Dictator

Over dinner Dolabella, who was unable to recline because of his wound but had to eat sitting up in a chair like a barbarian, described the campaign in Spain, and confided to us that it had been a near-disaster: that at one point the army’s line had broken and Caesar himself had been obliged to dismount, seize a shield and rally his fleeing legionaries. ‘He said to us when it was over, “Today for the first time I fought for my life.” We killed thirty thousand of the enemy, no prisoners taken. Gnaeus Pompey’s head was stuck on a pole and publicly displayed on Caesar’s orders. It was grim work, I can tell you, and I fear you and your friends will not find him as amenable as before when he gets home.’

‘As long as he leaves me alone to write my books, he’ll get no trouble from me.’

‘My dear Cicero, you of all men have no need to worry. Caesar loves you. He always says that you and he are the last two left.’

Late in the summer Caesar returned to Italy, and all the ambitious men in Rome flocked to welcome him. Cicero and I stayed in the country, working. We finished the Disputations and Cicero sent it to Atticus so that his team of slaves could copy it and distribute it – he particularly asked for one to be sent to Caesar – and then he began composing two new treatises, On the Nature of the Gods and On Divination. Occasionally the barbs of grief still pierced him and he would withdraw for hours into some remote part of the grounds. But increasingly he was contented: ‘What a lot of trouble one avoids if one refuses to have anything to do with the common herd! To have no job, to devote one’s time to literature, is the most wonderful thing in the world.’

Even in Tusculum, however, we were aware, as if it were a storm in the distance, of the Dictator’s return. Dolabella had spoken correctly. The Caesar who came back from Spain was different to the Caesar who had gone out. It was not simply his intolerance of dissent; it was as if his grasp on reality, once so terrifyingly secure, had at last begun to loosen. First he circulated a riposte to Cicero’s eulogy of Cato, which he called his Anti-Cato, full of vulgar gibes that Cato was a drunkard and a crank. As nearly every Roman had at least a grudging respect for Cato, and most revered him, the pettiness of the pamphlet did the Dictator’s reputation far more harm than it did Cato’s. (‘What is this restless desire of his to dominate everyone?’ Cicero wondered aloud when he read it. ‘That requires him to trample even on the dust of the dead?’) Then there was his decision to hold yet another triumph, this time to celebrate his victory in Spain: it seemed to most people that the annihilation of thousands of fellow Romans, including the son of Pompey, was not a thing to glory in. There was also his continuing infatuation with Cleopatra: it was bad enough that he installed her in a grand house with a park beside the Tiber, but when he had a golden statue of his foreign mistress erected in the Temple of Venus, he offended the pious and the patriotic alike. He even had himself declared a god – ‘the Divine Julius’ – with his own priesthood, temple and images, and like a god began to interfere in all aspects of daily life: restricting overseas travel for senators and banning elaborate meals and luxurious goods – to the extent of stationing spies in the marketplaces who would burst into citizens’ homes in the middle of dinner to search, confiscate and arrest.

Finally, as if his ambition had not caused enough bloodshed in recent years, he announced that in the spring he would be off to war again at the head of an immense army of thirty-six legions, to eliminate Parthia first of all, in revenge for the death of Crassus, and then to wheel around the far side of the Black Sea in a vast swathe of conquest that would encompass Hyrcania, the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus, Scythia, all the countries bordering on Germany and finally Germany itself, before returning to Italy by way of Gaul. He would be away three years. Over none of this did the Senate have any say. Like the men who built the pyramids for the pharaohs, they were mere slaves to their master’s grand design.

In December, Cicero proposed that we should transfer our labours to a warmer climate. A wealthy client of his on the Bay of Naples, M. Cluvius, had died recently, leaving him a substantial property at Puteoli, and it was to this that we headed, taking a week over the journey and arriving on the eve of Saturnalia. The villa was large and luxurious, built on the seashore, and even more beautiful than Cicero’s nearby house at Cumae. The estate came with a substantial portfolio of commercial properties located inside the town and a farm just outside it. Cicero was as delighted as a child with his new possession, and the moment we arrived he took off his shoes, hoisted his toga, and walked down the beach to the sea to bathe his feet.