Dictator

HOW EASY IT is for those who play no part in public affairs to sneer at the compromises required of those who do. For two years Cicero had stuck to his principles and refused to join with Caesar, Pompey and Crassus in their ‘triumvirate’ to control the state. He had denounced their criminality in public; they had retaliated by making it possible for Clodius to become a tribune; and when Caesar had offered him a legateship in Gaul that would have given him legal immunity from Clodius’s attacks, Cicero had refused it, because acceptance would have made him Caesar’s creature.

But the price of upholding those principles had been banishment, poverty and heartbreak. ‘I have made myself powerless,’ he said to me, after Milo had gone off to bed, leaving us alone to discuss Pompey’s offer, ‘and where is the virtue in that? What use am I to my family or my principles stuck in this dump for the rest of my life? Oh, no doubt one day I could become some kind of shining example to be taught to bored pupils: the man who refused ever to compromise his conscience. Perhaps after I’m safely dead they might even put up a statue of me at the back of the rostra. But I don’t want to be a monument. My skill is statecraft, and that requires me to be alive and in Rome.’ He fell silent. ‘Then again, the thought of having to bend the knee to Caesar is scarcely bearable. To have suffered all this, and then to have to go creeping back to him like some dog that’s learnt its lesson …’

He was still undecided when he retired for the night, and the following morning, when Milo called to ask him what answer he should take back to Pompey, I could not have predicted what he would say. ‘You can tell him this,’ responded Cicero. ‘That my whole life has been dedicated to the service of the state, and that if the state demands of me that I should reconcile with my enemy – then reconcile I shall.’

Milo embraced him and then immediately set off back to the coast in his war chariot with his gladiator standing beside him – such a pair of brutes longing for a fight that one could only tremble for Rome and all the blood that was bound to be spilt.

It was settled that I should leave Thessalonica on my mission to Caesar at the end of the summer, as soon as the military campaigning season was over. To have set off before then would have been pointless, as Caesar was with his legions deep inside Gaul, and his habit of rapid forced marches made it impossible to say with any certainty where he might be.

Cicero spent many hours working on his letter. Years later, after his death, our copy was seized by the authorities, along with all the other correspondence between Cicero and Caesar, presumably in case it contradicted the official history that the Dictator was a genius and that all who opposed him were stupid, greedy, ungrateful, short-sighted and reactionary. I assume it has been destroyed; at any rate, I have never heard of it since. However, I still possess my shorthand notes, covering most of the thirty-six years I worked for Cicero – such a vast mass of unintelligible hieroglyphics that the ignorant operatives who ransacked my archive doubtless assumed them to be harmless gibberish and left them untouched. It is from these that I have been able to reconstruct the many conversations, speeches and letters that make up this memoir of Cicero – including his humiliating appeal to Caesar that summer, which is not lost after all.

Thessalonica

From M. Cicero to G. Caesar, Proconsul, greetings.

I hope you and the army are well.

Many misunderstandings have unfortunately arisen between us in recent years but there is one in particular which, if it exists, I wish to dispel. I have never wavered in my admiration for your qualities of intelligence, resourcefulness, patriotism, energy and command. You have justly risen to a position of great eminence in our republic, and I wish only to see your efforts crowned with success both on the battlefield and in the counsels of state, as I am sure they will be.