Dictator

How odd it was to make that familiar walk again, to enter that unchanged house, and to find Cicero sitting in the courtyard on the same stone bench, staring into space with the same expression of utter dejection. He jumped up when he saw me, threw wide his arms and clasped me to him. ‘But you’re too thin!’ he protested, feeling the boniness of my shoulders and ribs. ‘You’ll become ill again. We must fatten you up!’

He called to the others to come and see who was here, and from various directions came his son, Marcus, now a strapping, floppy-haired sixteen-year-old, wearing the toga of manhood; his nephew, Quintus, slightly sheepish as he must have known his uncle would have told me of his malicious blabbing; and finally Quintus senior, who smiled to see me but whose face quickly lapsed back into melancholy. Apart from young Marcus, who was training for the cavalry and loved spending his time around the soldiers, it was plainly an unhappy household.

‘Everything about our strategy is wrong,’ Cicero complained to me over dinner that evening. ‘We sit here doing nothing while Caesar rampages across Spain. Far too much notice is being taken of auguries, in my opinion – no doubt birds and entrails have their place in civilian government, but they sit badly with commanding an army. Sometimes I wonder if Pompey is quite the military genius he’s cracked up to be.’

Cicero being Cicero, he did not restrict such opinions to his own household but voiced them around Thessalonica to whoever would listen, and it was not long before I realised he was regarded as something of a defeatist. Not surprisingly Pompey hardly ever saw him, but then I suppose this may have been because he was away so much training his new legions. Close to two hundred senators with their staffs were crammed into the city by the time I arrived, many of them elderly. They hung around the Temple of Apollo with nothing to do, bickering among themselves. All wars are horrible, but civil wars especially so. Some of Cicero’s closest friends, such as young Caelius Rufus, were fighting with Caesar, while his new son-in-law, Dolabella, actually had command of a squadron of Caesar’s fleet in the Adriatic. Pompey’s first words to Cicero when he arrived had been a curt ‘Where’s your new son-in-law?’ To which Cicero had replied, ‘With your old father-in-law.’ Pompey had grunted and walked away.

I asked Cicero what Dolabella was like. He rolled his eyes. ‘An adventurer like all of Caesar’s crew; a rogue, a cynic, too full of animal spirits for his own good – I rather like him actually. But oh dear, poor Tullia! What kind of husband has she landed herself with this time? The darling girl gave birth at Cumae prematurely just before I left but the child didn’t last out the day. I fear another attempt at motherhood will kill her. And of course the more Dolabella wearies of her and her illnesses – she’s older than him – the more desperately she loves him. And still I haven’t paid him the second part of her dowry. Six hundred thousand sesterces! But where am I to find such a vast sum when I’m trapped here?’

That summer was even hotter than the one when Cicero was exiled – and now half of Rome was exiled with him. We wilted in the humidity of the teeming city. Sometimes I found it hard not to take a certain grim satisfaction at the sight of so many men who had ignored Cicero’s warnings about Caesar – who had been prepared indeed to see Cicero driven from Rome in the interests of a quiet life – and who now found themselves experiencing what it was like to be far from home and facing an uncertain future.

If only Caesar had been stopped earlier! That was the lament upon everyone’s lips. But now it was too late and all the momentum of war was with him. At the height of the summer’s heat, messengers reached Thessalonica with the news that the Senate’s army in Spain had surrendered to Caesar after a campaign of just forty days. The news provoked intense dismay. Not long afterwards the commanders of that defeated army arrived in person: Lucius Afranius, the most loyal of all Pompey’s lieutenants, and Marcus Petreius, who fourteen years earlier had defeated Catilina on the field of battle. The Senate-in-exile was flabbergasted at their appearance. Cato rose to ask the question on the minds of them all: ‘Why are you not dead or prisoners?’ Afranius had to explain somewhat shamefacedly that Caesar had pardoned them, and that all the soldiers who had fought for the Senate had been allowed to return to their homes.

‘Pardoned you?’ raged Cato. ‘What do you mean, pardoned you? Is he now a king? You are the legitimate leaders of a lawful army. He is a renegade. You should have killed yourselves rather than accept a traitor’s mercy! What’s the use of living when you’ve lost your honour? Or is the point of your existence now just so that you can piss out of the front and shit out of the back?’