Dictator

VI

‘Seven years,’ said Cicero with great contempt after Vibullius and his men had gone. ‘Nothing in politics can be planned in advance for seven years. Is Pompey entirely lacking in sense? Does he not see how this devils’ pact works entirely in Caesar’s favour? In effect, he promises to protect Caesar’s back until such time as Caesar has finished pillaging Gaul, whereupon the conqueror will return to Rome and take control of the whole republic – Pompey included.’

He sat slumped on the terrace in despair. From the shore below came the lonely cries of seabirds as the oyster fishermen landed their catch. We knew now why the neighbourhood was so deserted. According to Vibullius, half the Senate had got wind of what was happening in Luca and more than a hundred had gone north to try to get their share of the spoils. They had forsaken the sun of Campania to bask in the warmest sun of all: power.

‘I am a fool,’ said Cicero, ‘to be counting the waves down here while the future of the world is being decided at the other end of the country. Let’s face it, Tiro. I am a spent force. Every man has his season, and I have had mine.’

Later in the day Terentia returned from her visit to the sibyl’s cave in Cumae. She noticed the dust on the carpets and the furniture and asked who had been in the house. Reluctantly Cicero described what had happened.

Her eyes shone. She said excitedly, ‘How strange that you should tell me this! The sibyl prophesied this very outcome. She said that first Rome would be ruled by three, and then by two, and then by one, and then by none.’

Even Cicero, who regarded the notion of a sibyl living in a jar and predicting the future as entirely fatuous, was impressed. ‘Three, two, one, none … Well we know who the three are – that’s obvious. And I can guess who the one will be. But who will be the two? And what does she mean by none? Is that her way of predicting chaos? If so, I agree – that’s what will follow if we allow Caesar to tear up the constitution. But for the life of me I can’t see how I am to stop him.’

‘Why should you be the one to stop him?’ demanded Terentia.

‘I don’t know. Who else is there?’

‘But why does it always fall to you to block Caesar’s ambitions when Pompey, the most powerful man in the state, will do nothing to assist you? Why is it your responsibility?’

Cicero fell silent. Eventually he responded, ‘It’s a good question. Perhaps it’s just conceit on my part. But can I really, with honour, stand back and do nothing, when every instinct tells me the nation is heading for disaster?’

‘Yes!’ she cried with passion. ‘Yes! Absolutely! Haven’t you suffered enough for your opposition to Caesar? Is there another man in the world who has endured more? Why not let others take up the fight? Surely you’ve earned the right to some peace at last?’ Then quietly she added, ‘I am sure that I have.’

Cicero did not answer for a long time. The truth, I suspect, is that from the moment he learnt about the Luca agreement, he knew in his heart that he could not continue opposing Caesar – not if he wanted to live. All he needed was for someone to put the issue to him bluntly, as Terentia had just done.

Finally he sighed with a weariness I had never before heard. ‘You’re right, my wife. At least no one will ever be able to reproach me for not having seen Caesar for what he is, and for not trying to stop him. But you are right – I’m too old and tired to fight him any longer. My friends will understand and my enemies will denounce me whatever I do, so why should I care what they think? Why shouldn’t I enjoy some leisure at last down here in the sun with my family?’

And he reached over and took her hand.

Nevertheless, he was ashamed of his capitulation. I know that, because although he wrote a long letter to Pompey in Sardinia setting out his change of heart – his ‘palinode’, he called it – he never let me see it and kept no copy. Nor did he show it to Atticus. At the same time he wrote to the consul Marcellinus announcing that he wished to withdraw his motion calling on the Senate to re-examine Caesar’s land laws. He offered no explanation; he did not need to; everyone recognised that the political firmament had shifted and the new alignment was against him.

We returned to a Rome full of rumours. Few knew for sure what Pompey and Crassus were planning, but gradually word got around that they were intending to run on a joint ticket for the consulship, just as they had in the past, even though everyone knew they had always loathed one another. Some senators, however, were determined to fight back against the cynicism and arrogance of the Three. A debate was scheduled on the allocation of consular provinces, and one motion called for Caesar to be stripped of both Nearer and Further Gaul. Cicero knew that if he attended the chamber, he would be asked his views. He considered staying away. But then he reasoned that he would have to recant publicly sooner or later: he might as well get it over with. He began working on his speech.

And then, on the eve of the debate, after more than two years away in Cyprus, Marcus Porcius Cato returned to Rome. He arrived in fine style, in a flotilla of treasure ships, sailing up the Tiber from Ostia, accompanied by his nephew, Brutus, a young man of whom great things were expected. The whole of the Senate, and all of the magistrates and priests, as well as most of the population, turned out to welcome Cato home. There was a landing stage with painted poles and ribbons where he was supposed to disembark and meet the consuls, but he sailed on past them, standing in the prow of a royal galley that had six banks of oars, his bony profile fixed straight ahead, wearing a shabby black tunic. The crowds at first gasped and groaned with disappointment at his high-handedness, but then his treasure started to be unloaded – ox wagon after ox wagon of it, seven thousand silver talents’ worth in all, that wound in procession from the Navalia all the way to the state treasury in the Temple of Saturn. With this one contribution, Cato transformed the finances of the nation – it was enough to provide free grain to the citizenry for five years – and the Senate went into immediate session to vote him an honorary praetorship, together with the right to wear a special purple-bordered toga.

Called upon by Marcellinus to respond, Cato scornfully denounced what he called ‘these corrupt baubles’: ‘I have discharged the duty placed upon me by the Roman people – an assignment I never requested and would have preferred not to have undertaken. Now that it is done, I need no Eastern flattery or showy garments to puff myself up: the knowledge that I have performed my duty is reward enough for me, as it should be for any man.’

He was back in the chamber for the next day’s debate on the provinces, as if he had never been away – sitting in his customary position, going through a set of the treasury’s accounts as he always did to make sure there was no waste in public expenditure. Only when Cicero rose to speak did he put them aside.

It was quite late on in the session and most ex-consuls had already given their opinions. Even so, Cicero managed to spin out the suspense a little longer by devoting the first part of his speech to an attack on his old enemies Piso and Gabinius, governors of Macedonia and Syria respectively. Then the consul, Marcius Philippus, who was married to Caesar’s niece, and who was growing restless like many others, interrupted him to ask why he spent all his time attacking those two puppets when the man who had really instigated the campaign that led to his exile was Caesar. This gave Cicero precisely the opening he wanted. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘I am taking account of the public welfare rather than my own grievances. It is this old and unfailing loyalty of mine to the republic which restores, reconciles and reinstates me in friendship with Gaius Caesar.

‘For me,’ he went on, having to shout now to be heard above the jeers, ‘it is impossible not to be the friend of one who renders good service to the state. Under Caesar’s command we have fought a war in Gaul, whereas before we merely repelled attacks. Unlike his predecessors he believes the whole of Gaul should be brought under our rule. And so he has, with brilliant success, crushed in battle the fiercest and greatest tribes of Germania and Helvetia; the rest he has terrified, checked and subdued and taught to submit to the rule of the Roman people.

‘But the war is not yet won. If Caesar is removed, the embers may yet burst out again into flame. Therefore, as a senator – even as the man’s personal enemy, if you like – I must lay aside private grievances for the sake of the state, for how can I be the enemy of this man, whose dispatches, whose fame, whose envoys fill our ears every day with fresh names of races, peoples and places?’

It was not his most convincing performance, and towards the end he rather tripped himself up by trying to pretend that he and Caesar had never really been enemies at all, a piece of sophistry that was greeted with derision. Still, he got through it. The motion to replace Caesar was defeated and at the end of the session, even though the most passionate anti-Caesareans – men like Ahenobarbus and Bibulus – pointedly turned their backs on him in contempt, Cicero walked towards the exit with his head unbowed. That was when Cato intercepted him. I was waiting by the door and was able to overhear their whole exchange.

Cato: ‘I am beyond disappointed in you, Marcus Tullius. Your desertion has just cost us what may have been our last chance to stop a dictator.’

Cicero: ‘Why should I want to stop a man who is winning victory after victory?’

Cato: ‘But who is he winning these victories for? Is it for the republic or is it for himself? And when did it become national policy to conquer Gaul in any case? Has the Senate or the people ever authorised this war of his?’

Cicero: ‘Then why don’t you put down a motion to end it?’

Cato: ‘Perhaps I shall.’

Cicero: ‘Yes – and see how far it gets you! Welcome home, incidentally.’

But Cato was in no mood for such pleasantries and stamped off to talk to Bibulus and Ahenobarbus. From this time on it was he who led the opposition to Caesar, while Cicero retreated to his house on the Palatine, and to a quieter life.

There was nothing heroic in what Cicero had done. He realised his loss of face. Good night to principle, sincerity and honour! was how he summed it up in a letter to Atticus.

Yet even after all these years, and even with the wisdom of hindsight, I do not see what else he could have done. It was easier for Cato to spit defiance at Caesar. He was from a rich and powerful family, and he did not have the constant threat of Clodius hanging over him.

Everything now proceeded exactly as the Three had planned, and Cicero could not have stopped it even if he had sacrificed his life. First, Clodius and his ruffians disrupted the canvassing for the consular elections so that the campaign came to a stop. Then they threatened and intimidated the other candidates until they withdrew. Finally the elections had to be postponed. Only Ahenobarbus, with the support of Cato, had the courage to continue to stand for the consulship against Pompey and Crassus. Most of the Senate put on mourning in protest.

That winter, for the first time, the city was filled with Caesar’s veterans – drinking, whoring and threatening any who refused to salute the effigy of their leader when they set it up at crossroads. On the eve of the postponed poll, Cato and Ahenobarbus went down by torchlight to the voting pens to try to stake out their canvassing position. But they were attacked en route, either by Clodius’s men or Caesar’s and their torchbearer was killed. Cato was stabbed in his right arm, and although he entreated Ahenobarbus to stand firm, the candidate fled back to his house and barricaded the door and refused to come out. The next day Pompey and Crassus were elected consuls, and soon after that, as agreed at Luca, they made sure they were allotted the provinces they desired to govern at the end of their joint term of office: Spain for Pompey, Syria for Crassus, both commands awarded for five years instead of the normal one, with a further five-year extension for Caesar as proconsul in Gaul. Pompey never even left Rome, but governed Spain through his subordinates.

Throughout all this, Cicero kept clear of politics. On the days when he had no engagements in the law courts, he stayed at home and supervised the schooling of his son and nephew in grammar, Greek and rhetoric. He dined quietly most evenings with Terentia. He composed poetry. He began to write a book on the history and practice of oratory.

‘I am still an exile,’ he remarked to me, ‘only now my exile is in Rome.’

Caesar quickly heard reports of Cicero’s about-face in the Senate and immediately sent him a letter of thanks. I recall Cicero’s surprise when it arrived, delivered by one of Caesar’s superbly swift and reliable military couriers. As I have explained, nearly all their correspondence has since been seized. But I remember the opening, because it was always the same:

From: G. Caesar, Imperator, to M. Cicero, greetings.

I and the army are well …

And this particular letter had one other passage I have never forgotten: It pleases me to know I have a place in your heart. There is not a man in Rome whose opinion I prize more than yours. You may rely on me in all things. Cicero was torn between feelings of gratitude and shame, relief and despair. He showed the letter to his brother Quintus, who had just returned from Sardinia.

Quintus said, ‘You have done the right thing. Pompey has proved a fickle friend. Caesar may be more loyal.’ And then he added, ‘To be honest, Pompey treated me with such contempt while I was away that I wondered if I might not do better to throw in my own lot with Caesar.’

‘And how would you do that?’

‘Well, I am a soldier, am I not? Perhaps I could ask for a position on his staff. Or perhaps you could ask for a commission on my behalf.’

At first Cicero was uncertain: he had no desire to beg for favours from Caesar. But then he saw how unhappy Quintus was to be back in Rome. There was his miserable marriage to Pomponia, of course, but it was more than that. He was not an advocate or orator like his elder brother. Neither the law courts nor the Senate held much appeal. He had already served as praetor and as a governor in Asia. The sole remaining step for him in politics was a consulship, and he would never gain that unless he enjoyed some spectacular stroke of good fortune or patronage. And then again, the only sphere in which such a transformation might come his way was on the battlefield …

The possibility seemed remote, but by such reasoning the brothers convinced themselves that they should further tie their fortunes to those of Caesar. Cicero wrote to him requesting a commission for Quintus, and Caesar replied at once that he would be delighted to oblige. Not only that: he asked Cicero in return if he would help supervise the great rebuilding programme he was planning in Rome to rival Pompey’s. Some hundred million sesterces was to be spent on laying out a new forum in the centre of the city and creating a covered walkway a mile long on the Field of Mars. As recompense for his efforts Caesar gave Cicero a loan of eight hundred thousand sesterces at two and a quarter per cent interest, half the market rate.

That was how he was. He was like a whirlpool. He sucked men in by the sheer force of his energy and power until almost the whole of Rome was mesmerised by him. Whenever his Commentaries were posted up outside the Regia, crowds would gather and remain there all day reading of his exploits. That year his young protege Decimus defeated the Celts in a great naval battle in the Atlantic, after which Caesar caused their entire nation to be sold into slavery and their leaders executed. Brittany was conquered, the Pyrenees pacified, Flanders suppressed. Every community in Gaul was required to pay a levy, even after he had sacked their towns and carted off all their ancient treasures. A vast but peaceful German migration of 430,000 members of the Usipetes and Tencteri tribes crossed the Rhine and was lulled by Caesar into a false sense of security when he pretended to agree a truce; then he annihilated them. His engineers erected a bridge across the Rhine and he and his legion rampaged about through Germany for eighteen days before withdrawing back into Gaul and dismantling the bridge behind them. Finally, as if this were not enough, he put to sea with two legions and landed on the barbarian shores of Britain – a place that many in Rome had refused to believe even existed, and which certainly lay beyond the limits of the known world – burned a few villages, captured some slaves, and then sailed home before the winter storms trapped him.

To celebrate his victories Pompey summoned a meeting of the Senate to vote his father-in-law a further twenty days of public supplication, whereupon a scene ensued that I have never forgotten. One after another the senators rose to praise Caesar, Cicero dutifully among them, until at last there was no one left for Pompey to call except Cato.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Cato, ‘yet again you have all taken leave of your senses. By Caesar’s own account he has slaughtered four hundred thousand men, women and children – people with whom we had no quarrel, with whom we were not at war, in a campaign not authorised by a vote either of this Senate or of the Roman people. I wish to lay two counter-proposals for you to consider: first, that far from holding celebrations, we should sacrifice to the gods that they do not turn their wrath for Caesar’s folly and madness upon Rome and the army; and second, that Caesar, having shown himself a war criminal, should be handed over to the tribes of Germany for them to determine his fate.’

The shouts of rage that greeted this speech were like howls of pain: ‘Traitor!’ ‘Gaul-lover!’ ‘German!’ Several senators jumped up and started shoving Cato this way and that, causing him to stumble backwards. But he was a strong and wiry man. He regained his balance and stood his ground, glaring at them like an eagle. A motion was proposed that he be taken directly by the lictors to the Carcer and imprisoned until such time as he apologised. Pompey, however, was too shrewd to permit his martyrdom. ‘Cato by his words has done himself more harm than any punishment we can inflict,’ he declared. ‘Let him go free. It does not matter. He will stand forever condemned in the eyes of the Roman people for such treacherous sentiments.’

I too felt that Cato had done himself great damage among all moderate and sensible opinion; I remarked as much to Cicero as we walked home. Given his new-found closeness to Caesar, I expected him to agree. But to my surprise he shook his head. ‘No, you are quite wrong. Cato is a prophet. He blurts out the truth with the clarity of a child or a madman. Rome will rue the day it tied its destiny to Caesar’s. And so shall I.’

I make no claim to be a philosopher, but this much I have observed: that whenever a thing seems at its zenith, you may be sure its destruction has already started.

So it was with the triumvirate. It towered above the landscape of politics like some granite monolith. Yet it had weaknesses that none could see and which were only to be revealed with time. Of these the most dangerous was the inordinate ambition of Crassus.

For years he had been feted as the richest man in Rome, with a fortune of some eight thousand talents, or nearly two hundred million sesterces. But latterly this had come to seem almost paltry compared to the wealth of Pompey and Caesar, who each had the resources of entire countries at their disposal. Therefore Crassus had set his heart on going out to Syria not to administer it but to use it as a base from which to mount a military expedition against the Parthian empire. Those who knew anything of the treacherous sands and cruel peoples of Arabia thought the plan was hugely risky – not least, I am sure, Pompey. But such was his detestation of Crassus that he did nothing to dissuade him. As for Caesar, he too encouraged him. He sent Crassus’s son Publius – whom I had met in Mutina – back to Rome from Gaul with a detachment of one thousand highly trained cavalry so that he could join his father as deputy commander-in-chief.

Cicero despised Crassus more than he did any other man in Rome. Even for Clodius he could occasionally summon a certain reluctant respect. But Crassus he considered cynical, grasping and duplicitous, all traits that he covered over with a slippery and false bonhomie. The two had a furious argument in the Senate around this time, when Cicero denounced the retiring governor of Syria, Gabinius – his old enemy – for finally succumbing to Ptolemy’s bribe and restoring the Pharaoh to the Egyptian throne. Crassus defended the man he was about to replace. Cicero accused Crassus of putting his personal interests above those of the republic. Crassus jeered that Cicero was an exile. ‘Sooner an honourable exile,’ retorted Cicero, ‘than a pampered thief.’ Crassus stalked over to him and thrust out his chest, and the two ageing statesmen had to be physically prevented from exchanging blows.

Pompey took Cicero aside and told him he would not tolerate such abuse of his consular colleague. Caesar wrote a stern letter from Gaul that he regarded any attack on Crassus as an insult to himself. What worried them, I believe, was that Crassus’s expedition was proving so unpopular with the people, it was beginning to undermine the authority of the Three. Cato and his followers denounced it as illegal and immoral to make war on a country with which the republic had treaties of friendship; they produced auguries to show it was offensive to the gods and would bring ruin down on Rome.

Crassus was sufficiently concerned to seek a public reconciliation with Cicero. He approached him via Furius Crassipes, his friend who was also Cicero’s son-in-law. Crassipes offered to host a dinner for them both on the eve of Crassus’s departure. To have refused the invitation would have shown disrespect to Pompey and Caesar; Cicero had to go. ‘But I want you to be on hand as a witness,’ he said to me. ‘This villain will put words in my mouth and invent endorsements I never gave.’

Naturally I was not present for the meal itself. Still, I remember some parts of the evening very clearly. Crassipes had a fine suburban house set in the middle of a park about a mile south of the city, on the banks of the Tiber. Cicero and Terentia were the first to arrive so that they could spend some time with Tullia, who had recently miscarried. She looked pale, poor child, and thin, and I noticed how coldly her husband treated her, criticising her for such domestic oversights as the wilting flower arrangements and the poor quality of the canapes. Crassus turned up an hour later in a veritable convoy of carriages that clattered to a halt in the courtyard. With him was his wife Tertulla – an elderly sour-faced lady, almost as bald as he was – together with their son Publius and Publius’s new bride Cornelia, a very gracious seventeen-year-old, the daughter of Scipio Nasica and considered to be the most eligible heiress in Rome. Crassus also trailed a retinue of adjutants and secretaries who seemed to have no function except to hurry back and forth with messages and documents, conveying a general impression of importance. When the principals went in to dinner and the coast was clear, they lolled about on Crassipes’s furniture and drank his wine, and I was struck by the contrast between these unmilitary amateurs and Caesar’s efficient, battle-hardened staff.

After the meal, the men went into the tablinum to discuss military strategy – or rather Crassus held forth and the others listened. He was very deaf by this time – he was sixty – and talked too loudly. Publius was embarrassed – ‘It’s all right, Father, there’s no need to shout, we’re not in the other room’ – and once or twice he glanced at Cicero and raised his eyebrows in silent apology. Crassus announced that he would head east through Macedonia, then Thrace, the Hellespont, Galatia, and the northern part of Syria, traverse the desert of Mesopotamia, cross the Euphrates and thrust deep into Parthia.

Cicero said, ‘They must be well aware you’re coming. Aren’t you worried you will lack the element of surprise?’

Crassus scoffed, ‘I have no need of the element of surprise. I prefer the element of certainty. Let them tremble as we approach.’

He had his eye on various rich pickings along the way – he cited the temples of the goddess Derceto at Hierapolis and of Jehovah at Jerusalem, the jewelled effigy of Apollo at Tigraocerta, the golden Zeus of Nicephorium and the treasure houses of Seleucia. Cicero joked that it sounded less a military campaign than a shopping expedition, but Crassus was too deaf to hear.

At the end of the evening the two old enemies shook hands warmly and expressed profound satisfaction that any slight misunderstandings that might have arisen between them had been put to rest at last. ‘These are mere figments of the imagination,’ declared Cicero, with a twirl of his fingers. ‘Let them be utterly eradicated from our memories. Between two such men as you and I, whose lot has fallen on the same political ground, I would hope that alliance and friendship will continue to the credit of both. In all matters affecting you during your absence, my devoted and indefatigable service and any influence I command are absolutely and unreservedly at your disposal.’

‘What an utter villain that fellow is,’ said Cicero as we settled into the carriage to drive home.

A day or so later – and a full two months before the expiry of his term as consul, so eager was he to be off – Crassus left Rome wearing the red cloak and full uniform of a general on active service. Pompey, his fellow consul, came out of the Senate house to see him off. The tribune Ateius Capito attempted to arrest him in the Forum for his illegal war-making, and when he was knocked aside by Crassus’s lieutenants he ran ahead to the city gate and set up a brazier. As Crassus passed by he threw incense and libations on to the flames and called down curses on him and upon his expedition, mingling his incantations with the names of strange and terrible deities. The superstitious people of Rome were appalled and cried out to Crassus not to go. But he laughed at them, and with a final jaunty wave turned his back on the city and spurred his horse.

Such was Cicero’s life at this period, walking on tiptoe between the three great men in the state, endeavouring to keep on good terms with all of them, doing their bidding, privately despairing of the future of the republic, but waiting and hoping for better times.

He sought refuge in his books, especially philosophy and history, and one day, soon after Quintus had gone off to join Caesar in Gaul, he announced to me that he had decided to produce a work of his own. It was too dangerous, he said, to write an open attack on the current state of politics in Rome. But he could approach it in a different way, by updating Plato’s Republic and setting out what an ideal state might look like: ‘Who could object to that?’ The answer, I thought, was a large number of people, but I kept my opinion to myself.

I look back on the writing of that work, which took us in the end almost three years, as one of the most satisfying periods of my life. Like most literary compositions, it entailed much heartbreak and many false starts. Originally he planned to write it in nine rolls, but then reduced that to six. He decided to cast it in the form of an imagined conversation between a group of historical characters – chief among them one of his heroes, Scipio Aemilianus, the conqueror of Carthage – who gather in a villa on a religious holiday to discuss the nature of politics and how societies should be organised. He reasoned that no one would mind if dangerous notions were placed in the mouths of the legendary figures of Roman history.

He started dictating it in his new villa in Cumae during the senatorial recess. He consulted all the ancient texts, and on one particularly memorable day we rode over to the villa of Faustus Cornelius Sulla, the son of the former dictator, who lived a little way along the coast. Cicero’s ally Milo, who was rising in politics, had just married Sulla’s twin sister Fausta, and at the wedding breakfast, which Cicero attended, Sulla had invited him to use his library whenever he liked. It was one of the most valuable collections in Italy. The volumes had been carted back by Sulla the Dictator from Athens almost thirty years earlier, and amazingly included most of the original manuscripts of Aristotle, written in his own hand three centuries earlier. I shall never forget as long as I live the sensation of unrolling each of the eight books of Aristotle’s Politics: tiny cylinders of minute Greek characters, the edges slightly damaged by damp from the caves in Asia Minor where they had been hidden for many years. It was like reaching back through time and touching the face of a god.

But I am wandering too far from my subject. The essential point was that Cicero for the first time laid out his political credo in black and white, and I can summarise it in a sentence: that politics is the most noble of all callings (‘there is really no other occupation in which human virtue approaches more closely the august function of the gods’); that there is ‘no nobler motive for entering public life than the resolution not to be ruled by wicked men’; that no individual, or combination of individuals, should be allowed to become too powerful; that politics is a profession, not a pastime for dilettantes (nothing is worse than rule by ‘clever poets’); that a statesman should devote his life to studying ‘the science of politics, in order to acquire in advance all the knowledge that it may be necessary for him to use at some future time’; that authority in a state must always be divided; and that of the three known forms of government – monarchy, aristocracy and people – the best is a mixture of all three, for each one taken on its own can lead to disaster: kings can be capricious, aristocrats self-interested, and ‘an unbridled multitude enjoying unwonted power more terrifying than a conflagration or a raging sea’.

Often today I reread On the Republic, and always I am moved, especially by the passage at the end of book six, when Scipio describes how his grandfather appears to him in a dream and takes him up into the heavens to show him the smallness of the earth in comparison to the grandeur of the Milky Way, where the spirits of dead statesmen dwell as stars. The description was inspired by the vast, clear night skies above the Bay of Naples:

I gazed in every direction and all appeared wonderfully beautiful. There were stars which we never see from earth, and they were all larger than we have ever imagined. The starry spheres were much greater than the earth; indeed the earth itself seemed to me so small that I was scornful of our empire, which covers only a single point, as it were, upon its surface.

‘If only you will look on high,’ the old man tells Scipio, ‘and contemplate this eternal home and resting place, you will no longer bother with the gossip of the common herd or put your trust in human reward for your exploits. Nor will any man’s reputation endure very long, for what men say dies with them and is blotted out with the forgetfulness of posterity.’

Composing such passages was Cicero’s chief comfort in the lonely days of his wilderness years. But the prospect that he might ever again have the chance to put his principles into effect seemed remote indeed.

Three months after Cicero began writing On the Republic, in the summer of Rome’s seven hundredth year, Pompey’s wife Julia gave birth to a baby boy. The moment he was brought the news at his morning levee, Cicero hastened round to see the happy couple bearing a gift, for the son of Pompey and the grandson of Caesar would be a mighty presence in the years to come, and he wanted to be among the first with his congratulations.

It was not long after dawn yet already hot. In the valley beneath Pompey’s house loomed his newly opened theatre, with its temples and gardens and porticoes, its fresh white marble dazzling in the sun. Cicero had attended its dedication ceremony just a few months earlier – a spectacle that had included fights involving five hundred lions, four hundred panthers, eighteen elephants and the first rhinoceros ever seen in Rome. He had found it all revolting, especially the slaughter of the elephants: What pleasure can a cultivated man get out of seeing a weak human being torn to pieces by a powerful animal or a noble creature transfixed by a hunting spear? But naturally he had kept his feelings to himself.

From the moment we entered the immense house it was clear something terrible had occurred. Senators and clients of Pompey stood in worried, silent groups. Someone whispered to Cicero that no announcement had been made, but Pompey’s failure to appear, and an earlier glimpse of several of Julia’s maids fleeing, weeping, across an inner courtyard, suggested the worst. Suddenly from the interior there was a flutter of activity, a curtain parted and Pompey emerged in the midst of a retinue of slaves. He stopped, as if shocked by the number of people waiting for him, and searched for a familiar face. His eye fell on Cicero. He raised his hand and walked towards him. Everyone watched. At first he seemed entirely calm and clear-eyed. But then as he reached his old ally the effort at self-control abruptly became too much. His whole body and face seemed to sag and with a terrible choking sob he cried out, ‘She’s dead!’

A great groan went round the vast room – of genuine shock and grief, I have no doubt, but also of alarm, for these were politicians and this was a much bigger thing than the death of one young woman, tragic though it was. Cicero, in tears himself, put his arms round Pompey and tried to comfort him, and after a few moments Pompey asked him to come and see the body. Knowing how squeamish Cicero was about death, I thought he might try to refuse. But that would have been impossible. He was not being invited purely as a friend. He was to be an official witness on behalf of the Senate in what was a matter of state. He went off holding Pompey’s hand, and when he returned shortly afterwards, the others gathered round.

‘She started bleeding again soon after the birth,’ reported Cicero, ‘and the flow could not be stopped. The end was peaceful and she was brave, as befits her lineage.’

‘And the child?’

‘He will not last the day.’

More groans greeted this announcement and then everyone left to spread the news across the city. Cicero said to me, ‘The poor girl was whiter than the sheet in which they’d wound her. And the boy was blind and limp. I am truly sorry for Caesar. She was his only child. It’s as if Cato’s prophecies of the gods’ rage are starting to come true.’

We went back to the house and Cicero wrote Caesar a letter of consolation. As ill luck would have it, Caesar was in the most inaccessible place it was possible for him to be, having crossed over to Britain again, this time with an invasion force of twenty-seven thousand men, including Quintus. It was not until he returned to Gaul several months later that he found the packets of letters informing him of his daughter’s death. He showed by all accounts not a tremor of emotion but retired to his quarters, never spoke of it, and after three days of official mourning went on with his normal duties. It was, I guess, the secret of his achievements that he was quite indifferent to the death of anyone – enemy or friend, his only child or even ultimately himself – a coldness of nature that he concealed beneath his famous layers of charm.

Pompey was at the opposite end of the human spectrum. All his depths were on the surface. He loved his various wives with great (some said excessive) tenderness, and Julia most of all. At her funeral – which was, despite Cato’s objections, a state occasion held in the Forum – he found it hard to deliver the eulogy through his tears, and generally gave every appearance of being broken in spirit. The ashes were afterwards interred in a mausoleum in the precincts of one of his temples on the Field of Mars.

It must have been perhaps two months later that he asked Cicero to come and see him and showed him the letter he had just received from Caesar. After commiserating with him on the loss of Julia, and thanking him for his condolences, Caesar proposed a new marital alliance, but of double the strength: he would give his sister’s granddaughter, Octavia, to Pompey, and Pompey in return would give him the hand of his daughter, Pompeia.

‘What do you make of this?’ demanded Pompey. ‘I believe the barbarian air of Britain must have affected his brain! For one thing, my daughter’s already betrothed to Faustus Sulla – what am I supposed to tell him? “Very sorry, Sulla, someone more important has just come along”? And then Octavia of course is married – and not to just some nobody, either, but to Caius Marcellus: how’s he going to feel about my stealing his wife? Damn it all, Caesar’s married himself, come to that, to that poor little drab Calpurnia! All these lives to be turned upside down, and meanwhile dear little Julia’s side of our bed is not yet cold! Do you know, I haven’t even had the heart to clear out her hairbrushes?’

Cicero for once found himself speaking up for Caesar: ‘I’m sure he’s only thinking of the stability of the republic.’

But Pompey was not to be pacified. ‘Well I shan’t do it. If I marry for a fifth time, it will be to a woman of my choice; and as for Caesar, he will have to find himself a different bride.’

Cicero, who loved gossip, could not resist describing Caesar’s letter to several friends, swearing each to secrecy. Naturally, after extracting a similar oath, each friend mentioned it to several others, and so it went on until the news of Caesar’s proposal was the talk of Rome. Marcellus especially was outraged that his wife was being spoken of by Caesar as if she were his chattel. Caesar was embarrassed when he heard what was being said; he blamed Pompey for revealing his plans. Pompey was unapologetic; he in turn blamed Caesar for the clumsiness of his matchmaking. Another crack had appeared in the monolith.