Cicero watched him go with amazement. 'That's a handsome offer,' he said, 'very handsome indeed. We must send him a letter saying we'll bear it in mind, just so we have it on the record.'
That was what we did. And when Caesar replied the same day confirming that the legateship was Cicero's if he wanted it, Cicero for the first time began to feel more confident.
That year's elections were held later than usual, thanks to Bibulus's repeated intercessions claiming that the auguries were unfavourable. But the evil day could not be postponed for ever, and in October Clodius achieved his heart's ambition and topped the poll for tribune of the plebs. Cicero spared himself the torment of going down to the Field of Mars to listen to the result. In any case he did not need to: we could hear the roars of excitement without leaving the house.
On the tenth day of December, Clodius was sworn in as tribune. Again Cicero kept to his library. But the cheers were such that we could not escape them even with the doors closed and the windows shuttered, and presently word came up from the forum that Clodius had already posted details of his proposed legislation on the walls of the Temple of Saturn. 'He's not wasting his time,' said Cicero with a grim expression. 'Very well, Tiro. Go down and find out what fate Little Miss Beauty has in mind for us.'
My state of mind as I descended the steps to the forum was, as you can imagine, one of great trepidation. The meeting was over, but small groups of people stood around discussing what they had just heard. There was an excited atmosphere, as if they had all witnessed some spectacular event and needed to share their impressions with one another. I went over to the Temple of Saturn and had to shoulder my way through the crowds to see what all the fuss was about. Four bills had been pinned up. I took out my stylus and wax tablet. One was designed to stop any consul in the future behaving like Bibulus, by restricting the ancient right to proclaim unfavourable auguries. The second reduced the censors' powers to remove senators. The third allowed neighbourhood clubs to resume meeting (such associations had been banned by the senate six years previously for rowdy behaviour). And the fourth – the one that obviously had got everyone talking – entitled every citizen, for the first time in Rome's history, to a free monthly dole of bread.
I copied down the gist of each bill and hurried home to Cicero to report on their contents. He had his secret consular history unrolled on the table in front of him, and was ready to begin work on his defence. When I told him what Clodius was proposing, he sat back in his chair, thoroughly mystified. 'So, no word about me at all?'
'None.'
'Don't tell me he's planning to leave me alone after all his threatening talk.'
'Perhaps he's not as confident as he pretends.'
'Read me those bills again.' I did as he asked, and he listened with his eyes half closed, concentrating on every word. 'This is all very popular stuff,' he observed when I had finished. 'Free bread for life. A party on every street corner. No wonder it has gone down well.' He thought for a while. 'Do you know what he expects me to do, Tiro?'
'No.'
'He expects me to oppose these laws, merely because he is the one who has put them forward. He wants me to, in fact. Then he can turn round and say, “Look at Cicero, the friend of the rich! He thinks it is fine for senators to eat well and make merry, but woe betide the poor if they ask for a bit of bread and a chance to relax after their hard day's work!” You see? He plans to lure me into opposing him, then drag me before the plebs on the Field of Mars and accuse me of acting like a king. Well damn him! I shan't give him the satisfaction. I'll show him I can play a cleverer game than that.'
I am still not sure, if Cicero had set his mind to it, how much of Clodius's legislation he could have stopped. He had a tame tribune, Ninnius Quadratus, ready to use a veto on his behalf, and plenty of respectable citizens in the senate and among the equestrians would have come to his aid. These were the men who believed that free bread would make the poor dependent on the state and rot their morals. It would cost the treasury one hundred million sesterces a year and make the state itself dependent on revenues from abroad. They also thought that neighbourhood clubs fostered immoral pursuits, and that the organising of communal activities was best left to the official religious cults. In all this they may well have been right. But Cicero was more flexible. He recognised that times had changed. 'Pompey has flooded this republic with easy money,' he told me. 'That's what they forget. A hundred million is nothing to him. Either the poor will have their share or they will have our heads – and in Clodius they have found a leader.'
Cicero therefore decided not to raise his voice against Clodius's bills, and for one last brief moment – like the final flare of a guttering candle – he enjoyed something of his old popularity. He told Quadratus to do nothing, refused himself to condemn Clodius's plans, and was cheered in the street when he announced that he would not challenge the proposed laws. On the first day of January, when the senate met under the new consuls, he was awarded third place in the order of speaking after Pompey and Crassus – a signal honour. And when the presiding consul, Caesar's father-in-law, Calpurnius Piso, called on him to give his opinions, he used the occasion to make one of his great appeals for unity and reconciliation. 'I shall not oppose, or obstruct, or seek to frustrate,' he said, 'the laws that have been placed before us by our colleague Clodius, and I pray that out of difficult times, a new concord between senate and people may be forged.'
These words were met with a great ovation, and when the time came for Clodius to respond, he made an equally fulsome reply. 'It is not so long ago that Marcus Cicero and I enjoyed the friendliest of relations,' he said, with tears of sincere emotion in his eyes. 'I believe that mischief was made between us by a certain person close to him' – this was generally taken as a reference to Terentia's rumoured jealousy of Clodia – 'and I applaud his statesmanlike attitude to the people's just demands.'
Two days later, when Clodius's bills became law, the hills and valleys of Rome echoed with excitement as the neighbourhood clubs met to celebrate their restoration. It was not a spontaneous demonstration, but carefully organised by Clodius's man of affairs, a scribe named Cloelius. Poor men, freedmen and slaves alike chased pigs through the streets and sacrificed them without any priests to supervise the rites, then roasted the meat on the street corners. They did not stop their revels as night fell, but lit torches and braziers and continued to sing and dance. (It was unseasonably warm, and that always swells a crowd.) They drank until they vomited. They fornicated in the alleyways. They formed gangs and fought one another till blood ran in the gutters. In the smarter neighbourhoods, especially on the Palatine, the well-to-do cowered in their houses and waited for these Dionysian convulsions to pass. Cicero watched from his terrace, and I could see he was already wondering if he had made a mistake. But when Quadratus came to him and asked if he should gather some of the other magistrates from around the city and try to disperse the crowds, he replied that it was too late – the water was well and truly boiling now, and the lid would no longer fit back on the cooking pot.
Around midnight the racket began to subside. The streets became quiet, apart from some loud snoring in odd parts of the forum, which rose from the darkness like the noise of bullfrogs in a swamp. I went gratefully to my bed. But an hour or two later, something woke me. The sound was very distant, and in the daytime one would never have paid it any attention: it was only the hour and the surrounding silence that made it ominous. It was the noise of hammers being swung against brick.
I took a lamp and climbed the steps to the ground floor, unlocked the back door and went out on to the terrace. The city was still very dark, the air mild. I could see nothing. But the noise, which was coming from the eastern end of the forum, was more distinct outside, and when I listened hard I could pick out individual hammers being wielded – sometimes isolated, more often falling in a kind of peal, metal on stone, that rang out across the sleeping city. It was so continuous, I reckoned there must be at least a dozen teams labouring a
way. Occasionally there were shouts, and suddenly the sound of rubble being tipped. That was when I realised this was not building work I was hearing; it was demolition.
Cicero rose soon after dawn, as was his habit, and as usual I went to him in his library to see if he needed anything. 'Did you hear that hammering noise in the night?' he asked me. I replied that I had. He cocked his head, listening. 'Yet now it's silent. I wonder what mischief has been happening. Let's go down and see what the rogues have been up to.'
It was too early even for Cicero's clients to have begun assembling, and the street was empty. We went down to the forum accompanied by one of his burly attendants, and at first all seemed normal, apart from the heaps of rubbish left after the previous night's carousing, and the odd body sprawled in a drunken stupor. But as we approached the Temple of Castor, Cicero stopped and cried out in horror. It had been quite hideously disfigured. The steps leading up to the pillared facade had been taken down, so that anyone wishing to enter the building was now confronted by a ragged wall, twice the height of a man. The rubble had been formed into a parapet, and the only access to the temple was via a couple of ladders, each of which was guarded by men with sledgehammers. The newly exposed red brickwork was ugly and raw and naked, like an amputation. Various large placards were nailed to it. One read: 'P. CLODIUS PROMISES THE PEOPLE FREE BREAD.' A second proclaimed: 'DEATH TO THE ENEMIES OF THE ROMAN PEOPLE.' A third said: 'BREAD amp; LIBERTY.' There were other more detailed notices posted lower down at eye level that looked from a distance to be draft bills, and three or four dozen citizens were milling around reading them. Up above their heads on the podium of the temple was a line of men, motionless, like figures in a frieze. As we came closer, I recognised various of Clodius's lieutenants – Cloelius, Patina, Scato, Pola Servius: a lot of the rogues who had run with Catilina back in the old times. Further along I glimpsed Mark Antony and Caelius Rufus, and then Clodius himself.
'This is a monstrosity,' said Cicero, shaking with anger, 'a sacrilege, an outrage…'
Suddenly I realised that if we could see the men who had done this, they most assuredly could see us. I touched Cicero on the arm. 'Why don't you wait here, Senator,' I suggested, 'and let me go and see what those bills say? It might be unwise for you to stray too close. They are a rough-looking lot.'
I made my way quickly across to the wall, beneath the gaze of Clodius and his associates. On either side, men with heavily tattooed arms and close-cropped heads leaned on their sledgehammers and stared at me belligerently. I quickly scanned the notices on the wall. As I guessed, they were new bills, a pair of them in fact. One was concerned with the allocation of consular provinces for the following year, and awarded Macedonia to Calpurnius Piso, and Syria (I think it was) to Aulus Gabinius. The other bill was very short, no more than a line: 'It shall be a capital offence to offer fire and water to any person who has put Roman citizens to death without a trial.'
I stared at it stupidly, not grasping its significance at first. That it was directed against Cicero was obvious enough. But it did not name him. It seemed more designed to frighten and harass his supporters than to threaten him directly. But then, like a great turning inside-out of my heart, I saw the devilish cunning in it, and felt the gorge rise into my mouth, so that I had to swallow the bitter taste to stop myself from vomiting. I stepped back from that wall as if the jaws of Hades had opened before me, and I kept stumbling backwards, unable to take my eyes from the words, increasing the distance and willing them to disappear. When I glanced up, I saw Clodius very plainly looking down at me, a smile on his face, enjoying every moment, and then I turned and hurried back to Cicero.
He saw at once in my expression that it was bad. 'Well?' he said anxiously. 'What is it?'
'Clodius has published a bill about Catilina.'
'Aimed at me?'
'Yes.'
'It cannot surely be as bad as your face suggests! What in the name of heaven does it say about me?'
'It doesn't even mention you.'
'Then what kind of bill is it?'
'It makes it a capital offence to offer fire or water to anyone who has put Roman citizens to death without a trial.'
His mouth dropped open. He was always much quicker on the uptake than I. He understood the implications at once. 'And that is all? One line?'
'That is all.' I bowed my head. 'I am very sorry.'
Cicero grabbed my arm. 'So the actual crime will be to help keep me alive? They won't even give me a trial?'
Suddenly his gaze flickered past me, over my shoulder, to the disfigured temple. I turned and saw Clodius waving at him – a slow and mocking gesture, as if he were waving goodbye to someone on a ship, leaving for a long journey. At the same time some of the tribune's henchmen started to climb down the ladders. 'I think we should get out of here,' I said. Cicero did not react. His mouth was working, but only a faint croak was emerging. It was as if he was being strangled. I looked back at the temple again. The men were on the ground now and moving towards us. 'Senator,' I said firmly, 'we really must get you out of here.' I gestured to his bodyguard to take his other arm, and together we propelled him out of the forum and back up the steps towards the Palatine. The gang of ruffians pursued us, and pieces of rubble from the temple started to fly past our ears. A sharp piece of brick caught Cicero on the back of his head, and he gave a cry. The cascade of missiles did not stop until we were halfway up the hill.
When we reached the safety of the house, we found it full of his morning callers. Not knowing what had happened, they moved at once towards Cicero as they always did, with their wretched letters and their petitions and their humble beseeching faces. Cicero gazed at them, blank with shock, and bleakly told me to send them away – 'all away' – then stumbled upstairs to his bedroom.
Once the clients had been thrown out, I gave orders for the front entrance to be locked and barred, and then I prowled around the empty public rooms, wondering what I should do. I kept waiting for Cicero to come down and give me orders, but the hours passed and there was no sign of him. Eventually Terentia sought me out. She was twisting a handkerchief between her hands, winding it tightly around her bony ringless fingers. She demanded to know what was going on. I replied that I was not entirely sure.
'Don't lie to me, slave! Why is your master collapsed on his bed and refusing to move?'
I quailed before her rage. 'He has – he has – made an error,' I stammered.
'An error? What manner of error?'
I hesitated. I did not know where to begin. There were so many errors: they stretched back like islands behind us, an archipelago of folly. Or perhaps 'errors' was the wrong word. Perhaps it was more accurate to call them consequences: the ineluctable consequences of a deed done by a great man for honourable motives – is that not, after all, how the Greeks define tragedy?
I said, 'He has allowed his enemies to take control of the centre of Rome.'
'And they are doing what, exactly?'
'They are preparing legislation that will make him an outlaw.'
'Well then, he must pull himself together and fight them!'
'It is very dangerous for him to venture out of the house.'
Even as I spoke, I could hear the mob in the street outside chanting, 'Death to the tyrant!' Terentia heard them too. As she listened, I could see the fear tauten her face. 'So what are we to do?'
'We could perhaps wait for nightfall and leave Rome,' I suggested. She stared at me and, frightened though she was, just for a moment I saw in her dark eyes a glint of that ancestor of hers – the one who had commanded a cohort against Hannibal. 'At the very least,' I went on hurriedly, 'we should restore all the precautions we took while Catilina was alive.'
'Send out messages to his colleagues,' she ordered. 'Ask Hortensius, Lucullus – any you can think – to come immediately. Fetch Atticus. Arrange everything else necessary to secure our safety. And summon his doctors.'
I did as she ordered. The shutters were fastened. The Sextus brothers h
urried over. I even summoned the guard dog, Sargon, from his retirement on a farm just outside the city. By early afternoon the house had begun to fill with friendly faces, although most arrived shaken by the experience of passing through the chanting crowd. Only the doctors refused to come: they had heard about Clodius's bill and they claimed to fear prosecution.
Atticus went up to see Cicero and came down tearful. 'He has his face turned to the wall,' he told me. 'He refuses to speak.'
'They have robbed him of his voice,' I replied, 'and what is Cicero without his voice?'
A meeting was convened in the library to discuss what could be done: Terentia, Atticus, Hortensius, Lucullus, Cato. I forget who else was present. I sat there silent, stunned, in the room in which I had spent so many hours with Cicero. I listened to the others and wondered how they could hold a conversation about his future without his presence. It was as if he was already dead. The whole animating spark of that household – the wit, the quick intelligence, the guiding ambition – seemed to have fled out of the door, as it does when someone passes from the earth. Terentia had the coolest head present. 'Is there any chance that this law won't pass?' she asked Hortensius at one point.
'Very little,' he said. 'Clodius has copied Caesar's tactics to perfection, and clearly means to use the mob to control the popular assembly.'
'What about the senate?'
'We can adopt a resolution in his support. I'm sure we shall – I'll propose it myself – but Clodius will take no notice. Now if Pompey or Caesar were to come out against the bill, of course, that would make a difference. Caesar has an army less than a mile from the forum. Pompey's influence is immense.'
'And if it passes,' said Terentia, 'where will that leave me?'
'His property will all be seized – this house, its contents, everything. If you try to assist him in any way, you'll be arrested. I fear his only chance is to leave Rome at once, as soon as he is well, and get clear of Italy before the bill becomes law.'
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