Dictator

Cicero listened in growing dismay. He intervened to say that there was no point in weeping over past errors, but couldn’t resist adding, ‘Besides, if it’s mistakes you’re talking about, never mind Decimus – the seeds of our present plight were sown when you failed to call a meeting of the Senate, failed to rally the people to our cause, and failed to seize control of the republic.’

‘Well upon my word!’ exclaimed Servilia. ‘I never heard anything like it – to be accused of a lack of resolution by you of all people!’

Cicero glowered at her and immediately fell silent, his cheeks burning either with fury or embarrassment, and not long after that the meeting ended. My notes record only two conclusions. Brutus and Cassius agreed grudgingly at least to consider accepting their grain commissionerships, but only after Servilia announced in her grandest manner that she would arrange for the wording of the Senate resolution to be couched in more flattering terms. And Brutus reluctantly conceded that it was impossible for him to go to Rome and that his praetorian games would have to be staged in his absence. Apart from that the conference was a failure, with nothing decided. As Cicero explained to Atticus in a letter dictated on the way home, it was now a case of ‘every man for himself’: I found the ship going to pieces, or rather its scattered fragments. No plan, no thought, no method. Hence, though I had no doubts before, I am now all the more determined to escape from here, and as soon as I possibly can.

The die was cast. He would go to Greece.

As for me, I was almost sixty and had privately resolved that the time had come for me to leave Cicero’s service and live what remained of my life alone. I knew from the way he talked that he wasn’t expecting us to part company. He assumed we would share a villa in Athens and write philosophy together until one or other of us died of old age. But I could not face leaving Italy again. My health was not good. And love him as I did, I was tired of being a mere appendage to his brain.

I dreaded having to tell him and kept postponing the fateful moment. He undertook a kind of farewell progress south through Italy, saying goodbye to all his properties and reliving old memories, until eventually we reached Puteoli at the beginning of July – or Quintilis, as he still defiantly insisted on calling it. He had one last villa he wished to visit, along the Bay of Naples in Pompeii, and he decided he would leave on the first leg of his journey abroad from there, hugging the coast down to Sicily and boarding a merchant ship in Syracuse (he judged it too dangerous to sail from Brundisium, as the Macedonian legions were due to start arriving any day). To convey all his books, his property and household staff, I hired three ten-oared boats. He took his mind off the voyage, which he dreaded, by trying to decide what literary composition we should undertake while at sea. He was working on three treatises simultaneously, moving between them as his reading and his inclination took him: On Friendship, On Duties and On Virtues. With these he would complete his great scheme of absorbing Greek philosophy into Latin and of turning it in the process from a set of abstractions into principles for living.

He said, ‘I wonder if this would be a good opportunity for us to write our version of Aristotle’s Topics? Let’s face it: what could be more useful in this time of chaos than to teach men how to use dialectics to construct reasoned arguments? It could be in the form of a dialogue, like the Disputations – you playing one part and I the other. What do you think?’

‘My friend,’ I replied hesitantly, ‘if I may call you that, I have wanted for some time to speak to you but have not been sure how to do it.’

‘This sounds ominous! You’d better go on. Are you ill again?’

‘No, but I need to tell you I have decided not to accompany you to Greece.’

‘Ah.’ He stared at me for what felt like a very long time, his jaw moving slightly as it often did when he was trying to find the right word. Finally he said, ‘Where will you go instead?’

‘To the farm you so kindly gave me.’

His voice was very quiet: ‘I see, and when would you want to do that?’

‘At any time convenient to you.’

‘The sooner the better?’

‘I don’t mind when it is.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘It can be tomorrow if you like. But that is not necessary. I don’t want to inconvenience you.’

‘Tomorrow then.’ And with that he turned back to his Aristotle.

I hesitated. ‘Would it be all right if I borrowed young Eros from the stables and the little carriage, to transport my belongings?’

Without looking up he replied, ‘Of course. Take whatever you need.’