Cicero (39 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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