Unchanging consistency of standpoint has never been considered a virtue in great statesmen. At sea it is good sailing to run before the gale, even if the ship cannot make harbor; but if she can make harbor by changing tack, only a fool would risk shipwreck by holding to the original course rather than change it and still reach his destination. Similarly, while all of us as statesmen should set before our eyes the goal of peace with honor to which I have so often pointed, it is our aim, not our language, which must always be the same.
Disappointment in public affairs drove Cicero to make the most of the comforts of private life and the consolations of literature and philosophy. With Quintus away in Sardinia, he spent time superintending the rebuilding of both his and his brother’s houses.
Now that the two boys, Marcus and Cicero’s nephew Quintus, were nearing their teens, their schooling had to be thought of. Cicero hired the services of a well-known Greek grammarian and literary scholar, Tyrannio of Amisus, to teach them at home. While his own nine-year-old son was an ordinary child with no exceptional talents, Quintus, who was now eleven, was impressively precocious and, according to his uncle, was “getting on famously with his lessons.” Cicero was amused by his description of some wrangle between Terentia and his brother’s wife, the endlessly difficult Pomponia. “Quintus (a very good boy),” he wrote to his brother in the spring of 56, “talked to me at length and in the nicest way about the disagreements between our two ladies. It was really most entertaining.”
Tyrannio also helped out with a reorganization of Cicero’s library, much of which must have been dispersed or destroyed by Clodius’s gangs during his exile. A couple of Atticus’s library clerks were borrowed to help with “gluing and other operations.” The results delighted him. “Those shelves of yours are the last word in elegance, now that the labels have brightened up the volumes.”
In 55 Pompey and Crassus held their prearranged Consulships and there was even less for Cicero to do. AS with politicians throughout the ages, when events compel them to spend more time with their families, he made the best of things. He wrote to Atticus:
But seriously, while all other amusements and pleasures have lost their charm because of my age and the state of the country, literature relieves and refreshes me. I would rather sit on that little seat you have beneath Aristotle’s bust than in our Consuls’ chairs of state, and I would rather take a stroll with you at your home than with the personage [i.e., Pompey] in whose company it appears that I am obliged to walk.
Clodius was still being troublesome. A strange “rumbling and a noise,” perhaps an earth tremor, had been heard in a suburb of Rome. The Senate had referred the matter to the soothsayers, who pronounced that expiation should be offered to the gods for various offenses, including the profanation of hallowed sites and impiety in the conduct of an ancient sacrifice. Clodius ingeniously argued that the site in question was Cicero’s house on the Palatine, which the College of Pontiffs had wrongly ruled never to have been consecrated at all. In a long harangue to the Senate, Cicero retorted that the mysterious sound had nothing to do with him but must be put down to Clodius’s bad behavior. The house in question was not his at all but a completely different one, which Clodius had acquired after murdering its owner, and the sacrifice in question was, of course, that of the Good Goddess whose ceremonies Clodius had polluted.
Aware that his public image needed burnishing but sensing the public would not welcome any more self-praise from his own pen, Cicero tried to interest a respected historian, Lucius Lucceius, in writing a history of his Consulship, exile and return, the main purpose of which would be to expose the “perfidy, artifice and betrayal of which many were guilty towards me.” He was candid about his expectations and asked Lucceius to write more enthusiastically than perhaps he felt. “Waive the laws of history for once. Do not scorn personal bias, if it urge you strongly in favor.” Lucceius agreed, although for some reason the book seems never to have appeared.
A high point of the year 55 was the grand opening of Pompey’s splendid new theater on the Field of Mars. Construction had started in 59 and the project was designed to show off its founder’s wealth and power. It was a statement in stone and mortar that he was Rome’s leading citizen.
The program included spectacular plays and shows. Cicero was unamused, writing to a friend: “What pleasure is there in having a Clytemnestra with six hundred mules or a Trojan Horse with three thousand mixing bowls?”
There were also lavish gladiatorial displays. These contests in which criminals were thrown to wild animals were among the most notorious features of Roman culture. By Cicero’s day they were becoming an exotic and sadistic entertainment, but as so often with Roman customs they originated in a profound sense of tradition. For centuries, contests of hired fighters were held in honor of the glorious dead; blood flowed to slake the thirst of ancestors. It was no accident that they were usually staged in that sacred space, the Forum, with its magical fissures and chasms opening into the underworld. It was symbolically apt that gladiators waited in the subterranean tunnels beneath the pavement before coming up to fight. An ancient historian claimed that “the first gladiatorial show was given in Rome in the cattle market in the Consulship of Appius Claudius and Marcus Fulvius. It was given by Marcus and Decimus Brutus to honor their father’s ashes at the funeral ceremony.” For their descendants, today’s Appius Claudius and Marcus Brutus, the violent deaths of armed men in the city’s heart, its central square, in some vestigial but still resonant way, opened a lane to the land of the dead.
Some gladiators were slaves hired for the purpose (like the troupe trained by Atticus), others were condemned criminals. Many men enrolled as gladiators to buy themselves out of poverty. They were lodged in special barracks (one has been excavated in Pompeii). Life was tough, with whips, red-hot branding irons and iron fetters used to keep discipline.
However, successful gladiators were celebrities, like today’s boxers and football stars. The gladiatorial ethos was so ingrained in the culture that in the following decade two allies, a Roman general and an African king, entered into a gladiatorial suicide pact after a lost battle. They fought a duel and when the Roman had killed his opponent he arranged for a slave to cut him down. We are told that children played gladiator games and young people discussed the form of leading fighters. Some were popular sex symbols: graffiti from the first century AD have been found on walls in Pompeii—one Thracian gladiator was “the maiden’s prayer and delight” and “the doctor to cure girls.” Their images appeared on pots and dishes.
Public displays attracted large crowds. A temporary stadium would be erected in the Forum. The gladiators fought with a variety of weapons and armor (some cruelly bizarre, such as the andabatae, whose helmets were blindfolds) and were never matched in their duels. So a naked retiarius was given a helmet, a net and trident and chased after a mirmillo, decked out in a coat of mail. Sometimes condemned criminals fought each other without armor until they were all killed. If they held back they were lashed into combat.
For his part, Cicero took little pleasure in these blood sports, at least those in which there was not a fair fight. His account of the displays with animals at Pompey’s games has a flavor of modern distaste.
What pleasure can a cultivated man get out of seeing a weak human being torn to pieces by a powerful animal or a splendid animal transfixed by a hunting spear? Anyhow, if these sights are worth seeing, you have seen them often; and we spectators saw nothing new. The last day was that for the elephants. The ordinary public showed considerable astonishment at them, but no enjoyment. There was even an impulse of compassion, a feeling that the monsters had something human about them.