Cicero (12 page)

The traditional Roman wedding was a splendid affair designed to dramatize the bride's transfer from the protection of her father's household gods to those of her husband. Originally, this literally meant that she passed from the authority of her father to her husband, but at the end of the Republic women achieved a greater degree of independence, and the bride remained formally in the care of a guardian from her blood family. In the event of financial and other disagreements, this meant that her interests were more easily protected. Divorce was easy, frequent and often consensual, although husbands were obliged to repay their wives' dowries.

The bride was dressed at home in a white tunic, gathered by a special belt which her husband would later have to untie. Over this she wore a flame-colored veil. Her hair was carefully dressed with pads of artificial hair into six tufts and held together by ribbons. The groom went to her father's house and, taking her right hand in his, confirmed his vow of fidelity. An animal (usually a ewe or a pig) was sacrificed in the
atrium
or a nearby shrine and an Augur was appointed to examine the entrails and declare the auspices favorable. The couple exchanged vows after this and the marriage was complete. A wedding banquet, attended by the two families, concluded with a ritual attempt to drag the bride from her mother's arms in a pretended abduction.

A procession was then formed which led the bride to her husband's
house, holding the symbols of housewifely duty, a spindle and distaff. She took the hand of a child whose parents were living, while another child, waving a hawthorn torch, walked in front to clear the way. All those in the procession laughed and made obscene jokes at the happy couple's expense.

When the bride arrived at her new home, she smeared the front door with oil and lard and decorated it with strands of wool. Her husband, who had already arrived, was waiting inside and asked for her
praenomen
or first name. Because Roman women did not have one and were called only by their family name, she replied in a set phrase: “Wherever you are Caius, I will be Caia.” She was then lifted over the threshold. The husband undid the girdle of his wife's tunic, at which point the guests discreetly withdrew. On the following morning she dressed in the traditional costume of married women and made a sacrifice to her new household gods.

By the late Republic this complicated ritual had lost its appeal for sophisticated Romans and could be replaced by a much simpler ceremony, much as today many people marry in a registry office. The man asked the woman if she wished to become the mistress of a household (
materfamilias
), to which she answered yes. In turn, she asked him if he wished to become
paterfamilias
, and on his saying he did the couple became husband and wife.

Just as the exact date of Cicero's marriage to Terentia is uncertain, so the style of their wedding is unknown. Perhaps the young provincial, the New Man from Arpinum with his feeling for the Roman past and his eagerness to be socially accepted, opted for tradition. On the other hand the skeptical Philhellene might well have resisted meaningless flummery. Unfortunately, there is not a scintilla of hard evidence pointing in one direction or the other. By the same token, the birth date of their first child, Tullia, is unknown. Although she came to be the apple of her father's eye, the arrival of a girl was no great cause for celebration or even notice in a male-oriented society. She was born probably in 75 or 76 but possibly earlier.

In 79 Cicero went abroad with a group of friends for an extended tour of the eastern Mediterranean and, as it would appear that the wedding took place that year, left his wife behind. Romans seldom took their wives with them on foreign trips. Cicero's emotional life was still centered on the male friendships he had made in his student years.

On the face of it, Cicero's decision to leave Rome just when his career had taken off was mysterious. People whispered that he was afraid of reprisals from Sulla, or perhaps more plausibly Chrysogonus, because of Roscius's acquittal. But on balance this seems unlikely. Having completed his work of reform, Sulla was now approaching retirement; reliving his debauched youth, he survived, if Plutarch is to be believed, only for a few more disreputably entertaining months.

Cicero's true motive for his foreign travels was the need to recover his health, which suddenly collapsed. Physically he was not robust. He was thin and underweight and had such a poor digestion that he could manage to swallow only something light at the end of the day. Success had come at a high price and he needed time to recoup his forces. Such in any case was his own explanation and there is little reason to doubt it. He recalled:

If recuperation was the primary reason for his travels, he also grasped the chance to deepen his professional training. For all his years of study, Cicero was unsatisfied with his technique; he lacked ease of delivery and his oratorical effects were sometimes strained and artificial. He visited various celebrated or fashionable teachers of rhetoric and, never forgetting what he saw as the moral dimension of rhetoric, also spent time on fundamental philosophical studies.

His brother Quintus, a small, choleric man, and his much younger cousin Lucius Cicero, son of the uncle whose early death cut short a promising career, went with him on this classical equivalent of an eighteenth-century grand tour. Two former fellow students, Titus Pomponius Atticus and Marcus Pupius Piso, were welcome additions to a congenial party. They spent six months in Athens and did a good deal of sightseeing.

Not long after their arrival the group was initiated into the secret religious mysteries of Eleusis, a few miles from Athens, which must have come as a shock to Romans brought up to see religion as a set of rules and social rituals. The mysteries were at the heart of a festival of purification and fertility; those taking part witnessed some kind of spiritual reenactment of death and rebirth, involving a descent into the underworld and a vision of the future life. Cicero was profoundly stirred by the experience and believed that of all Athenian contributions to civilization, these transcendental ceremonies were the greatest. Writing near the end of his life in his book
On Law
, he claimed: “we have learned from them the beginnings of life and have gained the power not only to live happily but also to die with a better hope.”

But what really interested him was Greek philosophy and, as he saw it, its essential interconnection with the art of public speaking. His book
On Supreme Good and Evil (De finibus)
, written more than three decades later, is a series of philosophical dialogues, one of which recalls his stay in Athens. The speakers are the companions of his grand tour and the setting is the Academy, the grove of olive trees containing a gymnasium or exercise ground where Plato had taught and which became a kind of university for the study of philosophy and rhetoric. In the morning the young men attend a class given by the head of the Academy, Antiochus of Ascalon, and in the afternoon they take a stroll in the gardens to enjoy the quiet calm of the place.

According to Plutarch, Cicero “planned that, if he were finally deprived of the chance of following a public career, he would retire to Athens, away from the law and politics, and spend his life here in the quiet pursuit of philosophy.” In fact, although from time to time over the years he was indeed forced into periods of retirement, this never happened. But if he did not go to Athens he made Athens come to him. At his house at Tusculum he would later re-create the Academy, with halls and walks for
intellectual debate and meditation, and build a version of Aristotle's base in Athens, the Lyceum.

In the autumn of 79, Cicero left Athens for Asia Minor. In Rhodes, he sat briefly at the feet of a well-known Stoic philosopher and historian, Posidonius. More important, he consulted a distinguished rhetorician, Apollonius Molon, whom he had heard twice in Rome and whose style was rather more restrained than that of his florid rivals on the Asian mainland. He provided the technical retraining Cicero needed. Molon was, Cicero later recalled,

In 78 news came of Sulla's death and any residual anxieties Cicero may have had for his personal safety disappeared. In two years he would be old enough, under the new rules, to put a foot on the first rung of the political ladder and run for Quaestor. He was determined to stand at the earliest legal opportunity. If elected he would hold office the following year, when he would be thirty. By 77 he was back in Rome rebuilding his legal career in the Forum and planning his first political campaign.

Cicero Enters the Ring: 77–63
BC

D
uring his childhood and youth Cicero had watched with horror as Rome set about dismantling itself. If he had a mission as an adult, it was to recall the Republic to order. The image that came to his mind when describing its constitution was of a musical concert.

These words were written late in life, but, even if his political thinking as a young man was not yet fully formed, Cicero's experience of Roman politics and his philosophical explorations would already have confirmed his conservative cast of mind. It became his self-ordained duty to conduct the orchestra of all the classes and train it to play in tune again.

Cicero campaigned vigorously and won his election as Quaestor for 75 without apparent difficulty. It may be imagined that he and his family
called in every favor and exploited every connection in order to ensure a good turnout. Doubtless many citizens of Arpinum took the trouble to travel to Rome to vote for their local boy. The fact that he was a New Man meant that the outcome would not have looked at all certain.

A Quaestor had no political or military authority. He and his colleagues assisted the Consuls by supervising the collection of taxes and authorizing payments. They were responsible for the management of the Treasury in the Temple of Saturn and had a small, permanent staff to conduct day-to-day business. Since Sulla's recent reforms the really important feature of the post was that it gave the holder automatic membership in the Senate.

Some Quaestors were given foreign postings and Cicero was allocated one of the two Quaestorships based in Sicily, reporting directly to the governor. Wives did not accompany Romans on official business abroad, and so, once again, Terentia was left behind in Italy, where she doubtless spent much of her time with little Tullia.

With the decline of Italian agriculture and the provision of subsidized corn for the urban masses in the capital, Sicily was Rome's most important provider of cereals and it was essential to ensure stability of its supply and price. The oldest of Rome's provinces, the island had been won from the Carthaginians in 241 and, as tribute, its communities were required to export gratis 10 percent of their corn harvest to Rome. If more was needed, it could be acquired by compulsory purchase. It was the Quaestors' job to calculate the price and the quantity of extra corn to be bought.

In carrying out this task Cicero showed a talent for competent and fair administration. To counteract an inflation of the corn price in Rome, he made an assessment of additional need and negotiated a fair rate with the suppliers. When the Sicilians received payment, he made sure that his office did not deduct the usual, but illegal, commission. This behavior made him very popular.

Cicero believed in honesty in public affairs, but it was also in his personal interest to win over local opinion. If his career was to progress, he would have to build up political support and his stay in Sicily was an excellent opportunity to expand his client list. Cicero won the backing of many
equites
, some of whom he represented in court in front of the governor. This class included Roman tax farmers and traders and also, since the enfranchisement of Italy and Sicily after the War of the Allies ten years
earlier, local aristocracies across the peninsula. It was a substantial new constituency of Roman citizens, still largely untapped, and someone like Cicero whose roots were non-Roman and provincial was well placed to appeal to it. Although his ambition was to join the ruling elite in Rome, he never forgot where his political backing really lay—among the Italian middle classes.

In his leisure hours Cicero was an indefatigable tourist. Sicily had a long and colorful history: originally colonized by the Greek states during their heyday, it contained many wealthy and beautiful cities, with fine temples and works of art by great sculptors and painters. Carthage had dominated the west of the island for many years and, although that was now long in the past, something of the exotic character of her culture survived. Cicero's headquarters were at Lilybaeum (now Marsala), a wealthy town at Sicily's western extremity.