Throughout his governorship he was never too busy to attend to developments in Rome. The optimates were pursuing their single, simple and disastrous policy of preventing Caesar from moving seamlessly from his Gallic posting to a second Consulship. They made repeated attempts to have the question of his successor discussed in the Senate, but these came to nothing, as they were invariably vetoed by one or more Tribunes in Caesar’s interest (and pay). Pompey let it be known that he felt it would be unfair to consider the question of Caesar’s replacement before March of the following year, the date when it would be legally permissible to do so. The disgruntled Faction, as Caesar nicknamed the optimates, had to settle for that. In an endless stream of letters Cicero pressed for compromise, but absence had weakened his influence. Caelius became Aedile in January 50, and concentrated on putting down fraud in the administration of the water supply (on which dry subject he published a well-received pamphlet). But he still found the time and energy to write to Cicero, who read his reports with mounting anxiety.
AS often happens when cataclysm approaches, a fruitlessly busy inertia paralyzed the political community. Caelius wrote in February:
Our Consuls are paragons of conscientiousness—to date they have not succeeded in getting a single decree through the Senate except about fixing the date of the Latin Festival.… The stagnation of everything here is indescribable. If I didn’t have a battle on with the shopkeepers and inspectors of conduits, a coma would have seized the community. Unless the Parthians liven you up a bit over there, we are as dead as dormice.
Caelius had high expectations for his and Cicero’s mutual friend, Curio, who became a Tribune in 50. He stood for election on a fiercely anti-Caesar platform and even threatened to raise again the issue of the Campanian lands, which had landed Cicero in such trouble with Caesar a few years previously. His efforts, however, were ineffective. The reason for this became clear only later: Caesar was secretly negotiating with him to change sides in return for settling his colossal debts. Curio cleverly created a smoke screen to cover his shift of allegiance and, although he soon began defending Caesar’s interest, it was a while before anyone realized that he was taking instructions from Gaul.
Military operations having been satisfactorily completed, Cicero turned his attention to administrative matters. Nothing that Appius could do or say surprised him, but he was greatly taken aback when he uncovered a financial scam that he eventually traced back to Marcus Brutus, the son of Servilia, Cato’s half-sister and at one time Caesar’s mistress. Brutus had a reputation for honesty and austerity. An intellectual devoted to Greek philosophy, he was, at thirty-four, the diametrical opposite of disreputable contemporaries such as Curio or Caelius. He modeled himself to some extent on his uncompromisingly virtuous half-uncle, Cato, and like him did not believe in half-measures. Caesar (whom gossip wrongly whispered was his natural father) once said acutely of Brutus: “What he wants is hard to say, but when he wants it, he wants it badly.”
Brutus had won the Quaestorship in 54 and served in Cilicia under Appius Claudius. Cicero was astonished to discover that this paragon of integrity, through some front men, had loaned a large sum of money to the town of Salamis in Cyprus at the extortionate interest rate of 4 percent a month (i.e., 60 percent compound interest over a year). That “very impecunious monarch” Deiotarus of Galatia was also in Brutus’s debt and finding it almost impossible to keep up his repayments. This was all the more shocking given that Senators were, in theory at least, barred from moneylending.
When Brutus asked Cicero to help his agents enforce the debts, the governor’s first reaction was to refuse to use his public authority for private ends. He reminded Brutus of his decision to set a 1 percent interest rate for loans in Cilicia. Privately he found the situation very awkward. “I shall be sorry to have incurred his displeasure,” Cicero told Atticus in February, “but far sorrier to find that he is not the man I took him for.” Matters were not helped by Brutus’s unwillingness to give any ground. “He is apt in his letters to me to take a brusque, arrogant, ungracious tone even when asking a favor.”
It was indeed a scandalous business: at one point Brutus’s people had used the cavalry to barricade the Senate of Salamis in their Senate House, as a result of which five Senators had starved to death. Cicero could not get the affair out of his mind and it dominated his correspondence with Atticus, at wearisome length. Atticus was a part of the problem, for he took Brutus’s side and, in a rare note of criticism of his friend, Cicero wrote: “My dearest Atticus, you have really cared too much for Brutus in this matter and not enough for me.”
The quick passage of time saved Cicero from having to take definitive action and he bequeathed the problem to his successor. We can guess that the outcome was unsatisfactory for the Salaminians, for Brutus accompanied the succeeding governor as one of his deputies.
With the waning of the Parthian threat, Marcus and young Quintus returned from Cappadocia and continued their education under a short-tempered tutor. In his father’s absence, marooned in the snowy Taurus Mountains with the army, young Quintus was proving a handful, but, his uncle told Atticus, “I shall keep him on a tighter rein.” It seems that the two got on badly and, to judge by later developments, efforts to discipline the teenager failed. On March 17, Cicero conducted the sixteen-year-old Quintus’s coming-of-age ceremony in his father’s absence.
Separation had done little to improve the elder Quintus’s marriage. The quarrel at Arpinum had had deep roots and Quintus was now meditating on divorce from Pomponia, Atticus’s difficult sister. He confided this to his freedman, Statius, who went around saying that Cicero approved (perhaps he was getting his own back on Pomponia, who cordially disliked him for his closeness to her husband). Cicero was furious and assured Atticus that this was the last thing he wanted. “Let me say only one thing: so far from wishing the bond between us to be in any way relaxed, I should welcome as many and as intimate links with you as possible,” he wrote to Atticus, “though those of affection, and of the closest, exist already. AS for Quintus, I have often found that he is apt to speak rather harshly in these matters, and again I have often mollified his irritation. I think you know this. During this foreign trip or rather service of ours I have repeatedly seen him flare up and calm down again. What he may have written to Statius I cannot say. Whatever step he proposed to take in such a matter he ought not to have written to a freedman.”
The impact of these marital difficulties was greatest on young Quintus, who was very close to his mother and seems to have taken her side. While he was away Cicero allowed him to open his father’s mail, in case it contained anything that needed urgent attention, and one day the boy stumbled on a reference to the possible divorce. He broke down in tears. His growing estrangement from his family in the coming years may have been partly caused by the difficulty of any talented boy growing up in the shadow of a famous relative, but perhaps a more pressing motive lay in what he saw as the ill treatment of a much-loved mother.