Cicero (9 page)

Caesar did not take part in the civil war that broke out after Sulla's return from Asia Minor. The victorious Dictator did not harm him, insisting only on one point—that he divorce his wife, perhaps because he had someone more suitable in mind. The young man rejected out of hand this apparent sign of goodwill. Fearful of Sulla's anger, Caesar slipped out of Rome and, he hoped, out of sight, but he fell seriously ill with malaria and was picked up by a Sullan patrol. He managed to buy his way out of trouble for the sum of 3,000 sesterces and eventually well-connected relatives persuaded a reluctant Sulla to leave him alone. Relieved, Caesar set off for Asia Minor to do some soldiering.

Why was he so steadfast in his resistance? It is hard to be sure, but his actions anticipate what we know of the mature man. He would not be bullied. He was loyal even when it was inconvenient to be so. (He stayed faithful to Cornelia until her death in 69.) He was energetic and cool-headed in a crisis. Caesar's views were governed by a profound impatience with the aristocracy, not just for its selfishness but for its incompetence. He had been brought up a
popularis
and would remain one for the rest of his life. While he held his first political position ten years or so later, a Quaestorship, his aunt Julia died. The Sullan constitution was still in place and the Senate very much in charge. Nevertheless, Caesar delivered the funeral oration and, in defiance of the law and with some personal courage, brought out effigies of Julia's husband, Marius, and his son to
display in the procession. No action was taken against him, but he had nailed his radical flag to the mast for all to see.

The second young man of the trio, Titus Pomponius, also had
popularis
connections, but he did not share Caesar's flamboyant temerity. In fact, he turned his back on politics, throwing in his cards before they had even been dealt. Born in Rome into a wealthy and cultivated equestrian family, he was related to Sulpicius, and when the Tribune came to grief in 88 he saw he was in serious danger. Realizing that Sulla's bloodletting was not just designed to eliminate opposition but was also a form of fund-raising, he decided to leave Italy and settled in Athens, taking good care to transfer all his assets to Greece at the same time. He may have heard the story of the rich man who, although having nothing to do with politics, read his name on the proscription lists in the Forum and remarked: “Things are bad for me: I am being hunted down by my Alban estate.” Pomponius had no more intention of losing his fortune than his life.

In fact, he wanted to become richer. He had inherited about 2 million sesterces and set about making his money grow. He bought a large amount of land in Epirus at a time when Mithridates had just ravaged Greece and prices were low. Noting the popularity of gladiatorial shows, he invested in fighters whom he kept on his estate and trained in the art of dying gracefully. He lent money at interest but on the quiet, as it was not felt to be a trade fit for a gentleman. He shared his father's literary tastes and by collecting a large staff of skillful copyists in his house became, in due course, a successful publisher. He was a distinguished scholar, writing a summary of Roman history from the earliest times to his day and genealogical studies of some aristocratic Roman families.

In Athens, Pomponius went to great lengths to be popular. He learned to speak Greek fluently and soon acquired the
cognomen
Atticus—after Attica, the territory of which Athens was the capital. From now on this was the name by which he was known and is how he will be referred to in this book. He was generous to local charities and took the trouble to develop the common touch. His biographer, Cornelius Nepos, a younger contemporary whom he knew personally, wrote that Atticus “behaved so as to seem at one with the poorest and on a level with the powerful.”

Atticus had a nasty fright when Sulla called at Athens on his way back to Rome in 83. The general was sufficiently impressed by the young man to ask him to go back to Italy with him. His back to the wall, Atticus for
once in his life refused to do a powerful man's bidding. “No, please, I beg you,” he replied.
“I left Italy to avoid fighting you alongside those you want to lead me against.” Sulla liked his candor and let the matter drop.

Atticus usually came back to Rome for elections and he made a profession of friendship. In his personal relationships, he was a kind and affectionate man and an excellent conversationalist. He insisted on high standards of personal behavior: according to Cornelius Nepos, “he never told a lie and could not tolerate lying in others.” He cultivated politicians of every persuasion, doing them favors and steering clear of any overt ideological commitment. He was often used as a go-between and could be relied on to carry messages discreetly hither and thither. Like Caesar, he was loyal but with this difference: he liked to do good by stealth, behind the scenes. Posterity is greatly in his debt, for his friendship with Cicero was maintained by a constant exchange of correspondence, much of which survives.

For all his excellent personal qualities, Atticus had an unerring instinct for the protection of his own interests. It is hard to warm to him. Gaston Boissier, who wrote in the mid-nineteenth century what is still one of the most charming and witty books on Cicero, observed:

Cicero agreed neither with Caesar nor with Atticus about the conclusions to be drawn from the years of bloodshed and confusion. In his eyes, the breakdown of civilized values was inexcusable. Physical timidity may have had something to do with it, but his deepest instincts were for the rule of law. What was needed, in his view, was a recall to order.

A
S
a fellow Arpinate, he had mixed feelings about Marius, whom he saw during his last agonized years. He wrote a poetic eulogy of Marius in epic hexameters and admired the superhuman achievements of the general who had destroyed the Cimbri and the Teutones and the tenacity that
had raised him to the head of affairs, but he was not at all tempted by his
popularis
politics. He despised Cinna, whose reign he regarded as a black interlude of criminality. The time spent in the company of senior statesmen and jurists, two of whom, Antonius and Scaevola, had perished in the chaos, gave him a love of tradition he never lost. If only the good old ways could be restored, he thought, all would again be well.

At the same time, although he was on Sulla's side ideologically, the memory of the Dictator's vengefulness never left him. In a book published in the 40s he referred, one senses almost with a physical shudder, to “the proscriptions of the rich, the destruction of the townships of Italy, the well-known ‘harvest' of Sulla's time.”
Cicero detested Roman militarism and came to the view that his old civilian patron, Scaurus, the Leader of the Senate and a forceful defender of the Senate's authority, was in no way inferior to a general like Marius. “Victories in the field,” he commented, “count for little if the right decisions are not taken at home.”

While in the last resort he could be brave and decisive, Cicero did not have Caesar's flamboyant coolness under fire. His brief military experience during the War of the Allies had not recommended a soldier's life to him. So, not for the last time in his career, when confronted by brute force, he retreated from the bloodshed into his books. He feared that he would never realize his ambition to become a lawyer, for, as he recalled, “it appeared that the whole institution of the courts had vanished forever.” A
S
Plutarch, his biographer, who wrote around the turn of the first century
AD
, put it: “Seeing that the whole state was splitting up into factions and that the result of this would be the unlimited power of one man, he retired into the life of a scholar and philosopher, going on with his studies and associating with Greek scholars.”

An uncovenanted benefit of the war with Mithridates was that many intellectuals and thinkers fled to Rome. One of these was Philo of Larisa, head of the Academy in Athens, founded by Plato three hundred years before. He inspired Cicero with a passion for philosophy, and in particular for the theories of Skepticism, which asserted that knowledge of the nature of things is in the nature of things unattainable. Such ideas were well judged to appeal to a student of rhetoric who had learned to argue all sides of a case. In his early twenties Cicero wrote the first two volumes of a work on “invention”—that is to say, the technique of finding ideas and
arguments for a speech; in it he noted that the most important thing was “that we do not recklessly and presumptuously assume something to be true.”
This resolute uncertainty was to be a permanent feature of his thought.

He learned about the doctrines of Stoicism from the philosopher Diodotus, who was a member of his
clientela
and, until his death in about 60, lived in Cicero's house. Diodotus seems to have been an indomitable old man; when he became blind in his declining years, he took up geometry and played the lyre. His young employer was impressed by what he learned of a school of thought that saw the universe as an organic whole consisting of two indivisible aspects: an active principle (God) and that which it acts on (matter). Man's duty was to live an active life in harmony with nature; that was the way to be virtuous, because virtue was the active principle that infused nature. It followed that the wise man was indifferent to fortune and suspicious of emotion. Cicero could not go this far, but he appreciated the modified Stoicism of his day, which sought to reconcile the notion of a divine spirit in the universe with conventional Greco-Roman religious ideas.

Cicero's withdrawal into literary pursuits was temporary; he had every intention of entering the law and politics once circumstances permitted. If he was out of sympathy with the more aggressive, military aspirations of his peers, he did share with them an unquenchable thirst for personal fame. This found its classic expression in Homer's
Iliad
, in which Glaucus says to Diomedes that he still hears his father's urgings ringing in his ears:

It was a text that had inspired Alexander the Great and, once Homer appeared on their curriculum, many Roman boys were equally impressed, among them Marcus Tullius Cicero. Years later he told his brother that the lines had expressed his “childhood dream.” He was determined to be the best and the bravest, to join the ranks of the Republic's greatest heroes. He planned to excel, however, not on the battlefield, but in Rome's sacred center, the Forum.

The Birth of an Orator: 81–77
BC

A
lmost all the main incidents in Cicero's career unfolded in a space hardly larger than two football fields, a square in the center of Rome. This was the Forum, where advocates addressed juries and politicians the People. In contemporary British terms, it combined the functions of Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, the City of London and a shopping mall. All the personal services of urban life could be found there, from food stores to rent boys.

Rome itself had a profound impact on a teenager who had spent his early years in a small provincial town. It was by far the largest city in the ancient world. Time-travelers from the present day who had only the gift of sight would be at home in a townscape recognizably like the ancient cities of the Maghreb—say, Marrakesh or Fez or the
casbah
of Algiers. But if they could hear and understand Latin, they would quickly realize that Rome was a city without any of the public facilities which today we take for granted (except for the water supply, channeled into the city on aqueducts and underground sewers). Life was lived in the daylight hours. There was no street lighting: when night fell, the only illumination came from individual torches carried by pedestrians or their servants. Most Romans found it safer to be indoors in the evening.

Town planning was an art in its infancy and Rome had no wide thoroughfares
or avenues. It was a web of lanes and alleys. Cicero referred to the city as “planted in mountains and deep valleys, its garrets hanging up above, its roads far from good, merely narrow byways.”
An urban district was, in effect, defined by a single street running through it. (The Latin word
vicus
meant both a quarter and a street.) The law required it to be at least five meters wide. At the end of each one there was a crossroads from which other roads and quarters led off. These central streets were the only ones that strangers were wise to visit. They were public spaces, but the urban hinterland beyond was essentially private and outside state control.

Different quarters specialized in particular industries or trades. So, for example, leather goods—books and sandals—could be found in the Argiletum. The Subura was known for its lowlife and brothels. The Aventine Hill, with its temple of Minerva, goddess of wisdom and the arts and sciences, on the summit, was an artists' quarter, like the Left Bank in Paris or London's Soho. Many playwrights and actors were based there, as was a community of poets. A self-help corporation of artists who lived and worked on the Aventine afforded a degree of mutual protection in what were, then as now, precarious professions. This was also a part of the city that attracted social misfits and victims of exclusion: foreigners, widows and prostitutes.

Rome was seriously overcrowded and, in an attempt to solve the chronic housing problem, blocks of apartments or
insulae
(literally, “islands”) were constructed. These high-rise buildings, usually with shops on the ground floor, had about five or six stories and could be as tall as twenty meters. They were usually jerry-built and frequently collapsed. Other risks that citizens, and especially the poor, faced were fires and periodic floods when the Tiber overflowed its banks. The state took little or no interest in such events and the only social intervention it made was to insure and subsidize the corn supply. Anything might happen to urban Romans, but at least they would not starve.