Cicero

by Anthony Everitt

  Appian, writing in the second century AD, has it that Antony spoke with passion about the dead man’s achievements and criticized the recent amnesty for the assassins. Standing close to the bier as though he were on stage, he hitched up his toga to free his hands. He bent over the body and, swept by emotion, pulled off Caesar’s gown, bloodstained and torn, and waved it about on a pole. Choirs then sang formal dirges, again stating the dead man’s achievements and bewailing his fate. At some point in these lamentations Caesar was imagined as listing by name those enemies of his whom he had helped and saying in amazement: “To think I saved the lives of the people who were to be my murderers.”

  It is possible that in their memory of this extraordinary day people mixed up the contents of Antony’s opening presentation and the dirges. It was not obviously to the Consul’s advantage to foment general disorder and Suetonius’s account may be the right one. Whatever the truth of the matter, the ceremony made a tremendous impact on the crowd. The climax came when a wax effigy of Caesar (the corpse itself was lying out of sight on the bier) was lifted up. It was turned around in all directions by a mechanical device and twenty-three wounds could be seen, on every part of the body and on the face.

  This was too much for many to bear. In a repetition of the outpouring of grief and rage at the death of Clodius, the mob went berserk. They burned down the Senate House, not long rebuilt after its previous incineration. Furniture and wood were pulled out of shops to create an impromptu pyre in the Forum not far from the Temple of the Castors. Musicians and performers who had been hired for the funeral threw their costumes onto it. It was reported that two young men with swords and javelins lit the pyre and subsequent mythmaking or ingenious stage management on the day suggested they were the divine brothers Castor and Pollux, who had a legendary record of guarding over Rome and making an appearance at moments of crisis. Caesar was cremated then and there.

  It is hard to believe that whoever designed the funeral ceremony was unaware of the effect it was likely to have. If Antony was not responsible, it must have been Caesar’s family, perhaps advised by his clever aides, Balbus and Oppius. After all, it was in their interest to subvert the attempts by Republicans and moderate Caesarians to create a peaceful transition to a new political order.

  The conspirators realized it was impossible for them to remain in Rome and withdrew to their country estates. This left Antony master of the situation. He acted with restraint, discouraged an unofficial cult of Caesar and was deferential to leading Senators. A well-received law was passed abolishing the office of Dictator. Antony was scrupulously polite to Cicero, who in early April decided that he was “more concerned about the composition of his menus than about planning any mischief.”

  This was a misjudgment of the situation, for the Consul was still intent on securing his power base. To this end he used Caesar’s papers for his own purposes, forging documents to reward his supporters and enrich himself. His main aim was to ensure that the compromise settlement of March 17 stuck. The main threat to him lay in the future behavior of the conspirators when they went abroad to take over their allotted provinces and armies. Decimus Brutus, soon to set off for Italian Gaul, already looked threatening and in the summer two other conspirators left for commands in Asia Minor.

  In some ways Cicero found himself in the same uncomfortable position that he had been in at the beginning of the civil war. This time, though, he had absolutely no doubt whose side he was on and had no intention of putting himself forward as mediator again. However, there was a problem of competence. He admired the conspirators for their heroism on the Ides of March but felt that everything they had done afterwards had been ill-conceived and poorly planned. He believed that Antony’s venality and willingness to act arbitrarily was the prelude to a new autocracy. Realizing that he was not being taken seriously, he became cross with everybody and left the city. He confessed wryly to Atticus that he ought to reread his own essay On Growing Old. “Advancing years are making me cantankerous,” he remarked in May. “Everything annoys me. But I have had my time. Let the young ones worry.”

  Cicero kept restlessly on the move from one villa to another, often sleeping in one place for only one night. He wrote to Atticus almost every day. He also seems to have revised the savage Secret History he had started working on in 59, in the bitter aftermath of his Consulship.

  Marcus was getting on reasonably well in Athens. Atticus, presumably in Greece, was helping out with his cash flow. The boy was poor at keeping in touch, but when in June he did eventually write home his father was pleased to see that his literary style showed signs of improvement. Meanwhile, Quintus fell out with his son and was having difficulty repaying Pomponia’s dowry. Young Quintus was as politically unsatisfactory as ever, having now attached himself to Antony.

  Balbus and Hirtius took care to keep in touch with Cicero. He received a very civil letter from Antony asking him to agree to the recall of one of Clodius’s followers from exile; this unpleasant reminder of the past annoyed him, but he made no objection. He was delighted when “my wonderful Dolabella” put down some pro-Caesar riots and demolished a commemorative pillar and altar where the Dictator had been cremated in the Forum. An agitator, falsely claiming to be Marius’s grandson, was arrested and executed.

  Cicero noted the hurried departure of Cleopatra from Rome. “The Queen’s flight does not distress me,” he wrote coolly. Well endowed with regal ways, Cleopatra appears not to have been a popular figure in Rome, and the death of her protector meant that there was nothing left to keep her in Italy. She may have hoped that Caesar would have recognized their son, but there had been no mention of Caesarion in his will. This may have been a disappointment, but at least she was able to leave with a renewed treaty of friendship between Rome and Egypt.

  A month later, on May 11 Cicero noted cryptically: “I hope it’s true about the Queen and that Caesar of hers.” A week or so later, he made further references to some rumor about her. It is hard to know what to make of this, but it has been conjectured that Cleopatra had become pregnant a second time and that she had been reported to have miscarried on the journey home. “That Caesar” would have been a dismissive reference to the dead fetus.

  Towards the end of April Caesar’s youthful heir arrived in Italy. Octavian had been born during Cicero’s Consulship in 63 and came from a respectable provincial family in the country town of Velitrae in the Alban Hills south of Rome. His ambitious father had married Atia, Caesar’s niece, but he had died when Octavian was four. The widowed Atia had married again, choosing Lucius Marcius Philippus, who was Consul in 56.

  Octavian grew up to be a short, slight, attractive young man with curly yellowish hair and clear, bright eyes. A weakness in his left leg sometimes gave him the appearance of having a limp. His health was delicate, but he was an industrious student. Although he had a gift for speaking extempore, he worked hard at improving his rhetorical technique.

  In 45, despite being in a state of semiconvalescence after a serious illness, Octavian had followed Caesar to Spain, where he was fighting the last campaign of the civil war. After surviving a shipwreck, he had traveled with a small escort along roads held by the enemy. His great-uncle had been delighted and impressed by his energy and formed a high estimation of his character. Doubtless this was why he had decided to make the boy his heir.

  After the battle of Munda, Octavian had been sent to the coastal town of Apollonia, across the Adriatic Sea in Macedonia. Caesar wanted him on the Parthian campaign and told him to wait there with the assembled legions until he joined them. In the meantime he was to pursue his education and receive military training.

  When the terrible news arrived in Apollonia, Octavian’s first nervous instinct was to stay with the army, whose senior officers offered to look after him. But his mother and stepfather suggested that it would be safer if he came quietly and without fuss to Rome. Shortly afterwards Octavian was informed of his dangerous inheritance. His family thought he should renounce it,
but he disagreed. Crossing the sea to Brundisium, he made contact with the troops there, who received him enthusiastically as Caesar’s son. He decided, as instructed, to assume his great-uncle’s name. He liked to be addressed as Caesar, although this was not to his stepfather Philippus’s liking, and for a time Cicero insisted on calling him Octavius and later by his cognomen after adoption, Octavianus.

  In taking these actions, Octavian was publicly asserting himself as the Dictator’s political, not merely personal, heir. He felt able to do so because he realized that Antony’s compromise settlement with the Senate did not take the feelings of the army into full account. It was a remarkably bold step and calls for explanation. IS it reasonable to believe that an inexperienced teenager would have seized the initiative in this way without prompting? It is of course a possibility, for his later career revealed very considerable political ability. It is much more plausible, however, that Balbus and other members of the Dictator’s staff, disenchanted with Antony’s policy of reconciliation, judged that the young man, carefully handled and advised, was well placed to assume the leadership of the Caesarian cause. The boy would be a focus for the simmering resentments among the Roman masses, the disbanded veterans and the standing legions, and that Antonius would be outmaneuvered and put on the defensive.

  The long-term plan, shadowy in outline at this stage and not publicly emphasized, would be to turn the tables on the conspirators and take revenge for the assassination. What the Caesarians had in mind was, in essence, a plot to overthrow a restored Republic. When Caesar foresaw that a new civil war would break out if he was removed from the scene, he can hardly have guessed that it would be his heir who fulfilled his prediction.

  On his journey north from Brundisium, Octavian was welcomed by large numbers of people, many of them soldiers or the Dictator’s former slaves and freedmen. Perhaps some of these demonstrations on the road were engineered, but they revealed a deep well of support for the young pretender. In Naples he was met by Balbus and went on to his stepfather’s villa at Puteoli. Cicero happened to be on hand when he arrived, for Philippus was his neighbor. (It was at their two villas that they had entertained Caesar the previous December.) Always prone to like young men and take them under his wing, Cicero may have been tempted by the prospect of another protégé to groom. On the following day he received a visit from Octavian and, writing to Atticus in his presence, insisted that gratified vanity did not mean he had been taken in. “Octavian is with me here—most respectful and friendly,” he noted. “My judgment is that he cannot be a good citizen. There are too many around him. They threaten death to our friends and call the present state of affairs intolerable.… I long to be away.”

  During recent weeks Cicero had been thinking of leaving the country for a few months and he arranged for a special leave of absence from the Consuls. He intended to be in Rome for a Senate meeting on June 1 but afterwards there would be no reason to linger. His idea was to go to his beloved Athens and check in person how Marcus was getting along.

  Young Octavian’s appearance on the scene turned the political situation on its head. His growing popularity with the army and the Roman masses had the effect, as intended, of detaching Antony from the Senate, for it compelled him to outbid his new rival as a loyal supporter of Caesar’s memory. This in turn meant that Brutus’s and Cassius’s strategy of sitting around quietly in their country houses, on the assumption that politics were gradually returning to normal, was pointless. All sums had to be recalculated.

  For the time being the newcomer was little more than a nuisance and the Consul called him dismissively a “boy who owes everything to his name.” However, the popularity of that name in the army and among the urban masses soon made him a force to be reckoned with. If he meant to remain at the head of affairs, Antony would sooner or later be driven to align himself against the constitutionalists (and so fulfill Cicero’s originally misplaced suspicions). To begin with, though, he bided his time.

  When Octavian asked Antony to make over the moneys promised in the Dictator’s will so that he could pay out the various bequests, the Consul coolly responded that the funds belonged to the state and had, in any event, been spent. With a sharp eye on public relations, Octavian simply raised the necessary funds from his family and by loans.

  The atmosphere in Rome grew tense and uneasy. Antony’s popularity slid and he enlisted the services of veterans to keep public order. The Consuls, who had been squabbling, were now friends, for Dolabella, bribed (or so Cicero thought) by Antony, had changed sides and abandoned the constitutionalists. They had already dispossessed Brutus and Cassius of their original provincial allocations, with Antony taking over Macedonia and Dolabella Syria. But this was no longer enough for Antony, who decided that it was time to tackle Decimus Brutus head-on in Italian Gaul. With the help of the General Assembly, Antony engineered a further switch of his Consular province from Macedonia (taking the army there with him) to the two Gauls. This was an unusual maneuver, for according to convention it was the Senate that decided provincial appointments, and the move was seen as a blatant attempt to undermine Decimus Brutus. A land-distribution bill was also passed, which would please the demobilized soldiery. In place of their original provincial commands, Brutus and Cassius were given insultingly unimportant commissions to purchase corn, respectively, in Asia and Sicily.

  Many moderates in the Caesarian camp, including the following year’s Consuls-elect Hirtius and Caius Vibius Pansa Caetronianus, now agreed with Cicero that open hostilities were approaching. They did their best to stop the main players from provocations. When Hirtius heard that Brutus and Cassius were thinking of leaving Italy, to raise troops he suspected, he sent Cicero a desperate appeal to try to prevent them. “Hold them back, Cicero, I beg you, and don’t let our society go down to ruin; for I swear it will be turned upside down in an orgy of looting, arson and massacre.”

  The conspirators’ position was becoming increasingly uncomfortable and a conference was called in Antium to consider the situation. Cicero was invited to attend. He gave Atticus a long description of what was said. Those present included Brutus and Cassius, together with their wives. Brutus’s mother and Julius Caesar’s onetime lover, Servilia, was also in attendance. For many years this well-connected and astute matriarch had been an influential figure in Roman politics behind the scenes, and she was still in a position to pull strings when necessary.

  Without revealing his source, Cicero passed on Hirtius’s advice that Brutus should not leave Italy. A general conversation followed, full of recriminations about lost opportunities. Cicero remarked that he agreed with what was being said, but there was no point in crying over spilled milk. He then launched into a reprise of all his familiar views (“nothing original, only what everyone is saying all the time”): Antony should have been killed alongside Julius Caesar, the Senate should have met immediately after the assassination and so forth. He was doing exactly what he had just criticized the others for, and no doubt at much greater length. Servilia lost her temper. “Really, I’ve never heard anything like it!” This silenced Cicero and the gathering went on to debate, with little success, what should be done next. The only firm decision taken was that the official Games, which Brutus was financing in his capacity as Praetor, should go ahead in his absence. Servilia promised to use her good offices to get the corn commissions revoked.

  “Nothing in my visit gave me any satisfaction except the consciousness of having made it,” Cicero concluded. “I found the ship going to pieces, or rather its scattered fragments. No plan, no thought, no method. AS a result, though I had doubts before, I am now all the more determined to escape from here, and as soon as I possibly can.”

  It would have been out of character if he had not delayed acting on his decision, and for the next month he nervously pondered the best route to take. The Macedonian legions being brought back to Italy by Antony would land at Brundisium, so he had better avoid the place. He worried that people might blame him for running aw
ay, but if he promised to return for the new year when Antony’s Consulship would have finally ended, surely that would pacify his critics? Brutus had, after all, decided to leave the country and perhaps he would allow Cicero to accompany him. (In fact, he was not very enthusiastic.)

  Despite his anxieties, Cicero insisted to Atticus that his underlying frame of mind was firm. He attributed his calmness to the “armor-proofing” of philosophy and it is evidence of Cicero’s creativity that he continued producing a flood of books and essays, including his treatise for Marcus, Duties. He monitored Octavian’s activities with interest and suspicion. “Octavian, as I perceived, does not lack intelligence or spirit,” he remarked to Atticus in June. “But how much faith to put in one of his years and name and heredity and education—that’s a great question.… Still, he is to be encouraged and, if nothing else, kept away from Antony.”

  He found it shocking that Brutus’s Games were advertised for “July,” the new name in honor of Julius Caesar that had replaced the month of Quintilis. The Republican Sextus Pompey, who had survived the disaster at Munda, was running a fairly successful guerrilla war in Spain and it was thought he might march his forces to Italy against Antony. If he turned up, it would create an awkward dilemma for Cicero, for there would be no mercy for neutrals this time around. It may have come as a relief when news arrived later that Sextus Pompey had come to terms with an army led by Lepidus, the Dictator’s onetime Master of the Horse.

  On the domestic front, young Quintus wanted to get back into Cicero’s good books. He claimed to have quarreled with Antony and to have decided to switch his allegiance to Brutus. Cicero did not believe a word of it. He asked Atticus: “How much longer are we going to be fooled?” More credibly, Quintus had apparently used his father’s name without permission in some dubious financial transaction. (It may well be that shortage of funds was behind much of his political maneuvering and his efforts to regain his family’s confidence.) He was still wife hunting and had found a possible candidate. His uncle was unimpressed: “I suspect he’s romancing as usual.”