Dictator

XIII

The funeral was in Rome. Only one good thing came out of it: Cicero’s brother Quintus, from whom he had been estranged ever since that terrible scene in Patrae, came round to offer his condolences the moment we got back, and the two men sat beside the coffin, wordless, holding hands. As a mark of their reconciliation, Cicero asked Quintus to deliver the eulogy: he doubted he would be able to get through it himself.

That apart, it was one of the most melancholy occasions I have ever witnessed – the long procession out on to the Esquiline Field in the freezing winter dusk; the wail of the musicians’ dirges mingled with the cawing of the crows in the sacred grove of Libitina; the small enshrouded figure lying on its bier; the racked face of Terentia, like Niobe’s seemingly turned to stone by grief; Atticus supporting Cicero as he put the torch to the pyre; and finally the great sheet of flame that suddenly shot up, illuminating us all in its scorching red glow, our rigid expressions set like masks in a Greek tragedy.

The following day, Publilia turned up on the doorstep with her mother and uncle, sulky that she had not been invited to the funeral and determined to move back into the house. She made a little speech that had obviously been written out for her and that she had memorised: ‘Husband, I know that your daughter found my presence difficult, but now that this impediment has been removed, I hope that we can resume our married life together and that I may help you to forget your grief.’

But Cicero didn’t want to forget his grief. He wished to be enveloped by it, consumed by it. Without telling Publilia where he was going, he fled the house that same day, carrying the urn containing Tullia’s ashes. He moved in to Atticus’s place on the Quirinal, where he locked himself away in the library for days on end, seeing no one and compiling a great handbook of all that has ever been written by the philosophers and poets on how to cope with grief and dying. He called it his Consolation. He told me that while he worked, he could hear Atticus’s five-year-old daughter playing in her nursery next door, exactly as Tullia had done when he was a young advocate: ‘The sound was as sharp to my heart as a red-hot needle; that kept me at my task.’

When Publilia discovered where he was, she began to pester Atticus for admittance, so Cicero fled again, to the newest and most isolated of all his properties – a villa on the tiny island of Astura, at the mouth of a river, only a hundred yards or so from the shore of the Bay of Antium. The island was entirely deserted and covered with trees and groves, cut into shady walks. In this lonely place he shunned all human company. Early in the day he would hide himself away in the thick, thorny wood, with nothing to disturb his meditations but the cries of the birds, and would not emerge till evening. What is the soul? he asks in his Consolation. It is not moist or airy or fiery or compounded of the earth. There is nothing in these elements that accounts for the power of memory, mind or thought, that recalls the past, foresees the future or comprehends the present. Rather the soul must be counted as a fifth element – divine and therefore eternal.

I remained in Rome and handled all his affairs – financial, domestic, literary and even marital, as now it fell to me to fend off the hapless Publilia and her relatives by pretending I had no idea where he was. As the weeks passed, his absence became increasingly difficult to explain, not just to his wife but to his clients and friends, and I was aware that his reputation was suffering, it being considered unmanly to surrender to grief so completely. Many letters of condolence arrived, including a line from Caesar in Spain, and these I forwarded to Cicero.

Eventually Publilia discovered his hiding place and wrote to him announcing her intention of visiting him in the company of her mother. To escape such a fraught confrontation, he abandoned the island, ashes in hand, and finally nerved himself to write a letter to his wife setting out his desire for a divorce. No doubt it was cowardly of him not to do it face to face. But he felt that her lack of sympathy over Tullia’s death had made their ill-conceived relationship entirely untenable. He left Atticus to sort out the financial details, which entailed selling one of his houses, and then he invited me to join him in Tusculum, saying he had a project he wished to discuss.

By the time I arrived, it was the middle of May. I had not seen him for more than three months. He was seated in his Academy reading when he heard my approach, and turned to look at me with a sad smile. His appearance shocked me. He was much gaunter, especially around the neck. His hair was greyer, longer and unkempt. But the real change was beneath the surface. There was a kind of resignation about him. It showed in the slowness of his movements and the gentleness of his manner – as if he had been broken and remade.

Over dinner I asked him if he had found it painful to return to a place where he had spent so much time with Tullia.

He replied: ‘I dreaded the prospect of coming, naturally, but when I arrived it was not so bad. One deals with grief, I have come to believe, either by never thinking of it or by thinking of it all the time. I chose the latter path, and here at least I am surrounded by memories of her, and her ashes are interred in the garden. Friends have been very kind, especially those who have suffered similar losses. Did you see the letter Sulpicius wrote me?’

He passed it to me over the table:

I want to tell you of something which has brought me no slight 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, 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. I began to think to myself: ‘Ah! How can we manikins wax indignant if one of us dies or is killed, ephemeral creatures 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. Can you really be so greatly moved by the loss of one poor little woman’s frail spirit? If her end had not come now, she must none the less have died in a few years’ time, for she was mortal.

‘I never thought Sulpicius could be so eloquent,’ I remarked.

‘Nor I. You see how all of us poor creatures strive to make sense of death, even dry old jurists such as him? It’s given me an idea. Suppose we were to compose a work of philosophy that helped relieve men of their fear of death.’

‘That would be an achievement.’

‘The Consolation seeks to reconcile us to the deaths of those we love. Now let us try to reconcile ourselves to our own deaths. If we were to succeed – well, tell me, what could bring humanity greater relief from terror than that?’

I had no answer. His proposition was irresistible. I was curious to see how he would manage it. And so was born what is now known as the Tusculan Disputations, upon which we started work the following day. From the outset, Cicero conceived it as five books:

On the fear of death

On the endurance of pain

On the alleviation of distress

On the remaining disorders of the soul

On the sufficiency of virtue for a happy life

Once again we assumed our old routine of composition. Like his hero Demosthenes, who hated to be beaten to the dawn by a diligent workman, Cicero would rise in the darkness and read in his library by lamplight until the day had broken; later in the morning he would describe to me what was in his mind and I would probe his logic with questions; in the afternoon while he napped I would write up my shorthand notes into a draft, which he would then correct; we would discuss and revise the day’s work over dinner in the evening, and finally before retiring we would decide the topics for the following morning.

The summer days were long and our progress swift, mostly because Cicero decided to cast the work in the form of a dialogue between a philosopher and a student. Usually I played the student and he was the philosopher, but occasionally it was the other way round. These Disputations of ours are still widely available, so it is unnecessary, I hope, for me to describe them in detail. They are the summation of all that Cicero had come to believe after the battering of recent years: namely, that the soul possesses a divine animation different to the body’s and therefore is eternal; that even if the soul is not eternal and ahead of us lies only oblivion, such a state is not to be feared as there will be no sensation and therefore no pain or misery (the dead are not wretched, the living are wretched); that we should think about death constantly and so acclimatise ourselves to its inevitable arrival (the whole life of a philosopher, as Socrates said, is a preparation for death); and that if we are determined enough, we can teach ourselves to scorn death and pain, just as professional fighters do:

What even average gladiator has ever uttered a groan or changed expression? Which has ever disgraced himself after a fall by drawing in his neck when ordered to suffer the fatal stroke? Such is the force of training, practice and habit. Shall a gladiator be capable of this while a man who is born to fame proves so weak in his soul that he cannot strengthen it by systematic preparation?

In the fifth book, Cicero offered his practical prescriptions. A human being can only train for death by leading a life that is morally good; that is – to desire nothing too much; to be content with what one has; to be entirely self-sufficient within oneself, so that whatever one loses, one will still be able to carry on regardless; to do none harm; to realise that it is better to suffer an injury than to inflict one; to accept that life is a loan given by Nature without a due date and that repayment may be demanded at any time; that the most tragic character in the world is a tyrant who has broken all these precepts.

Such were the lessons Cicero had learned and desired to impart to the world in the sixty-second summer of his life.

About a month after we started work on the Disputations, in the middle of June, Dolabella came to visit. He was on his way back to Rome from Spain, where he had once again been fighting alongside Caesar. The Dictator had been victorious; the remnants of Pompey’s forces were smashed. But Dolabella had been wounded in the battle of Munda. There was a slash from his ear to his collarbone and he walked with a limp: his horse had been killed beneath him by a javelin, throwing him to the ground and rolling on him. Still, he was as full of animal spirits as ever. He wanted particularly to see his son, who was living with Cicero at this time, and also to pay his respects at the place where Tullia’s ashes were buried.

Baby Lentulus at four months old was a large and rosy specimen, as healthy-looking as his mother had been frail. It was almost as if he had sucked all the life out of her, and I am sure that was the reason why I never saw Cicero hold him or pay him much attention – he could not quite forgive him for being alive when she was dead. Dolabella took the baby from the nurse and turned him around and examined him as if he were a vase, before announcing that he would like to take him back to Rome. Cicero did not object. ‘I have made provision for him in my will. If you wish to discuss his upbringing, come and see me any time.’

They strolled together to view the spot where Tullia’s ashes were resting, beside her favourite fountain in a sunny spot in the Academy. Cicero told me later that Dolabella knelt and placed some flowers on the grave, and wept. ‘When I saw his tears I ceased to feel angry with him. As she always said, she knew the type of man she was marrying. And if her first husband was more of a school friend to her than anything, and her second just a convenient way of escaping her mother, at least her third was someone she loved passionately, and I am glad she experienced that before she died.’

Over dinner Dolabella, who was unable to recline because of his wound but had to eat sitting up in a chair like a barbarian, described the campaign in Spain, and confided to us that it had been a near-disaster: that at one point the army’s line had broken and Caesar himself had been obliged to dismount, seize a shield and rally his fleeing legionaries. ‘He said to us when it was over, “Today for the first time I fought for my life.” We killed thirty thousand of the enemy, no prisoners taken. Gnaeus Pompey’s head was stuck on a pole and publicly displayed on Caesar’s orders. It was grim work, I can tell you, and I fear you and your friends will not find him as amenable as before when he gets home.’

‘As long as he leaves me alone to write my books, he’ll get no trouble from me.’

‘My dear Cicero, you of all men have no need to worry. Caesar loves you. He always says that you and he are the last two left.’

Late in the summer Caesar returned to Italy, and all the ambitious men in Rome flocked to welcome him. Cicero and I stayed in the country, working. We finished the Disputations and Cicero sent it to Atticus so that his team of slaves could copy it and distribute it – he particularly asked for one to be sent to Caesar – and then he began composing two new treatises, On the Nature of the Gods and On Divination. Occasionally the barbs of grief still pierced him and he would withdraw for hours into some remote part of the grounds. But increasingly he was contented: ‘What a lot of trouble one avoids if one refuses to have anything to do with the common herd! To have no job, to devote one’s time to literature, is the most wonderful thing in the world.’

Even in Tusculum, however, we were aware, as if it were a storm in the distance, of the Dictator’s return. Dolabella had spoken correctly. The Caesar who came back from Spain was different to the Caesar who had gone out. It was not simply his intolerance of dissent; it was as if his grasp on reality, once so terrifyingly secure, had at last begun to loosen. First he circulated a riposte to Cicero’s eulogy of Cato, which he called his Anti-Cato, full of vulgar gibes that Cato was a drunkard and a crank. As nearly every Roman had at least a grudging respect for Cato, and most revered him, the pettiness of the pamphlet did the Dictator’s reputation far more harm than it did Cato’s. (‘What is this restless desire of his to dominate everyone?’ Cicero wondered aloud when he read it. ‘That requires him to trample even on the dust of the dead?’) Then there was his decision to hold yet another triumph, this time to celebrate his victory in Spain: it seemed to most people that the annihilation of thousands of fellow Romans, including the son of Pompey, was not a thing to glory in. There was also his continuing infatuation with Cleopatra: it was bad enough that he installed her in a grand house with a park beside the Tiber, but when he had a golden statue of his foreign mistress erected in the Temple of Venus, he offended the pious and the patriotic alike. He even had himself declared a god – ‘the Divine Julius’ – with his own priesthood, temple and images, and like a god began to interfere in all aspects of daily life: restricting overseas travel for senators and banning elaborate meals and luxurious goods – to the extent of stationing spies in the marketplaces who would burst into citizens’ homes in the middle of dinner to search, confiscate and arrest.

Finally, as if his ambition had not caused enough bloodshed in recent years, he announced that in the spring he would be off to war again at the head of an immense army of thirty-six legions, to eliminate Parthia first of all, in revenge for the death of Crassus, and then to wheel around the far side of the Black Sea in a vast swathe of conquest that would encompass Hyrcania, the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus, Scythia, all the countries bordering on Germany and finally Germany itself, before returning to Italy by way of Gaul. He would be away three years. Over none of this did the Senate have any say. Like the men who built the pyramids for the pharaohs, they were mere slaves to their master’s grand design.

In December, Cicero proposed that we should transfer our labours to a warmer climate. A wealthy client of his on the Bay of Naples, M. Cluvius, had died recently, leaving him a substantial property at Puteoli, and it was to this that we headed, taking a week over the journey and arriving on the eve of Saturnalia. The villa was large and luxurious, built on the seashore, and even more beautiful than Cicero’s nearby house at Cumae. The estate came with a substantial portfolio of commercial properties located inside the town and a farm just outside it. Cicero was as delighted as a child with his new possession, and the moment we arrived he took off his shoes, hoisted his toga, and walked down the beach to the sea to bathe his feet.

The following morning, after he had handed out Saturnalian gifts to all the slaves, he called me into his study and gave me a handsome sandalwood box. I assumed that the box was my present, but when I thanked him, he told me to open it. Inside I found the deeds to the farm near Puteoli. It had been transferred to my name. I was as stunned by the gesture as I had been on the day he granted me my freedom.

He said, ‘My dear old friend, I wish it were more and I wish I could have given it to you sooner. But here it is at last, that farm you always wanted – and may it bring you as much joy and comfort as you have brought to me over the years.’

Even though it was a holiday, Cicero worked. He had no family anymore with whom to celebrate – dead, divorced and scattered as they were – and I suppose that writing eased his loneliness. Not that he was melancholy. He had started a new work, a philosophical investigation of old age, and he was enjoying it (O wretched indeed is that old man who has not learned in the course of his long life that death should be held of no account). But he insisted that I, at any rate, should have the day off, and so I went for a walk along the beach, turning over in my mind the extraordinary fact that I was now a man of property – a farmer indeed. It felt like the end of one part of my life and the start of another, a portent that my work with Cicero was almost done and that we would soon part.

All along that stretch of coast one encounters large villas looking west across the bay towards the promontory of Misenum. The property next door to Cicero’s was owned by L. Marcius Philippus, a former consul a few years younger than Cicero, who had been awkwardly placed during the civil war, given that he was Cato’s father-in-law and yet was also married to Caesar’s closest living relative, his niece Atia. He had been granted permission by both sides to keep out of the conflict, and had sat it out down here – a cautious neutrality that perfectly suited his nervous temperament.

Now, as I drew closer to the boundary of his estate, I saw that the beach was blocked off by soldiers who were preventing people passing in front of the house. For a moment I wondered what was happening, and when at last I worked it out, I turned and hurried back to tell Cicero – only to find that he had already received a message:

Caesar Dictator to M. Cicero.

Greetings.

I am in Campania inspecting my veterans and shall be spending part of Saturnalia with my niece Atia at the villa of L. Philippus. If it is convenient, my party and I could visit you on the third day of the festival. Please let my officer know.

I asked, ‘How did you reply?’

‘How else does one reply to a god? I said yes, of course.’

He pretended to be put-upon, but I could tell that secretly he was flattered, although when he enquired as to the size of Caesar’s entourage, which he would also have to feed, and was told it consisted of two thousand men, he had second thoughts. His entire household were obliged to postpone their holiday, and for the remainder of that day and the whole of the next made frantic preparations, emptying the food markets of Puteoli and borrowing couches and tables from neighbouring villas. A camp was pitched in the field behind the house and sentries were posted. We were given a list of twenty men who were to dine in the house itself, headed by Caesar and including Philippus, L. Cornelius Galba and C. Oppius – these last two Caesar’s closest associates – and a dozen officers whose names I have forgotten. It was organised like a military manoeuvre, according to a strict timetable. Cicero was informed that Caesar would be working with his secretaries in Philippus’s house until shortly after noon, that he would then take an hour’s vigorous exercise along the seashore, and would appreciate it if a bath could be provided for his use before dinner. As to the menu, the Dictator was following a course of emetics and so would have an appetite equal to whatever was provided, but he would particularly appreciate oysters and quail if they were available.

By this time Cicero was heartily wishing he had never agreed to the visit: ‘Where am I to find quail in December? Does he think I am Lucullus?’ Nevertheless, he was determined, as he put it, ‘to show Caesar that we know how to live’, and took pains to provide the finest of everything, from scented oils for the bathroom to Falernian wine for the table. Then, just before the Dictator was due to walk through the door, the ever-anxious Philippus hurried round with the news that M. Mamurra, Caesar’s chief engineer – the man who had built the bridge across the Rhine, among many other amazing feats – had died of apoplexy. For a moment it looked as if the occasion might be ruined. But when Caesar swept in, red-faced from the exertion of his walk, and Cicero broke the news to him, his expression did not even flicker.

‘That’s too bad for him. Which way is my bath?’

No further mention was made of Mamurra – and yet, as Cicero observed, he must have been one of Caesar’s closest comrades for more than a decade. Oddly, that brief insight into the coldness of Caesar’s character is the thing I remember most clearly of his visit, for I was soon distracted by the house being full of noisy men, spread between three dining rooms, and naturally I was not at the same table as the Dictator. In my room they were all soldiers – a rough crowd, polite enough to begin with but soon drunk, and there was a lot of trooping in and out between courses to vomit on the beach. All the talk was of Parthia and the forthcoming campaign. Afterwards I asked Cicero what had passed between him and Caesar.

He said, ‘It was really surprisingly pleasant. We avoided politics and talked mostly of literature. He said that he had just read our Disputations and was full of compliments – “Except,” he said, “I have to tell you that I am the living refutation of your principal proposition.” “And what is that?” “You claim that one can only conquer one’s fear of death by living a good life. Well, according to your definition I have hardly done that, and yet I have no fear of dying. What is your answer?” To which I replied that for a man with no fear of dying, he certainly travelled with a large bodyguard.’

‘Did he laugh?’

‘No he did not! He turned very serious, as if I had insulted him, and said that as the head of state he had a responsibility to take proper precautions, that if anything happened to him there would be chaos, but this didn’t mean that he was afraid to die – far from it. So I probed a little further into the subject and asked why it was that he was so unafraid: did he believe the soul was eternal, or did he think we all die with our bodies?’

‘And what was his reply?’

‘He said that he didn’t know about anyone else, but that obviously he wouldn’t die along with his body because he was a god. I looked to see if he was joking but I’m not sure that he was. At that moment, I tell you honestly, I ceased to envy him all his power and glory. It has driven him mad.’

The only time I saw Caesar again that night was when he left. He emerged from the principal dining room, leaning on Cicero and laughing at some remark he had just made. He appeared slightly flushed with wine, which was rare for him as he usually drank in moderation, if at all. His soldiers formed into lines as an honour guard and he lurched off into the night supported by Philippus and followed by his officers.

The next morning Cicero wrote an account of the visit to Atticus: Strange that so onerous a guest should leave a memory not disagreeable. But once is enough. He is not the kind of person to whom one says, ‘Do drop round the next time you are in the neighbourhood.’

As far as I know, that was the last time Cicero and Caesar ever spoke to one another.

On the eve of our return to Rome, I rode over to look at my farm. It was difficult to find, almost invisible from the coastal road, at the end of a long track leading up into the hills: an ancient, ivy-covered building commanding a wonderful panorama of the island of Capri. There was an olive grove and a small vineyard surrounded by low dry-stone walls. Goats and sheep grazed in the fields and on the nearby slopes; the tinkle of their neck bells rang soft as wind chimes; otherwise the place was entirely silent.

The farmstead was modest but fully appointed: a courtyard with portico, barns containing an olive press and stalls and feed racks, a fish pond, a vegetable and herb garden, a dovecote, chickens, a sundial. Beside the wooden gate a shaded terrace with fig trees faced out to sea. Inside, up a stone staircase, beneath the terracotta roof, was a large, dry, raftered room where I could keep my books and write: I asked the overseer to have some shelves built. Six slaves maintained the place and I was glad to see that all appeared healthy, unfettered and well fed. The overseer and his wife lived on the premises and had a child; they could read and write. Forget Rome and its empire: this was more than world enough for me. I should have stayed and told Cicero that he would have to return to the city on his own – I knew it even at the time. But that would have been poor thanks for his generosity, and besides, there were still books he wanted to finish and my assistance was needed. So I bade farewell to my little household, undertook to return to them as soon as I could, and rode back down the hill.

The Spartan statesman Lycurgus, seven hundred years ago, is said to have observed:

When falls on man the anger of the gods,

First from his mind they banish understanding.

Such was to be the fate of Caesar. I am sure Cicero was correct: he had gone mad. His success had made him vain, and his vanity had devoured his reason.

It was around this time – ‘since the days of the week are all taken’, as Cicero joked – that he had the seventh month of the year retitled ‘July’ in his honour. He had already declared himself a god and decreed that his statue should be carried in a special chariot during religious processions. Now his name was added to those of Jove and the Penates of Rome in every official oath. He was granted the title Dictator for Life. He styled himself Emperor and Father of the Nation. He presided over the Senate from a golden throne. He wore a special purple and gold toga. To the statues of the seven ancient kings of Rome that stood on the Capitol, he added an eighth – himself – and his image was introduced on the coinage – another prerogative of royalty.

Nobody spoke now of the revival of constitutional freedom – it was surely only a matter of time before he was declared monarch. At the Lupercalian festival in February, watched by a crowd in the Forum, Mark Antony actually placed a crown upon his head, whether mockingly or as a serious gesture none could say; but it was placed there, and the people resented it. On the statue of Brutus – the distant forefather of our contemporary Brutus – who had driven out the kings of Rome and established the consulship, graffito appeared: If only you were alive now! And on Caesar’s statue someone scrawled:

Brutus was elected consul

When he sent the kings away;

Caesar sent the consuls packing,

Caesar is our king today.

He was scheduled to leave Rome at the start of his campaign of world conquest on the eighteenth day of March. Before he left, it was necessary for him to decree the results of all the elections for the next three years. A list was published. Mark Antony was to be consul for the remainder of the year alongside Dolabella; they would be succeeded by Hirtius and Pansa; Decimus Brutus (whom I shall henceforth call Decimus, to distinguish him from his kinsman) and L. Munatius Plancus would take over the year after that. Brutus himself was to be urban praetor and thereafter governor of Macedonia; Cassius was to be praetor and then governor of Syria; and so on. There were hundreds of names; it was drawn up like an order of battle.

The moment he saw it, Cicero shook his head in amazement at the sheer hubris of it: ‘Julius the god seems to have forgotten what Julius the politician never would: that every time you fill an appointment, you make one man grateful and ten resentful.’ On the eve of Caesar’s departure, Rome was full of angry, disappointed senators. For example, Cassius, already insulted not to be chosen for the Parthian campaign, was offended that the less-experienced Brutus should be given a praetorship superior to his. But the greatest resentment was Mark Antony’s at the prospect of sharing the consulship with Dolabella, a man whom he had never forgiven for committing adultery with his wife, and to whom he felt greatly superior; in fact such was his jealousy, he was actually using his powers as an augur to block the nomination on the grounds that it was ill-omened. A meeting of the Senate was summoned in Pompey’s portico for the fifteenth, three days before Caesar’s departure, to settle the issue once and for all. The rumour was that the Dictator would also demand to be granted the title of king at the same session.

Cicero had avoided the Senate as much as possible. He could not bear to look upon it. ‘Do you know that some of these upstarts from Gaul and Spain that Caesar has put into the place can’t even speak Latin?’ He felt old and out of touch. His eyesight was poor. Nevertheless, he decided to attend on the Ides – and not merely to attend, but to speak for once, on behalf of Dolabella and against Mark Antony, whom he regarded as another tyrant in the making. He suggested that I should accompany him, as in the old days, ‘if only to see what the Divine Julius has done to our republic of mere mortals’.

We set off two hours after dawn, in a pair of litters. It was a public holiday. A gladiator fight was scheduled for later in the day and the streets around Pompey’s theatre, where the contest was to be held, were already packed with spectators. Lepidus, whom Caesar shrewdly judged weak enough to be a suitable deputy and therefore was the new Master of Horse, had a legion stationed on Tiber Island, ready to embark for Spain, of which he was to be governor; many of his men were heading for a final visit to the games.

Inside the portico, a troop of about a hundred gladiators belonging to Decimus, the governor of Nearer Gaul, practised their lunges and feints in the shadow of the bare plane trees, watched by their owner and a crowd of aficionados. Decimus had been one of the Dictator’s most brilliant lieutenants in Gaul, and Caesar was said to treat him almost as a son. But he was not widely known in the city and I had hardly ever seen him. He was stocky and broad-shouldered: he could have been a gladiator himself. I remember wondering why he needed so many pairs of fighters for what were only minor games. Around the covered walkways several of the praetors, including Cassius and Brutus, had set up their tribunals, conveniently closer to the Senate than the Forum, and were hearing cases. Cicero leaned out of his litter and asked the porters to set us down in a sunny spot so that we could have some spring warmth. They did as ordered, and while he reclined on his cushions and read through his speech, I enjoyed the sensation of the sun upon my face.

Presently, through half-closed eyes, I saw Caesar’s golden throne being carried through the portico and into the Senate chamber. I pointed it out to Cicero. He rolled up his speech. A couple of slaves helped him to his feet and we joined the throng of senators queuing to go in. There must have been three hundred men at least. Once I could have named almost every member of that noble order, and identified his tribe and family, and told you his particular interests. But the Senate that I knew had bled to death on the battlefields of Pharsalus, Thapsus and Munda.

We filed into the chamber. In contrast to the old Senate house it was light and airy, in the modern style, with a central aisle of black-and-white mosaic tiles. On either side rose three wide, shallow steps, along which the benches were arranged in tiers, facing one another. At the far end, on its dais, stood Caesar’s throne beside the statue of Pompey, upon the head of which some subversive hand had placed a laurel wreath. One of Caesar’s slaves kept jumping up, trying to knock it off, but much to the amusement of the watching senators he couldn’t quite reach it. Eventually he fetched a stool and climbed up to remove the offending symbol and was rewarded with mocking applause. Cicero shook his head and rolled his eyes at such levity and went off to find his place. I stayed by the door with the other spectators.

After that, a long time passed – I should say at least an hour. Eventually Caesar’s four attendants came back in from the portico, walked up the aisle to the throne, hoisted it on to their shoulders with difficulty (for it was made of solid gold) and carried it out again. A groan of exasperation went round the chamber. Many senators stood to stretch their legs; some left. Nobody seemed to know what was happening. Cicero strolled down the aisle. He said to me, ‘I don’t much want to deliver this speech in any case. I think I’ll go home. Will you find out if the session is definitely cancelled?’

I went out into the portico. The gladiators were still there, but Decimus had gone. Brutus and Cassius had given up listening to their petitioners and were talking together. I knew both men well enough to approach them – Brutus the noble philosopher, still youthful-looking at forty; Cassius the same age, but grizzled, harder. About a dozen other senators were hanging round them, listening – the Casca brothers, Tillius Cimber, Minucius Basilus and Gaius Trebonius, who had been designated by Caesar to be governor of Asia; I also remember Quintus Ligarius, the exile whom Cicero had persuaded the Dictator to allow home, and Marcus Rubrius Ruga, an old soldier who had also been pardoned and had never got over it. They fell silent and turned to look at me as I approached. I said, ‘Forgive me for disturbing you, gentlemen, but Cicero would like to know what’s happening.’

The senators looked sideways at one another. Cassius said suspiciously, ‘What does he mean by “what’s happening”?’

Puzzled, I replied, ‘Why, he simply wants to know if there will there be a meeting.’

Brutus said, ‘The omens are unpropitious, therefore Caesar is refusing to leave his house. Decimus has gone to try to persuade him to come. Tell Cicero to be patient.’

‘I’ll tell him, but I think he wants to go home.’

Cassius said firmly, ‘Then persuade him to stay.’

It struck me as odd, but I went and relayed the remark to Cicero. He shrugged. ‘Very well, let’s give it a little longer.’

He returned to his seat and looked at his speech again. Senators came up and spoke to him and drifted away. He showed Dolabella what he was planning to say. Another long wait ensued. But eventually, after a further hour, Caesar’s throne was carried back in and placed upon the dais. Clearly Decimus had persuaded him to come after all. Those senators who had been standing around talking resumed their places, and an air of expectation settled over the chamber.

I heard cheering outside. Turning, I saw through the open door that a crowd was streaming into the portico. In the middle of the throng, like battle standards, I could see the fasces of Caesar’s twenty-four lictors, and swaying above their heads the golden canopy of the Dictator’s litter. I was surprised there was no military bodyguard. Only later did I learn that Caesar had recently dismissed all those hundreds of soldiers he used to travel around with, saying, ‘It is better to die once by treachery than live always in fear of it.’ I have often wondered if his conversation with Cicero three months earlier had anything to do with this piece of bravado. At any rate, the litter was carried across the open space and set down outside the Senate, and when his lictors helped him out of it, the crowd was able to get very close to him. They thrust petitions into his hands, which he passed immediately to an aide. He was dressed in the special purple toga embroidered with gold that he alone was permitted by the Senate to wear. He certainly looked like a king; all that was missing was the crown. And yet I could see at once that he was uneasy. He had a habit, like a bird of prey, of cocking his head this way and that, and looking about him, as if searching for some slight stirring in the undergrowth. At the sight of the open door to the chamber, he seemed to draw back. But Decimus took him by the hand, and I suppose the momentum of the occasion must also have propelled him forwards: certainly he would have lost face if he had turned round and returned home; there were already rumours that he was ill.

His lictors cleared a path for him and in he came. He passed within three feet of me, so close I could smell the sweet and spicy scent of the oils and unguents with which he had been anointed after his bath. Decimus slipped in after him. Mark Antony was just behind Decimus, also on his way in, but Trebonius suddenly intercepted him and drew him aside.

The Senate stood. In the silence Caesar walked down the central aisle, frowning and pensive, twirling a stylus in his right hand. A couple of scribes followed him, carrying document boxes. Cicero was in the front row, reserved for ex-consuls. Caesar did not acknowledge him, or anyone else. He was glancing back and forth, up and down, flicking that stylus between his fingers. He mounted the dais, turned to face the senators, gestured to them to be seated, and lowered himself into his throne.

Immediately various figures rose and approached him offering petitions. This was normal practice now that the debates themselves no longer mattered: they had become instead rare opportunities to give the Dictator something in person. The first to reach him – from the left, both his hands stretched out in supplication – was Tillius Cimber. He was known to be seeking a pardon for his brother, who was in exile. But instead of lifting the hem of Caesar’s toga to kiss it, he suddenly grabbed the folds of fabric around Caesar’s neck and yanked so hard on the thick material that Caesar was pulled sideways, effectively pinioned and unable to move. He shouted angrily, but his voice was half strangled so I couldn’t quite make it out. It sounded something like, ‘But this is violence!’ A moment later, one of the Casca brothers, Publius, strode towards him from the other side and jammed a dagger into Caesar’s exposed neck. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: it was unreal – a play, a dream.

‘Casca, you villain, what are you doing?’ Despite his fifty-five years, the Dictator was still a strong man. Somehow he grabbed the blade of Casca’s dagger with his left hand – he must have torn his fingers to shreds – squirmed free of Cimber’s grasp, then swung round and stabbed Casca in the arm with his stylus. Casca cried in Greek, ‘Help me, brother!’ and an instant later his brother Gaius knifed Caesar in the ribs. The Dictator’s gasp of shock echoed round the chamber. He dropped to his knees. More than twenty toga-clad figures were now stepping up on to the dais and surrounding him. Decimus ran past me to join in. There was a frenzy of stabbing. Senators rose in their places to see what was happening. People have often asked me why none of these hundreds of men, whose fortunes Caesar had made and whose careers he had advanced, attempted to go to his aid. I cannot answer except to say that it was all so fast, so violent and so unexpected, one’s senses were stupefied.

I could no longer see Caesar through the ring of his assailants. I was told afterwards by Cicero, who was closer than I, that by some superhuman effort he briefly regained his feet and tried to break away. But such was the force, the desperate haste and the closeness of the attack that escape was impossible. His assailants even wounded one another. Cassius knifed Brutus in the hand. Minucius Basilus stabbed Rubrius in the thigh. It is said that the Dictator’s last words were a bitter reproach to Decimus, who had tricked him into coming: ‘Even you?’ Perhaps it is true. I wonder, though, how much speech he was capable of by then. Afterwards the doctors counted twenty-three stab wounds on his body.

Their business done, the assassins drew back from what a moment before had been the beating heart of the empire and was now a punctured skein of flesh. Their hands were gloved in blood. Their gory daggers were held aloft. They shouted a few slogans: ‘Liberty!’ ‘Peace!’ ‘The republic!’ Brutus even called out ‘Long live Cicero!’ Then they ran down the aisle and out into the portico, their eyes staring wildly in their excitement, their togas spattered like butchers’ aprons.

The moment they had gone, it was as if a spell had been broken. Pandemonium erupted. Senators clambered over the benches and even over one another in their panic to get away. I was almost trampled in the rush. But I was determined not to leave without Cicero. I ducked and twisted my way through the oncoming press of bodies until I reached him. He was still seated, staring at Caesar’s body, which lay entirely unattended – his slaves having fled – sprawled on its back, its feet pointed towards the base of Pompey’s statue, its head lolling over the edge of the dais, facing the door.

I told Cicero we needed to leave, but he did not seem to hear me. He was staring at the corpse, transfixed. He murmured, ‘No one dares go near him, look.’

One of the Dictator’s shoes had come off; his bare depilated legs were exposed where his toga had ridden up his thighs; his imperial purple was ragged and bloodied; there was a slash across his cheek that exposed the pale bone; his dark eyes seemed to stare, outraged, upside down, at the emptying chamber; blood ran from his wound diagonally across his forehead and dripped on to the white marble.

All those details I see today as clearly as I saw them forty years ago, and for an instant there flashed into my mind the prophecy of the sibyl: that Rome would be ruled by three, then two, then one, and finally by none. It took an effort for me to drag my gaze away, to seize Cicero by the arm and pull him to his feet. Finally, like a sleepwalker, he allowed himself to be led from the scene, and together we made our way out into the daylight.