At that moment it was possible to believe that Cicero’s banishment would soon be over, and I began to make discreet preparations for our departure to Italy. But Clodius was a resourceful and vindictive enemy. On the night before the people were due to meet, he and his supporters occupied the Forum, the comitium, the rostra – in sum, the whole legislative heart of the republic – and when Cicero’s friends and allies arrived to vote, they attacked them without mercy. Two tribunes, Fabricius and Cispius, were set upon and their attendants murdered and flung in the Tiber. When Quintus tried to get up on to the rostra, he was dragged off and beaten up so badly he only survived by pretending to be dead. Milo responded by unleashing his own squad of gladiators. Soon the centre of Rome was a battlefield, and the fighting went on for days. But although Clodius for the first time suffered severe punishment, he was not entirely driven out, and he still had the two tribunes with their vetoes. The law to bring Cicero home had to be abandoned.
When Cicero received Atticus’s account of what had happened, he fell into a despair almost as great as that which had gripped him in Thessalonica. From your letter, he wrote back, and from the facts themselves I see that I am utterly finished. In matters where my family needs your help I beg you not to fail us in our misery.
However, there is always this to be said for politics: it is never static. If the good times do not last, neither do the bad. Like Nature, it follows a perpetual cycle of growth and decay, and no statesman, however cunning, is immune to this process. If Clodius had not been so arrogant, reckless and ambitious, he never would have achieved the heights he did. But being all those things, and subject to the laws of politics, he was bound to overreach and topple eventually.
In the spring, during the Festival of Flora, when Rome was crowded with visitors from all over Italy, Clodius’s mob found itself for once outnumbered by ordinary citizens who despised their bullying tactics. Clodius himself was actually jeered at the theatre. Unused to anything other than adulation from the people, according to Atticus he looked around him in astonishment at the slow handclapping, taunts, whistles and obscene gestures, and realised – almost too late – that he was in danger of being lynched. He retreated hastily, and that was the beginning of the end of his domination, for the Senate now recognised how he could be beaten: by appealing over the heads of the urban plebs to the population at large.
Spinther duly laid a motion calling for the entire citizenry of the republic to be summoned together in its most sovereign body, the electoral college of one hundred and ninety-three centuries, and for them to determine the fate of Cicero once and for all. The motion passed in the Senate by four hundred and thirteen votes to one, the one being Clodius. It was further agreed that the vote on Cicero’s recall should take place at the same time as the summer elections, when the centuries would already be assembled on the Field of Mars.
The moment he heard what had been decided, Cicero was so certain he was reprieved he arranged for a sacrifice to be made to the gods. Those tens of thousands of ordinary citizens from across Italy were the solid, sensible foundation on which he had built his career; he was sure they would not let him down. He sent word to his wife and family asking them to meet him in Brundisium, and rather than lingering in Illyricum to await the result, which would take two weeks to reach us, he decided to sail for home on the day the vote was held. ‘If there is a tide flowing in one’s direction, one must catch it early, and not allow it time to ebb. Besides, it will look good if I show confidence.’
‘If the vote goes against you, you will be breaking the law by returning to Italy.’
‘But it won’t. The Roman people will never vote to keep me in exile – and if they do, well there’s no point in going on, is there?’
And so, fifteen months to the day after we had landed in Dyrrachium, we went down to the harbour to begin the journey back to life. Cicero had shaved off his beard and cut his hair and had put on a white toga with the purple stripe of a senator. As chance would have it, our return crossing was on the same merchant ship that had brought us over. But the contrast between the two journeys could not have been more marked. This time we skimmed across a flat sea all day with a favourable wind, spent the night lying out on the open deck, and the following morning came in sight of Brundisium. The entrance to the greatest harbour in Italy opens like an immense pair of outstretched arms, and as we passed between the booms and approached the crowded quayside, it felt as if we were being clasped to the heart of a dear and long-lost friend. The whole town seemed to be at the harbour and en fete, with pipes and drums playing, young girls carrying flowers, and youths waving boughs decorated with coloured ribbons.
I thought they were for Cicero, and said so in great excitement, but he cut me off and told me not to be a fool. ‘How would they have known we were coming? Besides, have you forgotten everything? Today is the anniversary of the founding of the colony of Brundisium, and therefore a local holiday. You would have known that once, when I was running for office.’
Nevertheless, some of the people had noticed his senatorial toga and quickly realised who he was. The word was passed. Soon a sizeable crowd was shouting his name and cheering. Cicero, standing on the upper deck as we glided towards our berth, raised his hand in acknowledgement and turned this way and that so all could see him. Among the multitude I spotted his daughter, Tullia. She was waving with the rest and calling out to him, even jumping up and down to attract his attention. But Cicero was sunning himself in the applause, his eyes half closed, like a prisoner released from a dungeon into the light, and in the noise and tumult of the crowd he did not see her.
III
That Cicero did not recognise his only daughter was less peculiar than it may seem. She had changed greatly in the time we had been away. Her face and arms, once plump and girlish, were thin and pale; her fair hair was covered by the dark headdress of mourning. The day of our arrival was her twentieth birthday, although I am ashamed to say that I had forgotten it and so had failed to remind Cicero.
His first act on stepping down from the gangplank was to kneel and kiss the soil. Only after this patriotic act had been loudly cheered did he look up and notice his daughter watching him in her widow’s weeds. He stared at her and burst into tears, for he truly loved her, and he had loved her husband too, and now he saw by the colour and style of her dress that he was dead.
He enfolded her in his arms, to the crowd’s delight, and after a long embrace took a step back to examine her. ‘My dearest child, you cannot imagine how much I have yearned for this moment.’ Still holding her hands, he switched his gaze to the faces behind her and scanned them eagerly. ‘Is you mother here, and Marcus?’
‘No, Papa, they’re in Rome.’
This was hardly surprising – in those days it was an arduous journey, especially for a woman, of two or three weeks from Rome to Brundisium, with a serious risk of robbery in the remoter stretches; if anything, the surprise was that Tullia had come, and come alone at that. But Cicero’s disappointment was obvious although he tried to hide it.
‘Well, it’s no matter – no matter at all. I have you, and that’s the main thing.’
‘And I have you – and on my birthday.’
‘It’s your birthday?’ He gave me a reproachful look. ‘I almost forgot. Of course it is. We shall celebrate tonight!’ And he took her by the arm and led her away from the harbour.
Because we did not yet know for certain that his exile had been repealed, it was decided that we should not set off for Rome until we had official confirmation, and once again Laenius Flaccus volunteered to put us up at his estate outside Brundisium. Armed men were stationed around the perimeter for Cicero’s protection, and he spent much of the next few days with Tullia, strolling through the gardens and along the beach, learning at first hand how difficult her life had been during his exile – how, for example, her husband, Frugi, had been set upon by Clodius’s henchmen when he was trying to speak on Cicero’s behalf, stripped naked and pelted with filth and driven from the Forum, and how his heart had ceased to beat properly afterwards until, a few months later, he died in her arms; how, because she was childless, she had been left with nothing except a few pieces of jewellery and her returned dowry, which she had given to Terentia to help pay off the family’s debts; how Terentia had been obliged to sell a large part of her own property, and had even steeled herself to plead with Clodius’s sister to intercede with her brother to grant her and her children some mercy, and how Clodia had mocked her and boasted that Cicero had tried to have an affair with her; how families they had always thought of as friends had closed their doors on them in fear; and so on and so forth.