Cicero (53 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C
icero's contemporaries and historians of the period were a little cool in their assessment of him. Livy, one of the greatest of the imperial historians, wrote:

Pollio, the governor of Spain and later an eminent historian, who knew Cicero personally, observed sharply:

This view was to hold for some time. Aufidius Bassus, a historian from the next imperial generation, observed acidly: “So died Cicero, a man born to
save the Republic. For a long time he defended and administered it. Then in old age it slipped from his hands, destroyed by his own mistake—his insistence that the state would only be secure if Antony were removed. He lived for sixty-three years, always on the attack or under attack. A day did not pass when it was not in someone's interest to see him dead.”

In Macedonia, Brutus received the news of his friend's murder with equanimity. He said that he felt more ashamed by the cause of Cicero's death than grief at the event itself. He had been baffled by Cicero's willingness, after a lifetime of constitutional rectitude, to defend the Republic by its enemies' methods. The relationship with Octavian had been unforgivable. However, he reluctantly exacted retribution by finally accepting Cicero's advice and executing Antony's brother, Caius, whom, as coincidence would have it, young Marcus had played an active part in capturing.

These contemporary assessments do not do full justice to their subject. In our eyes Cicero was a statesman and public servant of outstanding ability. He had administrative skills of a very high order and was the preeminent orator of his age, if not of any age. In a society where politicians were also expected to be good soldiers, he was preeminently a civilian and this makes his success all the more remarkable. That his career ended in ruins and that for long years he was a bystander at great events was not due to lack of talent but to a surplus of principle. The turning point in his career was his refusal to join Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus in their political alliance during the 50s. He declined the invitation to do so because it would have betrayed his commitment to the Roman constitution and the rule of law. In his eyes that was totally unacceptable.

Cicero acquired a reputation for vacillation and compromise. It is true that he sometimes found it difficult to decide on a particular course of action, as his letters reveal. But his maneuvering was invariably tactical and he never sold his beliefs. His basic aim—to restore traditional political values—remained unchanged throughout his life, although in his last two years his character hardened and he became willing to adopt unconstitutional methods.

Cicero's weakness as a politician was that his principles rested on a mistaken analysis. He failed to understand the reasons for the crisis that tore apart the Roman Republic. Julius Caesar, with the pitiless insight of genius, understood that the constitution with its endless checks and balances
prevented effective government, but like so many of his contemporaries Cicero regarded politics in personal rather than structural terms. For Caesar the solution lay in a completely new system of government; for Cicero it lay in finding better men to run the government and better laws to keep them in order.

His personality was insecure and nervous. This had two important consequences. First, he needed continuity and stability to thrive and it was his misfortune to live in an age of change; he was a temperamental conservative caught in the nets of a revolution. Second, he never stopped boasting of his successes. Roman politics was extremely competitive: where a man like Brutus had generations of ancestors stretching back to the foundation of the Republic with which to maintain his prestige, Cicero had only his own record. If he did not talk about it, nobody else would. His correspondence with Atticus shows that he did not take himself too seriously in private and was amused by his habit of talking up his achievements.

We know something of Cicero's domestic life, but not nearly enough to come to a firm judgment about it. His divorce of Terentia and marriage to Publilia may well have been justified, but they leave him in a rather poor light. It is hard to avoid the impression that he was insensitive to the feelings of his brother, Quintus, whom he treated as a political extension of himself rather than as an independent figure in his own right. Tullia seems to have been the only member of his family who engaged his deepest feelings; otherwise, if we may judge by the surviving evidence, his affections centered on male friendships.

If few people read his speeches today for pleasure, his philosophical writings are masterpieces of popularization and were one of the most valuable means by which the heritage of classical thought was handed down to posterity. Cicero was not an original philosopher, but all his life he read philosophy and his writings are imbued with a humane skepticism that reflects his character more than his age. In that sense, his greatest gift to European civilization was the man himself—rational, undogmatic, tolerant, law-abiding and urbane.

When Caesar was struck down and Brutus shouted out Cicero's name as the talisman of liberty regained, the conspirators supposed that the Republic would resume its interrupted course and that the civil wars were
over. Cicero knew better. He was not content to remain a symbol of civic virtue. He saw what Marcus Brutus could not, that the death of one man would not save the state, and with a surprising decisiveness and energy he seized the initiative himself. A
S
the Caesarian faction regrouped, he devised his policy of divide-and-rule and pushed it through ruthlessly. It was not because it was ill conceived or poorly executed that it failed.

Cicero did not have Julius Caesar's fabled luck. Failure, when it came, was the consequence of an unforeseeable and improbable accident: the deaths of both Consuls within a few days of each other during the two battles at Mutina. Even if Cicero had won, however, victory would have been only provisional. History admits no counterfactuals, no might-have-beens, but it is a reasonable guess that a restored Republic would have betrayed everything Cicero stood for, that at best it would have been a continuation of the violent, corrupt and unstable status quo that had lasted his lifetime, that further crises would have followed. Could he have endured the spectacle?

Under Julius Caesar's heir, history took a different course. At Philippi a year after Cicero's death the last great battle for the Republic was fought. The Republicans lost and Brutus and Cassius killed themselves. Lepidus was quickly discarded and the two remaining warlords divided the known world between them. Antony ruled the east and entered into an enduring partnership, more political than sexual, with Cleopatra. The new Caesar took the western half and stayed in Italy. The arrangement lasted uncomfortably for a decade, when war broke out again. Antony was defeated in the sea battle at Actium in 31, and in 30 he and his queen committed suicide in Alexandria. Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus was left the last man standing. With much greater patience and ingenuity than his great-uncle and adoptive father, he reformed the Republic, preserving its institutions—the Consuls, the Praetors and the other officeholders, the Senate and the General Assembly—as the medium through which an autocracy backed by military force could discreetly express itself. A
S
the Emperor Augustus, he laid the foundations for Rome's continuing dominion.

Cicero attracted loyalty after his death as well as during his lifetime. In distinction from his brother, his slaves and servants did their best to save him from his pursuers. Despite his delicate health Tiro apparently lived a long life, spent on his smallholding in Campania, and devoted himself to his
master's memory. He wrote a biography of Cicero, published the notes for his speeches and may have assembled a collection of his sayings and witticisms.

Marcus loved his father and defended his name.
He fought at Philippi and served under Sextus Pompey, but then made his peace with the triumphant Commissioners. He was pardoned in 39. The drinking that had worried Cicero when Marcus was a student in Athens became a lifelong habit. He was reported to down nine or ten pints at a session and once when drunk he threw a goblet at Augustus's greatest general, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. Fortunately, he inherited his father's administrative competence (and, apparently, his sense of humor). Augustus seems to have liked him: he was appointed Augur (according to Appian, “by way of apology for Cicero's sacrifice”) and in 30 he served as Consul. He was twice a provincial governor. Presumably he had no son, for, after him, nothing more is heard of the Tullii Cicerones.

During his Consulship, Marcus had the satisfaction of reading out in the Forum Octavian's dispatch from Alexandria announcing the death of Antony; he posted a document to that effect on the Speakers' Platform where his father's head and hands had been displayed. During the same year, the Senate took down Antony's statues, canceled all the other honors that he had been awarded and decreed that in future no member of his family should bear the name of Marcus. Plutarch commented with dry satisfaction: “In this way Heaven entrusted to the family of Cicero the final acts in the punishment of Antony.”

During one of his foreign postings Marcus found himself dining with a rhetorician who was critical of his father's oratory. According to an anecdote told by Seneca the Elder in the following century: