Dictator

Just as some particularly faithful dogs are said to lie by the graves of their masters, unable to accept that they are dead, so there were those in Rome who clung to the hope that the old republic might yet twitch back into life. Even Cicero fell briefly victim to this delusion. After the triumphs were over, he decided to attend a meeting of the Senate. He had no intention of speaking. He went partly for old times’ sake and partly because he knew that Caesar had appointed several hundred new senators and he was curious to see what they looked like.

‘It was a chamber full of strangers,’ he said to me afterwards, ‘a few of them actually foreign, many not elected – and yet somehow it was still a Senate for all that.’ It met on the Field of Mars, in the same room within Pompey’s theatre complex where it had assembled in emergency session after the old Senate house was burned down. Caesar had even allowed the large marble statue of Pompey to remain in its original position, and the image of the Dictator presiding from the dais with Pompey’s statue behind him gave Cicero hope for the future. The issue for debate was whether the ex-consul, M. Marcellus, one of the most intransigent of Caesar’s opponents, who had gone into exile after Pharsalus and was living on Lesbos, might be allowed to return to Rome. His brother Caius – the magistrate who had sanctioned my manumission – led the appeals for clemency, and he was just finishing his speech when a bird seemed to appear from nowhere, fluttered over the senators’ heads and swooped out of the door. Caesar’s father-in-law, L. Calpurnius Piso, immediately got up and declared it to be an omen: the gods were saying that Marcellus too should be given the freedom to fly home. Then the whole Senate, Cicero included, rose as one and approached Caesar to appeal for clemency; Caius Marcellus and Piso actually fell to their knees at his feet.

Caesar gestured at them to return to their seats. He said, ‘The man for whom you all plead has heaped more deadly insults upon me than any other person living. And yet I am touched by your entreaties and the omen seems to me especially propitious. There is no need for me to place my dignity above the unanimous desire of this house: I have lived long enough for nature or for glory. Therefore let Marcellus come home and dwell in peace in the city of his distinguished ancestors.’

This was received with loud applause, and several of the senators sitting around Cicero urged him to rise and make some expression of gratitude on behalf of them all. The scene so affected Cicero that he forgot his vow never to speak in Caesar’s illegitimate Senate and did as they asked, lauding the Dictator to his face in the most extravagant terms: ‘You seem to have vanquished Victory herself, now that you have surrendered to the vanquished all that Victory had gained. Truly you are invincible!’

Suddenly it seemed possible to him that Caesar might rule as ‘first among equals’ rather than as a tyrant. I thought I saw some semblance of reviving constitutional freedom, he wrote to Sulpicius. The next month he pleaded for the pardon of another exile, Quintus Ligarius – a senator almost as detestable to Caesar as Marcellus – and again Caesar listened and gave judgement in favour of clemency.

But the notion that this amounted to a restoration of the republic was an illusion. A few days afterwards, the Dictator had to leave Rome in a hurry in order to return to Spain and deal with an uprising led by Pompey’s sons, Gnaeus and Sextus. Hirtius told Cicero that the Dictator was in a rage. Many of the rebels were men he had pardoned on condition they did not take up arms again; now they had betrayed his forgiving nature. There would be no further acts of clemency, Hirtius warned: no more gracious gestures. For his own sake Cicero would be well advised to stay away from the Senate, keep his head down and stick to philosophy: ‘This time it will be a fight to the death.’

Tullia was pregnant again by Dolabella – the result, she told me, of her husband’s visit to Tusculum. At first she was delighted by the discovery, believing it would save her marriage. Dolabella seemed happy too. But when she returned to Rome with Cicero to attend Caesar’s four triumphs, and when she went to the house she shared with Dolabella intending to surprise him, she discovered Metella asleep in her bed. It was a terrible shock and to this day I feel the most profound guilt that I failed to warn her of what I had seen when I went there earlier.