For all his active social life, it would be wrong to regard the Cicero of these years as merely a dilettante and socialite. The creative and organizational energies he had once devoted to politics and the law were still running strongly and sought an outlet. He became very active in persuading Caesar to pardon leading opponents who were still in exile. Paradoxically, although he was profoundly out of sympathy with the new regime, his personal relations with Caesar had never been warmer. After the Dictator’s death, he admitted that “for some reason he was extraordinarily patient where I was concerned.”
The busy head of state enjoyed Cicero’s sense of humor and received daily reports of his latest sallies, even if some of them were at his expense. Different cultures have different senses of humor. Cicero specialized in the brutal put-down, as when he met a man with three ugly daughters and quoted the verse “Apollo never meant him to beget.” At one trial a young man accused of having given his father a poisoned cake said he wanted to give Cicero a piece of his mind. Cicero replied: “I would prefer that to a piece of your cake.” Only a few of Cicero’s jokes still raise a smile, but his contemporaries delighted in them.
Cicero told his friend Paetus in July 46:
I hear that, having in his day compiled volumes of bons mots, Caesar will reject any specimen offered him as mine which is not authentic. He does this all the more because his intimates are in my company almost every day. Talk of this and that produces many casual remarks which perhaps strike these people when I say them as not deficient in polish and point. They are conveyed to him with the rest of the day’s news, according to his express instructions.
In December one of the Dictator’s staff published a collection of these assiduously collected witticisms.
Cicero tirelessly exploited his Caesarian connections on behalf of defeated optimates. His motives for using his good offices in this way were predictably mixed. The unpatronizing tone and thoughtfulness of his correspondence with those he was helping suggest that natural kindliness was one of them. However, he would have been less than human not to take pleasure in offering a valuable service to the grandees who had scorned the New Man from Arpinum. He wanted to show them that, however much they criticized him, he bore no malice and was more than willing to help them.
By far the most important factor driving Cicero, though, was the hope that after all, at the eleventh hour and defying all probability, the “mixed constitution” for which he had argued in On the State and which had been Rome’s glory might be reinstated. Working closely with the Dictator on reconciliation was an essential precondition if the new political order was to be truly inclusive.
For Quintus Ligarius, a former opponent of whom the Dictator had a poor opinion, Cicero offered a personal plea, as he described in a letter to him: “On November 26 [46], at your brothers’ request, I paid Caesar a morning visit. I had to put up with all the humiliating and wearisome preliminaries of obtaining admission and interview. Your brothers and relations knelt at his feet, while I spoke in terms appropriate to your case and circumstances.” The meeting appeared to go well, but Caesar reserved an announcement of his decision for a more public occasion: while he was genuinely unvindictive, he did not want his clemency to be hidden under a bushel. So, according to an anecdote in Plutarch, Cicero agreed to speak in Ligarius’s defense at a formal hearing in the Forum. Caesar, who was presiding, was apparently so moved by what he heard, especially when Cicero touched on the battle of Pharsalus, that his body shook and he dropped the papers in his hand. Ligarius was duly acquitted and allowed to come back to Italy. Some scholars have discounted the story, but it is plausible enough as an instance of adept news management.
The most distinguished surviving Republican for whom Cicero spoke was Marcus Claudius Marcellus, the Consul for 51, a steady but not diehard opponent of Caesar who had retired to the island of Lesbos after Pharsalus. When the matter of his recall was raised at a Senate meeting, the Senate rose to its feet en masse to plead for clemency. Caesar, after complaining of Marcellus’s “acerbity,” suddenly and unexpectedly gave way. Cicero was delighted to see “some semblance of reviving constitutional freedom.” The story ended sadly, for Marcellus was murdered by a friend at a dinner party before returning home.
The decision to pardon Marcellus persuaded the orator to break his long silence in the Senate. He delivered a brilliant speech of thanks, which reached the boundary of flattery but did not quite cross it. With psychological acuteness, he appealed to the Dictator’s desire for glory. Caesar had recently said in reference to a reported plot against him: “Whether for nature or for glory I have lived long enough.” This was unacceptable, Cicero argued: Caesar was the only person who could reunite past enemies and bring back Rome’s traditional institutions—the rule of law, the freedom of the Senate, in a word everything that Cicero meant to convey by his slogan “harmony of the classes.” The Dictator should legislate a constitutional settlement that would outlast him. Cicero was not being inconsistent here: in On the State, published six years previously, he had been explicit that on occasion a Dictator was needed to restore order.
It is interesting to observe from the tone of Cicero’s correspondence at this time that he did not suffer the agonizing doubts of the early months of the civil war. He had come to a settled view which he maintained without great mental or emotional anxiety, until it became clear that the Dictator either would not or could not live up to his expectations.
Cicero’s book on Cato was published towards the end of the year and attracted much attention. Although it argued that Cato had been an exemplar of all that was best in Roman culture, this was apparently not good enough for its dedicatee, Brutus, who went on to produce his own eulogy. The appearance of Cicero’s Cato probably undid any good that might have been achieved by the Marcellus speech. Caesar was enraged. It was not just that he objected to the canonization of a man whom he regarded as a blundering reactionary. More seriously, it was a reminder that, to Cicero and the political class for which he stood, reform and renewal meant returning to a failed model of governance rather than inventing a new one. He was so upset that he asked Hirtius to write a refutation. (It was a flop, which Cicero delightedly asked Atticus to distribute as widely as possible, on the grounds that it could only further enhance Cato’s reputation.)
In due course, the Dictator regained his equanimity. The following summer he praised Cicero’s writing style and commented wryly that reading and rereading his Cato improved his powers of expression, whereas after reading Brutus’s account he began to fancy himself as a writer. The political damage of all this furor about Cato called for his personal attention. Caesar composed his own rebuttal, the Anti-Cato (also lost). The pamphlet drew an unflattering portrait of a drunkard and miser. Cicero himself was complimented for his oratory but indirectly criticized as a political weathercock. This lack of moderation disturbed opinion in Rome and cast some doubt on the genuineness of Caesar’s clemency. For the first time since the civil war began he had incautiously allowed it to be seen that an offense had wounded him personally.
The Anti-Cato was written while Caesar was on the march again, for it turned out that despite his African victory the civil war was not quite over after all. Having escaped from Thapsus, Pompey’s two sons, Cnaeus and Sextus, went to Spain, where they raised the standard of rebellion again. Caesar appointed commanders to manage the campaign against them, but they made little headway. In November 46 he decided that the situation required his personal attention and he suddenly left Rome for the battlefront. It was to be the final confrontation.