Of course, as Cicero said to me afterwards, the whole story was absurd. ‘For a start, whoever heard of such feeble gladiators? If that kind of man wishes to silence you, you are silenced.’ But it didn’t matter. The eating-house plot, as it became known, joined all the other rumours now circulating about Milo – that he had turned his house into an arsenal filled with swords, shields and javelins; that he had stocks of brands hidden throughout the city in order to burn it down; that he had shipped arms along the Tiber to his villa at Ocriculum; that the assassins who had murdered Clodius would be turned loose on his opponents in the election …
The next time the Senate met, no less a figure than Marcus Bibulus, Caesar’s former consular colleague and passionate lifelong enemy, rose to propose that Pompey should hold office by emergency decree as sole consul. This was remarkable enough; what no one had anticipated was the reaction of Cato. A hush fell over the chamber as he got to his feet. ‘I would not have proposed this motion myself,’ he said, ‘but seeing as it has been laid before us, I propose we accept it as a sensible compromise. Some government is better than no government; a sole consulship is better than a dictatorship; and Pompey is more likely to rule wisely than anyone else.’
Coming from Cato, this was almost unbelievable – he had used the word ‘compromise’ for the first time in his life – and no one looked more stunned than Pompey. Afterwards, so the story went, he invited Cato back to his house to thank him personally and to ask him in future to be his private adviser in all matters of state. ‘You have no need to thank me,’ replied Cato, ‘for I only did what I believed to be in the best interests of the republic. If you wish to talk to me alone I shall certainly be at your disposal. But I shall say nothing to you in private that I wouldn’t say anywhere else, and I shall never hold my tongue in public to please you.’
Cicero observed their new closeness with deep foreboding. ‘Why do you think men like Cato and Bibulus have suddenly thrown in their lot with Pompey? Do you imagine they believe all this nonsense about a plot to murder him? Do you think they’ve suddenly changed their minds about him? Not at all! They’ve given him sole authority because they see him as their best hope of checking the ambitions of Caesar. I’m sure Pompey recognises this and believes he can control them. But he’s wrong. Don’t forget I know him. His vanity is his weakness. They will flatter him and load him down with powers and honours, and he won’t even notice what they’re doing, until one day it will be too late – they will have set him on a collision course with Caesar. And then we shall have war.’
Cicero went straight from the Senate meeting to find Milo, and told him in blunt terms that he must now abandon his campaign for the consulship. ‘If you send a message to Pompey before nightfall and announce that you are withdrawing your candidacy in the interests of national unity, you might just head off a prosecution. If you don’t, you’re finished.’
‘And if I am prosecuted,’ responded Milo slyly, ‘will you defend me?’
I had expected Cicero to say it was impossible. Instead he sighed and ran his hand through his hair. ‘Listen to me, Milo – listen carefully. When I was at the lowest point of my life, six years ago in Thessalonica, you were the only one who offered me hope. Therefore you can rest assured, whatever happens I shan’t turn my back on you now. But for pity’s sake, don’t let it come to that. Write to Pompey today.’
Milo promised to think about it, although naturally he did not withdraw. The vaulting ambition that had carried him, in a mere half-dozen years, from ownership of a gladiator school to the brink of the consulship, was hardly likely at this late stage to be bridled by caution and good sense. Besides, his campaign debts were so enormous (some said the amount he owed was seventy million sesterces) that he was facing exile whatever he did; he gained nothing by giving up now. So he continued with his canvass and Pompey moved ruthlessly to destroy him by setting up an inquiry into the events of the eighteenth and nineteenth of January – including the murder of Clodius, the burning of the Senate house and the attack on the home of Lepidus – under the chairmanship of Domitius Ahenobarbus. The slaves of Milo and Clodius were put to the torture to ascertain the facts, and I feared that some poor wretch, in his desperation, might remember my presence at the scene, which would have been embarrassing to Cicero. But I seem to have been blessed with the sort of personality that nobody notices – the reason perhaps why I have survived to write this account – and nobody mentioned me.
The inquiry led to Milo’s trial for murder at the beginning of April and Cicero was required to honour his pledge to defend him. It was the only time I ever saw him prostrated by nerves. Pompey had filled the centre of the city with soldiers to guarantee order. But the effect was the opposite of reassuring. They blockaded every approach to the Forum and guarded the main public buildings. All the shops were closed. An atmosphere of tension and dread lay over the city. Pompey himself came to watch proceedings and took a seat high up on the steps of the Temple of Saturn, surrounded by troops. Yet despite the show of force, the vast pro-Clodian crowd was allowed to intimidate the court. They jeered both Milo and Cicero whenever they tried to speak and made it difficult for the defence to be heard. All outrage and emotion was on their side – the brutality of the crime, the spectacle of the weeping widow and her fatherless children, and above all perhaps that curious retrospective sanctity that settles over the reputation of any politician, however worthless, if his career is cut off in its prime.
As chief defence advocate, allowed under the special rules of the court only two hours to speak, Cicero had an almost impossible task. He could hardly pretend that Milo, who had openly boasted of what he had done, was innocent of the crime. Indeed some of Milo’s supporters, such as Rufus, thought that Cicero should make a virtue of it and argue that the murder was not a crime at all but a public service. Cicero recoiled from that line of reasoning. ‘What are you saying? That any man can be condemned to death without trial and summarily executed by his enemies if it suits enough people? That’s mob rule, Rufus – exactly what Clodius believed in – and I refuse to stand up in a Roman court and make such a case.’
The only feasible alternative was to argue that the killing was justified on the grounds of self-defence – but that was difficult to reconcile with the evidence that Clodius had been dragged out of the tavern and finished off in cold blood. Still, it was not impossible. I had known Cicero win from weaker positions. And he wrote a good speech. However, on the morning he was due to deliver it, he woke gripped by a terrible anxiety. At first I took no notice. He was often nervous before a big oration, and suffered from loose bowels and vomiting. But this morning was different. He was not gripped by fear, which he sometimes called ‘cold strength’ and had learned how to harness; rather he was simply in a funk and could not remember a word of what he was supposed to say.
Milo suggested he should go down to the Forum in a closed litter and wait somewhere out of sight, calmly composing himself until it was time for him to speak; and this was what we tried. Cicero, at his request, had been provided with a bodyguard by Pompey for the duration of the trial, and they cordoned off a part of the Grove of Vesta and kept everyone away while the orator reclined beneath the thick embroidered canopy, trying to commit his speech to memory and occasionally leaning out to retch on the sacred earth. But although he could not see the crowd, he could hear it chanting and roaring nearby, and that was almost worse. When the praetor’s clerk finally came to fetch us, Cicero’s legs were so weak he could barely stand. As we walked into the Forum, the noise was terrific, and the sunlight glinting on the armour and weapons of the soldiers dazzled our eyes.
The Clodians jeered Cicero when he appeared and jeered him all the louder when he tried to speak. His nerves were so obvious he actually confessed them in his opening sentence – ‘I am afraid, gentlemen of the jury: an unseemly condition in which to begin a speech in defence of the bravest of men, but there it is’ – and blamed his fear squarely on the rigged nature of the hearing: ‘Wh
erever I look, I look in vain for the familiar environment of the courts and the traditional procedure of the law.’
Unfortunately, complaining about the rules of a contest is always a sure sign of a man who knows he is about to lose it, and although Cicero made some effective points – ‘Suppose, gentlemen, I could induce you to acquit Milo, but only on condition that Clodius comes back to life again: why all those terrified glances?’ – a speech is only as good as its delivery. By thirty-eight votes to thirteen the jury found Milo guilty, and he was sent into exile for life. His property was hastily auctioned at knockdown prices to pay his creditors, and Cicero directed Terentia’s steward, Philotimus, to buy a lot of it anonymously so that it could be disposed of later and the profits handed to Milo’s wife, Fausta: she had made it clear she would not be accompanying her husband into exile. A day or two later Milo went off with remarkable cheerfulness to Massilia in southern Gaul. His departure was very much in the spirit of a gladiator who knew he would lose eventually and was simply grateful to have lived so long. Cicero tried to make amends by publishing the speech he would have given if his nerves hadn’t got the better of him. He sent a copy to Milo, who replied charmingly a few months later that he was glad Cicero hadn’t spoken it, for otherwise I should not be eating such wonderful Massilian mullets.
Soon after Milo left Rome, Pompey invited Cicero to dinner to show there were no hard feelings. Cicero went off grumbling and reeled home afterwards in such a state of amazement that he came and woke me up, for who should have been at the dinner table but the widow of Publius Crassus, the teenaged Cornelia – and Pompey had married her!
Cicero said, ‘Well, naturally I congratulated him – she’s a beautiful and accomplished girl, even if she is young enough to be his granddaughter – and then I asked him, by way of conversation, what Caesar had made of the match. He looked at me with great disdain and said that he hadn’t even told Caesar: what business was it of Caesar’s? He was fifty-three years old and he would marry whomever he pleased!
‘I replied, as gently as I could, that perhaps Caesar might take a different view – after all, he had sought a marital alliance and been rebuffed, and the bride’s father has not exactly shown himself a friend of Caesar’s. To which Pompey replied, “Oh, don’t worry about Scipio, he’s entirely friendly. I’m appointing him my consular colleague for the remainder of my term!” Is the man mad, do you suppose? Caesar is going to look at Rome and think that the whole place has been taken over by the aristocratic party, with Pompey at their head.’ Cicero groaned and closed his eyes; I guessed he had drunk rather a lot. ‘I told you this would happen. I am Cassandra – doomed to see the future yet destined never to be believed.’
Cassandra or not, there was one consequence of Pompey’s special consulship that Cicero had not foreseen. To help end electoral corruption, Pompey had decided to reform the laws relating to the fourteen provincial commands. Up to this point, consuls and praetors had always left Rome immediately upon the expiry of their term of office to take up their allotted province; and because of the huge sums that could be extorted from such commands, a practice had arisen of candidates borrowing against their expected earnings in order to fund their election campaigns. Pompey, with amazing hypocrisy considering his own abuse of the system, decided to put a stop to all that. Henceforth, a period of five years would have to elapse between holding office in Rome and taking up a governorship overseas. To fill such positions in the interim it was decreed that every senator of praetorian rank who had never done their turn as governor would have to draw lots for the vacant provinces.
To his horror, Cicero now realised he was in danger of having to do what he had always sworn to avoid: sweating it out in some corner of the empire, administering justice to the natives. He went to see Pompey to plead to be excused. His health was poor, he said. He was getting old. He even suggested that the time he had spent in exile might be counted as his term abroad.
Pompey wouldn’t hear of it. Indeed he seemed to take a malicious pleasure in running through all the possible commands that might now fall to Cicero, with their various unique drawbacks – extreme distance from Rome, rebellious tribesmen, ferocious customs, hostile climates, savage wild beasts, impassable roads, incurable local diseases and so forth. Lots to determine who went where were drawn at a special session of the Senate, with Pompey in the chair. Cicero went up and plucked his token from the urn and handed it to Pompey, who read out the result with a smile: ‘Marcus Tullius draws Cilicia.’
Cilicia! Cicero could barely conceal his dismay. This mountainous, primitive homeland of pirates at the extreme eastern edge of the Mediterranean – which included within its administration the island of Cyprus – was about as far away from Rome as it was possible to get. It also shared a border with Syria, and so was within range of the Parthian army, if Cassius was unable to hold them in check. Finally, to cap Cicero’s woes, the current governor was Clodius’s brother, Appius Clodius Pulcher, who could be relied upon to make his successor’s life as difficult as possible.
I knew he would expect me to go with him and I tried desperately to think of excuses why I should stay behind. He had just completed On the Republic. I told him that in my view I would be more use to him in Rome, overseeing its publication.
‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘Atticus will take care of copying and circulation.’
‘There’s also my health,’ I continued, ‘I’ve never really recovered from that fever I contracted at Arpinum.’
‘In that case a sea voyage will do you good.’
And so it went on. My every objection was met by an answer. He started to become offended. But I had a bad feeling about this expedition. Although he swore we would only be gone a year, I sensed it would be longer. Rome felt strangely impermanent to me. Perhaps it was a consequence of having to pass the burnt-out shell of the Senate house every day, or maybe it was my knowledge of the widening split between Pompey and Caesar. Whatever the reason, I had a superstitious dread that if I left I might never come back, and that even if I did return it would be to a different city.
Eventually Cicero said, ‘Well, I cannot force you to come – you’re a free man now. But I feel you owe me this one last service, and I’ll make a bargain with you. When we return, I’ll give you the money to buy that farm you’ve always wanted, and I shan’t press you to perform any more duties for me. The rest of your life will be your own.’
I could hardly refuse such an offer, and so I tried to ignore my forebodings and set about helping him plan his administration.
As governor of Cilicia, Cicero would have command of a standing army of about fourteen thousand men, with every prospect of having to fight a war. He decided therefore to appoint two legates with military experience. One was his old comrade Caius Pomptinus, the praetor who had helped him round up Catilina’s co-conspirators. For the second he turned to his brother Quintus, who had expressed a strong desire to quit Gaul. At first his service under Caesar had been a great success. He had taken part in the invasion of Britain, and on his return Caesar had placed him in command of a legion that soon afterwards was attacked in its winter camp by a vastly superior force of Gauls. The fighting had been fierce: nine tenths of the Romans had been wounded. But Quintus, although ill and exhausted, had kept a cool head and the legion had survived the siege long enough for Caesar to arrive and relieve them; afterwards he had been singled out for praise by Caesar in his Commentaries.
The following summer he was promoted to command of the newly formed Fourteenth Legion. This time, however, he had disobeyed Caesar’s orders. Instead of keeping all his men in camp, he had sent out several hundred raw recruits to forage for food. They had been cut off by an invading force of Germans. Caught in the open, they had stood gaping at their commanders, unsure of what to do, and half of them had been massacred when they tried to make a run for it. All my previous good standing with Caesar has been destroyed, Quintus wrote sadly to his brother. He treats me to my face with civility but I detect a certai
n coldness, and I know he goes behind my back to consult with my junior officers; in short I fear I may never fully regain his trust. Cicero wrote to Caesar asking if his brother might be allowed to join him in Cilicia; Caesar readily agreed; and two months later Quintus arrived back in Rome.
As far as I am aware, Cicero never uttered a word of reproach to his brother. Nevertheless, something was altered in their relationship. I believe Quintus felt a keen sense of failure. He had hoped to find fame and fortune and independence in Gaul; instead he came back tarnished, out of pocket and more dependent than ever on his famous sibling. His marriage remained bitter. He was still drinking heavily. And his only son, young Quintus, who was now fifteen, had all the charms of that particular age, being sullen, secretive, insolent and duplicitous. Cicero believed the boy needed more of his father’s attention and suggested he should accompany us to Cilicia, along with his own son, Marcus. My expectations of our trip, already low, receded further.
When we left Rome at the start of the senatorial recess, we were a huge party. Cicero had been invested with imperium and was obliged to travel with six lictors as well as a great retinue of slaves carrying all our baggage for the voyage abroad. Terentia came part of the way to see her husband off, and so did Tullia, who had just been divorced by Crassipes. She was closer to her father than ever and read him poetry on the journey. Privately he fretted to me about her future: twenty-five years old, no child, no husband … We stopped off at Tusculum to say goodbye to Atticus, and Cicero asked him as a favour to keep an eye on Tullia and try to find her a new match while he was away.