Cicero

16

DEATH AT THE SEASIDE

The End of the Republic: April–November 43 BC

As so often happens in human affairs, fate intervened at the moment of victory and destroyed the best-laid plans. It soon emerged that Hirtius had been killed in the second battle at Mutina, and Pansa died of the wound incurred in the first. This created a power vacuum at the worst possible moment. The absence of Consuls left Rome in disarray. There would have to be elections and in the meantime the Republic was without an effective executive authority. In the field Pansa’s troops went over to Octavian. He stayed where he was and refused to have anything to do with Decimus Brutus, the ally for whom he had fought at Mutina and, as he had not forgotten, one of his adoptive father’s assassins. He left Decimus Brutus and his forces to chase after the fleeing Antony on their own.

To Cicero’s annoyance and disappointment, Decimus Brutus made little progress. He wrote in extenuation that his “apology for an army” had hardly recovered from the privations of a siege. He had no cavalry and no pack animals. He was short of money. Also, although he did not admit this to Cicero, he was alarmed by the growing strength of Octavian’s military position and may not have wanted to see the young man’s only effective military rival in the west destroyed for good. Soon Antony joined forces with a supporter of his who had been raising troops in central Italy on his behalf: he was now back in charge of a powerful force and made his way north with greater confidence towards Lepidus. If he could win Lepidus (and Plancus in Long-haired Gaul) to his side, the defeat of Mutina would be reversed.

It took some time for the Senate to take in the significance of the loss of its Consuls. One of Cicero’s correspondents, surveying the scene at a distance, wrote wisely that those who were rejoicing at the moment “will soon be sorry when they contemplate the ruin of Italy.” However, for the moment the constitutionalists could think only of victory. In his fourteenth and last Philippic, Cicero called for an official Thanksgiving to last for an unprecedented period of fifty days. Antony was finally declared a public enemy. Decimus Brutus was voted a Triumph. There were to be ceremonies and a monument to honor the fallen. Cassius was confirmed in place in Asia Minor and Sextus Pompey, still in Spain with his guerrilla forces, was given a naval command.

Careful thought should have been given to Octavian’s position, but it was not. He was an ally of the Senate and had played his part, a minor one though useful for all that, in the battles at Mutina. But would he continue to obey its orders? The answer to that question depended on whether his rapprochement with Cicero was sincere or tactical. Whatever the leadership in Rome might propose, he disposed of the only significant army in Italy and was now at last in a position to act as he pleased. He could see that he was stronger than Antony—but was it really in his interest to see him swept away? If Brutus and Cassius were to come to Italy with their seventeen legions, he might wonder what his fate would be.

It would have been wise to placate him, but the Senate took the contrary view. It was reluctant to grant him the same honors as Decimus Brutus and excluded them both from membership of a commission established to distribute land allotments to the veterans who (it was presumed) would soon be demobilized. The Senate ruled that the commissioners should deal directly with the soldiers and not go through their commanders. It also reduced their promised bonuses. These were extraordinarily shortsighted measures, for they were bound to irritate rank-and-file opinion, which was fundamentally Caesarian. The Senators must have known this but presumably thought it did not matter. So far as they were concerned the war was over.

Cicero saw the dangers in this attitude and tried to have both generals appointed as commissioners, but the Senate, complacent now that the crisis was over, was less willing to do his bidding than it had used to be. He praised Octavian as highly as the other generals, despite the fact that he had played a subordinate role in the fighting. He proposed an Ovation for him, but it is not certain that the motion was passed.

Completely unexpectedly, Cicero’s policy was on the verge of collapse. Critics, even friendly critics, began to speak openly of the unwisdom of his cultivation of the young Caesar. In the middle of May an anxious Marcus Brutus wrote to him from Macedonia about reports that the young man was seeking the Consulship. “I am alarmed,” he commented. “I fear that your young friend Caesar may think he has climbed too high through your decrees to come down again if he is made Consul.… I only wish you could see into my heart, how I fear that young man.”

Privately, Brutus was increasingly unhappy about his friend’s behavior. He confided his feelings to Atticus, in a letter one hopes its subject never read. His judgment was that Cicero was swayed by vanity. “We’re not bragging every hour of the day about the Ides of March like Cicero with his Nones of December [the date in 63 when he put down the Catilinarian conspiracy].” The kernel of Brutus’s complaint was that Cicero was too eager to please.

You may say that he is afraid even now of the remnants of the civil war. So afraid of a war that is as good as over that he sees no cause for alarm in the power of the leader of a victorious army and the rashness of a boy? Or does he do it just because he thinks the boy’s greatness makes it advisable to lay everything at his feet without waiting to be asked? What a foolish thing is fear!… We dread death and banishment and poverty too much. For Cicero I think they are the ultimate evils. So long as he has people from whom he can get what he wants and who give him attention and flattery he does not object to servitude if only it be dignified—if there is any dignity in the sorriest depth of humiliation.

This is a powerful indictment, but it is not all there is to be said about the matter. It is true that Cicero was nervous and lacking in physical courage—but with the saving grace that he knew it, admitting that he was “susceptible to scares.” He was prone to seesaws of emotion and longed for compliments, of which he felt he did not receive nearly enough. But although his connection with Octavian fed his self-esteem, it was also based on a sound analysis of the political situation. Brutus’s judgment was distorted by his irritation with Cicero’s personality and he failed to understand that the only card Cicero had left in his hand was his relationship with Octavian, who might otherwise join forces with Antony so that he could be strong enough to deal with any conflict that might arise with Brutus and Cassius. Somehow or other he had to be charmed into staying loyal to the Republic. This was the essential priority and whatever had to be done to achieve it, however embarrassing and disagreeable, had to be done.

If the Consuls had survived and his strategy had succeeded, as it very nearly did, Cicero’s attitude towards Octavian would surely have been very different, for his usefulness to the Senate as its protector against Antony would have been at an end. In this connection it was most unfortunate that Octavian learned his “father’s” true intentions. Never one to avoid careless talk if a witty remark or a pun occurred to him, Cicero had observed that “the young man must get praises, honors—and the push.” The Latin is laudandum, ornandum, tollendum; the last word had a double meaning: to “exalt” and to “get rid of.” Towards the end of May, Decimus Brutus warned Cicero that someone had reported this joke to the young man, who had been unamused, commenting tersely that he had no intention of letting that happen.

Cicero watched, exhausted, as the edifice he had laboriously constructed during the previous six months was gradually demolished. In early June he wrote to Decimus Brutus: “What is the use? Believe me, Brutus, as one not given to self-deprecation, I am a spent force. The Senate was my weapon and it has fallen to pieces.” He realized that for all his struggles the constitution was dead and power lay in the hands of soldiers and their leaders.

Lepidus, claiming he had been forced into it by his men, switched allegiance to Antony and was followed by Plancus and then Pollio. The supposedly loyal army in Africa was recalled to Rome (a desperate measure, for its commander, Titus Sextius, was a Caesarian) and a legion of new recruits was formed. Frantic appeals were sent to Brutus in Macedonia to come home, but he knew better than to accede to them. He still hoped to avoid civil war; this was why he was keeping Caius Antonius alive as a hostage, despite Cicero’s obdurate appeals for his execution. He knew that safety lay in joining forces with Cassius and marched off eastwards to meet him. An invasion of Italy would be practicable only with their combined forces. For the time being, the Senate was on its own.

Throughout July, Cicero bombarded Brutus fruitlessly with letters begging him to intervene. He continued bravely, or obstinately, to defend his policy. “Our only protection was this lad,” he insisted. But in the end he was compelled to admit that he had failed. “Caesar’s army, which used to be excellent [i.e., loyal], is not only no help but forces us to ask urgently for your army.”

Octavian’s likely defection from the Republican cause was clear enough for any intelligent observer to predict, hence the appeals for help. However, Cicero must have felt he had no choice but to assume his trustworthiness until he had definite evidence otherwise. The two men stayed in touch.

Brutus was unimpressed by Cicero’s explanations and when he saw an excerpt from a letter he had written to Caesar, passed on to him by Atticus, he delivered a magisterial rebuke.

You thank him on public grounds in such a fashion, so imploringly and humbly—I hardly know what to write. I am ashamed of the situation, of what fortune has done to us, but write I must. You commend our welfare to him. Better any death than such welfare! It is a downright declaration that there has been no abolition of despotism, only a change of despot. Read over your words again and then dare to deny that these are the pleadings of a subject to his king.

On July 25 Servilia, Brutus’s mother, invited Cicero to an informal council of war and asked him for his advice as to whether they should try to persuade Brutus to return to Rome. Cicero said in the firmest terms that Brutus should “lend support to our tottering and almost collapsing commonwealth at the earliest possible moment.” In his last surviving (and perhaps his last actual) letter to Brutus on July 27, he reported this conversation in a further futile attempt to change his mind. Although he tried to be positive, he was obviously dispirited and gloomy. For the first time he admitted that the solemn oath he had sworn in the Senate at the beginning of January, guaranteeing Caesar’s good behavior, was no longer deliverable. “As I write I am in great distress because it hardly looks as though I can make good my promises in respect to the young man, boy almost, for whom I stood bail to the Republic.”

The rumors of Octavian seeking the Consulship turned out to be well grounded. According to Appian, he no longer troubled to communicate with the Senate but dealt privately with Cicero. He invited Cicero to join him in the Consulship—an echo of the far-off days when his adoptive father had tried to recruit the orator to join the First Triumvirate. It is possible that on this occasion Cicero was tempted to say yes, although a letter of the time to Brutus indicates otherwise. He claimed that “as soon as I had an inkling of [his wish to be Consul], I wrote him letter after letter of warning and taxed those friends of his who seemed to be backing his ambition to their faces, and I did not scruple to expose the origins of these criminal designs in the Senate.” The Senate was reluctant to give way to Octavian and postponed the elections. There was talk of a compromise that would allow him to stand as Praetor, but the sop was insufficient.

Not without reason, the families of the conspirators suspected that if he became Consul, the Dictator’s heir would launch a proscription. People were coming to believe that his alliance with the Republicans had been a pretense. He meant to avenge his father’s murder and restore his autocracy; no doubt it had been his secret policy all along.

In August, for the second time in a year, Octavian marched on Rome at the head of eight legions. He sent a flying force in advance, which entered the city and met the Senate. The soldiers made three demands: the Consulship, restoration of the bounty for the troops and, a sinister token of his future intentions, the repeal of the decree of outlawry against Antony. In the context of people’s fears, this was a comparatively modest request. It looked as if there would not, after all, be a proscription.

Some Senators lost their tempers and apparently struck the soldiers. One of the soldiers fetched his sword and touched it, saying: “If you don’t give Caesar the Consulship, this will.” Cicero replied dryly: “If that’s the way you ask for something, I am sure you’re right.”

Reluctant to face reality, the Senate would not be moved. Then, as Octavian approached, it panicked and issued a flurry of edicts, allowing him to stand for the Consulship in absentia, doubling the original army bonus, winding up the contentious Land Commission and transferring its powers to Octavian. But there was no stopping the young man now and he continued his advance.

With the arrival in Rome of the legions from Africa there was a flurry of resistance. The city planned for a siege, but the soldiers refused to fight and declared for the young Caesar. The next day he entered the city protected by a bodyguard. Even his opponents came out to greet him. The Urban Praetor, the Republic’s senior public official following the deaths of the Consuls, killed himself; this was the only bloodshed recorded.

Cicero arranged to meet Octavian and reportedly raised the now dead question of the joint Consulship. The “heaven-sent boy” did not bother to make a direct response. He simply remarked, with mocking regret, that Cicero had been the “last of his friends” to greet him.

A flame of hope briefly flared and died down again. A rumor spread through the city that two of Octavian’s legions were preparing to defect. Senators met at dawn at the Senate House with Cicero welcoming them at the door. AS soon as it transpired that there was nothing to the story he slipped away on a litter. On August 19 the Consular elections were held and the youngest Consul in Rome’s history took office with Quintus Pedius, a little-regarded relative of Julius Caesar, as his colleague in office. He had not reached his twentieth birthday. Now that he had power he was not slow to act. Dolabella was rehabilitated, Julius Caesar’s assassination was declared a crime and a special tribunal was appointed to try the conspirators.

Cicero was given permission to stay away from Senate meetings and his last surviving written words are an unheroic fragment of a letter to the new Consul. “I am doubly delighted that you have given Philippus [his neighbor at Puteoli and Octavian’s stepfather] and me leave of absence; for it implies forgiveness for the past and mercy for the future.” He probably stayed at Tusculum and for the time being disappears from view. It is curious that he did not try to leave the country and escape to Brutus. Perhaps he was under surveillance. More probably he simply lost heart.

Octavian left Rome and went back north at a leisurely pace, ostensibly to campaign against Antony. However, there was to be no more fighting. Octavian’s Consular colleague stayed in Rome and reversed the condemnations of Antony and Lepidus (who had also been declared a public enemy). Formal negotiations now opened to reunite the Caesarian factions which Cicero’s strategy had divided.

Antony and Octavian had every reason to distrust each other, but the logic of events drove them together. To deal with the challenge from Brutus and Cassius in the east, they were obliged to pool their resources. They gingerly marched their armies towards each other and met on a small island in a river at Bononia (today’s Bologna). Antony on one bank and Octavian on the other walked forward with 300 men each to bridges leading to the island. Lepidus went on ahead to conduct a search for hidden weapons and gave an all-clear by waving his cloak. The three men then met alone in talks that lasted for two or three days, working from dawn to dusk. Before sitting down they searched one another to make sure that no one had brought a dagger with him.

They agreed to appoint themselves as a three-man Constitutional Commission (which historians have called the Second Triumvirate) charged with the familiar duty of restoring the Republic. Their mandate was to last for five years. It was as if the old alliance of the First Triumvirate had returned in a new guise, but, unlike the private agreement among Pompey, Julius Caesar and Crassus in the 50s, the Commission was formally established in due course by the General Assembly and was, in effect, a triple Dictatorship. Of course, reform was the last thing on the Commissioners’ minds. Antony and Octavian (with Lepidus as a junior partner) had formed a coalition of convenience. Their priorities were to allocate provincial commands to themselves and assemble the forces necessary to defeat Brutus and Cassius.

The Commissioners were short of ready cash and needed to fundraise. They also had to consider what to do with the defeated Republican opposition in Rome. There was one solution that would solve both problems: a proscription. A good deal of time on the island was spent haggling over names. More than 130 Senators (perhaps as many as 300) and an estimated 2,000 equites were marked down for execution and property confiscation. Huge rewards were offered for anyone who killed a proscribed man—100,000 sesterces for a free man and 40,000 sesterces for a slave.

For members of the Roman ruling class, such as remained, history seemed to be repeating itself. They knew what to expect, for some of them could recall fearfully the last proscription conducted by Sulla nearly forty years previously. However, that dark moment in the history of the Republic had at least been followed by a rapid return to (more or less) constitutional government. Few people could be confident that this time around the three Commissioners would, like Sulla, step down voluntarily and retire into private life. What looked far more likely were further years of war as the reunited Caesarians fought it out with Brutus and Cassius in the east for final mastery.

During the following weeks new names were added to the original list—some because they were genuine political opponents, but others simply because they had been a nuisance or were friends of enemies or enemies of friends or, most appositely, were known to be rich. Appian writes: “The point was reached where a person was proscribed because he had a fine town house or country estate.” Verres, Cicero’s old adversary, whom he had prosecuted for corruption in Sicily a quarter of a century before, was still alive and a collector of valuable Corinthian bronze artifacts; it was said that Antony had him proscribed when he refused to part with any of them.

In a thoroughly un-Roman betrayal of family loyalties and the ties of amicitia, each Commissioner agreed to abandon friends and relatives. Lepidus allowed his brother Paulus to be marked down, Antony an uncle of his (although both ultimately survived) and Octavian a man reported to have been his guardian. Cicero was proscribed along with the rest of his family. It was claimed that Octavian fought to keep his name off the list for two days, but the vindictive Antony insisted. This account may have been propaganda, for Octavian will not have forgotten Cicero’s self-betraying remark about him, “Laudandum, ornandum, tollendum,” and this may have strengthened a resolve to see an end to the troublesome old man. If the last of the orator’s young disciples had genuine feelings of affection for him, they probably did not run deep: with Octavian personal ties took second place to public expediency.

Cicero and his brother were at Tusculum when they heard about the proscription. They moved at once to the villa at Astura about thirty miles away on the coast (and forty miles or so from Rome), planning to sail to Macedonia and join Brutus. They were carried on their way in litters—a journey that could be accomplished in a long day. According to Plutarch, “they were quite overwhelmed with grief and on the journey would often stop and, with the litters placed side by side, would condole with each other.” Quintus suddenly realized that he had brought no cash with him and Cicero too had insufficient funds for the journey. So Quintus volunteered to go back home, get what was needed and catch up with Cicero later. The brothers hugged each other and parted in tears.

The decision to return was disastrous. Bounty hunters were already on the family’s trail and Quintus was betrayed by servants. His son was either with him or within reach: according to one account, he found a hiding place for his father and, when tortured to reveal its whereabouts, did not utter a syllable. AS soon as Quintus was told about this, he came out into the open and gave himself up. Each man begged to be killed first. The conflicting requests were reconciled, for they were taken away to separate parties of executioners and, on an agreed signal, put to death simultaneously.

During the civil war both father and son had tried in their different ways to extricate themselves from Cicero’s clouded fortunes, but they had been unable to escape his ruin. The brothers had been reconciled, at least on the surface, and, whatever their disagreements about Julius Caesar, they both unhesitatingly backed the last surviving defenders of the Republican cause. Young Quintus was a clever but unsympathetic figure. However (if we can believe the story of his last days, as recounted by late sources), it is touching to see him behave for once with courage and unselfishness.

Meanwhile, Cicero reached Astura and, presumably after waiting vainly for Quintus or having received news of his capture, found a boat. He sailed twenty miles south to the headland of Circaeum. There was a following wind and the pilots wanted to continue their journey, but Cicero insisted on disembarking and walked about twelve miles in the direction of the Appian Way, the road to Rome.

His motives are unclear. Plutarch offers various alternative explanations. One is that he was afraid of the sea. It was true that Cicero disliked sea voyages, but in the past that had not prevented him from sailing; in 44 he got as far as Syracuse on his abortive escape to Greece. Plutarch also suggests that he had not entirely lost his faith in Octavian and thought he could negotiate a pardon; and conversely, that one idea he had was to go secretly to Octavian’s home, presumably in Rome or perhaps at a country villa, and kill himself on the hearthstone—this would be so grave a pollution that it would bring down a curse from heaven on its owner. Fear of being caught and tortured might have decided Cicero against this course of action. Whatever his motive, he lost his resolution, perhaps fearing he would be recognized on the Appian Way, and turned back to Astura, where he spent a sleepless night, according to Plutarch, with his mind “full of terrible thoughts and desperate plans.”

He now put himself in the hands of his servants and they took him by sea to his villa about sixty miles south at Caeta, near Formiae, which in happier days he had used as a refreshing retreat in the heat of summer. In Plutarch’s account, as the boat was being rowed to land, a flock of crows approached, cawing loudly. They perched on both ends of the yardarm and pecked at the ends of the ropes. Despite the fact that everyone thought this to be a bad omen, Cicero disembarked and went to the house to lie down and rest. He is reported to have said, rather grandly: “I will die in the country I have so often saved.” According to Plutarch:

Then most of the crows perched around the window, making a tremendous cawing. One of them flew down to the bed where Cicero was lying with his head all covered up, and little by little began to drag the garment away from his face with its beak. When the servants saw this they reproached themselves for standing by as spectators waiting for their master to be murdered, and doing nothing to defend him, while these wild brute creatures were helping him and caring for him in his undeserved ill fortune. So partly by entreaty and partly by force, they took him up and carried him in his litter towards the sea.

They were too late. A small party of men, led by a Military Tribune, Popillius Laenas, whom Cicero had once successfully defended in a civil case, and a centurion, Herennius, arrived at the villa. Finding the doors bolted, they broke them down, but those inside disclaimed all knowledge of their master’s whereabouts.

Then a young freedman of Quintus named Philologus, whom Cicero had educated, told Popilius that Cicero’s litter was being carried towards the sea along a path hidden by trees. In a flanking movement, Popilius went around to the shore where he could meet the party when it came out of the woods. Meanwhile Herennius hurried along the path. Cicero heard him coming and told his servants to put down the litter. This was the end and he was no longer going to run away.

He was reclining in a characteristic posture, with his chin resting on his left hand. He had a copy of Euripides’ Medea with him, which he had been reading. He would have been familiar with this drama of bitter revenge, in which a woman kills her children to spite her faithless husband. His eyes may have fallen on lines near the beginning of the play: “But now everything has turned to hatred and where love was once deepest a cancer spreads.”

He looked terrible: he was covered in dust, his hair was long and unkempt, his face pinched and worn with anxiety. He drew aside the curtain of his litter a little and said: “I am stopping here. Come here, soldier. There is nothing proper about what you are doing, but at least make sure you cut off my head properly.” Herennius trembled and hesitated. Cicero added, supposing that the man had already killed other victims and should by now have perfected his technique: “What if you’d come to me first?” He stretched his neck as far as he could out of the litter and Herennius slit his throat. While this was being done, most of those who were standing around covered their faces. It took three sword strokes and some sawing to detach the head and then the hands were cut off.

Popilius was very proud of his achievement. He had specifically asked Antony for the commission to execute Cicero and later set up a statue of himself wearing a wreath and seated beside his victim’s severed head. Antony was greatly pleased and topped up Popilius’s advertised reward with a bonus.

The surviving accounts differ in detail but they all agree on Cicero’s bravery. He showed the same professionalism as the gladiators he had written about in Conversations at Tusculum when they received the coup de grâce in the arena: “Has even a mediocre fighter ever let out a groan or changed the expression on his face? Who of them has disgraced himself, I don’t just mean when he was on his feet, but when falling to the ground? And, once fallen, who has drawn in his neck when ordered to submit to the sword?”

The news of Cicero’s death was received variously. Antony was unreservedly delighted. His comment “Now we can end the proscription” exposes the depth of his frustration with, and hatred of, the man who on three occasions had intervened decisively and negatively in his life and who had led a relentless oratorical campaign against him. When he was in his late teens, his stepfather, Lentulus, had been arrested and executed at Cicero’s instigation. Cicero had advised the elder Curio how to break up Antony’s close friendship with his son. And through the ferocious Philippics the orator had only just failed to derail his political career. None of these things was forgotten or forgiven.

His wife, Fulvia, also felt she had grounds for joy, for she had been married to Cicero’s greatest enemy, Clodius, before graduating via Curio to the victorious Commissioner, her third and last husband. Before the dead man’s head and the right hand that had written the Philippics were nailed onto the Speakers’ Platform in the Forum, it is said that Fulvia took the head in her hands, spat on it and then set it on her knees, opened its mouth, pulled out the tongue and pierced it with hairpins.

We are not told of Atticus’s reaction; one can assume his grief but also, one suspects, that he was too discreet to reveal it. All his energies were now devoted to getting onto the best possible terms with the new regime. Pomponia, despite the fact that she and Quintus were divorced, expressed her feelings more vigorously. Antony handed the freedman Philologus over to her; she forced him to cut off his own flesh bit by bit, roast the pieces and eat them.

These terrible stories may or may not be true. Plutarch records that Tiro, the defender of Cicero’s memory, who can be presumed to have known exactly how his master died, made no reference to Philologus in his writings. However, they are not inconsistent with other recorded atrocities both at this time and on the earlier occasions during the previous century when the rule of law had broken down.