‘By all means. I have nothing better to do. I had been expecting to stand for the consulship this summer, as you well know, until this young mischief-maker put a stop to it.’
It was the agility that was so shocking in a man of such height. He suddenly lunged forward and wrapped his powerful right arm around Clodius’s neck and dragged the younger man’s head down, so that Clodius was bent double. Poor Clodius – who was no weakling, incidentally – let out a muffled cry, and his fingers clawed feebly at Catilina’s arm. But the strength of Catilina was appalling, and I wonder if he might not have broken his visitor’s neck with a quick upward flick of his forearm, if Cicero had not said calmly, ‘I must advise you, Catilina, as your defence attorney, that it would be a grievous mistake to murder your prosecutor.’
On hearing that, Catilina swung round and frowned at him, as if he had momentarily forgotten who Cicero was. Then he started laughing. He ruffled Clodius’s blond curls and let him go. Clodius staggered backwards, coughing and massaging the side of his head and throat, and for an instant he gave Catilina a look of pure murder, but then he too started laughing, and straightened up. They embraced, Catilina called for some more wine, and we left them to it. ‘What a pair,’ exclaimed Cicero, as we passed by the Temple of Luna on our way back home. ‘With any luck they will have killed one another by morning.’
BY THE TIME we had returned to Cicero’s house, Terentia was in labour. There was no mistaking it. We could hear the screams from the street. Cicero stood in the atrium, white with shock and alarm, for he had been away when Tullia was born, and nothing in his philosophy books had prepared him for what was happening. ‘Dear heavens, it sounds as though she is being tortured. Terentia!’ He started towards the staircase which led to her room, but one of the midwives intercepted him.
We passed a long vigil in the dining room. He asked me to stay with him, but was at first too anxious to do any work. Sometimes he lay stretched out on the same couch Terentia had been occupying when we left, and then, when he heard another scream, he would jump up and pace around. The air was hot and heavy, the candle flames motionless, their black threads of smoke as rigid as plumb-lines suspended from the ceiling. I busied myself by emptying my case of the court papers I had carried back from Catilina’s house and sorting them into categories – charges, depositions, summaries of documentary evidence. Eventually, to distract himself, Cicero, still prone on the couch, stretched out a hand and started reading, picking up one roll after another and holding it to the lamp which I placed beside him. He kept flinching and wincing, but I could not tell whether it was the continuing howls from upstairs or the horrific allegations against Catilina, for these were indeed the most appalling accounts of violence and rape, dispatched by almost every town in Africa, from Utica to Thaenae, and from Thapsus to Thelepte. After an hour or two, he tossed them aside in disgust and asked me to fetch some paper so that he could dictate a few letters, beginning with one to Atticus. He lay back and closed his eyes in an effort to concentrate. I have the very document before me now.
It is a long time since I had a line from you. I have already written to you in detail about my election campaign. At the moment I am proposing to defend my fellow candidate Catilina. We have the jury we want, with full cooperation from the prosecution. If he is acquitted I hope he will be more inclined to work with me in the campaign. But should it go otherwise, I shall bear it philosophically.
‘Ha! That is certainly true enough.’ He closed his eyes again.
I need you home pretty soon. There is a decidedly strong belief going around that your noble friends are going to oppose my election.
And at that point my writing stops, because instead of a scream we heard a different sound from above us – the gurgling cry of a baby. Cicero sprang from the couch and ran upstairs to Terentia’s room. It was some time before he reappeared, and when he did he silently took the letter from me and wrote across the top in his own hand:
I have the honour to inform you that I have become the father of a little son. Terentia is well.
HOW TRANSFORMED A house is by the presence of a healthy newborn baby! I believe, although it is seldom acknowledged, that this must be because it is a double blessing. The unspoken dreads which attend all births – of agony, death and deformity – are banished, and in their place comes this miracle of a fresh life. Relief and joy are intertwined.
Naturally, I was not permitted upstairs to see Terentia, but a few hours later Cicero brought his son down and proudly showed him off to the household and his clients. To be frank, there was not much that was visible, apart from an angry little red face and a lick of fine dark hair. He was wrapped up tight in the woollen swaddling clothes which had performed the same service for Cicero more than forty years earlier. The senator also had a silver rattle preserved from his infancy which he tinkled above the tiny face. He carried him tenderly into the atrium and pointed to the spot where he dreamed that one day his consular image would hang. ‘And then,’ he whispered, ‘you will be Marcus Tullius Cicero, son of Marcus Tullius Cicero the consul – how does that sound? Not bad, eh? There will be no taunts of “new man” for you! Here you are, Tiro – make the acquaintance of a whole new political dynasty.’ He offered the bundle to me, and I held it nervously, in that way the childless do when handed a baby, and was relieved when the nurse took him from me.
Cicero meanwhile was once again contemplating the blank spot on his atrium wall, and had fallen into one of his reveries. I wonder what it was he was seeing there: his death mask, perhaps, staring back at him, like a face in the mirror? I enquired after the health of Terentia, and he said, distractedly, ‘Oh, she is very well. Very strong. You know what she is like. Strong enough, at least, to resume belabouring me for making an alliance with Catilina.’ He dragged his gaze away from the empty wall. ‘And now,’ he sighed, ‘I suppose we had better keep our appointment with the villain.’
When we reached the house of Catilina, we found the former governor of Africa in a charming humour. Cicero later made a list of his ‘paradoxical qualities’ and I give it here, for it was nicely put: ‘To attach many by friendship, and to retain them by devotion; to share what he possessed with all, and to be at the service of all his friends in time of need, with money, influence, effort, and – if necessary – with reckless crime; to control his natural temper as occasion required, and to bend and turn it this way and that; to be serious with the strict, easy with the liberal, grave with the old, amiable with the young, daring with criminals, dissolute with the depraved …’ This was the Catilina who was waiting for us that day. He had already heard about the birth of Cicero’s son, and pumped his advocate’s hand in warm congratulation, and then produced a beautiful calfskin box, which he insisted Cicero open. Inside was a baby’s silver amulet which Catilina had acquired in Utica. ‘It is merely a local trinket to ward off ill health and evil spirits,’ he explained. ‘Please give it to your lad with my blessing.’
‘Well,’ replied Cicero, ‘this is handsome of you, Catilina.’ And it was indeed quite exquisitely engraved, certainly no mere trinket: when Cicero held it to the light I saw all manner of exotic wild animals chasing each another, linked by a motif of curling serpents. For one last moment he toyed with it, and weighed it in his palm, but then he replaced it in its box and handed it back to Catilina. ‘I am afraid I cannot accept it.’
‘Why?’ asked Catilina, with a puzzled smile. ‘Because you are my advocate, and advocates cannot be paid? Such integrity! But this is only a trifle for a baby!’
‘Actually,’ said Cicero, drawing in his breath, ‘I have come to tell you I am not going to be your advocate.’
I was in the act of unpacking all the legal documents on to a small table which stood between the two men. I had been watching them in a sideways fashion but now I put my head down and carried on. After what seemed to me a long silence, I heard Catilina say, in a quiet voice, ‘And why is that?’
‘To speak frankly: because you are so obviously guil
ty.’
Another silence, and then Catilina’s voice, when it came, was once again very calm. ‘But Fonteius was guilty of extortion against the Gauls, and you represented him.’
‘Yes. But there are degrees of guilt. Fonteius was corrupt but harmless. You are corrupt and something else entirely.’
‘That is for the court to decide.’
‘Normally I would agree. But you have purchased the verdict in advance, and that is not a charade I wish to be a part of. You have made it impossible for me to convince myself that I am acting honourably. And if I cannot convince myself, then I cannot convince anyone else – my wife, my brother; and now, perhaps more importantly, my son, when he is old enough to understand.’
At this point I risked a look at Catilina. He was standing completely motionless, his arms hanging loosely by his sides, and I was reminded of an animal that has suddenly come across a rival – it was a type of predatory stillness: watchful and ready to fight. He said lightly, but it seemed to me the lightness was now more strained: ‘You realise this is of no consequence to me, but only to yourself? It does not matter who is my advocate; nothing changes for me. I shall be acquitted. But for you now – instead of my friendship, you will have my enmity.’
Cicero shrugged. ‘I prefer not to have the enmity of any man, but when it is unavoidable, I shall endure it.’
‘You will never have endured an enmity such as mine, I promise you that. Ask the Africans.’ He grinned. ‘Ask Gratidianus.’
‘You removed his tongue, Catilina. Conversation would be difficult.’
Catilina swayed forward slightly, and I thought he might do to Cicero what he had only half done to Clodius the previous evening, but that would have been an act of madness, and Catilina was never wholly mad: things would have been far easier if he had been. Instead he checked himself and said, ‘Well then, I suppose I must let you go.’
Cicero nodded. ‘You must. Leave the papers, Tiro. We have no need of them now.’
I cannot remember if there was any further conversation; I do not believe there was. Catilina and Cicero simply turned their backs on one another, which was the traditional means of signalling enmity, and so we left that ancient, empty, creaking mansion, and went out into the heat of the Roman summer.
XV
NOW BEGAN A most difficult and anxious period in Cicero’s life, during which I am sure he often regretted that he had made such an enemy of Catilina, and had not simply found some excuse to wriggle out of his commitment to defend him. For there were, as he often observed, only three possible outcomes to the coming election, and none was pleasant. Either he would be consul and Catilina would not – in which case who could tell what lengths his resentful and defeated rival might be willing to go to? Or Catilina would be consul and he would not, and all the resources of the office would be turned against him. Or – and this, I think, alarmed him most of all – he and Catilina might be consuls together, in which case his dream of supreme imperium would degenerate into a year-long running battle, and the business of the republic would be paralysed by their acrimony.
The first shock came when the trial of Catilina opened a couple of days later, because who should step forward to act as chief defence advocate but the senior consul himself, Lucius Manlius Torquatus, head of one of the oldest and most respected patrician families in Rome. Catilina was escorted into court by all the traditional old guard of the aristocracy – Catulus, of course, but also Hortensius, Lepidus and the elder Curio. The only consolation for Cicero was that Catilina’s guilt was utterly manifest, and Clodius, who had his own reputation to consider, actually made quite a decent job of drawing out the evidence. Although Torquatus was an urbane and precise attorney, he could only (to use the crude phrase of the time) apply so much perfume to this particular turd. The jury had been bribed, but the record of Catilina’s behaviour in Africa was sufficiently shocking that they very nearly found him guilty, and he was only acquitted per infamiam – that is, he was dishonourably discharged from the court. Clodius, fearful of retaliation from Catilina and his supporters, departed the city soon afterwards, to serve on the staff of Lucius Murena, the new governor of Further Gaul. ‘If only I had prosecuted Catilina myself!’ groaned Cicero. ‘He would be with Verres in Massilia by now, watching the waves coming in!’ But at least he had avoided the dishonour of serving as Catilina’s defender – for which, incidentally, he gave much credit to Terentia, and thereafter he was always more willing to listen to her advice.
Cicero’s campaign strategy now called for him to leave Rome for four months, and travel north to canvass, all the way up to the borders of Italy in Nearer Gaul. No consular candidate, as far as I am aware, had ever done such a thing before, but Cicero, even though he loathed to leave the city for so long, was convinced it was worth it. When he stood for aedile, the number of registered electors was some four hundred thousand; but now those rolls had been revised by the censors, and with the extension of the franchise as far north as the River Po, the electorate had increased to almost one million. Very few of these citizens would ever bother to travel all the way to Rome to cast their votes in person. But Cicero reckoned that if he could only persuade just one in ten of those he met to make the effort, it could give him a decisive edge on the Field of Mars.
He fixed his departure for after the Roman Games, which began that year as usual on the fifth day of September. And now came Cicero’s second – I will not call it a shock exactly, but it was certainly more troubling than a mere surprise. The Roman Games were always given by the curule aediles, one of whom was Caesar. As with Antonius Hybrida, nothing much was expected of him, for he was known to be hard up. But Caesar took the whole production over, and in his lordly way declared that the games were in honour not only of Jupiter, but of his dead father. For days beforehand he had workmen in the forum building colonnades, so that people could stroll around and see the wild beasts he had imported, and the gladiators he had bought – no fewer than three hundred and twenty pairs, clad in silver armour: the greatest number ever produced for a public spectacle. He laid on banquets, held processions, staged plays, and on the morning of the games themselves the citizens of Rome woke to discover that he had, overnight, erected a statue of the populist hero, Marius – the aristocrats’ great hate-figure – within the precincts of the Capitol.
Catulus immediately insisted that a session of the senate be called, and tabled a motion demanding that the statue be removed at once. But Caesar replied to him with contempt, and such was his popularity in Rome, the senate did not dare to press the matter further. Everyone knew that the only man who could possibly have lent Caesar the money for such an extravaganza was Crassus, and I remember how Cicero returned from the Roman Games in the same dejected manner that he had come back from Hybrida’s Games of Apollo. It was not that Caesar, six years his junior, was ever likely to run against him personally in an election, but rather that Crassus was clearly up to something, and he could not work out what. Cicero described to me that night a part of the entertainment. ‘Some poor wretch, a criminal, was led out naked into the centre of the Circus, armed with a wooden sword, and then they released a panther and a lion to attack him, which no doubt they had starved for weeks. And actually he put on a reasonable show, using the only advantage he had – his brains – dashing this way and that, and for a while it looked as though he might succeed in making the beasts attack one another instead of him. The crowd were cheering him on. But then he tripped and the creatures tore him to pieces. And I looked to one side of me at Hortensius and the aristocrats, all laughing and applauding, and at Crassus and Caesar side by side on the other, and I thought to myself, Cicero: that man is you.’
His personal relations with Caesar were always cordial, not least because Caesar enjoyed his jokes, but he had never trusted him, and now that he suspected he was in alliance with Crassus, he began to keep a greater distance. There is another story I should tell about Caesar. Around this time Palicanus came to call, seeking Cicero’s support fo
r his own bid for the consulship. Oh dear – poor Palicanus! He was a cautionary lesson in what can happen in politics if one becomes too dependent on the favour of a great man. He had been Pompey’s loyal tribune, and then his loyal praetor, but he had never been given his share of the spoils once Pompey had achieved his special commands, for the simple reason there was nothing left he could offer in return; he had been bled dry. I picture him, day after day sitting in his house, staring at his gigantic bust of Pompey, or dining alone beneath that mural of Pompey as Jupiter – truthfully, he had about as much chance of becoming consul as I did. But Cicero tried to let him down kindly, and said that although he could not form an electoral alliance with him, he would at least try to do something for him in the future (of course, he never did). At the end of the interview, just as Palicanus was rising, Cicero, keen to end on a friendly note, asked to be remembered to his daughter, the blowsy Lollia, who was married to Gabinius.
‘Oh, do not talk to me about that whore!’ responded Palicanus. ‘You must have heard? The whole city is talking about it! She is being screwed every day by Caesar!’
Cicero assured him he had not heard.
‘Caesar,’ said Palicanus bitterly. ‘Now there is a duplicitous bastard! I ask you: is that any time to bed a comrade’s wife – when he is a thousand miles away, fighting for his country?’
‘Disgraceful,’ agreed Cicero. ‘Mind you,’ he observed to me after Palicanus had gone, ‘if you are going to do such a thing, I should have thought that was the ideal time. Not that I am an expert on such matters.’ He shook his head. ‘Really, though, one has to wonder about Caesar. If a man would steal your wife, what else wouldn’t he take from you?’