Crisis or no crisis, the Season remained inviolable. Spring, flower-bright and crystalline, was when fashionable society decamped out of town. April 44 BC was no different. In the weeks following Caesar’s murder Rome began to empty. Many of those shuttering up their mansions must have felt relieved to be leaving the febrile, panic-racked city behind. Not that the country was without its own headaches. Cicero, for instance, arriving at his favourite villa just south of Rome, found it full of builders. He decided to continue on his way and headed south for the Bay of Naples – where he was promptly ambushed by surveyors. It appeared that a retail complex he had inherited in Puteoli was showing cracks. Two shops had actually collapsed. ‘Even the mice have moved out,’ Cicero sighed, ‘to say nothing of the tenants.’ Drawing inspiration from the example of Socrates, however, the landlord professed to be sublimely indifferent to his real-estate problems: ‘Immortal gods, what do such trivialities matter to me?’1
Yet the consolations of philosophy had their limits. At other times Cicero would confess to being in a permanent mood of irritation. ‘Old age’, he complained, ‘makes me ever more dyspeptic.’2 Now in his sixties, he felt himself a failure. It was not only his political career that had imploded. So too, over the previous few years, had his family life. First, amid much bitterness and mutual recrimination, he divorced his wife of more than thirty years and hitched himself to one of his wealthy, teenage wards. Twitted for marrying a virgin at his age, Cicero goatishly retorted that she would not be staying a virgin for long – but nor did she stay a bride. Only weeks after the wedding Cicero’s daughter, Tullia, died of complications following childbirth. Cicero was devastated. His new wife, transformed from trophy to unwanted distraction, was sent packing back to her mother, while Cicero, obsessively, tended the flame of his grief. Tullia, affectionate and intelligent, had been her father’s dearest companion. Now, with her gone, Cicero was desolate. His friends, perturbed by what they saw as unmanly emotionalism, sought to remind him of his duties as a citizen, but the old catchwords, once such an inspiration, served only to deepen his sense of despair. Painfully, to a well-wisher, he sought to explain: ‘There was a time when I could find in my home a refuge from the miseries of public life. But now, oppressed by domestic unhappiness as I am, there is no doing the opposite – no taking refuge in the affairs of state, and the comforts they once offered. And so I stay clear of both the Forum and of home.’3 Glimpsed in the mirror of Cicero’s grief, the Republic appeared to have taken on his daughter’s semblance: that of a young woman, goddess-like, beloved … and dead.
Then the Ides of March. Brutus, raising his dagger wet with Caesar’s blood, had called out Cicero’s name and congratulated him on the recovery of liberty. Cicero himself, startled and delighted, had reciprocated by hailing the conspirators as heroes, and Caesar’s murder as a glorious event. But it was only a start – and maybe, Cicero was soon fretting, not even that. Brutus and Cassius might have succeeded in striking down Caesar, but they had made no attempt to destroy his regime. Instead an awkward truce had been patched up between the dictator’s assassins and his henchmen, and as a result the advantage was daily slipping through the conspirators’ grasp. Already Brutus and Cassius had been forced by the menaces of pro-Caesarian demagogues to flee Rome. Cicero, who had been urging more ruthlessness and resolution on them, lambasted their strategy as ‘absurd’. It was said that the conspirators had decided to exclude him from their plans because they feared that he had grown timid with age. Now the old man paid them back in fitting coin. To the sacred task of redeeming the Republic from tyranny, he complained, the conspirators had brought ‘the spirits of men, but the foresight of children’.4
Naturally, even in the depths of his despond, the role of knowing elder statesman was one that Cicero could not help but relish. Few would have denied his right to it. The parvenu from Arpinum had become, to younger generations, an almost iconic figure, the very embodiment of tradition, a living relic of a vanished age of giants. Despite his gloating over the murder of their leader, he remained an object of curiosity even to Caesarians. One of these, a particularly startling visitor, was a fair-haired, bright-eyed young man, no more than eighteen, who dropped by to pay his respects while Cicero was still holidaying outside Puteoli. Only a month previously Gaius Octavius, the dictator’s great-nephew, had been in the Balkans, stationed with the expeditionary force for Parthia. When the news of Caesar’s murder had reached him he had sailed at once for Brundisium. There he had learned of his formal adoption in Caesar’s will, becoming, by its terms, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, and being mobbed by crowds of his adoptive father’s veterans. With their cheers still ringing in his ears, he had set off for Rome, but, rather than rushing headlong to the capital, had first turned aside to pay a visit to the Bay of Naples. Touring the holiday villas, he had consulted with assorted Caesarian heavyweights and made his pilgrimage to Cicero. The venerable republican, for once proving impervious to flattery, had refused to be charmed. After all, it was Octavian’s sacred duty, as Caesar’s heir, to hunt down the murderers of his adoptive father. How was such an avenger ever to become a good citizen? ‘Impossible,’ Cicero sniffed.5 Pointedly, he referred to the young man by his original name, Octavius, and not – as Octavian himself now preferred to be called – Julius Caesar alone.* For Cicero, one Julius Caesar had been more than enough.
Even so, he can hardly have been seriously alarmed by Octavian’s prospects. The young man was heading on from Puteoli armed with little more than the magic of his name and a determination to claim his inheritance in full. In the snake-pit of Rome these were not decisive qualifications. Indeed, for established Caesarians, let alone Caesar’s enemies, they verged on the provocative. The dictator might have named Octavian as his legal heir, but there were others, trusted lieutenants in positions of great power, who also had their eyes fixed on their dead master’s legacy. Now that Caesar was gone, the ambitions of Rome’s leading men once again had free play, but hardly in the manner that Brutus and Cassius had anticipated. ‘Freedom has been restored,’ Cicero noted in perplexity, ‘and yet the Republic has not.’6
Which was, as he further noted, ‘unprecedented’ – and raised a terrifying prospect. Was it possible that the old rules, the old traditions, poisoned by civil war, had been placed forever beyond recovery? If so, then a disorienting and blood-sodden new order threatened, one in which a magistracy would always prove to be of less moment than an army, and legitimacy less than the threat of naked violence. Already, by the summer of 44 BC, the outlines of such a future could be glimpsed. Would-be warlords toured the colonies where Caesar had settled his veterans, currying favour, offering bribes. Even Brutus and Cassius tried to get in on the act. The welcome they received from Caesar’s veterans was, unsurprisingly, chilly. By late summer they had come to the reluctant conclusion that Italy was no longer safe for them. Quietly, they slipped away – for the East, it was said, although no one could be sure. For men who had claimed to be liberators, exile anywhere was a bitter defeat.
And for those who had looked to them for leadership it was a disaster. Now, with Brutus and Cassius gone, it would take even more courage to stay behind, to defend the Republic where it still mattered most: in the city that had given birth to its freedoms, before the Senate and the people of Rome. Who was left to make such a stand? Eyes turned to Cicero – but, panicky and a born civilian, he had also vanished from Rome. His intention, painfully arrived at after much vacillation, had been to sail to Athens, where his son, who was supposed to be studying, was instead making a name for himself as the university’s foremost drunk. But the anxious father, eager to set his heir back on the straight and narrow, had no sooner set sail than he was swept by bad weather back into port, and it was there, while waiting for the storms to subside, that he learned how his journey was being represented back in Rome. ‘Fine! Abandon your country!’7 even the imperturbable Atticus had written to him. Cicero was mortified. Both shame and vanity served to steel his fluttering nerves. But so too did the knowledge that it was his duty to stand his ground, to beard the warlords in their den. Out came his luggage from the cargo hold. Bracing himself for the fray, Cicero set off back to Rome.
It was the most courageous decision of his life. But it was not entirely reckless. True, Cicero brought no legions to the armed and carnivorous death-struggle – but he did bring his unsurpassed powers of oratory, his well-honed skills in political dog-fighting and his prestige. The news of his arrival in Rome brought out cheering crowds to welcome him, and even among the highest echelons of the Caesarian grandees he did not lack for contacts. If he could only attach some of these to the cause of the constitution, Cicero hoped, then all might yet be well. He had two particular targets: Aulus Hirtius and Vibius Pansa. Both were prominent Caesarian officers, and had been appointed by the dictator as consuls-designate for the succeeding year, 43 BC. Of course, to Cicero, the fact that magistracies had been allocated in advance, without any reference to the electorate, was an outrage, but one which, for the moment, he was prepared to swallow. Hirtius and Pansa were both, by the standards of the troubled times, moderates, even to the extent of having asked Cicero himself for lessons in public speaking. Certainly, there were other Caesarians whom Cicero would far rather have seen excluded from the consulship. And of them all, in his opinion, the most dangerous was Mark Antony, who already held the office, not to mention an army and Caesar’s treasure to boot.
As far as Cicero was concerned, even the most attractive aspects of Antony’s character – his boldness, charm and generosity – served only to brand the consul all the more a menace. As did his taste in women: after years of pursuing Fulvia, Antony had finally succeeded in hitching himself to Clodius’ domineering widow. Pleasure-loving and exhibitionist as he was, Antony appeared to Cicero a worthy heir of Clodius’ bed, and as such a self-evident public danger. But there was another spectre, even grimmer, standing at Antony’s shoulder. ‘Why should it have been my fate’, Cicero pondered, ‘that for the past two decades the Republic has never had an enemy who did not turn out to be my enemy as well?’8 No doubt Catiline’s spectre would have laughed hollowly at that question. Indeed, Cicero’s conceit in 44 BC was, if anything, even greater than it had been during the year of his consulship. By denouncing Antony, he was effectively declaring war not on an open rebel, as Catiline had been, but on a man who was himself the head of state. But Cicero was unabashed. As with Catiline, so now with Antony, he believed himself confronted by a monster. Only by cutting off its head, he trusted, would the Republic be restored at least half-way to health. So it was that Cicero, the spokesman of legitimacy, prepared to work for the destruction of a consul.
As so many of his campaigns had done, the great orator’s assault on Antony was to prove inspirational and specious in equal measure. With a series of electrifying speeches to the Senate, Cicero sought to rouse his fellow citizens from the torpor of despair, to school them in their deepest ideals, to remind them of what they had been and might be still. ‘Life is not merely a matter of breathing. The slave has no true life. All other nations are capable of enduring servitude – but our city is not.’ Here, in Cicero’s oratory, was a worthy threnody for Roman freedom: both a soaring assertion of the Republic’s heroic past and a rage against the dying of the light. ‘So glorious is it to recover liberty, that it is better to die than shrink from regaining it.’9
To this claim, ancient generations had borne witness, and Cicero, by staking his life, was at last proving himself worthy of the ideals he had for so long aimed to defend. But there were other traditions, just as ancient, to which his speeches were also bearing witness. In the public life of the Republic, partisanship had always been savage, and the tricks of political rhetoric unforgiving. Now, in Cicero’s mauling of Antony, these same tricks received their apotheosis. Elevated calls to arms alternated with the crudest abuse, as, throughout Cicero’s speeches caricatures of a drunken Antony – vomiting up gobbets of meat, chasing after boys, pawing at actresses – were conjured. Malicious, rancorous, unfair – but it was the mark of a free Republic that its citizens’ speech be free too. Fortoo long Cicero had felt himself gagged. Now, for his swansong, he spoke without inhibition. As only he could, he touched the heights and in his next breath plumbed the depths.
Yet his words, like sparks borne on a gale, needed kindling – and this Cicero could only hope to procure by the dark and time-hallowed arts of political fixing. The Caesarian warlords had to be turned against each other and poisoned against Antony, just as rival noblemen had been persuaded to turn against the over-mighty throughout the Republic’s history. Hirtius and Pansa, already suspicious of Antony, needed little encouragement, but Cicero, not content with wooing the consuls-designate, was also luring a far more dramatic recruit to the cause. Only a few months previously he had cold-shouldered Octavian; now, in the dying days of 44 BC, there were few – and certainly not Cicero – who would presume to do that.
Even the gods had blessed the young Caesar with formidable proof of their favour. As Octavian, beneath a cloudless sky, had entered Rome for the first time, a halo in the form of a rainbow had appeared around the sun. Then, three months later, an even more spectacular phenomenon occurred. While Octavian was staging games in honour of his murdered father, a comet had blazed over Rome. It was hailed by the excited spectators as the soul of Caesar ascending to the heavens. Octavian, who privately regarded the comet as a portent of his own greatness, had publicly agreed – as well he might have done, for to become the son of a god was no small promotion, even for Caesar’s heir. ‘You, boy, owe everything to your name,’10 Antony had sneered. But if Octavian’s good fortune had been prodigious, then so too was the skill that he had brought to exploiting his inheritance. Already, even Antony, the seasoned populist, was finding himself outplayed. Requested to hand over Caesar’s treasure so that certain legacies promised to the people could be paid, he had proved obstructive; meanwhile, Octavian, speculating to accumulate, had coolly auctioned off some of his own estates and paid for the legacies out of the proceeds.
His reward was spectacular popularity – not only with the urban mob, but with Caesar’s veterans too. Recruiting head to head with Antony, Octavian soon had a private – and wholly illegal – bodyguard of three thousand men. With this, he briefly occupied the Forum, and although he was soon forced to retreat in the face of Antony’s much larger army, he remained a palpable threat to his rival’s ambitions.
By now it was late in the year, and Antony’s term of office was drawing to its close. Desperate to secure a continued power base, the consul marched north, crossed the Rubicon into Gaul, and proclaimed himself the governor of the province. Blocking his path was Decimus Brutus, the assassin of Caesar, who also claimed the post. Rather than surrender his province to Antony, Decimus chose instead to barricade himself in Modena and sit out the winter. Antony, advancing, settled down to starve him out. The new civil war, long threatening, had finally begun. And all the while, as Caesar’s two former lieutenants locked horns, Caesar’s heir lurked in their rear, a menacing but imponderable factor, his loyalties uncertain, his ambitions even more so.
Only to Cicero had he claimed to open his soul. Octavian had not ceased to woo the old statesman since their first meeting. Cicero, still suspicious of such flattering attentions, had wrestled painfully with the temptation that Octavian represented to him. On the one hand, as he had wailed plaintively to Atticus, ‘Only look at his name, his age!’11 How could Cicero possibly take Caesar’s heir at face value when the young adventurer, sending endless requests for advice, addressed him as ‘Father’ and insisted that he and his followers were at the service of the Republic? But, on the other hand, bearing in mind the desperate nature of the crisis, what was there to lose? By December, with reports of war arriving from the north, Cicero had finally made up his mind. On the twentieth he addressed a packed Senate House. Even as he continued to press for the destruction of Antony, the legitimate consul, he demanded that Octavian – ‘yes, a young man still, almost a boy’12 – be rewarded for his recruitment of a private army with fulsome public honours. To waverers, who were understandably startled by this proposition, Cicero protested that Octavian was already a glittering credit to the Republic. ‘I guarantee it, Fathers of the Senate, I promise it and solemnly swear it!’ Of course, as Cicero himself knew full well, he was protesting too much. All the same, even in private, he was not entirely cynical about Octavian’s prospects. Who was to say how the young man sitting at his knee, absorbing his wisdom and the ancient ideals of the Republic, might prosper? And should Octavian, despite Cicero’s tutorship, prove an unworthy pupil, then there would be ways to deal with him, when the occasion and opportunity arrived. ‘The young man should be lauded, glorified – then raised to the skies.’13 Just as Caesar had been, in other words.
This, of course, was precisely the kind of indiscreet witticism that had landed Cicero in hot water in the past. The joke spread like wildfire, and, inevitably, Octavian got to hear of it too. Cicero, however, could afford to shrug off the embarrassment. After all, Octavian was only one part of the coalition that he had patched together, nor even the most significant part of it. In April 43 BC the two consuls of the Roman people, Aulus Hirtius and Vibius Pansa, finally advanced against Antony. Octavian, with two legions, marched as their lieutenant. In two successive battles Antony was defeated and forced to withdraw across the Alps. News of the double victory, when it was brought to a waiting Rome, appeared the ultimate vindication of Cicero’s high-risk, high-stakes policy. Cicero himself, as he had been in the year of his consulship, was hailed as the saviour of his country. Antony was officially pronounced a public enemy. The Republic appeared to have been saved.
Then fresh messengers arrived in Rome bringing cruel and bitter news. The two consuls were both dead, one in battle, the other of wounds. Octavian, unsurprisingly, was refusing any form of rapprochement with Decimus Brutus. Antony, in the confusion, had got clean away. He was now marching along the coast beyond the Alps, into the province of another of Caesar’s lieutenants, Marcus Lepidus. The army of the ‘Master of Horse’, seven legions strong, was formidable, and its loyalties, as Antony drew ever nearer to it, had suddenly become an issue of desperate, even decisive, concern. In letters to the Senate, Lepidus reassured its leaders of his continued allegiance – but his men, seasoned Caesarians all, were already making up his mind for him the other way. On 30 May, days of fraternisation between the armies of Antony and Lepidus climaxed in a formal compact between their two generals and the union of their forces. Decimus Brutus, hopelessly outnumbered, attempted to flee but was betrayed by a Gallic chieftain and killed. The armies of the Senate, with baffling speed, had melted away utterly. Antony, on the run only a few weeks previously, had emerged stronger than ever. Now, it was only the young Caesar who stood between him and a march on Rome.
Which way would Octavian turn? The capital swarmed with rumours, and sweated on the answer. It would not be long in coming. In late July a centurion from Octavian’s army suddenly appeared in the Senate House. From the assembled gathering he demanded the consulship, still vacant, for his general. The Senate refused. The centurion brushed back his cloak and laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘If you do not make him consul,’ he warned, ‘then this will.’14 And so it happened. Once again a Caesar crossed the Rubicon. By now Octavian’s army numbered eight legions, and there was no one to oppose him. Cicero, sick at the ruinous end of all his hopes, trudged out with the rest of the Senate to welcome the conqueror. Desperately, he spun new proposals to Octavian, new plans. ‘Octavian, however, made no answer, save for the mocking reply that Cicero had been the last of his friends to come and greet him.’15
Permitted – or ordered – to leave Rome, the orator retreated to his favourite country villa. The building work on it had been completed, but there could be no more repairs to its owner’s ruined career. It was over – and with it, much else besides. Cicero followed his protégé’s progress with mute despair. On 19 August Octavian, still not yet twenty, was formally elected consul. Then, having secured the condemnation of Caesar’s assassins as traitors, he left Rome and marched northwards, straight towards the advancing army of Antony and Lepidus. Between the rival Caesarian leaders, unchallenged masters now of the entire Western empire, there was to be no war. Instead, on an island in a river near Medina, with their armies lined up on either bank, Antony and Octavian met, embraced and kissed each other’s cheek. Then, along with Lepidus, they settled down to carve up the world and pronounce the Republic dead.
Naturally, they disguised their purpose with specious and familiar words. They claimed not to be pronouncing the obituary of the Republic but setting it back in order. In truth, they were executing it. As a result of the island conference it was agreed that a triumvirate should be established, but not a loose and shifting alliance as had been established between Pompey, Caesar and Crassus. This time it would be formally constituted and endowed with ferocious powers. For five years the triumvirs were to exercise proconsular authority over the entire empire. They were to have the right to pass or annul laws as they pleased, without reference to the Senate or the Roman people. Martial law was extended into the sacred space of Rome herself. This, after more than four hundred years of Roman freedom, was effectively the end.
And the Republic’s quietus, fittingly, was sealed and signed with blood. The triumvirs, pronouncing their dead leader’s policy of clemency a failure, looked back instead to an earlier dictator for inspiration. The return of proscription lists was foreshadowed in Rome by grim and unmistakable portents: dogs howled like wolves, and wolves were seen running through the Forum; in the sky loud shouts were heard, along with the clash of weapons and the pounding of unseen hooves. The lists went up within days of the triumvirs’ entry into the city. Ruthless bargaining among the three men had determined whose names would appear on them. One factor more than any other had influenced their decisions: with more than sixty legions needing to be paid, the triumvirate was in desperate need of funds. As a result, the fruit of riches, as it had been under Sulla, became death. Even an exile such as Verres, enjoying his ill-gotten gains in sun-soaked exile, was proscribed – killed, it was said, for his ‘Corinthian bronzes’.16 Some were murdered for factional reasons – to remove potential adversaries of the new regime – and others were victims of personal enmities and feuds. Most chillingly of all, as proof of their commitment to the triumvirate, Antony, Lepidus and Octavian had each sacrificed a man they might otherwise have felt obliged to save. So it was that Antony had agreed to the proscription of his uncle and Lepidus his brother. Octavian, meanwhile, had put down the name of the man he had once called ‘Father’.
Even so, Cicero could have escaped. News of his proscription reached him well in advance of the bounty-hunters. Typically, however, he panicked and vacillated over what to do. Rather than setting sail to join Brutus and Cassius, who were even then recruiting a massive army of liberation in the East, he instead flitted despairingly from villa to villa, haunted, as he had been for so long, by the shadow of exile. After all, as Cato had taught him, there were nightmares worse than death. Trapped by his executioners at last, Cicero leaned out from his litter and bared his throat to the sword. This was the gesture of a gladiator, and one he had always admired. Defeated in the greatest and deadliest of all games, he unflinchingly accepted his fate. He died as he would surely have wished: bravely, a martyr to freedom and to freedom of speech.
Even his enemies knew that. When his severed head and hands were delivered by the bounty-hunters, Fulvia, Clodius’ widow and now Antony’s wife, hurried to gloat. Picking up the grisly souvenirs, she spat on Cicero’s head, then yanked out his tongue and stabbed it with a hairpin. Only when she had finished mutilating it was she willing to have the head exposed to the public. The hand that had written the great speeches against Antony was nailed up too. Silenced and pin-pricked as it was, exposed to the gaze of the Roman people, the tongue was eloquent still. Cicero had been the incomparable political orator of the Republic – and now the age of oratory and free politics was dead.