Cicero

by Anthony Everitt

  You [Mark Antony] assumed a man’s toga and at once turned it into a prostitute’s frock. At first you were a common rent boy; you charged a fixed fee, and a steep one at that. Curio soon turned up, though, and took you off the game. You were as firmly wedded to Curio as if he had given you a married woman’s dress. No boy bought for lust was ever as much in his master’s power as you were in Curio’s. How many times did his father throw you out of his house? How many times did he set watchmen to make sure you did not cross his front door? And yet under cover of night, driven by lust and money, you were let in through the roof tiles.

  This sounds exaggerated, but Cicero should have known what he was talking about, for he was brought in as mediator and persuaded Curio’s father to pay off his son’s debts. Antony was barred from the house and for a while latched himself on to Clodius. Their relationship did not last, perhaps because Antony had an affair with Clodius’s wife, Fulvia, whom he was later to marry. Also he grew uneasy with Clodius’s extremist politics and the opposition they were arousing. Deciding it was time for a fresh start, he went to Greece for military training and to study public speaking.

  In fact, although Cicero deeply disapproved of such goings-on, he knew many of the younger generation quite well. For a time he was friendly with Clodius, who had been a member of his consular bodyguard, until Terentia began to worry that he was attracted to Clodia. (It is hard to imagine a more implausible romance.) He became very fond of the brilliant but volatile Caelius, whom he first met in 66, when he took him on as an informal pupil to study public speaking. Caelius became a sharp-eyed observer of the Roman scene, delighted in gossip and had an excellent sense of humor; ten years on he kept Cicero, who would forgive a lot for a good joke, up-to-date on the latest events in the city when the reluctant elder statesman was in Asia Minor on a foreign posting.

  Catullus knew Cicero too and respected him enough to write him a charming poem:

  Silver-tongued among the sons of Rome,

  the dead, the living and the yet unborn,

  Catullus, least of poets, sends

  Marcus Tullius his warmest thanks:

  —as much the least of poets

  as he a prince of lawyers.

  It seems odd that Cicero was on such good terms with people whose behavior he found morally objectionable. The fact is that he liked young men and, as he grew older, took much pleasure in bringing them on, developing their talents and promoting their careers. He enjoyed the liveliness of their company. Caelius was the first in a succession of youthful friends—the last and trickiest of whom was to be Caesar’s adopted son, the young Octavian, later the Emperor Augustus.

  None of this is to suggest that Cicero was homosexual. He explicitly disapproved of same-sex relationships. In an age when politicians hurled every conceivable accusation of sexual malpractice against their opponents, this charge was very seldom laid at his door. Apart from the probably abusive suggestion that he lost his virginity to an older classmate in his youth, the only direct piece of evidence on the matter is a flirtatiously erotic ode he penned to a young slave of his, Tiro. But this is best seen as a playful imitation of Greek love poetry.

  The Senate was uncertain how to handle the Good Goddess scandal. A trial would only cause trouble and might ignite the populares, but it seemed that there was no alternative. A bill to set up a special tribunal was agreed on by the Senate and the proposal was then considered by the People. Cicero was there and described the scene: “When the day came for the bill to be put to the assembly under the terms of the Senatorial decree, there was a flocking together of our goateed young bloods, the whole Catilinarian gang with little Miss Curio at their head, to plead for its rejection. Clodius’s roughs had taken possession of the gangways.” It seems to have been impossible to take a vote and the matter went back to the Senate. Eventually, in July 61, a court was established, but on terms favorable to Clodius. Crassus, Catilina’s shadowy financier, happy as ever to make trouble for the Senate, came forward with funds to bribe the jurors.

  Clodius pleaded that he could not have been the intruder, for he had been out of Rome at the Etruscan town of Interamna (where he wielded considerable political influence and, according to Cicero, employed gangs to harass the countryside). Terentia, still irritated by the visits she believed her husband to be paying Clodia, goaded Cicero to take the witness stand and break Clodius’s alibi by reporting that he had seen him in Rome on the day in question. The trial started well, the jury asked for a guard (which suggested honesty), and it looked as if it was an open-and-shut case. But then Crassus’s cash began to do its work.

  Cicero reported to Atticus:

  Inside a couple of days, with a single slave (an ex-gladiator at that) for go-between, [Crassus] settled the whole business—called them to his house, made promises, backed bills or paid cash down. On top of that (it’s really too shocking!), some jurors actually received a bonus in the form of assignations with certain ladies or introductions to youths of noble families. Yet even so, with the [optimates] making themselves very scarce, 25 jurors had the courage to take the risk, no small one, preferring to sacrifice their lives rather than the whole community. AS for the other 31, they were more worried about their empty purses than their empty reputations.

  Clodius was acquitted, but he was a vindictive man and made up his mind to punish Cicero for having testified against him. For a while, though, nothing happened and Cicero could not help amusing himself at his expense. He liked to call him Pretty-Boy (making a play on his cognomen Pulcher, the Latin word for “beautiful”). There were a number of barbed exchanges at Senate meetings and elsewhere over the next year or so.

  “You bought a mansion,” Clodius sneered.

  “One might think he was saying I had bought a jury,” Cicero riposted.

  On another occasion, the two men happened to be taking a candidate for political office down to the Forum together and entered into conversation. Clodius asked if Cicero was in the habit of giving Sicilians who were in his clientela seats at gladiatorial shows. Cicero said he was not.

  “Ah,” replied Clodius. “But I’m a new patron of theirs and I’m going to institute the practice. But my sister, with all that free space at her disposal as an ex-Consul’s wife, only gives me one wretched foot.”

  Unable to resist referring to the gossip about their relationship, Cicero remarked: “Oh, don’t grumble about one foot in your sister’s case. You can always hoist the other.”

  This kind of jibe was not overlooked. AS SO often in his career, Cicero let his sense of humor do serious damage to his prospects.

  Sometime towards the end of 62 or perhaps in early 61, Pompey returned to Italy after nearly six years of campaigning. He had swept the seas clear of pirates, the war against Mithridates, King of Pontus, had been won, and Syria from the Euphrates to the frontiers of Egypt had been annexed to the Empire. Trade with Asia Minor could now resume and money flooded back into Rome.

  Pompey was an able rather than a great general, but he was an administrator of the first order. The campaign against Mithridates had been long and hard fought, for the king was a wily foe. Hostilities opened after he invaded Bithynia, a new Roman province, thirteen years previously. When Pompey arrived to take over command of the Roman forces in the east from his able predecessor, Lucullus, he found that final victory was close at hand. The groundwork had been done for him and he had only to stamp out the final flames of resistance. Pompey persuaded the King of Parthia to invade Armenia, which was ruled by an ally of Mithridates, while he himself marched into the enemy’s homeland, Pontus. With overwhelming superiority of numbers, the Romans won a crushing victory.

  The indomitable old king tried to keep going, seized the territories of a treacherous son, raised fresh troops and meditated an invasion of Italy. But his much put-upon subjects had had enough and revolts ensued. The great game was finally over. Holed up inside a remote citadel, Mithridates tried to poison himself, without success thanks to the physical immunity he ha
d laboriously built up, and was forced to get a slave to stab him.

  After some mopping-up operations, Pompey marched south to deal with a civil war in Palestine and visited the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. He dreamed of advancing Roman arms to the Red Sea, but when the news of Mithridates’ death reached him he moved from military to organizational matters. His task was to reorder the eastern empire in such a way that its long-term security was assured. His settlement of the eastern provinces was so well judged that it was to remain in place mostly unchanged until the next century. A chain of directly governed Roman provinces was established along the Mediterranean seaboard, stretching from Pontus in the Black Sea to Syria in the south. Their eastern frontiers were protected by a series of quasi-independent kingdoms which were allowed to manage their internal affairs without interference but whose foreign policy was in Roman hands.

  Pompey was only forty-four years old, but it must have seemed to him that there was little left in life for him to do. AS soon as he landed at Brundisium he disbanded his forces, much to everyone’s relief. The sight of the famous general traveling unarmed and in the company of only a few friends, “as if he were coming back from a foreign holiday” (as Plutarch put it), made a huge impression on public opinion. On his leisurely journey along the Via Appia to Rome, where he arrived in February, large crowds came out to watch him pass by.

  He felt no need to establish a military autocracy, as some had feared, for he was self-evidently the first man in Rome. But the Senate, envious of his preeminence, could not see that he was at heart a conservative and had no desire for monarchical powers. In any case, if he did ever come under threat, he knew that he had the public support, as well as the financial resources, to raise a new army.

  Pompey had two main aims in mind. The first was to persuade the Senate to ratify his eastern settlement, and the second was to arrange for a land-distribution law, which would grant farms to his veterans. His attempted deployment of Metellus Nepos showed that he foresaw trouble and, without making his views entirely clear, he positioned himself alongside the populares in order to gain leverage over the Senate.

  Cicero saw an opening. AS a distinguished backbencher in the Senate, he had influence rather than power, but he was still in a position to guide change. His aim as ever was to get the constitution to work better. This could be achieved only by persuading the different interest groups—the aristocracy with its stranglehold over the Senate, the equites with their commercial concerns and the People (and that meant, to all intents and purposes, the urban masses)—to work together more cooperatively. At present things were badly out of balance. The populares were constantly on the attack and the optimates refused, blindly, to have anything to do with them.

  If Cicero could only find a way of drawing Pompey towards the conservative cause and detaching him from the radicals, the ship of state might return to an even keel. This would mean gaining the general’s confidence. The going was more difficult than he expected. Cicero sent Pompey a long self-congratulatory letter about his Consulship during the general’s journey home but received only a perfunctory reply. Cicero’s boastfulness irritated Pompey and, more to the point, he knew that the orator had no real power base.

  Cicero saw he was making little progress and began to lose heart. On January 25 he gave Atticus a telling description of Pompey’s character: “He professes the highest regard for me and makes a parade of warm affection, praising on the surface while below it, well, not so far below that it’s difficult to see, he’s jealous. Awkward, tortuous, politically paltry, shabby, timid, disingenuous—but I shall go into more detail on another occasion.”

  In fact, Pompey was privately considering a rapprochement with the Senate. He hinted at his intentions by divorcing his wife, Mucia. Whatever personal reasons there were for this (Plutarch tells us that she was widely whispered to have been unfaithful), it was a political act; for the two Metelli, her half-brothers, were prominent populares. To make sure that everyone understood the message that he was thinking of shifting his ground in the direction of the optimates, Pompey opened negotiations for the hand of Cato’s niece. However, the Senate’s unyielding and self-appointed conscience dismissed the idea out of hand, calling the offer a kind of bribery. This left Pompey awkwardly placed, having abandoned one faction and been rebuffed by the other. His return to civilian life was off to a bad start.

  “Life out of uniform can have the dangerous effect of weakening the reputation of famous generals,” Plutarch noted in his biography of Pompey. “They are poorly adapted to the equality of democratic politics. Such men claim the same precedence in civilian life that they enjoy on the battlefield.… So when people find a man with a brilliant military record playing an active part in public life they undermine and humiliate him. But if he renounces and withdraws from politics, they maintain his reputation and ability and no longer envy him.”

  The trouble was that Pompey was a poor political tactician and an uninspiring public speaker. He found the grubby business of politicking in the Forum distasteful and embarrassing. He tended not to express his intentions clearly and was criticized for being misleading or even hypocritical. Proud of his achievements, he wanted to receive without having to ask and had no real idea how to handle the Senate. Crassus remained jealous of him and did little to be helpful. Only Caesar seemed happy to give him any assistance, but his Praetorship was now over and he would soon be leaving for a governorship in Spain. He was as ever hugely in debt and creditors delayed his departure. He remarked dryly: “I need 25 million sesterces just to own nothing.”

  Soon after his arrival in Rome in early February 61, Pompey addressed a meeting of the Senate. He commented politely but noncommittally on the sacrilege scandal and said in general terms that he approved of the Senate’s decrees. He was given a poor reception. Cicero said the speech was a “frost.” AS for his own contribution to the debate, he was of the opinion that he had given a vintage performance, which, he confessed wryly to Atticus, contained more than a degree of self-parody.

  I brought the house down. And why not, on such a theme—the dignity of our order, concord between Senate and equites, unison of Italy, remnants of the conspiracy in their death throes, reduced price of grain, internal peace? You should know by now how I can boom away on such topics. I think you must have caught the reverberations in Epirus [Atticus was on his estate there], and for that reason I won’t dwell on the subject.

  For the time being Pompey proceeded with caution. He decided to leave his bid to secure ratification of his provincial settlement and land for his soldiers until the following year. In an effort to improve his chances, he laid out large sums of money to ensure the election as Consul of his supporter, Lucius Afranius, an unimpressive man who was known for little more than being a good dancer. (This probably meant that he performed publicly on the stage, an unrespectable activity for an upper-class Roman citizen.)

  In the autumn of 61 Pompey finally celebrated his Triumph. A Triumph was a victory procession awarded to generals after important campaigns. It was the most splendid ceremony in the Roman calendar. Pompey was celebrating not just victory over Mithridates and his campaigns in Armenia, Syria and Arabia, but also his subjugation of the Mediterranean pirates, and two days were set aside: September 28 and, his birthday, September 29.

  Temporary stands were set up in the Forum and at the city’s racecourses. Crowds of people, all wearing white clothes, filled them and any other vantage point they could find along the processional route. All the temples were opened to the public and were filled with flowers and incense. Lictors and other attendants did their best to hold onlookers back and keep the streets open and clear.

  The procession set off from outside the city, crossed the pomoerium and wound its way towards the center. At its head placards displayed the names of all the countries over which the great general was triumphing: Pontus, Armenia, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Media, Colchis (mythical home of Medea and the Golden Fleece), Iberia, Albania, Syri
a, Cilicia, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia and Palestine, Judaea and Arabia. They claimed that Pompey had captured no fewer than 1,000 fortified places, nearly 900 cities and 800 pirate ships; and had founded 39 new cities. Even more spectacular were the resources now flowing into the city. Inscriptions boasted that Rome’s tax revenues had jumped from 200 million sesterces every year to 340 million thanks to Pompey’s annexation of new territories. He was also bringing to the Treasury a vast quantity of coined money and gold and silver plate. Captured weapons, shields, armor, swords and spears were carried on wagons. There were trophies for every engagement in which Pompey or his lieutenants had been victorious. The polished bronze and steel would have glinted in the sunlight and clattered together, adding a counterpoint to the harsh military music of bands. The crowds would have wished to see Rome’s great bogeyman, Mithridates, in chains. His suicide had made that impossible, but in his place a monumental statue of the king was included in the parade.

  On the second day of the Triumph the most distinguished prisoners of war were put on show. This was one of the high points of the ceremony, with the packed citizenry booing the Republic’s humiliated enemies as they walked past only a few feet away. Five of Mithridates’ children were in the procession, and one of his sisters. They were accompanied by the King of Armenia’s wife and son and the King of the Jews, together with captured pirate chiefs. Following them came a huge portrait of Pompey fashioned from pearls.

  Finally, Pompey himself appeared in a gem-encrusted chariot; he had a wreath of bay leaves on his head and was dressed in a purple toga decorated with golden stars. A cloak belonging to Alexander the Great hung from his shoulders. His face was covered in red lead, for the victor was supposed to represent Jupiter, king of the gods. A slave also stood in the chariot and whispered in his ear: “Remember that you are human.” Behind the chariot marched columns of soldiers who held sprays of laurel and chanted triumphal songs: they also sang, by ancient tradition, obscene lyrics satirizing their general.