A Pillar of Iron

by Taylor Caldwell

  He received a letter from Noë ben Joel from Jerusalem. Noë was now a gray-bearded grandfather several times over. “The wise men in the gates tell me that ‘something has moved’ in Heaven, but what it is and what it portends they do not say,” Noë wrote. “But they are soberly excited. They examine portents. They discuss matters in private with the priests. Has something quickened along the blood of the House of David, as prophesied? Has the Mother of the Messias been born, or He, Himself? Surely not as yet, say the wise men, for there has been no sound of trumpets from the battlements in the sky. They forget the prophesies of Isaias.

  “I have seen our old friend, Roscius, in the Temple, clad in coarse linen and walking in rope sandals. He does not know me, so ascetic and so far in mind has he become. But as each young mother brings her man-child into the Temple to offer him to the Lord, he peers at the face of the infant, then turns away with sadness and disappointment, muttering in his beard, ‘No, it is not He.’ Roscius, the great Roman actor, beloved of the ladies, applauded by all Romans, rich, effete, embroidered, gilded, is not recognizable in this silent old man who sweeps the Temple floors and cleans the chambers for his bread, and awaits the Messias as he has been promised—so he says—by God.”

  It came to Marcus, reading this letter, that he had not thought of the Messias of the Jews for a long time, so fearful had been the pressure upon him, the exigency of bloody events. It was hard to think of Him in Rome. It was easier in the golden peace of the island. If He ever, indeed, were born, surely He would come to the countryside or a little hamlet, and never to a roaring city. Marcus thought of what Socrates had said, that the ideal habitat for men was a village, surrounded by fields and forests, and never a great city where men could not think among the press of multitudes of other minds. “Out of cities grows confusion, madness, disordered imaginings, grotesque forms, perversions, excitements, fevers, mindless currents of men, upheavals, vehemences. But in the small hamlets, in the land, thoughts grow large and steadfast and philosophy can flourish as the vine and produce the fruit that gives exhilaration to the thoughts of men.”

  It was quite true. Small villages and the countryside, gave birth to the Cincinnatus. Rome gave birth to the men Crassus and Catilina, and the Caesars. The bedrooms of the rural places bred men. The chambers of the cities bred sterile perversions. Athens, that small city, produced Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and all the sciences. But Rome produced the ambitious.

  It was with regret that Marcus had to leave for Rome again, where once he had felt the excitement of life and felt it no longer.

  It was a seemingly ridiculous thing, considering the character of the lady, but Marcus as Consul of Rome and therefore the guardian of its proclaimed morals, was forced to prosecute Publius Clodius, surnamed Pulcher, for adultery with Pompeia, Caesar’s wife. He and the lady had been caught in “flagrant behavior” by Aurelia, Julius’ mother, in Caesar’s very house. It was even more ridiculous, in view of the debased morality of the Roman people in general. But Marcus knew that the more depraved a people the more their public indignation against immorality.

  He consulted Julius who expressed his tremendous hurt. Marcus said to him cynically, “Come now, Julius. Pompeia’s conduct has never been exemplary. Who is it you wish to marry this time?”

  Julius smiled and raised his eyebrows. “None, dear friend. I wish only to divorce Pompeia. I do not intend to appear as a witness against her. But the wife of Caesar must not be a public scandal.”

  Marcus mused, his eyes fixed on Julius’ antic face, “Has Clodius become dangerous to you, with his own ambitions.”

  “What nonsense!” cried Julius. “What is Clodius to me? He is only a tribune of the people! Did I not assist him in his small ambition? Yet he betrayed me.”

  “He has powerful friends who do not love you, Julius. By the way, it is very amusing to me to hear you speak of ‘betrayal.’ It is as if a thieving dog complained of another dog who had stolen his bone. What great household, which contains pretty women, has not been victimized by yourself?”

  But Caesar only laughed. He said to Marcus before leaving, “I have asked you this before, and each time you have refused. Join Crassus and me. We have mighty plans for the future. Consider. I love you. I should like you as one of us.”

  “Never,” said Marcus. “I must live with myself.” He studied his old friend. “There is a saying of the Greeks, that if a man is dangerous induce him to join you and thus disarm him.”

  But Julius suddenly became grave. “I shall not ask you again, dear comrade. Therefore, reflect.”

  After he had gone Marcus considered his words with alarm. Despite the fresh hostility of the Senate against him, and the growing and bitter rage of the patricians because of Marcus’ vengeance on many of their relatives, he had not believed himself in much danger of assassination. Catilina was dead, and most of the conspirators with him. Yet Julius’ black eyes had contained a deadly and ominous warning. Terentia, too, never refrained from hinting that her husband was in great disfavor among influential people. “You listen to no one,” she complained. “But I hear murmurs and rumors. Unless you conciliate you are lost.”

  She was not alone in her alarms. Many of Cicero’s friends hinted of these things. He could not force them to concrete statements. They evaded, yet they were strong in their opinions and warnings. Some even suggested that Marcus leave Rome for a time at the end of his Consulship. Many suggested he not testify against Clodius. On the other hand other friends urged that the prosecution be pursued, for the scandal had had an astonishing impact on the Roman people. “Besides,” said the friends, “Caesar wishes a divorce, and Caesar is very powerful.”

  “It was a shameful affair,” said some friends. “Not only did Clodius commit adultery with Pompeia, but he committed a sacrilege against the gods, and the gods,” said the friends smiling widely, “must never be insulted. That is a crime the people will not permit.”

  “Especially in a nation which does not believe in the gods,” said Marcus. “What, in truth, did Clodius do that is so heinous, considering the public reputation of the lady involved? He invaded the house of Julius Caesar during the female pious celebrations when no man must be present, and he wore female garments in order to gain entry. Thousands of Romans find that risible. But Caesar wishes to divorce his wife and has seized on this infamy as an excuse. However, I must prosecute Clodius to appease many factions, not to mention public opinion, which is no honest opinion at all.”

  On such shameful and insignificant matters can a man’s life be ruined or lost. Cicero wrote later, “It is one thing for a man to be defeated by a powerful and significant foe. It is quite another for him to die of the bite of a bedbug.”

  He had begun to lose favor even with the people of Rome who had but recently hailed him as savior. They, who had cared nothing for the law for endless years, suddenly became much aware of it (as taught them by secret mentors) and declared that Catilina had not been tried by a jury of his peers, in accordance with the Constitution, but had in truth been “ignobly assassinated by the armies of Cicero.” It was useless for Cicero’s friends to point out that Catilina had fled Rome, had not chosen to demand a trial before the proper magistrates, and had gathered up an army of his own to attack the city. Those who did not use the word “assassination” preferred an exercise in semantics and called Catilina’s death on the battlefield “summary execution,” and without any basis in known knowledge accused Quintus of the actual “execution.” “Men prefer to believe ill of men rather than the truth,” urged Cicero’s friends. But the planned indignation of the people only grew more vociferous. Many affected to be wounded by the executions of Catilina’s lieutenants and Cicero shrewdly guessed that young Mark Antony was the instigator. There was much talk that Cicero had violated the Bill of Rights, had suspended it, and that the lieutenants, too, should have been granted a trial by jury. It was all the more onerous to Cicero because he had to admit, privately, that the law demanded such a trial. Bu
t he had feared that during the slow measured dance of the trials Catilina would have led his followers to riot and thrown the city into chaos.

  “Join us,” said Crassus to Cicero, who only smiled coldly and did not reply. “Join us,” said Pompey, who had saved his life. Marcus looked at him curiously. “Why?” he asked. But Pompey merely colored with discomfort and left him. Marcus was more disagreeably disturbed by the fact that Pompey had urged him also than he had been at the urgings of Crassus and Caesar, whom he mistrusted with all his heart. He had come to feel a deep affection for Pompey, despite the fact that Pompey was in all ways the full portrait of the military man, the class which Cicero chronically regarded with apprehension. His troubles mounted, as the day of Clodius’ trial for sacrilege approached. He castigated himself for ever taking the affair seriously though he knew that the state religion, being an arm of the government, helped to keep the people in order. The aristocrats might laugh privately at Clodius’ exploits, but they knew that should the people ever come to consider that their rulers took religion lightly they would, inevitably, begin to take government lightly also, and chaos would result. So the “Good Goddess”* affair was pressed upon Cicero by the patricians, against Clodius who was also a patrician. He remanded Clodius for trial.

  He then wrote his famous frank letter to his publisher, Atticus, which was to fall later into the hands of his enemies among the patricians and the Senate: “In the challenges laid forth by both sides the prosecution magistrates, whom I had appointed for the trial, rejected the least valuable, but the defense rejected all the best men! There was never so disheveled a group around a table in a gambling house, Senators under suspicion, businessmen of the shabbiest and least solvent kind and known manipulators, to speak more kindly than necessary. A few honest men were there, also, who were obviously disgusted at being associated with such scoundrels.”

  Clodius, of course, pleaded not guilty. His witness swore that on the night of the women’s religious festival in Caesar’s house Clodius had been with him in the country. Angrily, then, Cicero called Julius as a witness, in behalf of his mother, Aurelia, who had originally made the complaint. Caesar emphatically declared that he knew nothing personally of the case. The prosecutor then asked him mildly why, under those circumstances, he had divorced Pompeia. To which he made his bland reply, which was to become famous: “My wife must be above the slightest suspicion.” At this Cicero gazed at him with disgust.

  Hardly suppressed laughter ran over the courtroom. Then Cicero, his anger growing at this comedy, was called as a witness for the prosecution. He testified that he, himself, had seen Clodius in Rome barely three hours before the ceremonies for the Good Goddess in Caesar’s house; therefore, Clodius could not have been ninety miles away as he and his witness had sworn.

  To his incredulous horror the jury voted that Clodius was not guilty, by a vote of thirty-three to twenty-five. There could be only one answer to this: The jury had been corrupted, just as Caesar had been induced, no doubt by Crassus, not to press the case against Clodius. “I am truly a simple man,” he wrote in his letter to Atticus. “I do not do well among subtle men whose every move and every word confuses me, who at one moment demand something and in the next demand that their demand not be heeded. When such scum as that jury could pretend to believe that something which had happened had not truly happened then the law is completely undermined, and without law the Republic is lost.” He added that the whole affair had been political and who could understand the machinations of born and devious politicians?

  He knew only one thing with surety: He had made a most formidable enemy of Clodius. Once Clodius met him in public and taunted him: “The jurors did not trust you on your oath.” To which Cicero replied with great anger, “Yes, twenty-five jurors believed me. Thirty believed you, after they had taken your money in advance.” At this all present laughed at Clodius, who could jest happily at others but could not endure jests against himself.

  On another occasion Cicero said bitterly to Caesar, “You urged me to testify against Clodius. Then, when you were called as witness you alleged not to know anything of the infamous affair, which I had not wished to prosecute from the very beginning.”

  “My dear Marcus,” said Julius with indulgence, “it is possible I changed my mind.”

  At the end of his term as Consul, Cicero prepared to address the people of Rome as was customary, from the Rostra. But one of the new tribunes, Caecilius Metellus Nepos, challenged Cicero, declaring that he was extremely audacious in wishing to make a speech covering his discharge of duties while Consul, alleging that a man who had asked for the death of Roman citizens without a trial before a jury of their peers ought not to be permitted to speak to Romans.

  “I saved Rome,” Cicero said. “Is that my crime, that I, a retiring Consul, should be challenged by an inferior in office?” At this the listening people, suddenly remembering that he had spoken justly, raised a great shout: “You have spoken true!” It was the last public applause he was to receive with the same sincerity and the same faith.

  As a retiring Consul he was entitled to the best choice of a province over which to be governor. At that time Macedonia was considered the most agreeable. But he remembered the services Antonius Hybrida had done him and assigned the governorship to the young patrician. Then in his magnanimity, he assigned the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul to Metellus Celer, the brother of the very tribune who had challenged him at the Rostra—Metellus Nepos, recalling the gallant action of the soldier in preventing Catilina from escaping via Faesulae. But the tribune openly sneered, “He seeks to cosset favor with me.”

  “I meet enemies wherever I turn,” Cicero complained to his friends. “There appears to be a plot to disgrace and defame me, but who is the instigator I do not know.”

  He had thought himself free from the malice of those who had benefitted from his kindness and generosity. But scandalous reports soon reached him to the effect that his former colleague, Antonius, was guilty of oppression and extortion in the province of Macedonia. He refused to believe this of Antonius, who was rich in his own right. He received a letter from Antonius urgently informing him that he was to be recalled from Macedonia to stand trial and requesting that “my old dear friend, Cicero,” defend him before the courts. Marcus wrote him a warm and reassuring letter, which Antonius intelligently retained. Marcus, before the arrival in Rome of his former colleague, prepared the case in defense, and he was filled with the kindliest and most affectionate feelings. Publicly, he declared that the whole accusation was absurd, for was not Antonius as close to him as a brother? This was remembered intact.

  Then another report reached Cicero which stupefied him. Antonius had written to friends in the Senate that Cicero had commanded him, before leaving for Macedonia, to share with him what spoils he could plunder from the province! This was so not in character with his memory of Antonius, and his honor, that at first he did not believe it and was enraged when it was told him. He was then shown a letter from Antonius, himself, written to a Senator, in which Antonius had written that Cicero’s former freedman, Hilarus, now employed by Antonius, had been sent by Cicero into Macedonia to gather the moneys from the robbery of the province. It was most evident that Antonius had not intended his letters to be read by anyone but his friends, but the malice of the Senators compelled them to make the letters public. In the meantime, Antonius was writing his old colleague lovingly thanking him for his acceptance of the defense. It was even more evident to the besieged Cicero that Antonius hoped to implicate him and thus escape a great measure of guilt himself, for would not Cicero be defending him?

  “He is mad,” said Cicero. “He has lost his mind. He is not the man I knew.”

  “My dear Marcus,” said Julius, “I have told you often: No man is ever the man we know. Antonius, though rich, has a normal lust for larceny, which heretofore had not manifested itself. Too, I have heard that many of his investments in Rome have failed.”

  “I shall never understa
nd human nature!” Marcus cried in despair. He withdrew from the defense of Antonius and trusted few men again. Besieged from without his house, and beleaguered from within, he sometimes thought of death. He wrote to Noë ben Joel: “I have filled my letters with lamentations, dear friend. Be sure I do not complain without reason, for what I have written to you is an understatement rather than an extravagance. I feel the creeping tides of dishonor lapping my feet, nay, my very knees! Under such circumstances it is expected that in indignation a Roman challenge his enemies. But I cannot discover and face them! It is all rumor, all malevolence, all whispers, all tittle-tattle, all malignity. Should I unearth my enemies I should sue them thoroughly for libel—but they do not reveal themselves. Therefore, I must keep silent, or write pages of denunciation and fall upon my sword—if I can find it.

  “You have often mentioned that suicide is man’s greatest crime against God, for it implies that a man does not trust his Creator or denies His existence. My reason tells me the latter is absurd; we have the earth as His witness, and the heavens above, and the vast orderliness of all creation, and its manifest laws. Law does not exist without a lawgiver, as we have often affirmed. Nevertheless, how can I trust God? I am deeply afflicted and have done no harm but have, in my limited way, done much good. I have saved my country; I have been faithful to my duties; I have shown mercy, and have been loyal to my friends and magnanimous to my enemies. At the last, I swear to you I should have intervened even to save Catilina, had he shown the slightest penitence or desire to reform—all this despite my love for Livia and, my natural hatred for her murderer and my vow to avenge her.