Dictator

She asked my advice and I urged her to divorce Dolabella without delay. The baby was due in four months. If she was still married when she gave birth, he would be entitled under the law to take the child; however if she were divorced, the situation would be much more complicated. Dolabella would have to take her to court to prove paternity, and at the very least, thanks to her father, she would have the best legal counsel available. She talked to Cicero and he agreed: the baby would be his sole grandchild and he had no intention of seeing it taken away from his daughter and entrusted to the care of Dolabella and the daughter of Clodia.

Accordingly, on the morning that Dolabella was due to leave with Caesar for the war in Spain, Tullia went to his house, accompanied by Cicero, and informed him that the marriage was over but that she wished to look after the baby. Cicero told me Dolabella’s reaction: ‘The scoundrel merely shrugged, wished her well with the child, and said that of course it must remain with its mother. Then he drew me aside to say that there was no way at the moment that he could repay her dowry and he hoped this would not affect our relations! What could I say? I can hardly afford to make an enemy of one of Caesar’s closest lieutenants, and besides, I still can’t bring myself entirely to dislike him.’

He was anguished and blamed himself for allowing the mess to develop. ‘I should have insisted that she divorce him the moment I heard of the way he was carrying on. Now what is she to do? An abandoned mother of thirty-one with a weak constitution and no dowry is hardly the most marriageable of prospects.’

If there was any marrying to be done, he realised grimly, the person who would have to do it would be him. Nothing could have suited him less. He liked his new bachelor existence, preferred living with his books to the prospect of living with a wife. He was now sixty, and although he still cut a handsome figure, sexual desire – never a strong part of his character even in his youth – was waning. It is true that he flirted more as he got older. He liked dinner parties where pretty young women were present – he even once attended the same table as Mark Antony’s mistress, the nude actress Volumnia Cytheris, a thing he would never have countenanced in the past. But murmured compliments on a dining couch and the occasional love poem sent round by a messenger the next morning were as far as things went.

Unfortunately, he now needed to marry to raise some money. Terentia’s clandestine recovery of her dowry had crippled his finances; he knew Dolabella would never repay him; and although he had plenty of properties – including two new ones, at Astura on the coast near Antium and at Puteoli on the Bay of Naples – he could barely afford to run them. You might ask, ‘Well why did he not sell some of them?’ But that was never Cicero’s way. His motto was always ‘Income adjusts to meet expenditure, not the other way round.’ Now that his income could no longer be expanded by legal practice the only realistic alternative was once again to take a rich wife.

It is a sordid story. But I swore at the outset to tell the truth, and I shall do so. Three potential brides were available. One was Hirtia, the elder sister of Hirtius. Her brother was immensely rich from his time in Gaul, and to get this tiresome woman off his hands he was prepared to offer her to Cicero with a dowry of two million sesterces. But as Cicero put it in a letter to Atticus, she was quite remarkably ugly, and it struck him as absurd that the cost of keeping his beautiful houses should be to install in them a hideous wife.

Then there was Pompeia, the daughter of Pompey. She had been the wife of Faustus Sulla, the owner of Aristotle’s manuscripts, recently killed fighting for the Senate’s cause in Africa. But if he married her, that would make Gnaeus – the man who had threatened to kill him at Corcyra – his brother-in-law. It was unthinkable. Besides, she bore a strong facial resemblance to her father. ‘Can you imagine,’ he said to me with a shudder, ‘waking up beside Pompey every morning?’

That left the least suitable match of all. Publilia was only fifteen years old. Her father, M. Publilius, a wealthy equestrian friend of Atticus, had died leaving his estate in trust for his daughter until she married. The principal trustee was Cicero. It was Atticus’s idea – ‘an elegant solution’, he called it – that Cicero should marry Publilia and so gain access to her fortune. There was nothing illegal about this. The girl’s mother and uncle were all for it, flattered by the prospect of forming a connection with such a distinguished man. And Publilia herself, when Cicero hesitantly broached the subject, declared that she would be honoured to be his wife.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked her. ‘I am forty-five years older than you – old enough to be your grandfather. Do you not find that … unnatural?’

She stared at him quite frankly. ‘No.’