Cicero

11

PACIFYING CAESAR

The Last Gasps of Republican Rome: 48–45 BC

This time arrival in Brundisium was a melancholy affair. There was no Terentia or Tullia waiting when he sailed into port in mid-October 48. Tullia was ill, perhaps recovering from her miscarriage, and Cicero was at his wits’ end with worry. Ready money was in short supply, for while in Greece he had made over to Pompey all the funds he had brought with him. The payment of Tullia’s dowry to her new husband, Dolabella, was a touchy issue.

Cicero’s lictors were still with him, an expensive and embarrassing nuisance. He was nervous about his reception as he walked into the town and made them mingle discreetly with the crowd so that he would not be noticed. He could not disband them because, although his successor in Cilicia had been nominated, Caesar, now in charge of the government in Rome, refused to accept the appointment. (This meant, interestingly, that Cicero recognized, however reluctantly and implicitly, Caesar’s legitimacy.)

Cicero was not sure what to do next. Atticus advised him to go nearer to Rome, traveling by night, but he did not relish the thought. He didn’t have enough stopping places at his disposal, so what would he do in the daytime? Also, there was no pressing reason to move on, for his old enemy, Vatinius, was in charge of Brundisium and was now both hospitable and friendly. Cicero always found it hard to keep a feud going and was prone to be fond of anyone who showed him affection, whatever he really thought of them and their politics.

Balbus and Oppius, busy managing Caesar’s affairs behind the scenes, wrote to Cicero telling him not to worry. His position would be protected, if not enhanced. Dolabella let him know that Caesar had authorized him to invite his father-in-law to come back to Italy. This good news was soon contradicted by Mark Antony, once again responsible for governing Italy in Caesar’s absence, who sent Cicero a copy of a letter he had received from Caesar which stated that no Pompeians would be allowed back into the country until he had reviewed their cases individually. “He expressed himself pretty strongly on these points,” Cicero informed Atticus gloomily. He settled down miserably in Brundisium to await Caesar’s return.

At the end of November he learned of Pompey’s fate. After Pharsalus, the general had made his way eastwards, with Caesar in hot pursuit. His destination had been Egypt; he thought he could make a stand there and raise another army by recruiting in Asia Minor. For many years he had been the incarnation of Roman authority in the region and he expected that his writ would still hold. Also he was the Senate-appointed guardian of the boy Pharaoh.

But the royal advisers to the Pharaoh had no intention of welcoming a loser. Imagining that they would ingratiate themselves with Caesar, they lured Pompey from his ship and had him killed before he had even reached land. Not long afterwards Caesar arrived in Alexandria and was presented with Pompey’s severed and pickled head; when he was given his old brother-in-law’s signet ring, he is said to have wept.

Success came early to Pompey and gave him a reputation he had to work to deserve. His portraits show a puzzled, worried expression and suggest a man not entirely at ease with himself. His contemporaries overrated his military abilities, and as a politician he was hesitant, devious and clumsy. Yet he had his qualities: he was a first-rate organizer and, if only the Roman constitution had allowed it, could have spent a happy career as an imperial administrator. His private life was exemplary: his two marriages were arranged for political reasons, but he seems to have loved his wives and won their loyalty.

Cicero was saddened by Pompey’s death but not surprised. The two men had been on good terms, but Pompey had kept his feelings to himself and, despite their surface affection, had been happy to manipulate and on occasion deceive his sometimes gullible friend. Cicero offered Atticus his own cool but generous epitaph: “As to Pompey’s end I never had any doubt, for all rulers and peoples had become so thoroughly persuaded of the hopelessness of his case that wherever he went I expected this to happen. I cannot but grieve for his fate. I knew him for a man of good character, clean life and serious principle.”

There was further news from the east, which Cicero took much more deeply to heart. Following the quarrel at Patrae, Quintus had sent his son ahead of him to find Caesar and make his excuses, hoping to be taken back into favor. Thinking that his own salvation depended on throwing Cicero to the wolves, he heaped all the blame for his own behavior on his elder brother. In addition, the younger Quintus was reported to have used scandalous language about his uncle in public. Cicero was deeply upset by these betrayals: “It is the most unbelievable thing that has ever happened to me,” he told Atticus, “and the bitterest of my present woes.”

In early January 47 a package of letters arrived from the elder Quintus for various addressees, including Vatinius and another person in Brundisium. Cicero had the local ones sent on at once. In no time the two recipients turned up on his doorstep, furious at what they had read. Apparently the letters contained malicious and inaccurate information about him. Cicero wondered what was in the rest of the correspondence, so he opened all the other letters and found much more in the same vein. He forwarded them all to Atticus for his opinion, telling him that Pomponia had a seal to replace the imprints he had broken.

Perhaps Cicero felt guilty for having taken his brother too much for granted; in any case, he wrote to Caesar accepting all responsibility for the decision to go to Greece and join Pompey: his brother had been “the companion of my journey, not the guide.” This gesture of generosity was well judged. Cicero knew Caesar well and might have guessed that treachery of this kind would not endear Quintus to a man who valued personal loyalty above almost all things. AS part of his reconciliation policy, Caesar had had all of Pompey’s correspondence burned unread after Pharsalus. It would hardly have been in character for him to pay attention to the self-interested information, or disinformation, which Quintus was purveying about his brother.

Meanwhile Dolabella, who was Tribune that year, was stirring up trouble in Rome. He picked up the baton Caelius had let fall and, in opposition to government policy, was campaigning for a cancellation of debts. Caesar’s financial settlement in Italy was faltering and discontent spread through the country, even contaminating veteran legions stationed not far away in Campania. Antony was forced to go to the troops to pacify them, leaving the city to Dolabella and disorder. Dolabella’s agitations seriously reduced his value to Cicero as an insurance policy with the new regime.

All in all, the behavior of his relatives added private misery to Cicero’s public misfortune. What was worse, he did not dare to draw attention to himself by leaving Brundisium, and there was little he could do so far from Rome except brood on an uncertain future.

Caesar now unexpectedly disappeared from view and nothing was heard from him for months. Between December 23, 48, and June of the following year he sent no dispatches to Rome. He had become embroiled, with too few troops at his back, in a bitter little war with the Egyptian court and at one stage was blockaded inside the royal palace in Alexandria. One of the daughters of the late Pharaoh, Ptolemy, was Cleopatra, now in her late teens. This young woman was to become one of the most celebrated and enigmatic figures in ancient history, mysterious in part because her memory is filtered through the malicious accounts of her enemies. Cleopatra was unable to offer her own version of the momentous events of her time; sex and politics are interwoven so closely in her career that her motives are hard to disentangle. Raison d’état led her into the bedrooms of two famous Romans—first Caesar, and later Mark Antony. To what extent did physical attraction or love also play a part? We do not know.

Cleopatra was not, it seems, particularly good-looking, but she had a bewitching personality. “Her own beauty, so we are told, was not of that incomparable kind which instantly captivates the beholder,” Plutarch avers. “But the charm of her presence was irresistible: and there was an attractiveness in her person and talk, together with a peculiar force of character which pervaded her every word and action, and laid all who associated with her under its spell. It was delight merely to hear the sound of her voice.”

At the time of her first meeting with Caesar, Cleopatra and a younger half-brother were joint Pharaohs (and, according to Egyptian custom for royal families, were probably married). She had no intention of sharing her authority with her brother for a minute longer than was necessary. The arrival of Rome’s leading general was an opportunity for her, if only she could win him over to her cause.

The Queen had herself smuggled into Caesar’s presence wrapped in a carpet or bedroll and they soon began an affair. She quickly persuaded him to take her side in the struggle for power with her brother. Caesar defeated the Egyptian army at the end of March 47 and Cleopatra’s annoying little brother was drowned while trying to escape by boat from the battlefield. She wasted no time in marrying yet another boy sibling. Unaccountably, Caesar did not leave the country until June. He seems to have spent some of this time on a lavish and leisurely excursion up the Nile.

This was risky, if not irresponsible behavior, for it undermined the apparently decisive result of Pharsalus. What remained of Pompey’s fleet was scoring successes in the Adriatic and the optimates in Africa were raising substantial forces. Antony was not doing well at governing Italy and failed to calm the mutinous soldiery. Caesar, cut off from the rest of the world, did not learn of these developments until later, but he could have foreseen that his absence would lead to problems. It was no time for him to quit the helm.

While Rome was distracted with its internal quarrels and Caesar was indulging in his Egyptian interlude, Mithridates’ son Pharnaces seized his chance, recovering his kingdom of Pontus and defeating a Roman army. Asia Minor was on the point of disintegration. It looked as if the chain of eastern provinces along the Mediterranean seaboard and the protective buffer zone of client kingdoms inland could be lost—a high price to pay for the luxury of a civil war.

It is hard to find a convincing political explanation for Caesar’s behavior. He may have thought that securing Egypt, with the kingdom’s vast wealth and inexhaustible corn supplies, was of high importance. Ensuring that the young and inexperienced queen was firmly established on the throne took time. In addition, he could have simply felt he needed a holiday in the company of his charming new mistress. This is posterity’s favorite explanation, and there may be truth in it.

In any event, he finally left Egypt a few weeks before the birth of Cleopatra’s son, named Caesarion and almost certainly the product of their affair. His first task, which he accomplished with remarkable rapidity, was to deal with Pharnaces. In a lightning five-day campaign, he annihilated the king’s army at Zela in Cappadocia. “Came, saw, conquered,” he remarked. He added acidly that Pompey was lucky to have been considered a great general if this was the kind of opposition he had had to face.

Meanwhile Cicero remained isolated in Brundisium, unable to move until Caesar reappeared and ruled on his case. Quintus, badgered by Atticus, sent his brother a grudging letter of apology, which as far as Cicero was concerned only made matters worse. Young Quintus also wrote to him “most offensively.” In the summer Cicero learned that his nephew had been given an interview with Caesar and that he and his father had been forgiven. He was pleased, with the reservation that concessions of this sort, “from a master to slaves,” could be revoked at will. Except for the occasional explosion, his anger with both Quintuses gradually subsided.

Then, as if he didn’t have enough domestic problems, relations with Terentia came under increasing strain. The details are clouded, but she was “doing some wicked things” regarding her will. Cicero remained very worried about the financial prospects of Marcus and Tullia and he must have believed that his wife was in some way imperiling their interests. But he still depended on her for advice and trusted her judgment on how to handle relations with Dolabella. Tullia’s marriage was turning out to be an unhappy one. Dolabella was rumored to have had a number of sexual escapades and was conducting an affair with a respectable married woman from the Metellus clan. To add insult to injury, he was proposing to erect a statue of Clodius, of all people. Divorce was being considered, but the timing was important. Was Dolabella too powerful to offend just at the moment?

In June 47 Tullia took the long and uncomfortable journey south to visit her father. He was touched and delighted, even if her presence made him feel guilty. “Her own courage, thoughtfulness and affection,” he wrote to Atticus, “far from giving me the pleasure I ought to take in such a paragon of daughters, grieve me beyond measure when I consider the unhappy lot in which so admirable a nature is cast, not through any misconduct of hers but by grave fault on my part.” In the absence of cash, Cicero begged Atticus to gather up his movables—plate, furniture, fabrics—and hide them away somewhere; they could be sold later as minimal provision for his children.

By now Cicero was desperate to leave Brundisium. He wrote to Antony, to Balbus and to Oppius, and finally he appealed to Atticus: “I must ask you to get me out of here. Any punishment is better than staying on in this place.” At long last, in August he received a letter directly from Caesar, who had emerged from his Egyptian imbroglio. It was “quite a handsome one,” he conceded to Terentia. We may assume that it indicated a pardon for Cicero, or at least the prospect of one, and Caesar seems to have proposed a meeting on his return to Italy. Athough welcome, this created yet another dilemma. Should he go to meet the returning victor halfway or wait where he was? He took the latter option, perhaps because it seemed less like a decision.

Caesar was in a hurry, for his first, urgent priority on regaining Italy was to meet his soldiers and quash the still simmering mutiny. In early October 47 he landed at Tarentum and made a detour to Brundisium, where Cicero was nervously waiting on the road outside the town, ashamed to be testing his personal status in front of so many witnesses. He stood alone ahead of other dignitaries. AS soon as he saw him Caesar dismounted from his horse and embraced him. Then, in signal evidence of favor, he walked along with him and they talked in private for a considerable distance. The content of their conversation is not known, but from what happened next it can be surmised that Cicero received permission to live or go wherever he wanted. He was probably also allowed to dismiss his lictors, much to his relief, for they had become an embarrassingly visible reminder of a time when Cicero counted for something in the world.

Cicero set out for home at once, after dashing off a note to Terentia. It was curt to the point of rudeness. “Kindly see that everything is ready. I may have a number of people with me and shall probably make a fairly long stay there [Tusculum]. If there is no tub in the bathroom, get one put in; likewise whatever else is necessary for health and subsistence. Good-bye.” If she detected a decisive coolness between the lines, she was not wrong. Soon after his return, Cicero divorced her. The marriage, which ended in 46, had lasted more than thirty years.

His complaints, as itemized by Plutarch, were chiefly thoughtlessness and financial mismanagement. Also, she did not trouble to go to meet him at Brundisium in all the months of his exile there, and, when Tullia did, she failed to provide her daughter with a proper escort and enough money for her expenses. Finally, she had stripped Cicero’s house of its contents and incurred a large number of debts. These faults do not quite justify Cicero’s sudden determination to get rid of Terentia. AS a rule, his emotions were changeable and he had forgiven Quintus and his nephew for seemingly far greater crimes. However, for whatever reason, he was now implacable.

Terentia’s defense against the charges, if she had one, cannot now be reconstructed. But it is clear that Cicero was not good at handling money, or at least that his finances were insecure: as his affairs went from bad to worse during the civil war, she might well have tried to protect what she could of the family’s or of her own fortune. She was a strong-minded woman and perhaps felt she had to take decisive action if something were to be saved from the wreckage.

Even if Cicero was entirely in the right, the episode leaves an unpleasant aftertaste, suggesting a surprising emotional coldness at the heart of his domestic life. One is left wondering what Tullia and Marcus made of their mother’s being sent away. AS for Terentia, she was tough enough to rebuild her life. She later remarried: she is reported to have chosen Caius Sallustius Crispus—the historian Sallust, whose books include, ironically, a study of the Catilinarian conspiracy, the occasion of her first husband’s greatest triumph. For his part, Cicero did not intend to remain single and discussed possible new wives with Atticus, though he made no immediate choice.

Caesar’s successes had not in fact decided the outcome of the war. The Italy to which he returned after an absence of a year and a half was in crisis. Antony, armed with a Final Act, had put down Dolabella’s insurrectionary debt campaign by storming the Forum with troops, an operation that led to a bloodbath with 800 citizens dead. He lost all political credibility and Caesar dropped him for the next two years. Curiously, though, Caesar retained his confidence in Dolabella and on his arrival in Rome further tightened the constraints on creditors.

The veterans waiting in Campania presented a much more serious challenge. They had had their fill of fighting and were agitating to be demobilized with their arrears paid up in full. The state was approaching bankruptcy and Caesar did not have the money to settle the account. In any case, he needed every sesterce he could lay his hands on to continue the war against the Republicans in Africa. A succession of senior figures had made the pilgrimage from Rome to parley with the veterans and been chased out of the camp. Finally Caesar promised a hefty bonus, but to no avail. The soldiers began to move on Rome. Their general had no choice but to confront them in person. He put on a bravura performance and called their bluff. He addressed them icily as “civilians,” as if they had already discharged themselves by their actions. Of course, he would let them go, he said. He would pay them later, once he had won the African campaign—with other soldiers.

The veterans’ defiance collapsed. It had not occurred to them that they would simply be dismissed. AS Caesar well knew, most of them loved and trusted him and for all their grievances could not bear the thought that he no longer needed them and would turn them away. The mood of the meeting was transformed. Men crowded up to the speaker’s dais, begging Caesar to change his mind and take them to Africa after all. With simulated reluctance he allowed himself to be won over.

After making some essential administrative arrangements in Rome, Caesar left the city for Africa in December 47. Once more he would be fighting a winter campaign against superior forces, for Cato and the Republicans had mustered ten legions. Also, despite the fact that it was a scandalous thing to encourage foreigners to fight against Romans, they had allied themselves with King Juba of Mauritania, who brought four legions with him. Rome was left on tenterhooks again. For once, Cicero reacted calmly to uncertainty. While waiting for news, he stayed in Rome to be near his friends. He wrote to a correspondent: “I think the victory of either will amount to pretty much the same thing.”

In April 46 Caesar won a decisive victory at Thapsus, despite the fact that at the outset of the battle he suffered from what sounds like an epileptic fit. The author of the history of the campaign, who was probably an officer on Caesar’s staff, referred to it as “his usual malady.” Caesar’s hectic and energetic life was catching up with him, and these attacks increased in frequency in his remaining years. He then marched on the North African port of Utica, where Cato and the few remaining Republican forces were based. It would be a great propaganda coup if he could extend his clemency to this obdurate upholder of Republican values. Cato understood this too and was determined to prevent him.

The Republican armies had been defeated and the war appeared to be over. All who wanted to leave by ship were allowed to do so, but Cato refused to let a delegation be sent to sue for peace. “I decline to be under an obligation to the tyrant for his illegal acts,” he said. “He is acting against the law when he pardons people over whom he has no authority, as if he owned them.”

A few nights later, after a bath and supper, there was some pleasant conversation over wine. Among the topics discussed was a paradox from Stoic philosophy: whatever his circumstances, the good man is free and only the bad man is a slave. Cato spoke so vehemently in favor of this proposition that his listeners guessed his intention. He then retired to bed and read Plato’s Phaedo, the famous dialogue on the nature of death and the immortality of the soul. His son had removed his sword from his room, much to Cato’s anger. He was so upset when he noticed its absence that he hit a slave on the mouth and hurt his hand. When the weapon was brought back, he said: “Now I am my own master.” He took up his book again, which he read through twice before falling into an unusually deep sleep. In the morning he asked for news and dozed.

Then, when he was alone, he stabbed himself in the stomach, but, owing to his now inflamed hand, failed to strike home. He fell off his bed and knocked over a geometrical abacus standing nearby, which clattered to the floor, making a loud noise. His son and the servants ran in and found Cato unconscious, covered with blood and with his bowels protruding from his stomach. A doctor tried to replace them and sew up the wound. Cato came to and realized what was happening. He pushed the doctor away, tore open the incision and pulled his bowels out again, after which he soon died. He was 48 years old.

The impact of this event on Roman opinion was enormous; indeed, it has echoed down the ages. A century later the poet Lucan saw in the dead constitutionalist a pattern of heroic virtue, which he summed up with a famous epigram in Pharsalia, his epic on the civil war: “The gods favored the winning side, but Cato the one that lost” (Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni).

Cato’s suicide was extremely damaging to Caesar’s reputation. At the beginning of the civil war, many educated Romans saw the struggle between Pompey and Caesar as no more than a competition between two overmighty generals and chose sides according to their personal and political loyalties. Inevitably, one or other of them would win. While some regarded Caesar’s whole career as a conspiracy against the state, the less pessimistic assumed that once hostilities were over political life would resume more or less as normal. There might be a bloodbath and a proscription. There would be pain and personal tragedies, but, as with Sulla, the constitution would eventually be restored in some broadly recognizable form. It would be the victor’s duty to ensure that this was done.

Although it began to look over time as if this might not, after all, be the final outcome, it was still possible at this stage to give Caesar the benefit of the doubt. So all-embracing and deeply rooted was the idea of the constitution’s permanence that it took a year or two before suspicions of his revolutionary intentions hardened into certainty that the days of the Republic were over for good. In the meantime Cato’s final act of defiance, his deliberate rejection of Caesar’s tyranny and by extension of all political servitude, harshly dramatized half-spoken fears.

Cicero was greatly moved by Cato’s death. He had found him an unbearable nuisance who bore no little responsibility for the slide into civil war. But his suicide burned away the inessentials of his character, leaving him as the symbol of pure principles and of a lost time for which he mourned. In May 46, shortly after the news from Utica had arrived in Rome, he was brooding on the possibility, indeed the desirability, of writing some kind of panegyric for the martyr, much more dangerous dead than alive. Brutus, whom Caesar had forgiven for fighting against him at Pharsalus and who was serving this year as governor of Italian Gaul, had been close to Cato and had given Cicero the idea. (They were now on good terms, the Cyprus moneylending scandal having been forgotten or forgiven.)

But how would Cicero be able to speak his mind without getting into trouble with the authorities? “It’s a problem for Archimedes,” he told Atticus. However, he was determined to find a solution and spent much of the summer at Tusculum writing his encomium, which he finished by August. The work has not survived, but it seems to have praised Cato’s strength of character and pointed out how he had predicted the political crisis, fought to prevent it and laid down his life so that he did not have to witness its consequences.

The Rome that Cicero found on return from Brundisium was a very different place from the one he had left, and in many ways he found that he was a stranger there. Politics had become the possession of a regime, not an establishment, and there was no role for him, unless he were somehow to create a new one. Many familiar faces were missing—dead, in exile or still fighting in distant corners of the empire. They had been largely replaced by the “underworld,” some of them members of the Catullan and Clodian counterculture of the early 60s and 50s, who had always rejected the old solid Roman virtues of duty and loyalty to tradition.

Cicero, now sixty years old, an old man in Roman eyes, had to find another way of leading his life. Depressed as he was, he still had reserves of energy and of social zest, and he set about making new friends. One of these was Marcus Terentius Varro, a distinguished and encyclopedic scholar. Varro had fought in the first Spanish campaign against Caesar, but after Pharsalus he had abandoned the Republican cause and was appointed to run a new project Caesar was planning, the creation of Rome’s first public library. The two men had not previously been close, and while Cicero admired his work, he did not think much of Varro’s prose style. They came together because of their mutual isolation: the surviving optimates despised them for coming to terms with the enemy and the victors classed them among the defeated. “As for our present times,” Cicero judged, “if our friends had won the day they would have acted very immoderately. They were infuriated with us.” The two agreed that the way out, or at least the way forward, was to concentrate on their writing. In April 46 Cicero advised Varro: “Like the learned men of old, we must serve the state in our libraries, if we cannot in the Senate House and Forum, and pursue our researches into custom and law.”

Cicero enjoyed the necessary solitude of a writer’s life and spent a good deal of time in his country villas, mainly at Tusculum, from where he made frequent forays to Rome, and later at Astura, which he loved for its remoteness. However, he was psychologically unable to devote himself entirely to decorous retirement. So although there was little legal work for him in Rome, he started giving private classes in public speaking to senior personalities in the government. “I have set up as schoolmaster, as it were, now that the courts are abolished and my forensic kingdom lost.” Cicero was exaggerating somewhat: although it may well be that the legal system was suspended from time to time during the civil war, it still functioned and indeed was reformed by Caesar. (The civil code was revised and simplified and jury membership altered.) In any event Cicero felt that teaching public speaking was good for his health since he had given up his rhetorical exercises; also, his oratorical talent would wither without practice.

In addition, there were plenty of invitations to dinner. He began to accept them, fairly indiscriminately. He was happy to dine with the enemy. Leading figures in the government were on cordial terms and Balbus and Oppius were unvaryingly attentive and thoughtful. He confessed to his friend Lucius Papirius Paetus: “Hirtius [a close colleague of Caesar’s who wrote the last chapter of The Conquest of Gaul, which its preoccupied author had left unfinished] and Dolabella are my pupils in oratory but my masters in gastronomy. I expect you have heard, if all news travels to Naples, that they practice making speeches in my house, and I practice dining at theirs.”

Cicero kept company he would once have thought unacceptable. At one meal he was surprised to see that the guests included Antony’s mistress Cytheris, who, against the rules of etiquette, was given a couch rather than a chair. Writing on the spot while waiting for the food, he noted to a friend: “I assure you I had no idea she would be there.” He held some dinner parties of his own. “I even had the audacity to give a dinner to Hirtius (think of it!)—no peacock though. At that meal nothing proved beyond my cook’s powers of imitation except the hot sauce.”

The government was alarmed at the growth of conspicuous expenditure in Rome and passed sumptuary laws to control it. The most expensive foods were banned and, as a result, chefs began to experiment with innovative vegetarian recipes. This put a strain on Cicero’s digestion, as he confessed ruefully to a friend in winter 46:

Our bons vivants, in their efforts to bring into fashion products of the soil exempted under the statute, make the most appetizing dishes out of fungi, potherbs and grasses of all sorts. Happening on some of these at an inaugural dinner at Lentulus’s house, I was seized with a violent diarrhea, which has only today begun (I think) to check its flow. So: oysters and eels I used to resist well enough, but here I lie caught in the nets of mesdames Turnip and Mallow! Well, I shall be more careful in future.

Caesar returned from Africa towards the end of July 46. His first weeks were spent organizing four Triumphs, which took place in late September and lasted an unheard-of eleven days. They marked his victories in Gaul and Egypt and over Pharnaces in Asia Minor and Juba in Africa. The number of enemies killed, excluding citizens, was claimed to be 1,992,000. Money to the value of 65,000 talents was carried in the parade. Games and shows were also staged. AS a personal tribute Caesar promoted a gladiatorial display in memory of his still much-missed daughter, Julia, and a public banquet with 22,000 tables. It was ill omened to triumph over Roman citizens and Pharsalus was passed by in silence, but the crowds showed their disapproval of painted representations of the deaths of the Republican leaders in Africa: Cato was depicted tearing himself apart like a wild animal. There were groans as the images passed along the streets. The all-conquering war leader had not yet registered how long a shadow Cato was to cast. Another incident alarmed superstitious Romans: the axle on Caesar’s chariot broke just opposite, of all places, the Temple of Fortune. AS atonement for the portent, he climbed the steps of the Capitol on his knees.

The public mood was unsettled. There were complaints about the amount of blood shed at the Games and the soldiery, annoyed by the extravagance, rioted. Caesar reacted with extraordinary fury: he grabbed one man with his own hands and had him executed. Two other soldiers were sacrificed by priests to Mars and the heads displayed outside his official residence, the State House. This was highly unusual: the most recent previous human sacrifice was reported to have been conducted by Catilina in the 60s to bind his fellow conspirators to his cause and before that one had to go back to the darkest days of the war against Hannibal more than one and a half centuries earlier. Perhaps the threat of a mutiny in the center of Rome was such a serious matter that the most extreme measures were required: alternatively, the soldiers’ offense may have broken some religious taboo. One way or the other the disinterested observer might have wondered about the stability of the regime.

The Forum of Julius, which had been under construction on the far side of the Senate House at Caesar’s expense since 54, was officially opened. It put the old Forum somewhat in the shade and eclipsed, both by its location and its extent, Pompeius’s theater beyond the pomoerium on the Field of Mars. Controversially, a gold statue of Cleopatra was erected next to one of Venus, whose temple was one of the Forum’s key features. About this time the Egyptian queen appeared in Rome in person with her court and her brother and co-Pharaoh, the thirteen-year-old Ptolemy XIV. Her motives for leaving her kingdom for what turned out to be an eighteen-month stay were probably mixed. She and Caesar no doubt wanted to continue their affair, but she also knew that her throne depended on her lover and the favor of Rome’s ruling class. Egypt was the last great imperial prize for the all-conquering Republic, and the danger of annexation was real. Cleopatra was prepared to devote all her personal charms to maintaining her country’s independence.

She also brought Caesarion with her, whose name drew scandalous attention to her liaison with the Dictator. She stayed in a garden villa of Caesar’s on the far side of the Tiber, where she must have held court with Egyptian splendor. Caesar was probably too busy to spend much time with her. She seems to have mixed on social terms with leading Romans, although she cannot have had much sympathy with antiauthoritarian attitudes. Cicero had some dealings with her and soon came to dislike her.

The Senate voted Caesar unprecedented honors, the most important of these extending his Dictatorship for ten years and the Controllership of Morals for three years and according him the right of nominating officeholders for election.

In the past, the Senate had been more or less a gentleman’s club, with a few New Men like Marius or Cicero added to the mixture from time to time. Caesar, wisely acknowledging the multicultural composition of both the Empire and the city of Rome itself, resumed the old custom of opening citizenship and power to defeated and annexed peoples. More radically, he enlarged the Senate, recruiting from the provinces and the Italian communities. Cicero was shocked to find himself sitting next to trousered Gauls, bankers, industrialists and farmers. Worse than that, former centurions and sons of freedmen were appointed to the Senate.

Caesar enacted at great speed a number of important and well-judged reforms. To many people’s surprise he acted evenhandedly and favored neither radical nor conservative causes, making decisions on the merits of a case. His first priority concerned the social problems of Rome and Italy. An exact census of the city’s population was conducted; the free distribution of corn (Rome’s equivalent of social security or unemployment payments) was limited; many of the urban proletariat were settled in citizen “colonies” overseas; special privileges were given to the fathers of large families in an attempt to increase the birth rate and so eventually replace the heavy casualties of war. In order to discourage the replacement of jobs for citizens by slave labor in the countryside, at least one third of the cattlemen on Italy’s large ranches had to be freeborn.

From January 1, 45, the calendar was sensibly extended to 365 days. Previously the year had had ten fewer days, necessitating occasional intercalary months and every other year the College of Pontiffs had usually inserted an additional month to keep the calendar in time with the sun. During the years running up to the civil war, this procedure had been neglected and the result was that the calendar was more than two months ahead of itself (this meant that when, for example, Cicero returned to Italy after the battle of Pharsalus in mid-October 48 according to contemporary dating, the real date was sometime in August). To effect the transition, Caesar inserted 67 days between November and December 46 and introduced the solar year of 365¼ days. In an acid reference to the new calendar, Cicero refused to be pleased with an autocrat’s decisions, however benign. When someone remarked that the constellation Lyra was due to rise on the following night, he replied: “Of course. It will be following orders.”

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

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

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

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

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

Cicero told his friend Paetus in July 46:

I hear that, having in his day compiled volumes of bons mots, Caesar will reject any specimen offered him as mine which is not authentic. He does this all the more because his intimates are in my company almost every day. Talk of this and that produces many casual remarks which perhaps strike these people when I say them as not deficient in polish and point. They are conveyed to him with the rest of the day’s news, according to his express instructions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AS for your congratulations on the step I have taken, I am sure your wishes are sincere. But I should not have taken any new decision at so sad a time, if on my return I had not found my household affairs in as bad a state as the country’s. In my own house, I knew no security, had no refuge from intrigue, because of the villainy of those to whom my welfare and estate should have been most precious in view of the signal kindnesses I had showered on them. So I thought it advisable to fortify myself by the loyalty of new connections against the treachery of old ones.

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

In January 45, she gave birth to a son, “little Lentulus,” as Cicero called him after one of his father’s names. The lying-in apparently took place at Dolabella’s house, although the couple was now divorced. The mother failed to recover, surviving for only a few weeks, and the child died some months later. Tullia is a shadowy figure, who never speaks for herself and is glimpsed only through her father’s loving comments. We can guess that she was intelligent and amusing (as well as being self-willed and with a pronounced tendency to fall for unsuitable men).

Cicero was devastated. Tusculum and his house on the Palatine were too full of memories and for a time he stayed with Atticus, reading everything he could find in his library that the Greek philosophers had to say about grief. Then, having gained leave of absence from his public duties, he fled the city. He went to Astura, a property he had recently bought on the coast south of Antium, a wooded and remote spot where he could hide away and grieve. The Romans disapproved of extravagant mourning, especially over a woman, and Cicero did his best to control or at least to conceal his emotions. He asked Atticus to attribute his absence from Rome to ill health.

Reading did not help, so he picked up his pen and wrote a Self-Consolation, one of the most celebrated works of antiquity, although now lost. Consolatory texts were a recognized genre, but he was, he thought, the first man to write one for himself. He assembled every relevant text he could find and “threw them all into one attempt at consolation,” he wrote to Atticus, “for my soul was in a feverish state and I attempted every means of curing its condition.” He worked quickly and finished the book by early March, when he promised a copy to Atticus (with whom he was corresponding daily). “I write all day long, not that I do myself any real good, but just for the time being it distracts me—not enough, for grief is powerful and importunate; still it brings a respite.” He suspected that his anguish was changing his personality and was afraid that Atticus would no longer feel towards him as in the past. “The things you like in me are gone for good.”

He found that he could not stop crying and spent most of his time on his own out-of-doors. “In this lonely place I don’t talk to a soul. Early in the day I hide myself in a thick, thorny wood, and don’t emerge till evening. When I am alone all my conversation is with books; it is interrupted by fits of weeping, against which I struggle as best I can. But so far it is an unequal fight.”

When contrasted with the self-indulgent and sometimes slightly formulaic expressions of grief of his letters from exile, Cicero’s state of mind during this crisis reveals a new intensity of feeling, too raw and too astonishing to be publicized. He showed little self-pity; his pain was so fierce as almost to be physical. This was a true breakdown and he recognized it. He withdrew from the world like a sick animal and fought as hard as he could for recovery, for the regaining of his life.

Tullia’s death spelled the end of Cicero’s brief marriage to Publilia. She was said to be pleased that someone she had seen as a rival had been removed from the scene, and Cicero could not forgive this. Even if the story was false, his bereavement pushed her to the far periphery of his concerns. Publilia was not allowed to visit him and he asked for Atticus’s support in preventing either her or her relatives from seeking him out. “I want you to find out just how long I can stay here [at Astura] without getting caught.” His mind was set on divorce and before long the baffled and relieved teenager was out of his life for good.

Letters of condolence for Tullia’s death poured in, among them from Brutus and from Caesar in Spain, who knew well the agony of grief for a dead daughter. His friend the jurist Servius Sulpicius Rufus wrote a long, touching epistle that brought home to Cicero the mutability of human affairs.

I want to tell you of something which has brought me no small comfort, in the hope that perhaps it may have some power to lighten your sorrow too. AS I was on my way back from Asia [to Rome on changing sides after Pharsalus], sailing from Aegina towards Megara, I began to gaze at the landscape around me. There behind me was Aegina, in front of me Megara, to the right Piraeus, to the left Corinth; once flourishing towns, now lying low in ruins before one’s eyes. [These cities had not recovered from the Roman annexation of Greece in the middle of the previous century: Corinth had been sacked.] I began to think to myself: “Ah, how can we little creatures wax indignant if one of us dies or is killed, ephemeral beings as we are, when the corpses of so many towns lie abandoned in a single spot? Check yourself, Servius, and remember that you were born a mortal man.” That thought, I do assure you, strengthened me not a little. If I may suggest it, picture the same spectacle to yourself. Not long ago so many great men died at one time, the Roman Empire was so gravely impaired, all its provinces shaken to pieces; can you be so greatly moved by the loss of one poor little woman’s frail spirit?

Slowly Cicero began to get better. With an effort of will he returned to Tusculum towards the end of May. One good sign was that he transposed his emotions onto an external project. He conceived the idea of erecting a shrine to Tullia’s memory. This would give her immortality of a sort, for it would celebrate her “glory.” The Greeks and Romans believed that in exceptional cases a bridge could be built between the human and the divine. In Asia Minor there was an established tradition of worshiping great men and according divine status to rulers. Cicero was not going as far as that, but he wanted his daughter’s remarkable qualities to receive a permanent memorial. In a fragment from the Self-Consolation he wrote that if it had been appropriate for heroes of Greek mythology to be raised to heaven, “surely she too deserves the same honor and devotion, and I shall give it to her.”

Atticus thought the scheme eccentric, but he went patiently along with his friend and for some months they discussed various possible sites Cicero might purchase. It was important that the monument should not be off the beaten track, so perhaps somewhere in the suburbs of Rome would be best. Price was not an object, for Cicero would happily sacrifice some of his luxuries or even one of his villas to raise the necessary funds. He considered a wide range of properties, including one belonging to one of Clodius’s sisters.

By the summer the project was abandoned. Cicero’s engagement with and curiosity about the world around him were returning. He wrote a new will to take account of his short-lived grandson and Terentia made a nuisance of herself about it. He paid increasingly affectionate attention to Atticus’s daughter, who was born around 51. Although she was only about five or six years old, she already had a tutor. She had a tendency towards fevers and Cicero was always asking after the little girl. She was no replacement for Tullia, but she took his mind off his loss.

On March 17, 45, Caesar won the battle of Munda against an army led by Pompey’s son Cnaeus. His victory, although total, was narrowly achieved. Afterwards he admitted: “Today, for the first time, I fought for my life.” His old comrade-in-arms, Labienus, who had deserted him at the start of the civil war, lay among 30,000 Republican dead. Cnaeus was caught and killed in flight.

Caesar remained for a few months in Spain reorganizing the provincial administration before setting out for home. Exhausted and unwell, he did not go to the capital immediately but spent some time on one of his country estates. There he wrote his will, which he deposited in September with the Vestal Virgins, as custom dictated. This was a personal, not a political, testament and disposed of his immense private fortune; however, when it was published after his death, it was to change the course of Roman history.

The civil war was conclusively over. The human price had been high, for it has been estimated that 100,000 Roman citizens had lost their lives since the opening of hostilities in 49. No one was left in the field for Caesar to fight. His leading opponents were dead. The Republic was dead too: he had become the state.

By agreement with Balbus and Oppius, Atticus suggested that Cicero write a letter of advice to Caesar, in which he could return to the theme of the restoration of the constitution. Cicero obediently attempted a draft and, out of courtesy and caution, showed it to the two confidential agents before sending it off. They thought it too outspoken and counseled a revision. On May 25, Cicero informed Atticus that it would be better not to write anything. He was relieved to have extricated himself because it now occurred to him that Caesar would interpret the letter as an apology for the Cato. But Atticus would not give in and continued to badger him. On the following day, Cicero came to a final decision. He announced that he was simply unable to write the letter, not so much because he would be ashamed of its contents as because he could not think of anything else to say.

Cicero no longer entertained hopes that the Republic would be restored and moved gradually from collaboration to opposition. It was becoming common knowledge in the Dictator’s circle that, despite the end of the war, he had no intention of settling permanently in Rome; he had decided that the continuing Parthian threat should be addressed once and for all. So he would soon be marching off on another military campaign. Clearly he was uninterested in addressing constitutional issues.

Also, perhaps, the deep depression from which Cicero was emerging had hardened him and made him less inclined to compromise. Tullia’s death and the quarrels in his family circle meant that old ties had loosened and that he could follow his own wishes.

A by-product of this more explicit disillusionment with the present state of affairs was the cooling of Cicero’s friendship with Brutus. He had already been irritated by an inaccurate and less than generous account of his Consulship in 63 in Brutus’s book on Cato. “Brutus reports that Caesar has joined the honest men,” he wrote sardonically to Atticus. “Good news! But where is he going to find them—unless he hangs himself? AS for Brutus, he knows which side his bread is buttered.”

In June, Dolabella, with whom Cicero was still friendly, paid a visit and reported some new scandal concerning young Quintus. “Dolabella came this morning,” Cicero wrote to Atticus. “We got on to Quintus. I heard of much that is too bad for utterance or narration, and one thing of such a kind that if the whole army did not know of it I should not dare to put it on paper myself, let alone dictate it to Tiro.” The nature of this thing is not disclosed, for at this point the letter has been cut, probably by Atticus when he began to allow his friends to read his collection of Cicero’s correspondence. It is hard to conceive of what new offense the young man could have committed.

In August Quintus, now back in Italy after the Spanish campaign, fell out with his mother. For this reason he needed to have a house of his own and his father wondered whether to vacate his own home to make room for him. But Quintus was still doing his best to blacken his uncle’s reputation and was now busy criticizing his father as well. Cicero told Atticus that, according to Hirtius, he “is at it constantly, especially at dinner parties. When he finishes with me he comes back to his father, his most plausible line being that we are thoroughly hostile to Caesar and are not to be trusted.”

The two brothers were on rather better terms than they had been and the problematic youth may have helped bring them back together. Cicero was in the money again—he had just learned of a substantial legacy from a wealthy banker—and, after settling his own debts, he planned to make over the surplus, apparently as a loan, to his brother. This was a remarkably generous gesture after their bitter quarrel and a further illustration of Cicero’s inability to bear a grudge. That year Quintus finally divorced Pomponia. The aging siblings now had only each other as the remaining pillars of a dispersed family.

When Atticus had an idea he seldom let it rest. He continued to press his friend to write to Caesar and at last Cicero yielded. Cicero had told Balbus and Oppius that he had been impressed by the Anti-Cato (untrue; he may have admired it for stylistic reasons, but he later called it an “impudent” work). They mentioned this to the Dictator and in August Cicero agreed to write a discursive letter about the book. He had them vet the text as usual, and this time they cleared it enthusiastically. They had “never read anything better.”

A gap in the correspondence with Atticus follows for nearly three months, but it seems that Cicero was on superficially good terms with Caesar again. The Dictator was back in Rome in October to celebrate a Triumph for the Spanish war. He had been elected sole Consul, but had had himself replaced for the last three months of the year by two other Senators.

Towards the end of the year Cicero made a short speech on behalf of Deiotarus, King of Galatia, who was alleged to have plotted Caesar’s assassination during the civil war. The case was heard in the accused’s absence behind closed doors in the Dictator’s house. Caesar cast himself as judge and jury. Cicero combined compliment with candor (he commented adversely on the irregularity of the judicial procedure), a mixture that usually pleased his listener. It would appear that the Dictator found against him, but, if Cicero in a later tirade against Mark Antony is to be trusted, Antony restored the King’s lost territories to him after Caesar’s death.

In December, Caesar toured Campania, perhaps visiting veteran colonies, and called on Cicero at his house in the seaside resort of Puteoli. What was intended as a friendly gesture was, in fact, a massive inconvenience for a reluctant host. The Dictator turned up on December 18 with no fewer than 2,000 soldiers, who camped out in the open. He stayed the night at a neighbor’s villa. The house was so crowded with soldiers that there was hardly a spare room for Caesar to dine in. Cicero was “a good deal perturbed” about what would happen the following day with so many troops wandering around. Fortunately an officer agreed to post sentries.

Caesar spent the morning alone till one o’clock, apparently working on accounts with Balbus. Then he went for a walk on the beach and took a bath an hour later. Some bad news about his Prefect of Engineers was brought in, but the expression on Caesar’s face did not change. Once his skin had been oiled at the end of his bath (as was the custom), he took his place at Cicero’s dinner table. The occasion throws an attractive light on Caesar’s personality; although, or possibly because, he was encumbered by the cares and paraphernalia of state, he wanted a short break from work, relaxing in good company and engaging in agreeable conversation. Cicero reluctantly conceded that he too had had a pleasant time. “It really was a fine, elegantly served meal,” he reported to Atticus.

His entourage was lavishly entertained in three other dining rooms. The humbler freedmen and slaves had all they wanted—the smarter ones I entertained in style. In a word, I showed I knew how to do things. But my guest was not the kind of person to whom one says, “Do come again when you are next in the neighborhood.” Once is enough. We talked of nothing serious, but a good deal on literary matters. All in all, he was pleased and enjoyed himself.

The year was ending on a modestly contented note. Not only was Cicero’s relationship with Caesar ostensibly in good repair, but harmony of a sort was breaking out on the domestic front. Some days after the Dictator’s visit, young Quintus paid his uncle a visit. He intended to accompany Caesar on the Parthian expedition and wanted to mend some bridges.

Cicero noted the conversation for Atticus.

“Why do you have to go?” Cicero asked.

“Debt—I haven’t even enough to pay my traveling expenses.”

Cicero, discreet for once, held his tongue.

“What upsets me most is my uncle, Atticus.”

“Why do you let him be annoyed—I prefer to say ‘let’ rather than ‘make’?”

“I won’t anymore. I’ll get rid of the reason.”

“Excellent. But if you don’t mind my asking, I would be interested to know what the reason is.”

“It’s because I couldn’t make up my mind whom to marry. My mother was cross with me, and so as a result was he. Now I don’t care what I do to put things right. I’ll do what they want.”

“Well, good luck, and congratulations on your decision.”

It seemed that the difficult, hostile teenager was beginning to settle down into an ordinary Roman young-man-about-town with debts, who realized that it would be in his interest to be on good terms again with his disappointed family. Whether or not Quintus acted as he said he would is unknown, but there is no subsequent reference to a wife in the fragmentary surviving documentation. One thing is certain, though: he did not accompany the legions to Parthia, for the expedition never took place. He must have found some alternative solution to the problem of his debts.

By now, Cicero had become less volatile than he had been in the past. He met the challenges and misfortunes that faced him with determination. In politics he made up his mind about the regime with fewer of his usual doubts and nervous questionings. Criticism did not bother him as much as it had once. He still reacted passionately to events and was no less self-absorbed, but he had learned to control himself. Family estrangements troubled him and he had nearly been broken by Tullia’s death, but he had struggled with all his might to regain his emotional balance. Tempered by the fire, he seemed to have acquired a new, steely resolve.