Dictator

From that point onwards Caesar’s funeral followed the pattern of Clodius’s. The body was supposed to be burned on a pyre already prepared on the Field of Mars. But as it was being borne down from the rostra, angry voices cried out that it should instead be cremated in Pompey’s Senate chamber, where the crime was committed, or on the Capitol, where the conspirators had taken refuge. Then the crowd, with some collective impulse, changed its mind and decided that it should be burned on the spot. Antony did nothing to stop any of this but looked on indulgently as once again the bookshops of the Argiletum were ransacked and the benches of the law courts were dragged into the centre of the Forum and stacked in a pile. Caesar’s bier was set upon the bonfire and torched. The actors and dancers and musicians pulled off their robes and masks and threw them into the flames. The crowd followed suit. They tore at their own clothes in their hysteria and these along with everything else flammable went flying on to the fire. When the mob started running through the streets carrying torches, looking for the houses of the assassins, I finally lost my nerve and headed back to the Palatine. On my way I passed poor Helvius Cinna, the poet and tribune, who had been mistaken by the mob for his namesake the praetor Cornelius Cinna, whom Antony had mentioned in his speech. He was being dragged away screaming with a noose around his neck, and afterwards his head was paraded around the Forum on a pole.

When I staggered back into the house and told Cicero what had happened, he put his face in his hands. All that night the sounds of destruction went on and the sky was lit up by the houses that had been set on fire. The following day Antony sent a message to Decimus warning that the lives of the assassins could no longer be protected and urging them to withdraw from Rome. Cicero advised them to do as Antony suggested: they would be more useful to the cause alive than dead. Decimus went to Nearer Gaul to try to take control of his allotted province. Trebonius travelled by a circuitous route to Asia to do the same. Brutus and Cassius retreated to the coast at Antium. Cicero headed south.

XV

HE WAS FINISHED with politics, he said. He was finished with Italy. He would go to Greece. He would stay with his son in Athens. He would write philosophy.

We packed up most of the books he needed from his libraries in Rome and Tusculum and set off with a large entourage, including two secretaries, a chef, a doctor and six bodyguards. The weather had been unseasonably cold and wet ever since the assassination, which of course was taken as yet another sign of the gods’ displeasure at Caesar’s murder. My strongest memory of those days spent travelling is of Cicero in his carriage composing philosophy with a blanket over his knees while the rain drummed continuously on the thin wooden roof. We stayed one night with Matius Calvena, the equestrian, who was in despair over the future of the nation: ‘If a man of Caesar’s genius could find no way out, who will find one now?’ But apart from him, in contrast to the scenes in Rome, we found no one who was not glad to see the back of the Dictator. ‘Unfortunately,’ as Cicero observed, ‘none of them has control of a legion.’

He sought refuge in his work, and by the time we reached Puteoli on the Ides of April, he had completed one entire book – On Auguries – half of another – On Fate – and had begun a third – On Glory – three examples of his genius that will live for as long as men are still capable of reading. And no sooner had he got out of his carriage and stretched his legs along the seashore than he began sketching the outline of a fourth, On Friendship (With the single exception of wisdom, I am inclined to regard it as the greatest of all the gifts the gods have bestowed upon mankind), which he planned to dedicate to Atticus. The physical world might have become a hostile and dangerous place for him, but in his mind he lived in freedom and tranquillity.