‘What’s the point? I’m finished!’
‘You’re not finished. Quite the contrary: we have that woman exactly where we want her.’
‘We?’ repeated Rufus, squinting up at Cicero through bloodshot eyes. ‘When you say “we”, does that imply you’re on my side?’
‘Not merely on your side, my dear Rufus. I am going to be your advocate!’
‘Wait,’ said Rufus. He touched his hand gently to his forehead, as if checking it was still intact. ‘Wait a moment – did you plan all this?’
‘Consider yourself to have been given a political education. And now let us agree that the slate is wiped clean between us, and concentrate on beating our common enemy.’ Rufus began to swear. Cicero listened for a while, then interrupted him. ‘Come, Rufus. This is a good bargain for us both. You’ll get that harpy off your back once and for all, and I’ll satisfy the honour of my wife.’
Cicero held out his hand. At first Rufus recoiled. He pouted and shook his head and muttered. But then he must have realised he had no choice. At any rate, eventually he extended his own hand, Cicero shook it warmly, and with that the trap he had laid for Clodia snapped shut.
The trial was scheduled to take place at the start of April, which meant it would coincide with the opening of the Festival of the Great Mother, with its famous parade of castrated holy men. Even so, there was no doubting which would be the greater attraction, especially when Cicero’s name was announced as one of Rufus’s advocates. The others were to be Rufus himself, and Crassus, in whose household Rufus had also served an internship as a young man. I am certain Crassus would have preferred not to have performed this service for his former protege, especially given the presence of Cicero on the bench beside him, but the rules of patronage placed him under a heavy obligation. On the other side once again were young Atratinus and Herennius Balbus – both furious at Cicero’s duplicity, not that he cared a fig for their opinion – and Clodius, representing the interests of his sister. No doubt he too would have preferred to be at the Great Mother’s festivities, which he, as aedile, was supposed to oversee, but he could hardly have backed out of the trial when his family’s honour was at stake.
I cherish my memories of Cicero at this time, in the weeks before Rufus’s trial. He seemed once again to hold all the threads of life in his hands, just as he had in his prime. He was active in the courts and in the Senate. He went out to dinner with his friends. He even moved back in to the house on the Palatine. True, it was not entirely finished. The place still reeked of lime and paint; workmen trailed mud in from the garden. But Cicero was so delighted to be back in his own home, he did not care. His furniture and books were fetched out of storage, the household gods were placed on the altar, and Terentia was summoned back from Tusculum with Tullia and Marcus.
Terentia entered the house cautiously and moved between the rooms with her nose wrinkled in distaste at the pungent smell of fresh plaster. She had never much cared for the place from the start, and was not about to change her opinion now. But Cicero persuaded her to stay: ‘That woman who caused you so much pain will never harm you again. She may have laid a hand on you. But I promise you: I shall flay her alive.’
He also, to his great delight, after two years’ separation, heard that Atticus had at last returned from Epirus. The moment he reached the city gates, he came straight round to inspect Cicero’s rebuilt house. Unlike Quintus, Atticus had not changed at all. His smile was still as constant, his charm as thickly laid-on – ‘Tiro, my dear fellow, thank you so much for taking care of my oldest friend so devotedly’ – his figure as trim, his silvery hair as sleek and well cut. The only difference was that now he trailed a shy young woman at least thirty years his junior, whom he introduced to Cicero … as his fiancee! I thought Cicero might faint with shock. Her name was Pilia. She was of an obscure family, with no money and no particular beauty either – just a quiet, homely country girl. But Atticus was besotted. At first Cicero was greatly put out. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ he grumbled to me when the couple had gone. ‘He’s three years older even than I am! Is it a wife he’s after or a nurse?’ I suspect he was mostly offended because Atticus had never mentioned her before, and worried that she might disrupt the easy intimacy of their friendship. But Atticus was so obviously happy, and Pilia so modest and cheerful, that Cicero soon came round to her, and sometimes I saw him glancing at her in an almost wistful way, especially when Terentia was being shrewish.
Pilia quickly became a close friend and confidante of Tullia. They were the same age and of similar temperaments, and I often saw them walking together, holding hands. Tullia had been a widow by this time for a year and encouraged by Pilia now declared herself ready to take a new husband. Cicero made enquiries about a suitable match and soon came up with Furius Crassipes – a young, rich, good-looking aristocrat, of an ancient but undistinguished family, eager for a career as a senator. He had also recently inherited a handsome house and a park just beyond the city walls. Tullia asked me for my opinion.
I said, ‘What I think doesn’t matter. The question is: do you like him?’
‘I think I do.’
‘Do you think you do or are you sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Then that is enough.’
In truth I thought Crassipes was more in love with the idea of Cicero as a father-in-law than Tullia as a wife. But I kept this view to myself. A wedding date was fixed.
Who knows the secrets of another’s marriage? Certainly not I. Cicero, for example, had long complained to me of Terentia’s peevishness, of her obsession with money, of her superstition and her coldness and her rude tongue. And yet the whole of this elaborate legal spectacle he had contrived to be enacted in the centre of Rome was for her – his means of making amends for all the wrongs she had suffered because of the failure of his career. For the first time in their long marriage, he laid at her feet the greatest gift he had to offer her: his oratory.
Not that she wanted to listen to it, mind you. She had hardly ever heard him speak in public, and never in the law courts, and had no desire to start now. It took considerable amounts of Cicero’s eloquence simply to persuade her to leave the house and come down to the Forum on the morning he was due to speak.
By this time the trial was in its second day. The prosecution had already laid out its case, Rufus and Crassus had responded, and only Cicero’s address remained to be heard. He had sat through the other speeches with barely concealed impatience; the details of the case were irrelevant to him and the advocates bored him. Atratinus, in his disconcertingly piping voice, had portrayed Rufus as a libertine, addicted to pleasure, sunk in debt, ‘a pretty-boy Jason in perpetual search of a golden fleece’ who had been paid by Ptolemy to intimidate the Alexandrian envoys and arrange the murder of Dio. Clodius had spoken next and described how his sister, ‘this chaste and distinguished widow’, had been tricked by Rufus into giving him gold out of the goodness of her heart – money she had thought was to finance public entertainment but which he had used to bribe Dio’s assassins – and how Rufus had then provided poison to her slaves to kill her and so cover his traces. Crassus, in his plodding way, and Rufus, with typical verve, had rebutted each of the charges. But the balance of opinion was that the prosecution had made its case and that the young reprobate was likely to be found guilty. This was the state of play when Cicero arrived in the Forum.