Marcellus said, ‘Who wishes this day to free this slave?’
Cicero replied, ‘I do.’
‘You are the legal owner?’
‘I am.’
‘Upon what grounds is he to be freed?’
‘He has shown great loyalty and given exemplary service to our family ever since he was born into the condition of slavery, and to me in particular, and also to the Roman state. His character is sound and he is worthy of his freedom.’
Marcellus nodded. ‘You may proceed.’
The lictor briefly touched his rod of office to my head. Cicero stepped in front of me, grasped my shoulders and recited the simple legal formula: ‘This man is to be free.’ He had tears in his eyes; so had I. Gently he turned me round until I had my back to him, and then he let me go, as a father might release a child to take its first steps.
It is difficult for me to describe the joy of becoming free. Quintus expressed it best when he wrote to me from Gauclass="underline" I could not be more delighted, my dear Tiro, believe me. Before you were our slave but now you are our friend. Outwardly, nothing much changed. I continued to live under Cicero’s roof and to perform the same duties. But in my heart I was a different man. I exchanged my tunic for a toga – a cumbersome garment that I wore without ease or comfort, but with intense pride. And for the first time I began to make plans of my own. I started to compile a comprehensive dictionary of all the symbols and abbreviations used in my shorthand system, together with instructions on how to use it. I drew up a scheme for a book on Latin grammar. I also went back through my boxes of notes whenever I had a spare hour and copied down particularly amusing or clever quotations thrown out by Cicero over the years. He greatly approved of the idea of a book of his wit and wisdom. Often after a particularly fine remark he would stop and say, ‘Note that down, Tiro – that’s one for your compendium.’ Gradually it became understood between us that if I outlived him, I would write his biography.
I asked him once why he had waited so long to set me free, and why he had decided to do it at that moment. He answered, ‘Well, you know I can be a selfish man, and I rely on you entirely. I thought to myself, “If I free him, what’s to stop him going off and transferring his allegiance to Caesar or Crassus or someone? They’d certainly pay him plenty for all he knows about me.” Then when you fell ill in Arpinum I realised how unjust it would be if you died in servitude, and so I made my pledge to you, even though you were too feverish to understand it. If ever there was a man who deserved the nobility of freedom, it is you, dear Tiro. Besides,’ he added with a wink, ‘nowadays I have no secrets worth selling.’
Love him though I did, I nevertheless wanted to end my days under my own roof. I had some savings and now was paid a salary; I dreamed of buying a smallholding near Cumae where I could keep a few goats and chickens and grow my own vines and olives. But I feared loneliness. I suppose I could have gone down to the slave market and bought myself a companion, but the idea repulsed me. I knew with whom I wanted to share this dream of a future life: Agathe, the Greek slave girl whom I had met in the household of Lucullus and whose freedom I had asked Atticus to purchase on my behalf before I went into exile with Cicero. Atticus confirmed he had done as I asked and that she had been manumitted. But although I made enquiries as to what had happened to her, and always kept an eye out whenever I walked through Rome, she had vanished into the teeming multitudes of Italy.
I did not have long to enjoy my freedom in tranquillity. My modest plans, like everyone else’s, were about to be mocked by the immensity of events. As Plautus has it:
Whatever the mind may hope for
The future is in the hands of the gods.
A few weeks after my liberation, in the month that was then named Quintilis but that we are now required to call July, I was hurrying along the Via Sacra, trying not to trip over my new toga, when I saw a crowd gathered ahead. They were deathly still – not at all animated as they usually were when news of one of Caesar’s victories was posted on the white board. I thought immediately that he must have suffered a terrible defeat. I joined the back of the throng and asked the man in front of me what was happening. Irritated, he glanced over his shoulder and muttered in a distracted voice, ‘Crassus has been killed.’
I stayed just long enough to pick up the few details that were available. Then I hastened back to tell Cicero. He was working in his study. I gasped out the news and he quickly stood up, as if such grave information should not be acknowledged sitting down.
‘How did it happen?’
‘In battle, it’s reported – in the desert, near a town in Mesopotamia named Carrhae.’
‘And his army?’
‘Defeated – wiped out.’
Cicero stared at me for a few moments. Then he shouted to one slave to bring his shoes and another to arrange a litter. I asked him where he was going. ‘To see Pompey, of course – come too.’
It was a sign of Pompey’s pre-eminence that whenever there was a major crisis in the state, it was to his house that people always flocked – be it the ordinary citizens, who that day crowded the surrounding streets in silent, watchful multitudes; or the senior senators, who even now were arriving in their litters and being ushered by Pompey’s attendants into his inner sanctum. As luck would have it, both the elected consuls, Calvinus and Messalla, were under indictment for bribery and had been unable to take up office. Present instead was the informal leadership of the Senate, including senior ex-consuls such as Cotta, Hortensius and the elder Curio, and prominent younger men like Ahenobarbus, Scipio Nasica and M. Aemilius Lepidus. Pompey took command of the meeting. No one knew the eastern empire better than he: after all, much of it he had conquered. He announced that a dispatch had just been received from Crassus’s legate, G. Cassius Longinus, who had managed to escape from enemy territory and get back into Syria, and that if everyone was in agreement he would now read it out.
Cassius was a cold, austere man – ‘pale and thin’, as Caesar later complained – not given to boastfulness or lying, so his words were heard with all the greater respect. According to him, the Parthian king, Orodes II, had sent an envoy to Crassus on the eve of the invasion to say that he was willing to take pity on him as an old man and allow him to return in peace to Rome. But Crassus had boastfully replied that he would give his answer in the Parthian capital, Seleucia, at which the envoy had burst out laughing and pointed to the palm of his upturned hand, saying, ‘Hair will grow here, Crassus, before you set eyes on Seleucia!’
The Roman force of seven legions, plus eight thousand cavalry and archers, had bridged the Euphrates at Zeugma in a thunderstorm – itself a bad omen – and at one point during the traditional offerings to placate the gods, Crassus had dropped the entrails of the sacrificial animal into the sand. Although he had tried to make a joke of it – ‘That’s what comes of being an old man, lads, but I can grip my sword tightly enough!’ – the soldiers groaned, remembering the curses that had accompanied their departure from Rome. Already, wrote Cassius, they sensed that they were doomed.
From the Euphrates [he continued] we advanced ever deeper into the desert, with insufficient supplies of water and no clear sense of a route or objective. The land is trackless, flat, with no living tree to offer shade. After wading for fifty miles with full packs through soft sand in desert storms during which hundreds of our men succumbed to thirst and heat, we reached a river called the Balissus. Here for the first time our scouts sighted elements of the enemy’s forces on the opposite bank. On the orders of M. Crassus we crossed the river at noon and set off in pursuit. But by now the enemy had entirely disappeared again. We marched for several more hours until we were in the midst of a wilderness. Suddenly from all around us we heard the beating of kettle drums. At that moment, as if springing out of the sand, arose in every direction an immense horde of mounted archers. The silken banners of the Parthian commander, Sillaces, were visible behind.