Dictator

I had to wait ten days for a favourable wind and did not reach Dyrrachium until the festival of Saturnalia. The City Fathers had placed at Cicero’s disposal a well-defended house up in the hills with a view across the sea, and this was where I found him, gazing at the Adriatic. He turned at my approach. I had forgotten how much exile had aged him. My dismay must have shown in my expression, because his own face fell the moment he saw me, and he said bitterly, ‘So I take it the answer was no?’

‘On the contrary.’

I showed him his original letter with Caesar’s scrawl in the margin. He held it in his hands and studied it for a long while.

‘“Approved. Caesar”,’ he said. ‘Will you look at that? “Approved. Caesar”! He’s doing something he doesn’t want to do and he’s as sulky about it as a child.’

He sat on a bench under an umbrella pine and made me recount my visit in every detail, and then he read the extracts I had copied from Caesar’s Commentaries. When he had finished, he said, ‘He writes very well in his brutal way. Such artlessness requires some art – it will add to his reputation. But where will his campaigning take him next, I wonder? He could grow strong – very strong. If Pompey is not careful, he will wake up to find a monster on his back.’

There was nothing we could do now but wait, and whenever I think of Cicero at this time, I always picture him in the same way: on that terrace, leaning over the balustrade, a letter bearing the latest news from Rome clenched in his hand, staring grimly at the horizon, as if somehow by sheer willpower he could see all the way to Italy and impose himself on events.

First we heard from Atticus of the swearing-in of the new tribunes, eight of whom were Cicero’s supporters and only two his declared enemies – but two was enough to impose a veto on any law repealing his exile. Then from Cicero’s brother, Quintus we learned that Milo, as tribune, had brought a prosecution against Clodius for violence and intimidation, and that Clodius’s response had been to order his bullies to attack Milo’s house. On New Year’s Day the new consuls took office. One, Lentulus Spinther, was already a firm supporter of Cicero. The other, Metellus Nepos, had long been considered his enemy. But someone must have got at him, because in the inaugural debate of the new Senate, Nepos declared that while he still did not care for Cicero personally, he would not oppose his recall. Two days later, a motion to repeal Cicero’s exile, drawn up by Pompey, was laid by the Senate before the people.

At that moment it was possible to believe that Cicero’s banishment would soon be over, and I began to make discreet preparations for our departure to Italy. But Clodius was a resourceful and vindictive enemy. On the night before the people were due to meet, he and his supporters occupied the Forum, the comitium, the rostra – in sum, the whole legislative heart of the republic – and when Cicero’s friends and allies arrived to vote, they attacked them without mercy. Two tribunes, Fabricius and Cispius, were set upon and their attendants murdered and flung in the Tiber. When Quintus tried to get up on to the rostra, he was dragged off and beaten up so badly he only survived by pretending to be dead. Milo responded by unleashing his own squad of gladiators. Soon the centre of Rome was a battlefield, and the fighting went on for days. But although Clodius for the first time suffered severe punishment, he was not entirely driven out, and he still had the two tribunes with their vetoes. The law to bring Cicero home had to be abandoned.

When Cicero received Atticus’s account of what had happened, he fell into a despair almost as great as that which had gripped him in Thessalonica. From your letter, he wrote back, and from the facts themselves I see that I am utterly finished. In matters where my family needs your help I beg you not to fail us in our misery.

However, there is always this to be said for politics: it is never static. If the good times do not last, neither do the bad. Like Nature, it follows a perpetual cycle of growth and decay, and no statesman, however cunning, is immune to this process. If Clodius had not been so arrogant, reckless and ambitious, he never would have achieved the heights he did. But being all those things, and subject to the laws of politics, he was bound to overreach and topple eventually.