Cicero

9

THE DRIFT TO CIVIL WAR

52–50 BC

During his sole Consulship in 52, Pompey put through a range of reforms. Some were sensibly designed to correct administrative abuses, but others were purely political and suggested that he was considering whether to align himself with Caesar, now within sight of the end of his labors in Gaul, or with the Senate. On the face of it, he still supported Caesar. Despite the displeasure of the optimates, he had arranged for legislation which gave Caesar permission to stand for a second Consulship in absentia. Caesar intended to hold office in 48—very properly observing the convention that a second Consulship could not take place until ten years had elapsed since the first.

The law that had appointed Caesar as governor of Gaul did not allow the Senate to discuss his successor before March of 50. The allocation of provinces for a given year was decided in advance, before the Consuls and Praetors who would receive them were elected. This meant that Caesar could be replaced only by the senior officeholders of 49. Although it was technically feasible for a Consul to take up a governorship while still in office, it was unusual and so in all probability Caesar could count on remaining in his post until the beginning of 48, by which time he could expect to be Consul.

It was essential that he be able to stay in his province until then. If any interval of time arose between the end of his governorship and the start of his Consular term, and if he were compelled to come to Rome and campaign in person, his legal immunity would lapse and his enemies in the Senate, led by Cato, would undoubtedly bring him to trial for alleged breaches of the law during his first Consulship in 59. If he was found guilty, his career would be brought to a rapid premature conclusion. So Pompey’s new law was vital for his political survival. Yet even if Caesar lost his immunity, few believed that he would actually appear in court. More probably, the matter would be settled by force: he would lead his legions into Italy.

Meanwhile, Pompey was still governor of Spain. (In fact, he had had his appointment renewed, although he never left Italy and sent out deputies to administer the province in his place.) So he would be in a position, if the Senate asked, to fight an invading Caesar. The terrible truth was dawning on intelligent people that the days of Sulla and Marius could be returning.

Having provided a guarantee for Caesar with one hand, Pompey apparently withdrew it with the other. AS part of a package of measures designed to clean up public life, he promoted a law providing that candidates for office should canvass in person. When Caesar’s friends pointed out that this blatantly contradicted the previous law excusing him from this very obligation, the Consul brushed the matter aside. The new legislation was not aimed at Caesar, Pompey claimed, and, to prove it, he added a codicil excluding him by name. But he did so on his own authority and the exception probably did not have legal validity.

A decision taken in Pompey’s private life had equally unfriendly implications. After Julia’s death, Caesar had hoped that his son-in-law would marry a young relative of his. Instead, Pompey chose a member of the Metellus clan, Cornelia, the daughter of a leading conservative, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica. He arranged for his new father-in-law to become his fellow Consul during the last months of his sole term. This demonstrated in the most obvious fashion his rapprochement with the Senate and distancing from Caesar.

At about the same time, Pompey enacted another seemingly innocuous law, which imposed a five-year gap between the holding of a senior office and a subsequent governorship. Candidates for office frequently laid out huge bribes knowing that they could recoup the expenditure a year later by extorting money from their provinces. An immediate payback was now made impossible. In itself, this was a good reform, but it had unpleasant implications for Caesar. When the Senate came to discuss provincial appointments on the due date of March 50, they would not be allowed to choose from the senior officeholders of 49. They could select anyone who had held the Consulship five or more years previously, and their candidate would thus be free to take over the governorship at once rather than wait till the end of 49. The dangerous gap when Caesar would have no official post and so be liable for criminal prosecution had suddenly reappeared. The only escape from the trap was for Caesar to persuade a Tribune to veto any Senatorial decision to accelerate the appointment process in this way—something which in due course he managed to do. From now on he would have to be more vigilant.

What were the real causes of the coming conflict? Plutarch saw the question as essentially one of personal relationships. According to him:

Caesar had long ago decided that he must get rid of Pompey—just as Pompey, of course, had decided to get rid of Caesar. Crassus had been waiting for the outcome of this contest and intended to take on the winner himself, but he had died in Parthia. It was now left for the man who wanted the top position to remove the one who occupied it and for the man who occupied the top position to dispose of his feared rival. In fact, it was only recently that Pompey had come to fear Caesar. Previously he had despised him, feeling that it would be a simple task to put down the man he had raised up. But Caesar had laid his plans from the beginning.… In the wars in Gaul he had trained his troops and increased his reputation, reaching a height of success from which he was able to compete with Pompey’s past achievements.

There is truth in this account, but it is too simply described. It is uncertain when Pompey made his final choice between loyalty to Caesar and joining the optimates to thwart him. This is because he was seldom clear, one suspects even to himself, about his true political intentions. He had a way of getting himself into morally uncomfortable positions from which he hoped to extricate himself without anyone noticing. AS a result it was often hard to know what he wanted and he pleased nobody. Caesar’s readiness to test the constitution to its limits, and even beyond them, disconcerted the former general. The sole Consulship had enabled Pompey to reassert himself and had given him an opportunity to edge slyly away from Caesar into the arms of the Senate.

AS for Caesar, his aims and the precise nature of his relationship with Pompey were equally difficult to fathom. His public line was that he was simply claiming his rights and he used studiedly moderate language in putting them forward. He must have realized that his new preeminence would inevitably lead to a clash with Pompey, but it would seem he anticipated this rather than sought it. What is uncertain is whether the repeated attempts he made at compromise were public relations (that is, he knew they would fail) or whether he genuinely hoped for a peaceful solution.

Of course, there was much more to the origins of the civil war than a clash of individual wills, important as that was. Its inception can be traced much farther back to the long struggle between the optimates and the populares which opened with the attempted reforms of Tiberius Gracchus almost a century before: between those who saw the need to modernize the Republic and those who stood for the established order of things. Marius, Sulla, even Catilina in his desperate way had tried to resolve matters, but they had all failed. Sooner or later a final decision between the contending sides had to be reached.

The new rules on governorships were a tedious irritation to Cicero. Former Consuls were being dragged out of retirement to run the empire. One of these was Cicero and much against his will he accepted the governorship of Cilicia in present-day southern Turkey. He made it clear he would do so for the minimum time possible, twelve months; he would resist any idea of an extension. “My one consolation for this colossal bore,” he told Atticus, “is that I expect it will only last a year.”

Despite his irritation Cicero rose to the challenge. AS during his Quaestorship in Sicily many years before, he was an able, hardworking and fair-minded administrator. Following Crassus’s defeat and death, the region was uneasily anticipating incursions, perhaps a full-scale invasion, by the aroused and victorious Parthians. Since he himself had practically no military experience, he made sure that his Legates, or deputies, did. One of these was his brother, Quintus, whose background both as a governor and as a general in Gaul would make him an invaluable adviser and aide. Another was the able Caius Pomptinus, who had led the ambush at the Milvian Bridge during Cicero’s Consulship and had later efficiently put down a revolt of the Allobroges in Gaul in the wake of Catilina’s conspiracy.

On the domestic as well as the political front, the two brothers were leaving trouble behind them. They spent the May Day holiday, a time of symbolic misrule when servants and slaves were waited on by their masters, at Quintus’s hideaway farm near Arpinum. Pomponia decided to stage a monumental sulk. Her casus belli was Quintus’s continuing fondness for his freedman, Statius—a subject on which in principle she and her brother-in-law agreed. Cicero told Atticus, Pomponia’s brother, what had happened:

When we arrived, Quintus said in the kindest way: “Pomponia, will you ask the women in and I’ll get the boys? [i.e., the slaves and servants].” Both what he said and his intention and manner were perfectly pleasant, at least it seemed so to me. Pomponia however answered in our hearing, “I am a guest here myself.” That, I imagine, was because Statius had gone ahead of us to see to our luncheon. Quintus said to me: “There! This is the sort of thing I have to put up with all the time.” You’ll say, “What is there in that, pray?” A good deal. I myself was quite shocked. Her words and manner were gratuitously rude. I concealed my feelings, painful as they were, and we all took our places except the lady. Quintus however had some food sent to her, which she refused. In a word, I felt my brother could not have been more forbearing nor your sister ruder.… [Quintus] came over to see me the following day. He told me that Pomponia had refused to spend the night with him and that her attitude when she said good-bye was just as I had seen it. You may tell her to her face that in my judgment her manners that day left something to be desired.

Tullia, now probably in her mid- to late twenties, presented another difficulty. The marriage with her second husband, Crassipes, had not been a success and about this time they were divorced. Cicero was worried about Tullia’s future marital prospects, although—or perhaps because—she appears to have been quite a strong-minded young woman.

Leaving his domestic affairs in Terentia’s hands, Cicero and his entourage made their leisurely way south to the port of Brundisium, where they were to take a ship for Athens and the east. Marcus and young Quintus, who were in their early and middle teens, were old enough to accompany their fathers and joined the expedition. Cicero called in at his villa at Cumae, where he was gratified to receive a visit from his old rival Hortensius, who had come a long way to see him despite being in poor health. Cicero pressed him to do all he could to prevent an extension of his Cilician penance, if anyone were unkind enough to propose such a thing in the Senate.

Cicero found widespread anxiety about the future among all he met. No chief political players had shown their hands. Cicero’s own view remained much as it had always been; he preached moderation, compromise and reconciliation. He was pleased to have the chance to talk things over with Pompey in the few days he spent with him at his villa outside the Greek city of Tarentum and was relieved to find that he understood where his duty lay. “I leave him in the most patriotic frame of mind,” he told Atticus, “fully prepared to be a bulwark against the dangers threatening.”

For all his reservations about the die-hard optimates, Cicero’s deepest instincts were to support the Senate against Caesar. But he was seriously embarrassed by the fact that he had allowed himself to yield to Caesar’s blandishments; he owed him many favors and, worst of all, the large loan of 800,000 sesterces Caesar had made him in 54 had yet to be liquidated. He was desperate to return the money to Caesar, but it was an awkward moment to have to do so. His personal finances were coming under additional strain, for his outlay as governor promised to be high and he would not be earning any money while he was absent.

It was the worst possible time to be away from Rome and Cicero made sure that he was kept fully up-to-date about the latest developments. He arranged for Marcus Caelius to be his political correspondent. Despite Caelius’s rascally past, when he had been a friend of Clodius and a lover of his sister Clodia, Cicero had always had a soft spot for him. Even if he exercised little judgment over his own life, he was an amusing and well-informed commentator on the actions and motives of others. Caelius accepted the commission with boyish enthusiasm. Once he realized that what Cicero wanted was not gossip, rumors or even news stories but intelligent commentary, he proceeded to offer just that. He was candid as well as witty. When Cicero told him he would be meeting Pompey at Tarentum, Caelius warned him with unkind accuracy that Pompey “is apt to say one thing and think another, but is not clever enough to keep his real aims out of sight.”

Caelius was not the kind of man to forgo his expectation of a return for his services. He had a tendency to pester Cicero with inappropriate requests, at one time asking him to dedicate a book to him. Elected Aedile for 50, he was keen to stage some impressive games (one of an Aedile’s main duties) and asked Cicero to send him some Cilician leopards. This would have entailed exactly the kind of abuse of office which Cicero denounced in others and disapproved of. Pressed into a corner, Cicero claimed to have engaged hunters to find some. This was probably a white lie and he told a joke to extricate himself. “The creatures are in remarkably short supply, and those we have are complaining bitterly because they are the only beings in my province who have to fear designs against their safety. So they are reported to have decided to leave the province and emigrate to Caria.”

After a long journey which included stopovers in Athens and the island of Delos, Cicero set foot in his province on July 31, 51, exactly three months after his departure from Rome. He was in a gloomy frame of mind and felt homesick. “When all’s said,” he wrote to Atticus, “this isn’t the kind of thing I’m pining for, it’s the world, the Forum, Rome, my house, my friends. But I’ll stick it out as best I can so long as it’s only for a year.”

Cilicia was a large mixed bag of a territory stretching along the southern coast of Asia Minor to the Amanus Mountains, which provided a natural frontier with Syria. It also included the island of Cyprus which Cato had annexed a few years previously. (There had been no very obvious reason for this, except, presumably, that the island was too small to qualify as a province in its own right and someone had to look after it.) In western Cilicia mountains ran down to the sea and an abundance of wood made it a center for shipbuilding. In the lawless years after the decline of the Seleucid Empire, the region became a base for the pirate fleets which had disrupted trade and commerce for more than a century until Pompey solved the pirate problem once and for all in 67. He had acted with comparative leniency and settled some of the former buccaneers in the Cilician town of Soli. In the east of the province lay its main city, the port of Tarsus, and a fertile coastal plain crisscrossed by rivers. Not far to the south was the site of the battle of ISSUS, one of Alexander the Great’s victories over the Persians.

Cicero insisted from the outset that he meant to run a clean administration. He did his best to make sure that no provincial had to spend money entertaining him and his staff. He opened his own quarters to local people (or at least to those “whom he found agreeable”), where he offered generous if not lavish hospitality. There was no gatekeeper at his official residence to deter visitors and Cicero had a habit of rising early so that he was ready at first light to greet those who came to pay their respects. Following the advice he had once given Quintus during his governorship, he kept his temper in public and was careful not to inflict insulting punishments. He avoided traditional brutalities such as beating offenders with rods or stripping them of their clothes. AS he intended, this behavior had a powerful effect on local opinion, and Cicero made sure that the political world in Rome knew of it too. He was keenly aware of the damage done to Roman interests by bad government and meant to set an example for others to follow.

He also wanted to draw the sharpest possible distinction between his regime and that of his predecessor, Clodius’s brother, Appius Claudius Pulcher. (It must sometimes have seemed to Cicero that, wherever he turned, he could not escape this domineering and hostile family.) Appius’s policy as governor had been simply to enrich himself. Cicero was shocked when he saw the consequences. Writing while on the road, he described a “forlorn and, without exaggeration, permanently ruined province.” Local communities had been forced to sell prospective tax revenues to tax farmers in order to meet Appius’s rapacity for cash. “In a phrase, these people are absolutely tired of their lives.”

However, Cicero had no intention of broaching these issues directly with Appius, to whom he wrote before his arrival with scrupulous politeness. He had learned from bitter experience that one baited a Claudius at one’s peril. He tried to arrange a meeting for a debriefing, but Appius seems to have done his best to avoid Cicero and showed signs of a reluctance to lay down his authority. While knowing perfectly well that the new governor had arrived at one end of the province, he continued to hold assizes at the other.

Cicero’s patience was sorely tried and eventually he wrote to Appius in terms of firm but courteously indirect protest. He also inquired nervously of the whereabouts of three military cohorts.

Malicious persons … said you were holding assizes in Tarsus, making both administrative and judicial decisions, although you had reason to think that your successor had arrived.… Their talk had no effect on me.… But I must own candidly that I am disturbed to find three cohorts missing from my exiguous force, and those the most nearly up to strength, and to be ignorant of their whereabouts.

Cicero was right to be worried about the state of the armed forces at his disposal. Persistent reports were coming in that the Parthians were on the move and he would be expected to do what he could to resist them. The allied kingdoms, which Pompey had arranged as buffer states in his eastern settlement, looked increasingly unreliable.

Cicero urgently needed to lay his hands on the missing soldiers. Cilicia was garrisoned with two legions, but both were under strength. Some had been mutinous, although Appius had eventually pacified them by settling their arrears of pay. When campaigning abroad, the Romans usually employed as soldiers only their own citizens and relied on local levies for cavalry and lightly armed soldiers; but Cilicia was a recent acquisition and had no tradition of supplying troops to the Romans. Recruitment promised to be difficult. Caelius in Rome was just as worried about the military situation as Cicero was, but he warned that there would be little sympathy back home for his predicament. “Your army is hardly capable of defending a single pass. Unfortunately nobody allows for this: a man holding public office is expected to cope with any emergency, as though every item in complete preparedness had been put at his disposal.”

Cicero joined his army and did his best to enlist locals. AS a precaution, he sent the boys, Marcus and Quintus, north to the friendly kingdom of Galatia (in modern-day Turkey), where he hoped they would be out of harm’s way at the court of its ruler, Deiotarus. Deiotarus sent him a Roman-style legion of Galatians, who turned out to be surprisingly good soldiers.

AS the autumn came on, the news grew worse. The Parthians were reported to have crossed the Euphrates and there was talk that the King of Armenia was planning to invade Cappadocia, an allied kingdom to the northeast of Cilicia, in support. No word had come from the nearest province, Syria, where the new governor was the stubborn and luckless Bibulus, Caesar’s fellow Consul in 59. In fact, it was not even clear if he had arrived yet to take up his duties. Cicero commented dryly: “My best resource is winter.” He positioned his troops in the Taurus Mountains, from where he could either march north to meet a threat to Cappadocia or descend into the flatlands of eastern Cilicia near the Syrian border. In a dispatch to the Senate in mid-September he urgently appealed for more troops.

The young King of Cappadocia, Ariobarzanes, who styled himself “the Pious and Pro-Roman,” came to see the new Roman governor in a highly nervous state. He had recently inherited the throne after his father’s assassination and told Cicero that he had uncovered a plot against his own life. The idea was to install his brother, who would take an anti-Roman line. The Queen Mother was implicated and a semi-independent principality was on the point of open rebellion. Cicero advised him to take strong measures to punish the conspirators. But although Ariobarzanes asked for troops, none could be spared. It was agreed that the king could threaten their use, if necessary. AS SO often with young men, Cicero got on well with Ariobarzanes and when they were not talking politics they found time to discuss the differences between the Roman and Galatian systems of augury.

Hearing that the Parthian force was some way off, Cicero led his army, which he now thought “tolerably well provided,” forward towards the Syrian frontier. His cavalry fought off a brief and probably exploratory Parthian incursion. By the time he arrived at the Syrian border he heard that Caius Cassius Longinus had beaten the enemy at Antioch on the other side of the Amanus Mountains. A dour character, Cassius, Marcus Junius Brutus’s brother-in-law, was a good soldier and had taken charge of Syria after disaster had befallen Crassus at Carrhae.

Cicero learned that Bibulus had at last arrived in Syria. He later claimed (to some derision) that it had been his own presence close by that had emboldened Cassius to act. With the Parthian threat blunted at least for the time being, Cicero then led a punitive expedition against the Free Cilicians, mountain communities that had never fully acknowledged the rule of Rome. He did not take himself seriously as a general but knew that enough fighting to warrant a Triumph (or, as he called it lightheartedly, “a sprig of laurel”) would enhance his prestige in Rome.

The brief campaign was a success. His soldiers hailed him in the field as imperator, or Commander-in-Chief, an honor given to a general for leading his army to victory in person, which its recipient could use after his name (as Cicero later did when writing to Caesar). From the account he gave Atticus, it looks as if the leading role was played by Pomptinus. “On October 13 we made a great slaughter of the enemy, carrying and burning places of great strength, Pomptinus coming up at night and myself in the morning. For a few days we were encamped near ISSUS in the very spot where Alexander, a considerably better general than either you or I, pitched his camp against Darius.” He was not altogether displeased to hear that Bibulus had attempted some fighting of his own on the Syrian side of the mountains, out of jealousy he suspected, and come to grief, losing an entire cohort.

Cicero then moved against the well-defended Free Cilician fortress of Pindenissum and a full-scale siege ensued, which lasted some weeks. A moat was dug and a huge mound with a high siege tower and penthouses was erected. Siege artillery was deployed and many archers. Eventually, on or about December 17, the town fell with no Roman loss of life and all the plunder was handed over to the army. “A merry Saturnalia was had by all,” Cicero told Atticus, referring to the Christmas-like winter festival which took place at this time. The campaigning season now ended and the gratified and probably grateful imperator handed over his army to Quintus, who marched it away to winter quarters. Even if he was not awarded a Triumph, he could reasonably hope for a consolation prize, the lesser victory celebration called an Ovation.

Cicero’s vow to govern evenhandedly was severely tested in the coming months. He had set out what he believed to be the principles of good administration in the letter of guidance he had sent his brother during his governorship of Asia from 61 to 59; we may conjecture that Quintus was watching closely to see if Cicero would live up to his own precepts.

One of the most common complaints by provincials was the tax burden. Here Cicero had no sympathy with them, for in his view taxes were a payment for peace and tranquillity and for the rule of law. A more embarrassing problem, as Cicero well knew, was caused by the way public dues were collected. In the absence of a civil service, Rome sold the right to collect taxes to the highest bidder. Tax farmers often colluded with governors to make exorbitant profits. This was a subject where Cicero had to tread carefully, for he had built his career in part as a spokesman for businessmen and traders, and the local tax farmers were expecting favorable treatment.

Cicero knew that some form of compromise would be necessary. He disguised his determination to see fair play by assiduous politeness. The tax farmers complained that people would not pay what they owed, and the provincials said that they could not. The governor insisted that debts must be settled, but he allowed plenty of time for repayment and set interest rates at the legal maximum (often breached) of 1 percent per month. The provincials found this to be fair. And the tax farmers were happy enough too, for they were now sure to get their money, even if at a lower rate of return than they had originally expected. To smooth the path, Cicero buttered them up, asking them to dinner parties and doing all he could to flatter their self-esteem. At the same time he did his best to keep his staff under control, somewhat to their annoyance as they had to forgo customary pickings. He also took venal local officials aside and persuaded them quietly to repay funds they had acquired illegally.

Throughout his governorship he was never too busy to attend to developments in Rome. The optimates were pursuing their single, simple and disastrous policy of preventing Caesar from moving seamlessly from his Gallic posting to a second Consulship. They made repeated attempts to have the question of his successor discussed in the Senate, but these came to nothing, as they were invariably vetoed by one or more Tribunes in Caesar’s interest (and pay). Pompey let it be known that he felt it would be unfair to consider the question of Caesar’s replacement before March of the following year, the date when it would be legally permissible to do so. The disgruntled Faction, as Caesar nicknamed the optimates, had to settle for that. In an endless stream of letters Cicero pressed for compromise, but absence had weakened his influence. Caelius became Aedile in January 50, and concentrated on putting down fraud in the administration of the water supply (on which dry subject he published a well-received pamphlet). But he still found the time and energy to write to Cicero, who read his reports with mounting anxiety.

AS often happens when cataclysm approaches, a fruitlessly busy inertia paralyzed the political community. Caelius wrote in February:

Our Consuls are paragons of conscientiousness—to date they have not succeeded in getting a single decree through the Senate except about fixing the date of the Latin Festival.… The stagnation of everything here is indescribable. If I didn’t have a battle on with the shopkeepers and inspectors of conduits, a coma would have seized the community. Unless the Parthians liven you up a bit over there, we are as dead as dormice.

Caelius had high expectations for his and Cicero’s mutual friend, Curio, who became a Tribune in 50. He stood for election on a fiercely anti-Caesar platform and even threatened to raise again the issue of the Campanian lands, which had landed Cicero in such trouble with Caesar a few years previously. His efforts, however, were ineffective. The reason for this became clear only later: Caesar was secretly negotiating with him to change sides in return for settling his colossal debts. Curio cleverly created a smoke screen to cover his shift of allegiance and, although he soon began defending Caesar’s interest, it was a while before anyone realized that he was taking instructions from Gaul.

Military operations having been satisfactorily completed, Cicero turned his attention to administrative matters. Nothing that Appius could do or say surprised him, but he was greatly taken aback when he uncovered a financial scam that he eventually traced back to Marcus Brutus, the son of Servilia, Cato’s half-sister and at one time Caesar’s mistress. Brutus had a reputation for honesty and austerity. An intellectual devoted to Greek philosophy, he was, at thirty-four, the diametrical opposite of disreputable contemporaries such as Curio or Caelius. He modeled himself to some extent on his uncompromisingly virtuous half-uncle, Cato, and like him did not believe in half-measures. Caesar (whom gossip wrongly whispered was his natural father) once said acutely of Brutus: “What he wants is hard to say, but when he wants it, he wants it badly.”

Brutus had won the Quaestorship in 54 and served in Cilicia under Appius Claudius. Cicero was astonished to discover that this paragon of integrity, through some front men, had loaned a large sum of money to the town of Salamis in Cyprus at the extortionate interest rate of 4 percent a month (i.e., 60 percent compound interest over a year). That “very impecunious monarch” Deiotarus of Galatia was also in Brutus’s debt and finding it almost impossible to keep up his repayments. This was all the more shocking given that Senators were, in theory at least, barred from moneylending.

When Brutus asked Cicero to help his agents enforce the debts, the governor’s first reaction was to refuse to use his public authority for private ends. He reminded Brutus of his decision to set a 1 percent interest rate for loans in Cilicia. Privately he found the situation very awkward. “I shall be sorry to have incurred his displeasure,” Cicero told Atticus in February, “but far sorrier to find that he is not the man I took him for.” Matters were not helped by Brutus’s unwillingness to give any ground. “He is apt in his letters to me to take a brusque, arrogant, ungracious tone even when asking a favor.”

It was indeed a scandalous business: at one point Brutus’s people had used the cavalry to barricade the Senate of Salamis in their Senate House, as a result of which five Senators had starved to death. Cicero could not get the affair out of his mind and it dominated his correspondence with Atticus, at wearisome length. Atticus was a part of the problem, for he took Brutus’s side and, in a rare note of criticism of his friend, Cicero wrote: “My dearest Atticus, you have really cared too much for Brutus in this matter and not enough for me.”

The quick passage of time saved Cicero from having to take definitive action and he bequeathed the problem to his successor. We can guess that the outcome was unsatisfactory for the Salaminians, for Brutus accompanied the succeeding governor as one of his deputies.

With the waning of the Parthian threat, Marcus and young Quintus returned from Cappadocia and continued their education under a short-tempered tutor. In his father’s absence, marooned in the snowy Taurus Mountains with the army, young Quintus was proving a handful, but, his uncle told Atticus, “I shall keep him on a tighter rein.” It seems that the two got on badly and, to judge by later developments, efforts to discipline the teenager failed. On March 17, Cicero conducted the sixteen-year-old Quintus’s coming-of-age ceremony in his father’s absence.

Separation had done little to improve the elder Quintus’s marriage. The quarrel at Arpinum had had deep roots and Quintus was now meditating on divorce from Pomponia, Atticus’s difficult sister. He confided this to his freedman, Statius, who went around saying that Cicero approved (perhaps he was getting his own back on Pomponia, who cordially disliked him for his closeness to her husband). Cicero was furious and assured Atticus that this was the last thing he wanted. “Let me say only one thing: so far from wishing the bond between us to be in any way relaxed, I should welcome as many and as intimate links with you as possible,” he wrote to Atticus, “though those of affection, and of the closest, exist already. AS for Quintus, I have often found that he is apt to speak rather harshly in these matters, and again I have often mollified his irritation. I think you know this. During this foreign trip or rather service of ours I have repeatedly seen him flare up and calm down again. What he may have written to Statius I cannot say. Whatever step he proposed to take in such a matter he ought not to have written to a freedman.”

The impact of these marital difficulties was greatest on young Quintus, who was very close to his mother and seems to have taken her side. While he was away Cicero allowed him to open his father’s mail, in case it contained anything that needed urgent attention, and one day the boy stumbled on a reference to the possible divorce. He broke down in tears. His growing estrangement from his family in the coming years may have been partly caused by the difficulty of any talented boy growing up in the shadow of a famous relative, but perhaps a more pressing motive lay in what he saw as the ill treatment of a much-loved mother.

A worried Cicero wrote to Atticus: “He does seem very fond of his mother, as he should be, and extraordinarily fond of you. But the boy’s nature, though gifted, is complex and I have plenty to do in guiding it.” With Cicero’s encouragement, Quintus played a part in helping to reconcile his parents. The divorce did not take place.

Serious trouble was also brewing closer to home. In June 50 Cicero broached a highly sensitive topic with Atticus, writing in veiled terms and in Greek. Terentia had sent him out to Cilicia to see Cicero and his behavior had been strange. “There’s something else about which I must write to you en langue voilée, and you must lay your nose to the scent. From the confused and incoherent way he talked the other day, I formed the impression that my wife’s freedman (you know to whom I refer) has cooked the accounts regarding [a property purchase]. I am afraid that something—you’ll take my meaning. Please look into it.… I can’t put all I fear into words.” The implication is that his wife was somehow involved.

The divorced Tullia had now settled on a new husband and she could hardly have made a more unsatisfactory choice. Her eye had fallen on a handsome young aristocrat, Publius Cornelius Lentulus Dolabella. A reckless and womanizing playboy, he was not at all the match Cicero had been hoping for.

Tullia seems usually to have gotten her way with her indulgent father, and on this occasion he knew little of what was afoot until she and her mother presented him with a fait accompli. He made the best of a bad situation, although the marriage placed him in Appius Claudius’s bad books just when he thought he had gotten out of them. AS luck would have it, Dolabella was in the process of bringing Appius to trial on a treason charge. “Here I am in my province paying Appius all kinds of compliment, when out of the blue I find his prosecutor becoming my son-in-law!”

In the summer of 50, much to his relief, Cicero had reached the end of his posting and set off for Rome, despite the brief threat of another Parthian invasion. On the journey home he had plenty of time to think about the political situation he was going to find on his return. He called at Rhodes and Athens and wrote an affectionate letter to his “darling and much-longed-for Terentia,” complimenting her on her letters to him, which “covered all items most carefully,” and asking her to come and meet him in Brundisium if her health allowed. He reached the port in late November at the same time as his wife arrived at the city gates: they met in the market square. The suspicions he had raised with Atticus had evidently been lulled, at least for the time being. He was also coming to terms with Tullia’s new husband, the playboy Dolabella. “We all find him charming, Tullia, Terentia, myself,” he told Atticus. “He is as clever and agreeable as you please. Other characteristics, of which you are aware, we must put up with.”

Cicero was in no hurry to reach Rome and did not arrive there until early January 49. He would need to retain his governor’s imperium until he crossed the city boundary, if he were to be awarded a Triumph or an Ovation, and so he stayed at Pompey’s grand country house outside the capital, accompanied by his official guard of lictors, their axes now wreathed in laurel because of his title of imperator. Cicero was back where he felt he belonged, and he did not intend to be inactive.