feared, for he was self-evidently the first man in Rome. But the Senate, envious of his preeminence, could not see that he was at heart a conservative and had no desire for monarchical powers. In any case, if he did ever come under threat, he knew that he had the public support, as well as the financial resources, to raise a new army.

Pompey had two main aims in mind. The first was to persuade the Senate to ratify his eastern settlement, and the second was to arrange for a land-distribution law, which would grant farms to his veterans. His attempted deployment of Metellus Nepos showed that he foresaw trouble and, without making his views entirely clear, he positioned himself alongside the populares in order to gain leverage over the Senate.

Cicero saw an opening. AS a distinguished backbencher in the Senate, he had influence rather than power, but he was still in a position to guide change. His aim as ever was to get the constitution to work better. This could be achieved only by persuading the different interest groups—the aristocracy with its stranglehold over the Senate, the equites with their commercial concerns and the People (and that meant, to all intents and purposes, the urban masses)—to work together more cooperatively. At present things were badly out of balance. The populares were constantly on the attack and the optimates refused, blindly, to have anything to do with them.

If Cicero could only find a way of drawing Pompey towards the conservative cause and detaching him from the radicals, the ship of state might return to an even keel. This would mean gaining the general’s confidence. The going was more difficult than he expected. Cicero sent Pompey a long self-congratulatory letter about his Consulship during the general’s journey home but received only a perfunctory reply. Cicero’s boastfulness irritated Pompey and, more to the point, he knew that the orator had no real power base.

Cicero saw he was making little progress and began to lose heart. On January 25 he gave Atticus a telling description of Pompey’s character: “He professes the highest regard for me and makes a parade of warm affection, praising on the surface while below it, well, not so far below that it’s difficult to see, he’s jealous. Awkward, tortuous, politically paltry, shabby, timid, disingenuous—but I shall go into more detail on another occasion.”

In fact, Pompey was privately considering a rapprochement with the Senate. He hinted at his intentions by divorcing his wife, Mucia. Whatever personal reasons there were for this (Plutarch tells us that she was widely whispered to have been unfaithful), it was a political act; for the two Metelli, her half-brothers, were prominent populares. To make sure that everyone understood the message that he was thinking of shifting his ground in the direction of the optimates, Pompey opened negotiations for the hand of Cato’s niece. However, the Senate’s unyielding and self-appointed conscience dismissed the idea out of hand, calling the offer a kind of bribery. This left Pompey awkwardly placed, having abandoned one faction and been rebuffed by the other. His return to civilian life was off to a bad start.

“Life out of uniform can have the dangerous effect of weakening the reputation of famous generals,” Plutarch noted in his biography of Pompey. “They are poorly adapted to the equality of democratic politics. Such men claim the same precedence in civilian life that they enjoy on the battlefield.… So when people find a man with a brilliant military record playing an active part in public life they undermine and humiliate him. But if he renounces and withdraws from politics, they maintain his reputation and ability and no longer envy him.”

The trouble was that Pompey was a poor political tactician and an uninspiring public speaker. He found the grubby business of politicking in the Forum distasteful and embarrassing. He tended not to express his intentions clearly and was criticized for being misleading or even hypocritical. Proud of his achievements, he wanted to receive without having to ask and had no real idea how to handle the Senate. Crassus remained jealous of him and did little to be helpful. Only Caesar seemed happy to give him any assistance, but his Praetorship was now over and he would soon be leaving for a governorship in Spain. He was as ever hugely in debt and creditors delayed his departure. He remarked dryly: “I need 25 million sesterces just to own nothing.”

Soon after his arrival in Rome in early February 61, Pompey addressed a meeting of the Senate. He commented politely but noncommittally on the sacrilege scandal and said in general terms that he approved of the Senate’s decrees. He was given a poor reception. Cicero said the speech was a “frost.” AS for his own contribution to the debate, he was of the opinion that he had given a vintage performance, which, he confessed wryly to Atticus, contained more than a degree of self-parody.

I brought the house down. And why not, on such a theme—the dignity of our order, concord between Senate and equites, unison of Italy, remnants of the conspiracy in their death throes, reduced price of grain, internal peace? You should know by now how I can boom away on such topics. I think you must have caught the reverberations in Epirus [Atticus was on his estate there], and for that reason I won’t dwell on the subject.

For the time being Pompey proceeded with caution. He decided to leave his bid to secure ratification of his provincial settlement and land for his soldiers until the following year. In an effort to improve his chances, he laid out large sums of money to ensure the election as Consul of his supporter, Lucius Afranius, an unimpressive man who was known for little more than being a good dancer. (This probably meant that he performed publicly on the stage, an unrespectable activity for an upper-class Roman citizen.)

In the autumn of 61 Pompey finally celebrated his Triumph. A Triumph was a victory procession awarded to generals after important campaigns. It was the most splendid ceremony in the Roman calendar. Pompey was celebrating not just victory over Mithridates and his campaigns in Armenia, Syria and Arabia, but also his subjugation of the Mediterranean pirates, and two days were set aside: September 28 and, his birthday, September 29.

Temporary stands were set up in the Forum and at the city’s racecourses. Crowds of people, all wearing white clothes, filled them and any other vantage point they could find along the processional route. All the temples were opened to the public and were filled with flowers and incense. Lictors and other attendants did their best to hold onlookers back and keep the streets open and clear.

The procession set off from outside the city, crossed the pomoerium and wound its way towards the center. At its head placards displayed the names of all the countries over which the great general was triumphing: Pontus, Armenia, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Media, Colchis (mythical home of Medea and the Golden Fleece), Iberia, Albania, Syria, Cilicia, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia and Palestine, Judaea and Arabia. They claimed that Pompey had captured no fewer than 1,000 fortified places, nearly 900 cities and 800 pirate ships; and had founded 39 new cities. Even more spectacular were the resources now flowing into the city. Inscriptions boasted that Rome’s tax revenues had jumped from 200 million sesterces every year to 340 million thanks to Pompey’s annexation of new territories. He was also bringing to the Treasury a vast quantity of coined money and gold and silver plate. Captured weapons, shields, armor, swords and spears were carried on wagons. There were trophies for every engagement in which Pompey or his lieutenants had been victorious. The polished bronze and steel would have glinted in the sunlight and clattered together, adding a counterpoint to the harsh military music of bands. The crowds would have wished to see Rome’s great bogeyman, Mithridates, in chains. His suicide had made that impossible, but in his place a monumental statue of the king was included in the parade.

On the second day of the Triumph the most distinguished prisoners of war were put on show. This was one of the high points of the ceremony, with the packed citizenry booing the Republic’s humiliated enemies as they walked past only a few feet away. Five of Mithridates’ children were in the procession, and one of his sisters. They were accompanied by the King of Armenia’s wife and son and the King of the Jews, together with captured pirate chiefs. Following them came a huge portrait of Pompey fashioned from pearls.

Finally, Pompey himself appeared in a gem-encrusted chariot; he had a wreath of bay leaves on his head and was dressed in a purple toga decorated with golden stars. A cloak belonging to Alexander the Great hung from his shoulders. His face was covered in red lead, for the victor was supposed to represent Jupiter, king of the gods. A slave also stood in the chariot and whispered in his ear: “Remember that you are human.” Behind the chariot marched columns of soldiers who held sprays of laurel and chanted triumphal songs: they also sang, by ancient tradition, obscene lyrics satirizing their general.

When he reached the end of the processional route, the Capitol Hill, Pompey dedicated 8 million sesterces to the goddess Minerva and promised a shrine in honor of Venus the Victorious at the new theater he was to build on the Field of Mars. Surely, he may reasonably have felt, his glorious deeds would win him the gratitude of the Senate and People of Rome.

Towards the end of the year Cicero, powerless, witnessed a serious blow to his ideal of an “alliance of all the classes.” The equites, mainly traders and businessmen, on whom Cicero relied for much of his political support, were annoyed by a Senatorial decree which removed their immunity from prosecution when sitting as jurors. The effect was simply to put them on an equal footing with Senators, but, while they kept their feelings to themselves, they resented the reform.

Not long afterwards a delegation of equites asked the Senate to review their tax-farming concessions in the provinces of Asia Minor. On reflection, they felt that they had bid too high for the contracts and that their profit margins were at risk. Crassus was behind the move. His support for the tax farmers was in part a bid to counterbalance Pompey’s huge new power base in Asia Minor. Plutarch writes: “Giving up all attempts to equal Pompey in military matters, Crassus devoted himself to politics. Here by taking pains, by helping people in the law courts or with loans … he acquired an influence and a reputation equal to that which Pompeius had won by all his great military expeditions.”

Cicero was furious but had no choice but to support the claim. “The demand was disgraceful,” he wrote to Atticus on December 5, “a confession of recklessness. But there was the gravest danger of a complete break between Senate and equites if it had been turned down altogether.” Cato was his usual obstructive self and made sure that the Senate resisted the request. The equites began to think that if Cicero could not get them what they wanted, they would have to look elsewhere for favors.

Early in 60 a Tribune, Lucius Flavius, brought forward a comprehensive bill to distribute land to Pompey’s soldiers. It was carefully and unprovocatively framed and, after proposing some amendments, Cicero supported it. Private interests were to be protected and he welcomed the prospect that, if properly organized, “the dregs of the urban population can be cleared out and Italy repeopled.” To critics who argued that he was abandoning his constitutionalist position, he replied that Pompey “has become more constitutionally minded and less inclined to court popularity with the masses.” In other words, if Pompey’s wishes were granted, he might be persuaded to abandon the radicals and join the conservative interest.

The optimates saw things in a very different light and opposed the measure from start to finish. This had little to do with its intrinsic merits. They were thinking in exclusively competitive terms; anything that enhanced Pompey’s standing would diminish theirs. It would not be long before this ill-conceived attack brought about the exact opposite of what was intended.

Had there been more conservative politicians of real ability, the history of these years might have been quite different. The bloodlettings earlier in the century under Marius and Sulla had depopulated the ruling class and, with the deaths of senior figures (including, recently, that of that elderly pillar of the political establishment Catulus), the talent on the Senate’s benches was much reduced. The increasing wealth that flowed from the provinces had reduced the appeal of, and the necessity for, a political career. Major personalities such as Hortensius and Lucullus (the able general who had preceded Pompey in the east) had withdrawn into a private life of, in Cicero’s opinion, scandalous luxury.

Of course, Cato did not fall into this category. But his inability to compromise made him as fatal to his cause, Cicero believed, as the moral dereliction of the others did. “As for our dear friend Cato,” he observed to Atticus while the land bill was being debated, “I have as warm a regard for him as you do. The fact remains that with all his patriotism, he can be a political liability. He speaks in the Senate as if he were living in Plato’s Republic instead of Romulus’s cesspool.”

By June the political atmosphere was overheating. The Consul, Metellus Celer, placed all kinds of obstacles in the way of Flavius, who eventually lost his temper and dragged him off to the prison not far from the rear of the Senate House. The Consul preserved his sangfroid and resisted offers of help from other Tribunes. (They could, for example, have vetoed the arrest.) Instead he called a Senate meeting at the prison. Flavius, undaunted, placed himself across the entry to prevent the Senators from going in. The Consul, however, countered this move by having a hole knocked through the wall. AS he had doubtless calculated, public opinion swung decisively in his support. An embarrassed Pompey intervened and called Flavius off. He did not proceed with the bill. This incident marked the end of any possible rapprochement between him and the Senate.

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.

What I most badly need at the moment is a confidant.… And you whose talk and advice has so often lightened my worry and vexation of spirit, the partner in my public life and intimate of all my private concerns, the sharer of all my talk and plans, where are you? I am so utterly forsaken that my only moments of relaxation are those I spend with my wife, my little daughter and my darling Marcus. My brilliant, worldly friendships may make a fine show in public, but in the home they are barren things. My house is crammed of a morning, I go down to the Forum surrounded by droves of friends, but in all the crowds I cannot find one person with whom I can exchange an unguarded joke or let out a private sigh.

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? AS 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:

Meantime the paths which you from earliest days did seek,

Yes, and when Consul too, as mood and virtue called,

These hold, and foster still your fame and good men’s praise.

Nobody else had taken the book very seriously, but, as he pointed out to Atticus, for Cicero the passage reminded him of his duty. AS 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.

The strategy of the optimates was simple; to oppose Caesar’s reforms lock, stock and barrel and to get his fellow Consul Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, to veto them. This would have the effect either of neutralizing Caesar or of pushing him into illegality, for which he could be put on trial once he resigned.

The Forum now provided the setting for one of those decisive turning points in history. AS recounted by Dio Cassius, Caesar seems to have been genuinely taken aback by the opposition of the diehards and, using his legal power of enforcement (coercitio), ordered an official to arrest Cato and take him to prison. This was too much for many Senators and, as in the recent case of Metellus Celer, they followed him to the prison.

“Why are you leaving the meeting early?” Caesar asked one of them.

“I prefer Cato’s company in prison to yours in the Senate,” came the reply.

Outmaneuvered, the Consul rescinded the arrest and announced that he would ignore the Senate from now on and take the bill directly to the People. An informal public meeting was held at which Caesar asked Bibulus if he had any objections to what was proposed. Bibulus replied that there would be no innovations during his term of office.

“You shall have the law,” Caesar told the crowd, “only if he agrees to it.”

“You shall not have this law this year, not even if you all want it,” Bibulus shouted back. This incautiously undemocratic admission made the Senate’s intransigence embarrassingly clear.

Pompey and Crassus were then brought forward to speak, an unusual step for they were private citizens and had no official status. They made the point that the law could well be afforded, seeing that the eastern campaign had filled the state’s coffers. In fact, it would even be possible to acquire land for the veterans of an earlier war, a measure which the Senate had approved at the time but never acted on.

Bibulus now started to “watch the heavens daily”—a religious device for halting public business and, to make assurance double sure, declared all the remaining days of the year on which the General Assembly could be legally held to be holidays. This did not deter Caesar from formally convening the General Assembly to pass the bill—a good example of the Consul’s sweeping powers, even when wielded against his coequal colleague. The result of the vote could not be in any doubt, but Caesar was taking no risks. Crowds of veterans occupied the Forum the night before it was to be taken. Bibulus, with a crowd of followers, turned up during the middle of a speech Caesar was giving from the Temple of the Castors. He was let through, partly out of respect for his office and partly because no one imagined he would continue to maintain his opposition. But that was just what he did. When he tried to announce a veto, he was thrown down the Temple steps. He was showered with filth, his fasces—the rods and axes of office—were smashed and he and some Tribunes who supported him were lucky to escape with their lives. After being beaten up and wounded, they made their escape as best they could.

The optimates had little choice but to give way under duress and the bill was passed. Insultingly it included a clause obliging Senators to sign a statement agreeing to abide by the legislation. Cato was persuaded only with the greatest difficulty to do so.

With every new development, each side raised the stakes. Not long afterwards, Caesar introduced a second land bill, this time much harsher in its terms. Its purpose was to redistribute publicly owned land in Campania (a fertile territory in the Naples area) to Roman citizens with more than three children. At present it was rented out, so the reform would severely reduce an important stream of state revenue. AS Cicero noted, nothing could be better designed to inflame “better class sentiment.” An ancient Senator, Lucius Gellius, declared that the bill would not be implemented for as long as he lived. “Let us wait then,” said Cicero, “since Gellius is not asking us to postpone things for long.” Despite Senatorial opposition, this measure too was pushed through the General Assembly.

Bibulus withdrew to his house, where he stayed for the rest of the year. He tried to halt all public business, including elections, by continually declaring bad omens. Because they had been unable to stop Caesar, the optimates were laying the ground for a move, after the Consulship was over, to declare all his measures unlawful. Powerless, Bibulus resorted to insult: dredging up the old story about King Nicomedes, he described Caesar in an edict as “the Queen of Bithynia … who once wanted to sleep with a king but now wants to be one.” On the streets people laughingly spoke of the Consulship of Julius and Caesar.

Cicero was not impressed by Bibulus’s behavior. He became more and more depressed by the course of events and could only wait and watch from the sidelines as Pompey’s settlement in the east was at last ratified, in the end with little trouble. Crassus’s tax farmers had the price of their contracts reduced by a third, but he could not claim any of the credit.

In March Cicero defended his former fellow Consul, Antonius, on a corruption charge, without success. After Antonius’s conviction, flowers were laid on Catilina’s grave and a celebratory banquet was held. Audaciously Cicero used his speech for a strong attack on the First Triumvirate. He soon saw that this was a serious mistake. Caesar made no public comment, but he acted at once to bring Cicero into line by letting Clodius off his leash. On the afternoon of the day Cicero made his comments, Caesar approved an application by Clodius for a change in status from Patrician to Plebeian. This was no mere technicality: only a Plebeian could be elected Tribune—a post Clodius coveted, for (among other things) it would enable him to get his long meditated revenge. AS part of the procedure to change his social status, Clodius had to be adopted by a Plebeian man; to show his disregard for social norms, he chose as his “father” a youth of twenty.

Alongside covert threats, various blandishments were offered to Cicero during the spring and summer, including a seat on the commission that had been set up to implement the land-reform laws and an assignment as special envoy to the Egyptian Pharaoh. He turned them all down. Seeing that Caesar would use fair means or foul to gag him, he silently admitted defeat and for the time being withdrew from public life, leaving Rome for a tour of his villas.

Cicero was planning to write a book on geography but could not concentrate on it. He preferred to work instead on a candid memoir of his life and times, in which he denounced his enemies and attacked the First Triumvirate. This Secret History (De consiliis suis) was well-known in antiquity but is now lost; it was unpublishable in Cicero’s lifetime and he gave it to young Marcus with the instruction not to issue it until after his death. In April 59, he told Atticus: “I have taken so kindly to idleness that I can’t tear myself away from it. So either I amuse myself with books, of which I have a good stock at Antium, or I count the waves—the weather is unsuitable for mackerel fishing.… And my sole form of political activity is to hate the rascals, and even that I do without anger.” This did not mean he had lost his appetite for news and gossip. He depended on his friend for a reliable flow. “When I read a letter of yours I feel I am in Rome, hearing one thing one minute and another the next, as one does when big events are toward.” At about the same time, he wrote: “I have so lost my manly spirit that I prefer to be tyrannized over in peace and quiet.”

Curio paid an unexpected visit. No longer a “little Miss” but now “my young friend,” he brought the welcome news that his circle was unhappy with the regime but also reported, less agreeably, that Clodius was definitely standing as Tribune for 58. Cicero could see this only as an ominous development.

In Rome matters went from bad to worse for the optimates. AS the months passed, the existence of an explicit alliance among the three became public knowledge. Pompey’s marriage in April to Caesar’s dearly loved daughter, Julia, was a sign that it was not a temporary expedient but a permanent arrangement. Pompey’s private life seems to have been remarkably free from scandal. Attractive to women, he had some affairs, but usually acted with great caution in questions of the heart. A courtesan, Flora, used to recall that she never left his bed without carrying the marks of his teeth and he is reported to have slept with the wife of a favorite freedman of his. In fact, he was uxorious by nature and tended to fall in love with his wives. This was certainly the case with Julia. He adored her and was criticized for spending too much time on holiday with her at Italian resorts when he should have been attending to public business. For her part, despite a considerable difference in age, she developed a genuine affection for her middle-aged husband and was a crucial, emollient and reconciling link between him and her father in Gaul.

Cicero told Atticus that “Sampsiceramus,” his nickname for Pompey (after an oriental potentate), “is out for trouble. We can expect anything. He is confessedly working for absolute power.… They would never have come so far if they were not paving their way to other and disastrous objectives.” He noticed that the uninhibited freedom of speech which marked political life in the Republic was giving way to caution at social gatherings and across dinner tables. Despite the fact that there was no official censorship, he agreed on a simple code with Atticus for sensitive parts of their correspondence.

Popular opinion began to move against the First Triumvirate and they were booed at a gladiatorial show in July. A contemporary commentator called them “the Beast with Three Heads.” When an actor in a play spoke the line, “To our misfortune art thou Great,” the audience took it as a reference to Pompey and called for a dozen encores.

Cicero began to detect a weakness in the alliance. He suspected that Pompey profoundly disliked the position he found himself in. He was right, up to a point. But although he knew better than to trust Pompey, with whose double-dealing he was familiar, he needed so much to believe that the former general could be detached from the “rascals” that he over-interpreted the evidence of his unease. There is no doubt that Pompey did feel uncomfortable, but at the same time there is every reason to suppose that his alliance with Caesar and Crassus remained as firm as ever. In fact, it was Cicero, the recipient of many melancholy private confidences, who would be discarded.

Cicero pretended to take Clodius’s election as Tribune lightly, but he could not stop mentioning it. “Dear Publius is threatening me, most hostile.… I think I have very firm backing in my old Consular army of all honest men, including the moderately honest. Pompeius signifies goodwill to me out of the ordinary. He also assures me that Clodius will not say a word about me; in this he does not deceive me but is himself deceived.”

Caesar’s final task was to decide on the future once his Consulship came to an end. So far he had achieved all they could have hoped: Pompey had had his eastern settlement approved and his soldiers had been given land, and Crassus had had the tax farmers’ contract renegotiated. The Consular elections, delayed from the summer by a decree of Bibulus, were eventually held on October 17. Two supporters of the Triumvirate, Aulus Gabinius and Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, whose daughter Caesar had recently married, won the day. Caesar was allocated the governorships of Italian Gaul, Transalpine Gaul and Illyricum (today Dalmatia) for five years. His friend Sallust wrote: “For himself he wanted a high command, an army and a war in some field where his gifts could shine in all their brightness.” This is what he had now obtained and over the coming years he methodically set about conquering what is now France and Belgium. Rome called these territories Long-haired Gaul (Gallia Comata).

On December 10, Clodius at last took office as Tribune. Unfortunately, as his great crisis approached, Cicero was joined in Rome by Atticus and their correspondence stops. He was still guardedly optimistic about his prospects and thought that the worst that could happen would be a trial before the Military Assembly, as had been the case with Rabirius. Because its voting system favored the affluent, his chances of acquittal would, he felt, be reasonably good. In any case, “all Italy” would come to his support.

It soon transpired that the new Tribune had more ambitious plans than anyone had expected. He produced a far-reaching program, well tailored to win the support of the urban proletariat. Grain distributions to citizens in Rome would, for the first time, be absolutely free; the right of association was restored and the veto on local clubs revoked; officeholders were prohibited from halting public business by reporting bad omens on days when the General Assembly was due to vote on a bill; a limitation on legislation brought in by Tribunes was removed; and a restriction on the Censors’ powers to expel Senators (presumably this was to protect popularis members) was imposed. The importance of the clubs or collegia for Clodius was that they would allow him to organize support (in the form of well-organized street gangs) in Rome’s poorer districts.

Clodius was a mysterious and in some senses a maligned figure, whose behavior was so bizarre that for some people rational explanations were unnecessary. So far as can be judged from the uniformly hostile sources, he was a serious politician with a loyal constituency among the urban masses. He had a coherent reform program designed to advance their interests. According to Cicero, the restoration of political clubs meant that he had inherited “all Catilina’s forces with scarcely any change of leaders.” However, unlike Catilina, Clodius saw that there was a distinction to be drawn between revolution and behavior that was merely illegal. Clodius observed the basic political norms, attending Senate meetings and standing for office. In the years ahead he stood for Aedile, successfully, and for Praetor. From the few scraps of evidence that remain, he maintained a client list both in the city and beyond.

Clodius’s originality lay in his perception of what could be achieved by consistent violence on the streets and in the Forum. For half a century politicians of every persuasion had resorted to force from time to time. The scale of public spaces in the city center, the absence of wide streets or avenues and the facts that there was no police force and that soldiers were forbidden to cross the pomoerium meant that gangs could temporarily take over the seat of government, terrorize officeholders and force legislation through or impede it. Clodius saw that this could be turned into a permanent state of affairs. He developed the concept of the standing gang, equipped and ready to act at any time. Once his Tribuneship was over in December 58, this would become his power base. He realized that this private army would need an operational headquarters and, apparently, took over the Temple of the Castors in the Forum for a time, turning the building into a fortress by demolishing the steps that led down from its high podium. This was insurrection as a means of government rather than as a means of overthrowing a government.

What Clodius wanted to do with power, once he had achieved it, is uncertain. Unlike other radicals, whether of the left or right, he gave no indication that has come down to us of a serious interest in root-and-branch constitutional reform. He was happy enough to exploit the constitution or subvert it, but he had no idea of overthrowing it. Beneath the eccentricity of his politics probably lay a basically conventional ambition to climb the political ladder, reach the Consulship and make a fortune from misgoverning a province. In that sense, there was no material difference between him and his hot-tempered brother, Appius Claudius Pulcher, who stood on the other side of the political fence and was a leading conservative. Clodius was typical of his ancestors in his waywardness, volatile moods and disrespect for respectable opinion. He regarded the political scene in a highly personalized light and was not a man to be crossed lightly, as Cicero found out.

Wisely, Cicero had taken steps to protect his personal position by finding a friendly Tribune who agreed to veto all Clodius’s reforms. In response, Clodius made a deal with Cicero: if Cicero would not block his legislation, he promised not to launch a prosecution. He made a point of being friendly with Cicero, saying that he wanted a reconciliation and blaming Terentia for their estrangement.

In late January or early February of 58, Clodius hurled his thunderbolt. He proposed two new bills, the first of which bought off the Consuls by allotting them rich provinces (Macedonia and Cilicia) for the following year with unusually generous financial allowances. The second cynically broke the assurance he had given Cicero. It punished with the denial of the traditional symbols of hospitality, fire and water (in other words exile), any public official who executed or had executed a citizen without due process of law. This was, in effect, a renewal or restatement of an existing law, but its target was obvious. It would be wrong, though, to see the bill simply as a question of revenge. From the point of view of his patron, Caesar, waiting outside the city limits in order to watch developments before he left for his provincial command, the indictment of Cicero for illegal acts as Consul would distract the Senate from examining the legality of his own legislation. More broadly, Clodius was exactly the weapon Caesar needed to keep the Senate cowed and on the defensive.

Cicero responded by going into mourning, wearing torn clothes and letting his beard and hair grow, and presented himself in public as a suppliant. This was recognized behavior when a Roman found himself in serious trouble and especially if facing prosecution in the courts. Many equites followed suit and held a protest meeting at the Capitol. According to Plutarch, “the Senate met to pass a vote that the people should go into mourning as at times of public calamity.” The Consuls, one of whom was Caesar’s father-in-law, were politely unsympathetic. They opposed the measure, although the Senate as a whole seems to have been on Cicero’s side. When Clodius surrounded the Senate House with armed men, many Senators ran out of the building, tearing their clothes as a sign of grief.

Although they did not want their involvement to become known, the First Triumvirate was complicit with Clodius, who, in another ingenious initiative, managed to temporarily remove the obstructive Cato from the scene, sending him on a commission to annex Cyprus. Special commands were his bane, but, as a strict constitutionalist, Cato felt obliged to accept an officially conferred duty. He was absent from Rome for two years. Clodius’s move had two purposes: to further weaken the optimates and to provide revenue to pay for his planned free distribution of corn.

Caesar and Pompey knew what was going on but posed as candid friends, giving Cicero cordial if conflicting advice. Caesar said he should accept a command with him in Gaul; in that case, he would be seen to be acting from a position of strength. Pompey criticized Caesar for his advice, remarking that to quit Rome precipitately would be cowardly; Cicero should defend himself openly and, naturally, his old friend would be on hand to help him.

AS the crisis came to a head, Pompey became increasingly embarrassed by his own double-dealing and withdrew to his splendid villa in the Alban Hills outside Rome. Cicero went to seek him out and plead for assistance. According to Plutarch, when the great man heard of Cicero’s arrival he

could not face seeing him. He was bitterly ashamed when he remembered how in the past Cicero had fought his battles on many important occasions and had often taken a particular line in politics for his sake; but he was Caesar’s son-in-law, and at his request betrayed his previous obligations. He slipped out of the house by another door and so avoided the interview.

Clodius shared with Cicero an inability to hold his tongue. He was indiscreet about Caesar’s connivance and there were signs that public opinion was swinging to Cicero. Now that he had officially taken up his military command, Caesar was not allowed to enter the city. He was studiedly reasonable, assuring the crowd that, as everyone well knew, he had disapproved of Lentulus’s execution—but he equally disapproved of retrospective legislation.

Wherever Cicero turned, support was lukewarm and he slowly came to realize that his position was untenable. He could hardly leave his house without being pelted with mud and stones by the Tribune’s gangs. Even friends were counseling retreat. At a meeting in his house, senior optimates, led by Hortensius, advised him to leave the city, promising him an early return—advice he took but never forgave. Most people were sympathetic in principle (or appeared to be), but nobody in practice would act against Clodius.

Despairing, Cicero carried a little statue of Minerva down through the Forum and up to the summit of the Capitol, where he dedicated it with the inscription: “To Minerva, Guardian of Rome.” He had once been Rome’s guardian and now he asked the goddess to protect the Republic during his enforced absence. Then, escorted by friends, he slipped out of the city, on foot in dead of night in order to avoid detection.

AS soon as Cicero’s departure was discovered, a furious Clodius placed a new, bolder measure before the People, this time condemning Cicero by name and confiscating his goods. He was to be refused fire and water and was forbidden to live closer than 400 miles from Rome. It is a sign of the affection in which Cicero was widely held, of his fundamental likeability, that most people paid little attention to the new law and happily put up the exile on his journey from Italy. There were exceptions, though: the Praetor of Sicily asked him to avoid the island, so he made his way instead through Macedonia and settled in Thessalonica, where the Roman Quaestor, Cnaeus Plancius, generously and not uncourageously took him into his official residence.

Cicero was always prone to excessive mood swings. He easily became overconfident when his affairs went well and a setback could drive him into an exaggerated depression. The present crisis was unlike anything he had faced before. Even the most sanguine mind would have been daunted. If we are to believe what he writes in his letters, he may have suffered something like a mental breakdown and seems to have attempted, or at least considered, suicide.

Before too long, though, the exile returned to something approaching his old form, scheming and arguing for his recall. He decided that Terentia, probably now in her early forties, should not join him because she would be more useful to his interests in Rome. Atticus bore the brunt of his newfound agitations, receiving a constant flow of suggestions, instructions and criticisms without apparent complaint.

But if Cicero was determined that one day he would return to Italy, his enemy had different ideas. Clodius did all he could to ensure that his victim’s disappearance was permanent. He had his house on the Palatine burned down, together with some if not all of his villas in the country and arranged for the site of the house to be consecrated and reserved for a Temple of Liberty.