Dictator

Over dinner I asked him if he had found it painful to return to a place where he had spent so much time with Tullia.

He replied: ‘I dreaded the prospect of coming, naturally, but when I arrived it was not so bad. One deals with grief, I have come to believe, either by never thinking of it or by thinking of it all the time. I chose the latter path, and here at least I am surrounded by memories of her, and her ashes are interred in the garden. Friends have been very kind, especially those who have suffered similar losses. Did you see the letter Sulpicius wrote me?’

He passed it to me over the table:

I want to tell you of something which has brought me no slight comfort, in the hope that perhaps it may have some power to lighten your sorrow too. As I was on my way back from Asia, sailing from Aegina towards Megara, I began to gaze at the landscape around me. There behind me was Aegina, in front of me Megara, to the right Piraeus, to the left Corinth; once flourishing towns, now lying low in ruins before one’s eyes. I began to think to myself: ‘Ah! How can we manikins wax indignant if one of us dies or is killed, ephemeral creatures as we are, when the corpses of so many towns lie abandoned in a single spot? Check yourself, Servius, and remember that you were born a mortal man.’ That thought, I do assure you, strengthened me not a little. Can you really be so greatly moved by the loss of one poor little woman’s frail spirit? If her end had not come now, she must none the less have died in a few years’ time, for she was mortal.

‘I never thought Sulpicius could be so eloquent,’ I remarked.

‘Nor I. You see how all of us poor creatures strive to make sense of death, even dry old jurists such as him? It’s given me an idea. Suppose we were to compose a work of philosophy that helped relieve men of their fear of death.’

‘That would be an achievement.’

‘The Consolation seeks to reconcile us to the deaths of those we love. Now let us try to reconcile ourselves to our own deaths. If we were to succeed – well, tell me, what could bring humanity greater relief from terror than that?’

I had no answer. His proposition was irresistible. I was curious to see how he would manage it. And so was born what is now known as the Tusculan Disputations, upon which we started work the following day. From the outset, Cicero conceived it as five books:

On the fear of death

On the endurance of pain

On the alleviation of distress

On the remaining disorders of the soul

On the sufficiency of virtue for a happy life

Once again we assumed our old routine of composition. Like his hero Demosthenes, who hated to be beaten to the dawn by a diligent workman, Cicero would rise in the darkness and read in his library by lamplight until the day had broken; later in the morning he would describe to me what was in his mind and I would probe his logic with questions; in the afternoon while he napped I would write up my shorthand notes into a draft, which he would then correct; we would discuss and revise the day’s work over dinner in the evening, and finally before retiring we would decide the topics for the following morning.