Dictator

I cherish my memories of Cicero at this time, in the weeks before Rufus’s trial. He seemed once again to hold all the threads of life in his hands, just as he had in his prime. He was active in the courts and in the Senate. He went out to dinner with his friends. He even moved back in to the house on the Palatine. True, it was not entirely finished. The place still reeked of lime and paint; workmen trailed mud in from the garden. But Cicero was so delighted to be back in his own home, he did not care. His furniture and books were fetched out of storage, the household gods were placed on the altar, and Terentia was summoned back from Tusculum with Tullia and Marcus.

Terentia entered the house cautiously and moved between the rooms with her nose wrinkled in distaste at the pungent smell of fresh plaster. She had never much cared for the place from the start, and was not about to change her opinion now. But Cicero persuaded her to stay: ‘That woman who caused you so much pain will never harm you again. She may have laid a hand on you. But I promise you: I shall flay her alive.’

He also, to his great delight, after two years’ separation, heard that Atticus had at last returned from Epirus. The moment he reached the city gates, he came straight round to inspect Cicero’s rebuilt house. Unlike Quintus, Atticus had not changed at all. His smile was still as constant, his charm as thickly laid-on – ‘Tiro, my dear fellow, thank you so much for taking care of my oldest friend so devotedly’ – his figure as trim, his silvery hair as sleek and well cut. The only difference was that now he trailed a shy young woman at least thirty years his junior, whom he introduced to Cicero … as his fiancée! I thought Cicero might faint with shock. Her name was Pilia. She was of an obscure family, with no money and no particular beauty either – just a quiet, homely country girl. But Atticus was besotted. At first Cicero was greatly put out. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ he grumbled to me when the couple had gone. ‘He’s three years older even than I am! Is it a wife he’s after or a nurse?’ I suspect he was mostly offended because Atticus had never mentioned her before, and worried that she might disrupt the easy intimacy of their friendship. But Atticus was so obviously happy, and Pilia so modest and cheerful, that Cicero soon came round to her, and sometimes I saw him glancing at her in an almost wistful way, especially when Terentia was being shrewish.

Pilia quickly became a close friend and confidante of Tullia. They were the same age and of similar temperaments, and I often saw them walking together, holding hands. Tullia had been a widow by this time for a year and encouraged by Pilia now declared herself ready to take a new husband. Cicero made enquiries about a suitable match and soon came up with Furius Crassipes – a young, rich, good-looking aristocrat, of an ancient but undistinguished family, eager for a career as a senator. He had also recently inherited a handsome house and a park just beyond the city walls. Tullia asked me for my opinion.

I said, ‘What I think doesn’t matter. The question is: do you like him?’

‘I think I do.’

‘Do you think you do or are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Then that is enough.’

In truth I thought Crassipes was more in love with the idea of Cicero as a father-in-law than Tullia as a wife. But I kept this view to myself. A wedding date was fixed.

Who knows the secrets of another’s marriage? Certainly not I. Cicero, for example, had long complained to me of Terentia’s peevishness, of her obsession with money, of her superstition and her coldness and her rude tongue. And yet the whole of this elaborate legal spectacle he had contrived to be enacted in the centre of Rome was for her – his means of making amends for all the wrongs she had suffered because of the failure of his career. For the first time in their long marriage, he laid at her feet the greatest gift he had to offer her: his oratory.

Not that she wanted to listen to it, mind you. She had hardly ever heard him speak in public, and never in the law courts, and had no desire to start now. It took considerable amounts of Cicero’s eloquence simply to persuade her to leave the house and come down to the Forum on the morning he was due to speak.