The other sides of civil war

In 49 BCE, after many weeks of indecision and despite his realistic sense that there was not much to choose between Caesar and Pompey, Cicero decided not to remain neutral in the civil war but to join the Pompeians and sail for their camp in northern Greece. Although not quite in the league of either of the protagonists, he was still a significant enough figure that neither side wanted him as a declared enemy. But some of his irritating habits made Cicero an unpopular member of Pompey’s squad. His fellow fighters could not stand the way he went around the barracks with a scowl on his face while trying to relieve the tension by cracking feeble jokes. ‘So why not employ him as guardian of your children, then?’ he retorted when a decidedly inappropriate candidate was promoted to a command position on the grounds that he was ‘mild mannered and sensible’. When the day of the Battle of Pharsalus came, Cicero used Polybius’ tactic and was conveniently off sick. After the defeat, rather than move on from Greece to Africa with some of the hardliners, he returned directly to Italy to wait for an amnesty from Caesar.

Cicero’s letters from this period, about 400 in all, reveal something of the tawdriness and the terror of civil war, as well as the disorganisation, the misunderstanding, the back-stabbing, the personal ambitions, even the bathos of this, or any, conflict and its aftermath. They offer a useful antidote to Caesar’s artfully partisan Commentaries on the Civil War, written to match his Commentaries on the Gallic War, and to some of the high-flown rhetoric and big principles that the clash between Caesarians and Pompeians still evokes. Civil war had its seedy side too.

Part of Cicero’s indecision in 49 BCE was caused not by political ambivalence but by almost farcical ambition. He had only just returned from Cilicia and was keen for the senate to award him a triumph to celebrate his successful skirmish in the province a year earlier, and the rules demanded that he neither enter the city nor dismiss his official staff until the decision on the award had been made. He was anxious about his family and uncertain whether his wife and daughter should remain in Rome. Could they be useful to him there? Would there be enough food for them? Would it give the wrong impression for them to stay in the city when other rich women were leaving? In any case, if he was to stand a chance of a triumph, he had little option but to spend a few months traipsing around outside Rome, increasingly inconvenienced and embarrassed by his detachment of official bodyguards, who were still carrying the drooping laurel leaves that he had been awarded to celebrate his little victory. Eventually he accepted the inevitable: the senators had more pressing matters on their minds than his ‘bauble’, as he sometimes called it; he would give up any hope of a triumph and join Pompey.

Even when he returned from those inglorious few months on the front line, he still faced the personal ruptures, uncertainties and spill-over violence that were part and parcel, day-to-day, of the big story of civil war. There were quarrels with his brother, Quintus, who seemed to be trying to make his own peace with Caesar by bad-mouthing Cicero. There were suspicions about the killing in Greece of one of his friends, a prominent adversary of Caesar, who in an after-dinner fight had been fatally stabbed in the stomach and behind the ear. Was this just a personal quarrel about money, as Cicero suspected, for the killer was known to be short of cash? Or was Caesar somehow behind the death? Violence apart, even playing his cards right and maintaining good personal relations with the winning side could prove irksome.

It was never more irksome than when a couple of years later Cicero ended up entertaining Caesar to dinner in one of his seaside estates on the Bay of Naples, where many wealthy Romans from the city had luxury getaways. He gives a wry description of all the trouble it involved in a letter to his friend Atticus from the end of 45 BCE, which is also one of the most vivid pictures to survive of Caesar off duty (and a particularly favourite moment in Cicero’s career for Gore Vidal centuries later). Caesar was travelling with a battalion of no fewer than 2,000 soldiers as a guard and escort, which was an awful burden for even the most generous and tolerant host: ‘a billeting rather than a visit’, as Cicero puts it. And that was in addition to Caesar’s large civilian following of slaves and ex-slaves. Cicero explains that he had three dining rooms laid up for visiting senior staff alone and made appropriate arrangements for those further down the social pecking order, while Caesar took a bath and had a massage before he reclined to dine, in the formal Roman fashion. He turned out to have a large appetite, partly because he had been following a course of emetics, which was a popular regime of detoxification among wealthy Romans involving regular vomiting; and he enjoyed urbane conversation more about literature than about ‘anything serious’ (see plate 14).

How his own slaves and staff coped with this invasion, Cicero does not stop to say, or perhaps did not notice, but he congratulated himself that the evening had passed off well, even though he did not relish a repeat: ‘My guest was not the sort to whom you would say, “Please drop by again when you are next around”. Once is enough.’ The best one can observe is that entertaining a victorious Pompey would almost certainly have been just as much bother.

Cicero’s letters also reveal that the trials of war and the demands of receiving a dictator were only one part of his troubles at the time. Between Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon and his assassination on the Ides of March, 44 BCE, Cicero’s family and household fell apart. In those five years, he divorced Terentia, his wife of thirty years, and quickly remarried. He was aged sixty, his new bride, Publilia, was about fifteen years old and the relationship lasted only a few weeks before he sent her back to her mother. Meanwhile, his daughter Tullia was divorced from her third husband, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, an enthusiastic supporter of Caesar. Tullia was pregnant at the time of the divorce and died early in 45 BCE, shortly after giving birth to a son, who only briefly survived her. Her previous child by Dolabella had been born prematurely and had also died, just a couple of weeks old. Cicero was engulfed in grief, which did not help his relationship with his new bride, as he retreated to be alone on one of his more isolated estates and to plan how to commemorate his daughter; he was soon busy reflecting on how to give her some kind of divine status. As he put it, he wanted to ensure her ‘apotheosis’.