Dictator

I am not sure whether Cicero was more relieved or disappointed. However, he still managed to have a war of sorts. Some of the local tribes had taken advantage of the Parthian crisis to rise in revolt against Roman rule. There was one fortress in particular, named Pindessium, where the rebel forces were concentrated, and Cicero laid siege to it.

We lived in an army camp in the mountains for two months, and Quintus was as happy as a schoolboy building ramps and towers, digging moats and bringing up artillery. I found the whole adventure distasteful, and so I think did Cicero, for the rebels stood no chance. Day after day we launched arrows and flaming projectiles into the town, until eventually it surrendered and our legionaries poured into the place to ransack it. Quintus had the leaders executed. The rest were put in chains and led off to the coast to be shipped to Delos and sold into slavery. Cicero watched them go with a gloomy expression. ‘I suppose if I were a great military man like Caesar I would have all their hands amputated. Isn’t that how one brings peace to these people? But I can’t say I derive much satisfaction from using all the resources of civilisation to reduce a few barbarian huts to ashes.’ Still, his men hailed him as imperator in the field, and afterwards he had me write six hundred letters – that is, one to every member of the Senate – requesting that he be awarded a triumph: a tremendous labour for me, working in the primitive conditions of an army camp, that left me prostrate with exhaustion.

Cicero placed Quintus in command of the army for the winter and returned to Laodicea. He was rather shocked by the relish with which his brother had crushed the rebellion, and also by his brusque manner with subordinates (irritable, rude, careless, as he described him to Atticus); he did not care much for his nephew, either – a boy with a fine conceit for himself. Quintus Junior liked to make sure everyone knew who he was – his name alone saw to that – and he treated the locals with great disdain. Still, Cicero tried to do his duty as an affectionate uncle, and at that spring’s Festival of Liberalia, in the absence of the boy’s father, he presided over the ceremony at which young Quintus became a man, personally helping him to shave his wispy beard and dress in his first toga.

As for his own son, young Marcus gave him cause for concern in a different way. The lad was affable, lazy, fond of sport and somewhat slow on the uptake when it came to his schoolwork. Rather than study Greek and Latin, he liked to hang around the army officers and practise swordplay and javelin throwing. ‘I love him dearly,’ Cicero said to me, ‘and he is certainly a good-hearted fellow, but sometimes I wonder where on earth he comes from – I detect nothing in him of me at all.’

Nor was that the end of his family worries. He had left the choice of Tullia’s new husband up to her and her mother, having made clear simply that his own preference was for a safe, worthy, respectable young aristocrat such as Tiberius Nero or the son of his old friend Servius Sulpicius. But the women had set their hearts instead on Publius Cornelius Dolabella, a most unsuitable match in Cicero’s view. He was a notorious rake, only nineteen – about seven years younger than Tullia – yet remarkably he had already been married once, to a much older woman.

By the time the letter announcing their choice reached him, it was too late for Cicero to intervene: the wedding would have taken place before his answer arrived in Rome – a fact the women must have known. ‘What is one to do?’ he sighed to me. ‘Well, such is life – let the gods bless what is done. I can understand why Tullia wants it – no doubt he’s a handsome, charming type, and if anyone deserves a taste of life at last, it’s she. But Terentia! What is she thinking of? It sounds as though she’s half in love with the fellow herself. I’m not sure I understand her any more.’

And here I come to the greatest of all Cicero’s personal worries: that something clearly was amiss with Terentia. Recently he had received a reproachful letter from the exiled Milo demanding to know what had happened to all that property of his that Cicero had bought so cheaply at auction: his wife, Fausta, had never received a penny. As it happened, the agent who had acted on Cicero’s behalf – Philotimus, Terentia’s steward – was still hoping to persuade Cicero to adopt some dubious money-making scheme and was due to visit him in Laodicea.

Cicero received him in my presence and told him bluntly that there was no question of him or any member of his staff or family engaging in any shady business. ‘So you can save your breath as far as that’s concerned and tell me instead what’s become of Milo’s bankrupt estate. You remember the sale was fixed so you got it all for next to nothing, and then you were supposed to sell it at a profit and give the proceeds to Fausta?’