Dictator

We reached Athens in the spring and stayed for ten days with Aristus, the principal professor of the Academy, who was at that time the greatest living exponent of the philosophy of Epicurus. Like Atticus, who was also a devoted Epicurean, Aristus took a practical, material view of what makes for a happy life: a healthy diet, moderate exercise, pleasant surroundings, congenial company and the avoidance of stressful situations. Cicero, whose god was Plato and whose life was full of stress, disputed this. He believed that Epicureanism amounted to a kind of anti-philosophy: ‘You say happiness depends on bodily well-being. But continual physical well-being is beyond our control. If a man is suffering an agonising illness, say, or if he is being tortured, then in your philosophy he cannot be happy.’

‘Perhaps he cannot be supremely happy,’ conceded Aristus, ‘but happiness will still be there in some form.’

‘No, no, he cannot be happy at all,’ insisted Cicero, ‘because his happiness is entirely contingent on the physical. Whereas the most magnificent and fruitful promise in the entire history of philosophy is the simple maxim: nothing is good except what is morally good. From this we can prove that moral goodness is sufficient by itself to create the happy life. And from that derives a third maxim: moral goodness is the only sort of good there is.’

‘Ah, but if I torture you,’ objected Aristus, with a knowing laugh, ‘you will be every bit as unhappy as I am.’

Cicero, however, was very serious. ‘No, no, because if I remain morally good – which I am not claiming is easy, by the way, let alone that I have achieved it – then I must remain happy, however great my pain. Even as my torturer falls back in exhaustion there will be something beyond the physical that he cannot reach.’

Naturally I am simplifying a long and complicated discussion that lasted several days as we toured the buildings and antiquities of Athens. But this was what it boiled down to, and it was now that Cicero began to conceive of the idea of writing some work of philosophy that would not be a set of high-flown abstractions but rather a practical guide to achieving the good life.

From Athens we sailed down the coast and then hopped from island to island across the Aegean in a fleet of a dozen vessels. The Rhodian boats were large, cumbersome and slow; they pitched and rolled in even moderate seas and were open to the elements. I remember how I shivered in a rainstorm as we passed Delos, that melancholy rock where up to ten thousand slaves are said to be sold in a single day. Everywhere the crowds that turned out to see Cicero were immense; among Romans only Pompey and Caesar, and I suppose just possibly Cato, can have been more famous in the world. At Ephesus our teeming expedition of legates, quaestors, lictors and military tribunes, with all their slaves and baggage, was transferred to a convoy of ox carts and pack mules and we set off along the dusty mountain roads into the interior of Asia Minor.

It was a full fifty-two days after leaving Italy that we reached Laodicea, the first town in the province of Cilicia, where Cicero was immediately required to begin hearing cases. The poverty and exhaustion of the common people, the endless shuffling queues of petitioners in the gloomy basilica and the glaring white-stone forum, the constant moans and groans about customs officials and poll taxes, the petty corruption, the flies, the heat, the dysentery, the sharp stink of goat and sheep dung that seemed always in the air, the bitter-tasting wine and oily spicy food, the small scale of the town and the lack of anything beautiful to look at, or sophisticated to listen to, or savoury to eat – oh, how Cicero hated being stuck in such a place while the fate of the world was being decided back in Italy without him! I had barely unpacked my ink and stylus before he was dictating letters to everyone he could think of in Rome, pleading with them to make sure his term was restricted to a year.

We had not been there long when a dispatch arrived from Cassius reporting that the King of Parthia’s son had invaded Syria at the head of such a massive force he had been obliged to withdraw his legions to the fortified city of Antioch. This meant Cicero had to set off immediately to join his own army at the foot of the Taurus mountains, the immense natural barrier separating Cilicia from Syria. Quintus was greatly excited, and for a month there seemed a real possibility that Cicero might have to command the defence of the entire eastern flank of the empire. But then a fresh report came from Cassius: the Parthians had retreated before the impregnable walls of Antioch; he had pursued and defeated them; the king’s son was dead and the threat was over.