As chief defence advocate, allowed under the special rules of the court only two hours to speak, Cicero had an almost impossible task. He could hardly pretend that Milo, who had openly boasted of what he had done, was innocent of the crime. Indeed some of Milo’s supporters, such as Rufus, thought that Cicero should make a virtue of it and argue that the murder was not a crime at all but a public service. Cicero recoiled from that line of reasoning. ‘What are you saying? That any man can be condemned to death without trial and summarily executed by his enemies if it suits enough people? That’s mob rule, Rufus – exactly what Clodius believed in – and I refuse to stand up in a Roman court and make such a case.’
The only feasible alternative was to argue that the killing was justified on the grounds of self-defence – but that was difficult to reconcile with the evidence that Clodius had been dragged out of the tavern and finished off in cold blood. Still, it was not impossible. I had known Cicero win from weaker positions. And he wrote a good speech. However, on the morning he was due to deliver it, he woke gripped by a terrible anxiety. At first I took no notice. He was often nervous before a big oration, and suffered from loose bowels and vomiting. But this morning was different. He was not gripped by fear, which he sometimes called ‘cold strength’ and had learned how to harness; rather he was simply in a funk and could not remember a word of what he was supposed to say.
Milo suggested he should go down to the Forum in a closed litter and wait somewhere out of sight, calmly composing himself until it was time for him to speak; and this was what we tried. Cicero, at his request, had been provided with a bodyguard by Pompey for the duration of the trial, and they cordoned off a part of the Grove of Vesta and kept everyone away while the orator reclined beneath the thick embroidered canopy, trying to commit his speech to memory and occasionally leaning out to retch on the sacred earth. But although he could not see the crowd, he could hear it chanting and roaring nearby, and that was almost worse. When the praetor’s clerk finally came to fetch us, Cicero’s legs were so weak he could barely stand. As we walked into the Forum, the noise was terrific, and the sunlight glinting on the armour and weapons of the soldiers dazzled our eyes.
The Clodians jeered Cicero when he appeared and jeered him all the louder when he tried to speak. His nerves were so obvious he actually confessed them in his opening sentence – ‘I am afraid, gentlemen of the jury: an unseemly condition in which to begin a speech in defence of the bravest of men, but there it is’ – and blamed his fear squarely on the rigged nature of the hearing: ‘Wherever I look, I look in vain for the familiar environment of the courts and the traditional procedure of the law.’
Unfortunately, complaining about the rules of a contest is always a sure sign of a man who knows he is about to lose it, and although Cicero made some effective points – ‘Suppose, gentlemen, I could induce you to acquit Milo, but only on condition that Clodius comes back to life again: why all those terrified glances?’ – a speech is only as good as its delivery. By thirty-eight votes to thirteen the jury found Milo guilty, and he was sent into exile for life. His property was hastily auctioned at knockdown prices to pay his creditors, and Cicero directed Terentia’s steward, Philotimus, to buy a lot of it anonymously so that it could be disposed of later and the profits handed to Milo’s wife, Fausta: she had made it clear she would not be accompanying her husband into exile. A day or two later Milo went off with remarkable cheerfulness to Massilia in southern Gaul. His departure was very much in the spirit of a gladiator who knew he would lose eventually and was simply grateful to have lived so long. Cicero tried to make amends by publishing the speech he would have given if his nerves hadn’t got the better of him. He sent a copy to Milo, who replied charmingly a few months later that he was glad Cicero hadn’t spoken it, for otherwise I should not be eating such wonderful Massilian mullets.
Soon after Milo left Rome, Pompey invited Cicero to dinner to show there were no hard feelings. Cicero went off grumbling and reeled home afterwards in such a state of amazement that he came and woke me up, for who should have been at the dinner table but the widow of Publius Crassus, the teenaged Cornelia – and Pompey had married her!
Cicero said, ‘Well, naturally I congratulated him – she’s a beautiful and accomplished girl, even if she is young enough to be his granddaughter – and then I asked him, by way of conversation, what Caesar had made of the match. He looked at me with great disdain and said that he hadn’t even told Caesar: what business was it of Caesar’s? He was fifty-three years old and he would marry whomever he pleased!
‘I replied, as gently as I could, that perhaps Caesar might take a different view – after all, he had sought a marital alliance and been rebuffed, and the bride’s father has not exactly shown himself a friend of Caesar’s. To which Pompey replied, “Oh, don’t worry about Scipio, he’s entirely friendly. I’m appointing him my consular colleague for the remainder of my term!” Is the man mad, do you suppose? Caesar is going to look at Rome and think that the whole place has been taken over by the aristocratic party, with Pompey at their head.’ Cicero groaned and closed his eyes; I guessed he had drunk rather a lot. ‘I told you this would happen. I am Cassandra – doomed to see the future yet destined never to be believed.’
Cassandra or not, there was one consequence of Pompey’s special consulship that Cicero had not foreseen. To help end electoral corruption, Pompey had decided to reform the laws relating to the fourteen provincial commands. Up to this point, consuls and praetors had always left Rome immediately upon the expiry of their term of office to take up their allotted province; and because of the huge sums that could be extorted from such commands, a practice had arisen of candidates borrowing against their expected earnings in order to fund their election campaigns. Pompey, with amazing hypocrisy considering his own abuse of the system, decided to put a stop to all that. Henceforth, a period of five years would have to elapse between holding office in Rome and taking up a governorship overseas. To fill such positions in the interim it was decreed that every senator of praetorian rank who had never done their turn as governor would have to draw lots for the vacant provinces.
To his horror, Cicero now realised he was in danger of having to do what he had always sworn to avoid: sweating it out in some corner of the empire, administering justice to the natives. He went to see Pompey to plead to be excused. His health was poor, he said. He was getting old. He even suggested that the time he had spent in exile might be counted as his term abroad.
Pompey wouldn’t hear of it. Indeed he seemed to take a malicious pleasure in running through all the possible commands that might now fall to Cicero, with their various unique drawbacks – extreme distance from Rome, rebellious tribesmen, ferocious customs, hostile climates, savage wild beasts, impassable roads, incurable local diseases and so forth. Lots to determine who went where were drawn at a special session of the Senate, with Pompey in the chair. Cicero went up and plucked his token from the urn and handed it to Pompey, who read out the result with a smile: ‘Marcus Tullius draws Cilicia.’
Cilicia! Cicero could barely conceal his dismay. This mountainous, primitive homeland of pirates at the extreme eastern edge of the Mediterranean – which included within its administration the island of Cyprus – was about as far away from Rome as it was possible to get. It also shared a border with Syria, and so was within range of the Parthian army, if Cassius was unable to hold them in check. Finally, to cap Cicero’s woes, the current governor was Clodius’s brother, Appius Clodius Pulcher, who could be relied upon to make his successor’s life as difficult as possible.