Dictator

From the moment we entered the immense house it was clear something terrible had occurred. Senators and clients of Pompey stood in worried, silent groups. Someone whispered to Cicero that no announcement had been made, but Pompey’s failure to appear, and an earlier glimpse of several of Julia’s maids fleeing, weeping, across an inner courtyard, suggested the worst. Suddenly from the interior there was a flutter of activity, a curtain parted and Pompey emerged in the midst of a retinue of slaves. He stopped, as if shocked by the number of people waiting for him, and searched for a familiar face. His eye fell on Cicero. He raised his hand and walked towards him. Everyone watched. At first he seemed entirely calm and clear-eyed. But then as he reached his old ally the effort at self-control abruptly became too much. His whole body and face seemed to sag and with a terrible choking sob he cried out, ‘She’s dead!’

A great groan went round the vast room – of genuine shock and grief, I have no doubt, but also of alarm, for these were politicians and this was a much bigger thing than the death of one young woman, tragic though it was. Cicero, in tears himself, put his arms round Pompey and tried to comfort him, and after a few moments Pompey asked him to come and see the body. Knowing how squeamish Cicero was about death, I thought he might try to refuse. But that would have been impossible. He was not being invited purely as a friend. He was to be an official witness on behalf of the Senate in what was a matter of state. He went off holding Pompey’s hand, and when he returned shortly afterwards, the others gathered round.

‘She started bleeding again soon after the birth,’ reported Cicero, ‘and the flow could not be stopped. The end was peaceful and she was brave, as befits her lineage.’

‘And the child?’

‘He will not last the day.’

More groans greeted this announcement and then everyone left to spread the news across the city. Cicero said to me, ‘The poor girl was whiter than the sheet in which they’d wound her. And the boy was blind and limp. I am truly sorry for Caesar. She was his only child. It’s as if Cato’s prophecies of the gods’ rage are starting to come true.’

We went back to the house and Cicero wrote Caesar a letter of consolation. As ill luck would have it, Caesar was in the most inaccessible place it was possible for him to be, having crossed over to Britain again, this time with an invasion force of twenty-seven thousand men, including Quintus. It was not until he returned to Gaul several months later that he found the packets of letters informing him of his daughter’s death. He showed by all accounts not a tremor of emotion but retired to his quarters, never spoke of it, and after three days of official mourning went on with his normal duties. It was, I guess, the secret of his achievements that he was quite indifferent to the death of anyone – enemy or friend, his only child or even ultimately himself – a coldness of nature that he concealed beneath his famous layers of charm.

Pompey was at the opposite end of the human spectrum. All his depths were on the surface. He loved his various wives with great (some said excessive) tenderness, and Julia most of all. At her funeral – which was, despite Cato’s objections, a state occasion held in the Forum – he found it hard to deliver the eulogy through his tears, and generally gave every appearance of being broken in spirit. The ashes were afterwards interred in a mausoleum in the precincts of one of his temples on the Field of Mars.

It must have been perhaps two months later that he asked Cicero to come and see him and showed him the letter he had just received from Caesar. After commiserating with him on the loss of Julia, and thanking him for his condolences, Caesar proposed a new marital alliance, but of double the strength: he would give his sister’s granddaughter, Octavia, to Pompey, and Pompey in return would give him the hand of his daughter, Pompeia.

‘What do you make of this?’ demanded Pompey. ‘I believe the barbarian air of Britain must have affected his brain! For one thing, my daughter’s already betrothed to Faustus Sulla – what am I supposed to tell him? “Very sorry, Sulla, someone more important has just come along”? And then Octavia of course is married – and not to just some nobody, either, but to Caius Marcellus: how’s he going to feel about my stealing his wife? Damn it all, Caesar’s married himself, come to that, to that poor little drab Calpurnia! All these lives to be turned upside down, and meanwhile dear little Julia’s side of our bed is not yet cold! Do you know, I haven’t even had the heart to clear out her hairbrushes?’

Cicero for once found himself speaking up for Caesar: ‘I’m sure he’s only thinking of the stability of the republic.’

But Pompey was not to be pacified. ‘Well I shan’t do it. If I marry for a fifth time, it will be to a woman of my choice; and as for Caesar, he will have to find himself a different bride.’