The impact of this event on Roman opinion was enormous; indeed, it has echoed down the ages. A century later the poet Lucan saw in the dead constitutionalist a pattern of heroic virtue, which he summed up with a famous epigram in Pharsalia, his epic on the civil war: “The gods favored the winning side, but Cato the one that lost” (Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni).
Cato’s suicide was extremely damaging to Caesar’s reputation. At the beginning of the civil war, many educated Romans saw the struggle between Pompey and Caesar as no more than a competition between two overmighty generals and chose sides according to their personal and political loyalties. Inevitably, one or other of them would win. While some regarded Caesar’s whole career as a conspiracy against the state, the less pessimistic assumed that once hostilities were over political life would resume more or less as normal. There might be a bloodbath and a proscription. There would be pain and personal tragedies, but, as with Sulla, the constitution would eventually be restored in some broadly recognizable form. It would be the victor’s duty to ensure that this was done.
Although it began to look over time as if this might not, after all, be the final outcome, it was still possible at this stage to give Caesar the benefit of the doubt. So all-embracing and deeply rooted was the idea of the constitution’s permanence that it took a year or two before suspicions of his revolutionary intentions hardened into certainty that the days of the Republic were over for good. In the meantime Cato’s final act of defiance, his deliberate rejection of Caesar’s tyranny and by extension of all political servitude, harshly dramatized half-spoken fears.
Cicero was greatly moved by Cato’s death. He had found him an unbearable nuisance who bore no little responsibility for the slide into civil war. But his suicide burned away the inessentials of his character, leaving him as the symbol of pure principles and of a lost time for which he mourned. In May 46, shortly after the news from Utica had arrived in Rome, he was brooding on the possibility, indeed the desirability, of writing some kind of panegyric for the martyr, much more dangerous dead than alive. Brutus, whom Caesar had forgiven for fighting against him at Pharsalus and who was serving this year as governor of Italian Gaul, had been close to Cato and had given Cicero the idea. (They were now on good terms, the Cyprus moneylending scandal having been forgotten or forgiven.)
But how would Cicero be able to speak his mind without getting into trouble with the authorities? “It’s a problem for Archimedes,” he told Atticus. However, he was determined to find a solution and spent much of the summer at Tusculum writing his encomium, which he finished by August. The work has not survived, but it seems to have praised Cato’s strength of character and pointed out how he had predicted the political crisis, fought to prevent it and laid down his life so that he did not have to witness its consequences.
The Rome that Cicero found on return from Brundisium was a very different place from the one he had left, and in many ways he found that he was a stranger there. Politics had become the possession of a regime, not an establishment, and there was no role for him, unless he were somehow to create a new one. Many familiar faces were missing—dead, in exile or still fighting in distant corners of the empire. They had been largely replaced by the “underworld,” some of them members of the Catullan and Clodian counterculture of the early 60s and 50s, who had always rejected the old solid Roman virtues of duty and loyalty to tradition.
Cicero, now sixty years old, an old man in Roman eyes, had to find another way of leading his life. Depressed as he was, he still had reserves of energy and of social zest, and he set about making new friends. One of these was Marcus Terentius Varro, a distinguished and encyclopedic scholar. Varro had fought in the first Spanish campaign against Caesar, but after Pharsalus he had abandoned the Republican cause and was appointed to run a new project Caesar was planning, the creation of Rome’s first public library. The two men had not previously been close, and while Cicero admired his work, he did not think much of Varro’s prose style. They came together because of their mutual isolation: the surviving optimates despised them for coming to terms with the enemy and the victors classed them among the defeated. “As for our present times,” Cicero judged, “if our friends had won the day they would have acted very immoderately. They were infuriated with us.” The two agreed that the way out, or at least the way forward, was to concentrate on their writing. In April 46 Cicero advised Varro: “Like the learned men of old, we must serve the state in our libraries, if we cannot in the Senate House and Forum, and pursue our researches into custom and law.”
Cicero enjoyed the necessary solitude of a writer’s life and spent a good deal of time in his country villas, mainly at Tusculum, from where he made frequent forays to Rome, and later at Astura, which he loved for its remoteness. However, he was psychologically unable to devote himself entirely to decorous retirement. So although there was little legal work for him in Rome, he started giving private classes in public speaking to senior personalities in the government. “I have set up as schoolmaster, as it were, now that the courts are abolished and my forensic kingdom lost.” Cicero was exaggerating somewhat: although it may well be that the legal system was suspended from time to time during the civil war, it still functioned and indeed was reformed by Caesar. (The civil code was revised and simplified and jury membership altered.) In any event Cicero felt that teaching public speaking was good for his health since he had given up his rhetorical exercises; also, his oratorical talent would wither without practice.
In addition, there were plenty of invitations to dinner. He began to accept them, fairly indiscriminately. He was happy to dine with the enemy. Leading figures in the government were on cordial terms and Balbus and Oppius were unvaryingly attentive and thoughtful. He confessed to his friend Lucius Papirius Paetus: “Hirtius [a close colleague of Caesar’s who wrote the last chapter of The Conquest of Gaul, which its preoccupied author had left unfinished] and Dolabella are my pupils in oratory but my masters in gastronomy. I expect you have heard, if all news travels to Naples, that they practice making speeches in my house, and I practice dining at theirs.”
Cicero kept company he would once have thought unacceptable. At one meal he was surprised to see that the guests included Antony’s mistress Cytheris, who, against the rules of etiquette, was given a couch rather than a chair. Writing on the spot while waiting for the food, he noted to a friend: “I assure you I had no idea she would be there.” He held some dinner parties of his own. “I even had the audacity to give a dinner to Hirtius (think of it!)—no peacock though. At that meal nothing proved beyond my cook’s powers of imitation except the hot sauce.”
The government was alarmed at the growth of conspicuous expenditure in Rome and passed sumptuary laws to control it. The most expensive foods were banned and, as a result, chefs began to experiment with innovative vegetarian recipes. This put a strain on Cicero’s digestion, as he confessed ruefully to a friend in winter 46:
Our bons vivants, in their efforts to bring into fashion products of the soil exempted under the statute, make the most appetizing dishes out of fungi, potherbs and grasses of all sorts. Happening on some of these at an inaugural dinner at Lentulus’s house, I was seized with a violent diarrhea, which has only today begun (I think) to check its flow. So: oysters and eels I used to resist well enough, but here I lie caught in the nets of mesdames Turnip and Mallow! Well, I shall be more careful in future.