A Pillar of Iron

by Taylor Caldwell

  His seat in the Senate demanded many expenditures, to which Terentia contributed nothing. She was careful with every penny, saving her fortune for her beloved son. In the meantime she continued to complain that the Alexandrian glass in the house was far inferior to that of the past and appeared to believe that Cicero was personally responsible. She chose the furniture and grumbled that the amounts set by her husband for it were too low. She protested that the gardens he planned were too extravagant; she preferred two thicknesses of Persian carpets on the marble floors of the interior. Very often these days she bewailed Cicero’s former “imprudence,” that misfortune had come to him. To escape her voice and her presence Cicero spent his leisure hours in his daughter’s apartments, or played with his son and imagined that young Marcus’ every prattling word was imbued with an occult wisdom.

  After the Saturnalia, which was a disordered celebration due to the activities of Clodius’ mobs, Quintus departed for Sardinia as one of Pompey’s fifteen lieutenants. He was to act as grain commissioner and to govern that tumultuous island. But before Quintus left he had a serious talk with his beloved brother. It began when Cicero remarked that nothing had changed in Rome, that he seemed to be living a perpetual nightmare, that Clodius had replaced Catilina, and that Caesar was truly the most dangerous man in the Triumvirate. Quintus smiled his rosy smile. “It is said of Caesar, among soldiers, that he is every woman’s husband and every man’s wife,” he said. “Yet it must be admitted that he is a military genius, one of the greatest Rome has ever known, and I say that who never liked or trusted him. He is writing a book about his Gallic campaigns and your own publisher is to publish it. I agree with you that he is dangerous to Rome. But I remember your exile and your suffering. Therefore I say to you: Accept the decree of the Fates. Rome is lost. We shall never see the Republic again. Compose your soul. Be resigned. Turn your energy to investments and to peace, to your library and your law and your books. Seek pleasures where you never sought them before. Acquire a beauteous mistress who will beguile you. Dine pleasantly; drink good wine. Visit friends. In short, live as do the majority of your friends and forget that Rome can be saved from the Caesars.”

  “That is supine, Quintus. Once you did not think so.”

  “True. But now I have discovered that it is useless to attempt to interrupt the Fates. I do my work as a soldier with all my might; I obey orders. I love life. I have always been of a lustier spirit than you, Marcus. You are a philosopher and I have noted that philosophers are not comforted by their philosophy. They are unhappy men. Better it is not to stare too fixedly at life, but to enjoy what it has to give and to shrug off its more dismal aspects.”

  “I prefer to end as a man, and not a surfeited animal,” said Cicero with unusual anger. “We have a greater destiny than that of a beast!”

  “What?” asked Quintus, indulgently.

  Cicero was exasperated. “If we did not have such a destiny, mysterious though it is, we should not yearn for it and for the knowledge of it.”

  Quintus was still indulgent. “You are the descendant, Marcus, of the only two who survived the Flood, according to our priests: the virtuous Deucalion and his wife, Pyrrha. They were truly the last who were truly human. You will recall that they bewailed the fact that only they remained, after the vengeance of God on the fallen race of man; the goddess Themis advised them to leave her temple and throw large stones behind them. From these stones and from fire and water, was a new race created, but far different from the old race. Stone. Hot moisture. Earth—mud. With you, son of Deucalion and Pyrrha, does this race now contend, and you are baffled by it and it is baffled by you! I pity you. You cry ‘Justice,’ but you will remember that Justice was the last goddess to leave the earth, and she has never returned.”

  Quintus was suddenly very grave. “The sons of Deucalion will never understand this world and will forever try to enlighten or lift it to the heavens. And forever will they fail. I have heard you say that the desire for justice lives in every man’s heart. Experience surely must have taught you that this is a fallacy. Did you not once tell me a tale of the Jews, that one Abraham pleaded with God to spare two evil cities and God told him that should he find a certain number of just men within them He would withhold His Hand? But Abraham did not find any just men at all in those cities, and so they were destroyed. Search Rome. You will not find within it six just men. Nor will you find them in Athens or in Alexandria, or anywhere else you search.

  “No, I am no cynic. I was always more realistic than you. Resign yourself to the world and its ways in which you must live. You have a family. Spare them further misery. Be prudent. Caesar could have you murdered at a word. But he loves you in his fashion, and though you would protest it, you have an affection for him. He is the most formidable man in Rome. He now manipulates everything and everyone in the city. He is loved by the people because he is a libertine, like them, and a lover of life, like them also, and despoiler like themselves, and has, in short, all their vices. Men adore their vices; they hide their virtues, if any, as if they were shameful secrets. They also adore the politician and the soldier who has their vices in larger measure, for in him they see themselves. Rome, in Caesar’s face, sees her own image. Do not annoy him, Marcus.”

  “So he advised me himself,” said Cicero with bitterness.

  “It was good advice. Take it.” Quintus embraced his brother tenderly. It made him ache to his burly heart that Cicero seemed almost weightless in his arms, and that the bones were close to the pale skin, and that Cicero had aged with sorrow and that his mouth expressed so much pain. Exile was not alone the culprit. His just soul would not let him rest, but clamored incessantly that he act and not refrain. Quintus sighed as he left his brother. He doubted that Cicero would take his excellent advice, and Caesar’s.

  Though Cicero equated Publius Clodius with Catilina, he admitted to himself that Clodius was no madman. However, it was evident that he fomented insurrections, riots, demonstrations, assaults and defiance of the law in Rome. That he was tolerated, and probably even encouraged, enraged Cicero. He inquired of his friends if “great Caesar were powerless to restrain this violent rascal, who has the dark design of revolution in his spirit.” His friends evaded him; they refused a reply to the direct question. So Cicero knew that his suspicions had been correct from the very beginning. Clodius was suffered because of a special plan in the mind of the Triumvirate. But, he reflected with some murky anger, which of the three will seize absolute power for himself? Pompey was a strong soldier, and no fool; he would desire the throne. Crassus was old, but the lust for power is like wine in an old man’s veins. Caesar, then. He was the most dangerous. When would he finally attack both Pompey and Crassus? Two would die; one would live, and one only. Like wolves, tyrants inevitably attack rivals to the death, though formerly they had hunted in concert.

  When rumors reached Cicero that Caesar and Clodius were often seen in company together, and in affability, then he knew that indeed his suspicions were correct, and that Rome was lost. In the meantime Caesar’s reputation as the greatest soldier Rome had ever known grew speedily day by day. His own reports from Gaul, Cicero noted, confirmed that fact with enthusiasm.

  Cicero began his monumental work, De Republica, did his duty well as a Senator, reopened his law offices and received clients, loved his children, endured his wife, tried for contentment with his friends, and felt that his whole life was entirely useless, and that, if he had only applied more diligence and dedication, his country might have been saved.

  Letter to Atticus:

  “I have often heard politicians remarking smugly, on the eve of their retirement: ‘I wish to spend more of my days with my family.’ Either they know they face defeat in politics or they have looted the national Treasury enough to satisfy even themselves—or they have become womanish.”

  Against the advice of even such noble men as Titus Milo and Porcius Cato, and Servilius, Cicero soon discovered that he could not keep silence, that he could n
ot passively permit his country to flee with increasing swiftness to the abyss. “We are young men, Milo and I,” said Cato. “Let it rest with us, knowing that we have your prayers and your devotion. It is time for old soldiers to retire and let those fewer in years take their places in the battle.”

  “No,” said Cicero. “What can console me in my family, my library, my gardens, my farms, and even on my ancestral island if Rome dies without a word from me? There is active evil, such as supporting evil men and traitors. And there is the passive evil, speaking not when a man should speak. This is the worst—that good men do nothing or become tired or hopeless. It is notable that wicked men have boundless energy and enthusiasm, as if they draw sustenance and vile new spirit from some dark, Plutonian underground.”

  He went to many of his friends and asked them to help in the defeat of Clodius for the aedileship. Even he, who considered that his years had disillusioned him about mankind, was aghast at the suddenly veiled eyes, the shrugs, the muttered words of “tolerance” for Clodius. “We are living under a tyranny,” said Cicero. “Are you content?” Then their faces suddenly flushed deeply, but whether it was with anger or with amusement Cicero could not know. They laughed, spoke of their prosperity and roared, “If this is tyranny, give us more of it!” and slapped their knees and made silly, mocking jests.

  Clodius threatened that if he were defeated for office he would command a revolution. In spite of Crassus’ indulgent remarks that “Clodius was merely a hot-head and did not mean half he shouted,” Titus Milo opposed Clodius, tried to prevent the meeting of comitia who appointed the aediles. He declared that if he met Clodius face to face he would be moved to kill him, “for violences against Rome and against my house and my own person.” Cicero appeared before the Senate and catalogued Clodius’ threats against the state and his public impudence in defying it and his demonstrations in the streets. “Have we no longer an orderly government?” asked Cicero. “Are we ruled, at last, by the spirit of the mobs, and openly?”

  While speaking with great eloquence and earnestness he suddenly had the nightmare sensation that forever he had been speaking so, that forever he was fixed in this vortex of despair and futility, and that forever the same faces would confront him—and that forever he would be seeing the countenance of Lucius Sergius Catilina. The names changed, and the features, but it was always Catilina against mankind, eons without end. It was no terrible shock to him, therefore, when Clodius was elected aedile in spite of all the evidence against him.

  “I meet nothing but confusion everywhere,” Cicero said to his friends. “I walk down a colonnade and there I am! twenty years younger and faced with the same problems! I stroll down a street and encounter myself at thirty-five, wondering how Romans can permit violence and corruption. I enter a temple, and in the marble is reflected my face at twenty-eight, and the same words of traitors and the exigent are ringing in my ears. I have seen them all from my cradle and I suppose I shall see them at the last moment before my eyes close in death!”

  But some inertia which he could not control kept him spinning, kept him crying out against the inevitable fate of Rome and indeed the fate of all republics. But what nobler government was there than a republic—if men were truly men and not malicious animals? The failure of government was the fault of humanity.

  “If only I could be content with merely living and enjoying each day as it comes,” he would remark to friends. “But it is not in me. Some hidden divinity impels me to protest, to struggle, to exhort, though I know it is all in vain.” He could no longer enjoy the sweat and shock of the battle. He was now past fifty years of age, and often he was assailed by his old rheumatism and often by a mysterious dysentery. And he was, incessantly, assailed by his wife, whom nothing could satisfy.

  “Day by day,” she would complain, “you are in less favor in Rome. I believed that when you returned from exile you would have learned your lesson and have become powerful again in Rome. But the Senate secretly laughs at you, and the people mock you.”

  Young Marcus, the son, was now ten years old, a handsome boy with a broad highly colored face and a beguiling manner. But his cousin, young Quintus, appeared to lead him. “My son is a philosopher and therefore not given to sweaty vigor,” Cicero would remark to his wife. He wrote paeans of praise about his son to his publisher, Atticus. “Young Marcus, I confess, needs a goad to assert himself, while his cousin needs the reins. But is this not true of all incipient philosophers like my son? He is a marvel in his studies; his mastery of Greek is superb.” He did not know that young Marcus was greedy and self-indulgent. Terentia secretly encouraged him in his habits; she was delighted that her son did not resemble his father in the least. His laziness did not dismay her; his lack of discipline did not make her reflect. Her son was a gentleman and not a vulgar dissenter like his father.

  Tullia came to Cicero one night and shyly announced that she wished to marry the young patrician, Dolabella, who had loved her long before she had married Piso. Cicero felt the firm pavement of his private life giving way under him. He did not like the house of Dolabella, which he believed was idle and dissipated. He cried out, “Your mother has arranged this marriage and has slyly kept all machinations from me!”

  Tullia, in tears, protested. It was true that Terentia was pleased at the thought of the marriage, which she had desired before Tullia’s wedding to Piso. Tullia took her father’s angry face in her slender young hands and pleaded with him. Did he wish her to die as a widow, and childless? He would not live forever; was he pleased at the prospect that she would some day be left alone? Who would console her in her own old age, and cherish her, when her father was dead? “Who loves me in this household?”

  “You would leave me again, and for a Dolabella! You are young still. Remain with me for a while. I am sorrowful enough as it is.”

  But Tullia married Dolabella and Cicero was reconciled when he saw her genuine happiness. However, he again had the sensation that he was treading old paths and that none of them was leading anywhere except to his own death and his final end in futility.

  He took refuge in his library, and in his writings. “At the last a man must return to himself and confront himself, and never can he escape that last confrontation,” he wrote. “The world cannot hide him; the love of his family cannot help him flee. Affairs of state cannot deafen the voice he must finally hear, which is his own. Books, music, sculpture, arts, science, philosophy: these are lovely delays, but they are only delays.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Later Atticus was to write young Marcus Tullius Cicero, and with sadness: “Your father was Rome, and her history was his history. All those whom men account great touched his life, and he touched theirs. They brought evil and blood and despair on their country; he brought valor and virtue. They succeeded. He did not succeed. But in the final accounting between man and God who knows but what a man’s defeat is victory before the Almighty?”

  If he wished to survive, physically, Cicero knew that he must have some abeyance in his life, some self-wrought peace. He immured himself in his library; he wrote some of his noblest books which were to survive the ages and warn men yet unborn with fear for their own countries. He had long conversations with his son, young Marcus, and did not know, mercifully, that the boy listened to him with a sober face but with inner mockery. He visited his daughter and his beloved island. He resolutely shut from his awareness the events transpiring in Rome. He could do nothing; to fight any longer would be to impale himself on a sword.

  “You are a pillar of iron,” Noë wrote him. “And God has indicated that a just man is such, among nations. Long after the polished marble has crumbled the iron of justice remains and upholds the roof over man. Without such as you, dear Marcus, throughout all history, nations would die and man would be no more.”

  “They die, and some day man will be no more,” Cicero wrote to his friend in a period of despondency. “Have you not told me of the prophecies?* The awful day of the wrath of God upon m
an, and whirlwinds and fire and universal destruction of the ‘fenced cities’ and ‘the high bulwarks,’ and the obscurity of the sun, and the falling of the mountains and the burning of the seas—have you not told me of this? Man offends God by his very existence, for his heart is evil and his ways are the ways of death.”

  His law business unaccountably—at least to himself—began to flourish. The number of his clients increased enormously from week to week, and as the majority were men of substance who could make excellent gifts Cicero found his coffers filling satisfactorily again. Civil law did not entangle him with politicians and for the time being, at least, he shunned politicians who sickened him with their wily cunning and their expediency.

  Then one day to his astonishment he was appointed to a vacancy on the Board of Augurs in Rome, a life office not only of dignity but of large remuneration. Atticus rejoiced for him, but Cicero was skeptical though pleased. The Board was composed of agnostics who disputed with the College of Pontices (Pontiffs) on obscure religious doctrines. Then a disagreeable thought of much involvement came to Cicero: The College of Pontices had always shown him a deep friendliness, as he was a devoutly religious man. The Board of Augurs contended often with them. Who was it who wished to reconcile both the Augurs and the Pontiffs, and in his person? Letter to Caesar:

  “It may be news to you, dear friend, and again it may not, to hear that I have been appointed to the Board of Augurs. Do I discern your fine and subtle hand in this? You will not, certainly, tell me the truth. I am conjecturing just how you believe I can serve you in my present capacity.”