The affair confirmed Cicero’s continuing resentment against fair-weather friends in the Senate, who he believed would never let slip an opportunity to harm his interests. He told Atticus: “Those same gentlemen (you don’t need me to tell you their names) who formerly clipped my wings don’t want to see them grow back to their old size. However, I hope they are growing already.”
It turned out that Clodius had only appeared to accept defeat in the gang wars: he was running for Aedile in 56—an important venture, for, if successful, he would once again have a constitutional position. When the elections were postponed Clodius stepped up the pressure on the streets. He let it be known that if elections were not held soon, he would carry out reprisals against the city. In November he staged a series of riots. On November 3 an armed gang drove away the workmen who were rebuilding Cicero’s house on the Palatine. From this vantage point they threw stones at Quintus’s house nearby and set it on fire. A few days later Clodius mounted an attack on Cicero in person. Cicero wrote excitedly to Atticus:
On November 11 as I was coming down the Holy Way, he came after me with his men. Uproar! Stones flying, cudgels and swords in evidence. And like a bolt from the blue! I retired into Tettius Damio’s forecourt, and my companions had no difficulty keeping out the rowdies. Clodius himself could have been killed, but I am becoming a dietitian, I’m sick of surgery.
The next morning, in broad daylight, Clodius led a force armed with swords and shields to storm and burn the house of Milo, his competitor for mastery of the streets. A counterattack beat them off and a number of leading Clodians were killed. For the time being, this was a decisive encounter, and Clodius temporarily lost control of the situation.
In general, Cicero was in a remarkably good mood, considering the political disarray, his continuing money worries and the threats to his physical safety. “My heart is high,” he wrote to Atticus, “higher even than in my palmy days, but my purse is low.” We do not know the reason for his elation, because the surviving correspondence with Atticus is sparse for a number of months, but he may have been buoyed by signs of strain among the First Triumvirate. In December, apparently with Pompey’s tacit support, a long-standing Senatorial grievance received a new airing: a Tribune criticized Caesar’s second Land Reform Act, which had removed from state ownership the profitable Capuan Marches and had been a sore point with the optimates ever since. The Senate had been forced to authorize 40 million sesterces to pay for the corn supply and this new expenditure went to highlight the loss of state revenues that the law had brought about.
In the new year a problem with the Egyptian Pharaoh led to a falling out between Pompey and Crassus. Although nominally a freestanding kingdom, Egypt was effectively a Roman dependency. Its importance was not merely its legendary wealth but its grain production, which served as an increasingly valuable complement to Sicilian supplies. King Ptolemy had been expelled from his country by his subjects and the question arose of who should reinstall him. A stable Egypt was in Rome’s interest and, what was more, the king could be counted on to pay a generous reward to his lucky savior. The Senate thought that the former Consul Lentulus, now governor of Cilicia, should be given the commission. However, as it promised to be an extremely lucrative operation, Pompey was understood not to be averse to accepting it himself.
This was most embarrassing to Cicero, who was indebted to both men for their help in ending his exile. He was seeing a good deal of Pompey at this time, who as usual failed to make his wishes explicit. For once, Cicero found this vagueness helpful, for it allowed him to press Lentulus’s qualifications for the job without causing offense. He describes these attempts in laborious detail in a sequence of long letters to Lentulus. Reading between the lines, one senses that he knew he was fighting for a lost cause. The optimates were determined to prevent Pompey from winning the commission under any circumstances and, with breathtaking shortsightedness, allied themselves with Clodius to present a common front. Pompey strongly suspected that Crassus was behind this curious turn of events.
About this time an old prophecy was discovered in the Sibylline Books, stored in a vault in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol Hill and consulted in times of emergency. Cicero had little faith in them, though he admired the ingenuity by which they avoided specific references to persons and place and so appeared to predict everything that happened. On this occasion, they conveniently but unconvincingly pronounced that the Egyptian king should not be restored “with a host.” The point was that the Senate did not want to see the great commander in charge of another army. To their disappointment Pompey let it be known that he would be willing to restore Ptolemy without military assistance.
With typical impudence Clodius, who had by now won election as Aedile and was back in office, brought Milo to court in February 56 for the illegal use of force. Milo appeared with Pompey as his supporting counselor. The Forum was packed with supporters of both sides. Clodius’s people tried to shout Pompey down when he got up to speak, but he plowed doggedly on. He concluded with some highly scabrous verses about Clodius and Clodia. Cicero described the scene in a letter to his brother, Quintus:
Pale with fury, [Clodius] started a game of question and answer in the middle of the shouting:
“Who’s starving the people to death?”
“Pompey,” answered his gang.
“Who wants to go to Alexandria?”
“Pompey.”
“Who do you want to go?”
“Crassus …”
About quarter past two the Clodians started spitting at us, as though on a signal. Sharp rise in temperature! They made a push to dislodge us, our side countercharged. Flight of gang. Clodius was hurled from the Speakers’ Platform, at which point I too made off for fear of what might happen in the free-for-all.
Pompey found it hard to handle this kind of abuse and, nervous, stayed away from the Forum. He eventually abandoned the idea of the Egyptian command (as did Lentulus, who had no intention of proceeding without an army behind him) and came to believe that there was a plot against his life. Soon after he decided to bring men to the city from his country estates in northern Italy to protect him.
Cicero continued to speak in the courts as and when the opportunity arose. Sometime in the spring of 56 he gave his entertaining (and successful) defense of young Marcus Caelius Rufus, his former pupil, against Clodia’s charge of attempted murder. This allowed him plenty of opportunity to amuse himself and his listeners with jabs at her brother. AS ever, he could not resist a joke. “My refutation would be framed in considerably more forcible terms,” he said, “if I did not feel inhibited by the fact that the woman’s husband—sorry, I mean brother, I always make that slip—is my personal enemy.”