Dictator

I guess it must have been about a month after our retreat to Tusculum that he sought me out one morning and told me he would like to review his old letters: ‘This constant talk with Quintus about my early years has stirred the sediment of my memory.’ I had preserved them all, however fragmentary, incoming and outgoing, over more than three decades, and had sorted them by correspondent and arranged them on rolls chronologically. I carried the cylinders into his library and he lay on the couch while one of his secretaries read them out. It was all there, an entire life, from his early struggles to gain election to the Senate, through the hundreds of legal cases he took to make his name famous and which culminated in the epic prosecution of Verres, his election to aedile and then to praetor and finally to consul, his struggles with Catilina and Clodius, his exile and return, his relations with Caesar and Pompey and Cato, the civil war, the assassination, his return to power, Tullia and Terentia …

For more than a week he relived his life, and at the end he had recovered something of his old self. ‘What an adventure it has been,’ he mused, stretching out on the couch. ‘It has all come back to me, the good and the bad, the noble and the base. I truly believe I can say, without being immodest, that these letters add up to the most complete record of an historical era ever assembled by a leading statesman. And what an era! No one else saw so much, and wrote about it while it was still fresh. This is history composed without any benefit of hindsight. Can you think of anything to compare with it?’

‘It will be of immense interest a thousand years from now,’ I said, trying to encourage his new good mood.

‘Oh, it’s more than merely of interest! It’s the case for my defence. I may have lost the past and lost the present, but I wonder if with this I might not yet win the future.’

Some of the letters showed him in a bad light – vain, duplicitous, greedy, wrong-headed – and I expected him to weed out the most egregious examples and order me to destroy them. But when I asked him which letters he wished me to discard, he replied, ‘We must keep them all. I can’t present myself to posterity as some improbable paragon – no one will believe it. If this archive is to have the necessary authenticity, I must stand before the muse of history as naked as a Greek statue. Let future generations mock me for my follies and pretensions however much they like – the important thing is that they will have to read me, and in that will lie my victory.’

Of all the sayings associated with Cicero, the most famous and characteristic is: ‘While there is life there is hope.’ He still had life – or the semblance of it, at least; and now he had the faintest gleam of hope.

Beginning that day, he concentrated what remained of his strength on the task of ensuring his papers survived. Atticus eventually agreed to help, on condition he was allowed to retrieve every letter he had ever written to Cicero. Cicero rather despised him for his caution but in the end agreed: ‘If he wants to be a mere shadow in history, that’s his lookout.’ With some reluctance I returned the correspondence I had carefully assembled over so many years and watched as Atticus lit a brazier and – not trusting the task to a servant – burnt with his own hand all the rolls on which his letters had been preserved. Then he put his scribes to work. Three complete sets of the collected letters were produced. Cicero kept one, Atticus another and I the third. I sent mine down to my farm along with locked boxes containing all my shorthand notes recording thousands of meetings, speeches, conversations, witticisms and barbed remarks, as well as the dictated drafts of his books. I told the overseer that it all should be hidden in one of the barns and that if anything happened to me he should give it to Agathe Licinia, the freedwoman who owned the baths of Venus Libertina at Baiae. Quite what she would do with it, I was not sure, but I sensed that I could trust her above all people in the world.

At the end of November, Cicero asked me if I would go back to Rome to make sure the last of his papers had been removed from his study, and to carry out a final general inspection. The house was being sold on his behalf by Atticus, and much of the furniture had already gone. It was the start of winter. The morning was chilly, the light gloomy. I wandered between the empty rooms as if I were an invisible spirit, and in my imagination I re-peopled them. I saw the tablinum once again filled with statesmen discussing the future of the republic, heard Tullia’s laughter in the dining room, saw Cicero bent over his books of philosophy in the library attempting to explain why fear of death was illogical … My eyes were blurred with tears; my heart ached.