However, the modern reader should not be misled that Cicero was anything other than a man of his age. Just as Dr. Johnson felt that “prize fighting made people accustomed not to be alarmed at seeing their own blood,” so Cicero believed that gladiatorial contests, if well managed, were object lessons in endurance for spectators. He approved of public violence if it was a legal punishment with death as the inevitable outcome and he regretted that by his day gladiators had become professional performers whose fights, even if bloody, were exercises in virtuosity rather than courage in the face of adversity.
Pompey’s theater made a great impression. During these years when competition among politicians was fierce and the profits of empire had never been so high, the city and its environs became a vast building site with leading Romans investing heavily in prestige construction projects. Caesar had ambitious plans of his own, which would more than match Pompey’s and he recruited Cicero to help with the necessary land purchases. In 54 Cicero wrote to Atticus:
Caesar’s friends (I mean Oppius and myself, choke at that if you must) have thought nothing of spending 60 million sesterces on the work you used to be so enthusiastic about, to widen the Forum.… We couldn’t settle with the owners for a smaller sum. We shall achieve something really glorious. AS for the Field of Mars, we are going to build covered marble booths for the General Assembly and surround them with a high colonnade, a mile of it in all. At the same time the Public Residence [Villa Publica, on the Field of Mars, used mainly to house foreign envoys] will be attached to our building.
During the year that Pompey and Crassus were Consuls, Gabinius, who had failed to help Cicero during his exile and was now governor of Syria, stepped into the fray and restored King Ptolemy to power in Egypt for a huge price with the help of a Roman army. In light of the prohibition in the Sibylline Books, this was a serious flouting of the law.
At about this time unusually bad weather broke the banks of the Tiber, flooding the lower levels of the city. Some people were drowned as were many animals, and houses were damaged. In the public mind the disaster was a punishment for Gabinius’s invasion.
Cicero launched a blistering attack on Gabinius in the Senate. Pompey and Crassus responded in his defense. Crassus seems to have hurled the epithet “exile” at him, an insult that Cicero, who had never liked him, refused to forgive. Pompey, backed by a letter from Caesar, used his personal authority to impose an entente. The widowed Tullia, probably now about twenty years old, had recently married her second husband, Furius Crassipes, a member of an old but faded patrician family. Cicero’s new son-in-law held a dinner party in the garden of his house to celebrate the apparent reconciliation with Crassus. Towards the end of the year, Crassus, paying no attention to bad omens, set off on his great expedition against the Parthians. “What a rascal he is!” Cicero observed, unrepentantly.
The three members of the First Triumvirate, or now, rather, the two, persuaded Cicero, against his better judgment, fearful that they might switch their support back to Clodius again, to give evidence on Gabinius’s behalf when he faced a treason charge. The task was all the more difficult in that Cicero remained on extremely bad terms with Gabinius. He told Atticus: “Pompey is putting a lot of pressure on me for a reconciliation, but so far he has got nowhere, nor ever will if I keep a scrap of personal independence.” He had even asked Cicero to undertake the defense, but that was a line Cicero absolutely refused to cross.
Cicero’s finances continued to cause him anxiety. Help came at this time from a surprising source. In 54, despite what he called his own “straitened circumstances” (without for one moment expecting to be believed), Caesar agreed to make him a loan of 800,000 sesterces and offered Quintus, also hard-pressed for cash, an appointment as one of his senior officers in Gaul.
The brothers accepted the money—evidence not only of the straits in which they found themselves but of their warm personal relations with Caesar despite political disagreements. Cicero knew how deeply he was indebted. He wrote to his brother later in the year, after Quintus had joined the legions in Gaul, that he had come to regard Caesar almost as a member of the family: “In all the world Caesar is the only man who cares for me as I could wish, or (as others would have it) who wants me to care for him.” No doubt he said this with half an eye on the likelihood that Quintus would show Caesar the letter, but there is little reason to doubt the sincerity of his gratitude. Caesar was a man of great charm and was fond of the sensitive, witty advocate; of course, he was also a hardheaded calculator and had every interest in using generosity to neutralize an opponent.
The relationship between the two was helped by their shared literary interests. Somehow Caesar found time during his campaign to compose a weighty tome on Latin grammar. Well aware of Cicero’s penchant for praise, he flatteringly dedicated it to Cicero, who responded by sending him another ill-advised epic he had written, this time on his exile and return. Caesar made some polite comments but evidently had reservations, and it seems the work was never published.
Quintus was a competent soldier and Caesar valued his services. At one point Quintus and his legion were besieged in their camp by a Gallic tribe, the Nervii, which had already ambushed and destroyed a Roman army. Attacks came in wave after wave. Quintus behaved coolly and bravely, as Caesar made clear in his account of the Gallic War: “Cicero himself, although in very poor health, would not rest even at night, until a crowd of soldiers actually went to him and by their remonstrances made him take care of himself.” The Nervii repeated a trick they had played on the previous army and tried unsuccessfully to lure Quintus out of his camp on the promise of safe conduct.
The siege continued and messenger after messenger dispatched to Caesar was caught, tortured and killed. The Nervii invested the camp with a rampart and managed to set much of it alight with incendiary darts and red-hot molded-clay bullets. Eventually news got through to Caesar of Quintus’s plight and he marched to relieve him. He sent one of his Gallic horsemen ahead to tell him to hold out. The man was afraid to go up to the camp and enter it so he flung a javelin with a message wrapped around it into the camp. Unfortunately, the javelin happened to stick in one of the camp towers and was not noticed for a couple of days. Eventually a soldier saw it, pulled it out and took it to Quintus. By this time the smoke of burning villages warned the Romans that help was near. The camp was relieved and, in due course, the Nervii were defeated. Although on one occasion he allowed some of his troops to be surprised by a German force, there is no question that Quintus had a good war.
In Italy, his brother was still looking after his domestic interests. Quintus had bought a couple of villas near Arpinum and Cicero spent time supervising their refurbishment. In September 54 he wrote to Quintus: “Escaped from the great heat wave (I don’t remember a greater), I have refreshed myself on the banks of our delightful river at Arpinum.” Cicero went on to tell his brother how impressed he was by one of the new properties. He seems to have had conventional tastes in interior decor and fine art, admiring the work of Greek painters and sculptors from their heyday in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. “I was very pleased with the house, because the colonnade is a most imposing feature; it struck me only on this visit, now that its whole range is open to view and the columns have been cleared. All depends on the elegance of the stucco, and that I shall attend to. The paving seemed to be going nicely. I did not care for some of the ceilings and gave orders to alter them.”