A month before the end of his official term as governor, Cicero, escorted by his lictors, set off back to Rome taking me and the two boys with him and leaving his quaestor in charge of the province.
He knew he could face censure for abandoning his post prematurely and for placing Cilicia in the hands of a first-year senator, but he calculated that with Caesar’s governorship of Gaul about to come to an end, most men would have bigger issues on their minds. We travelled via Rhodes, which he wanted to show to Quintus and Marcus. He also desired to visit the tomb of Apollonius Molon, the great tutor of oratory whose lessons almost thirty years before had started him on his political ascent. We found it on a headland looking across the Carpathian Straits. A simple white marble stone bore the orator’s name, and beneath it was carved in Greek one of his favourite precepts: Nothing dries more quickly than a tear. Cicero stood looking at it for a long time.
Unfortunately the diversion to Rhodes slowed our return considerably. The Etesian winds were unusually strong that summer, blowing in from the north day after day, and they trapped our open boats in harbour for three weeks. During that period the political situation in Rome worsened sharply, and by the time we reached Ephesus there was a sackful of alarming news waiting for Cicero. The nearer the struggle approaches, wrote Rufus, the plainer the danger appears. Pompey is determined not to allow Caesar to be elected consul unless he surrenders his army and provinces; whereas Caesar is persuaded that he cannot survive if he leaves his army. So this is what their love affair, their scandalous union has come to – not covert backbiting, but outright war!
In Athens, a week later, Cicero found more letters, including ones from both Pompey and Caesar, each complaining about the other and appealing to his loyalty. As far as I am concerned, he may be consul or he may keep his legions, wrote Pompey, but I am certain that he cannot do both; I assume that you agree with my policy and will stand resolutely on my side and on the side of the Senate as you have always done. And from Caesar: I fear that Pompey’s noble nature has blinded him to the true intentions of those individuals who have always wished me harm; I rely upon you, dear Cicero, to tell him that I cannot be, should not be, and will not be left defenceless.
The two letters plunged Cicero into a state of acute anxiety. He sat in Aristus’s library with both laid on the table before him and looked back and forth from one to the other. I fancy I see the greatest struggle that history has ever known, he wrote to Atticus. There looms ahead a tremendous contest between them. Each counts me as his man. But what am I to do? They will try to draw a statement of my views. You will laugh when I say it, but I wish to heaven I was still back in my province.
That night I lay shivering despite the Athens heat, my teeth chattering, hallucinating that Cicero was dictating a letter to me, a copy of which had to go to both Pompey and Caesar, assuring each of his support. But a phrase that would please one would infuriate the other, and I spent hour after hour in a panic trying to construct sentences that were utterly neutral. Whenever I thought I had managed it, the words would become disorganised in my head and I would have to start again. It was utter madness yet at the same time it seemed absolutely real, and when morning came I realised in a lucid interval that I had lapsed back into the fever that had afflicted me at Arpinum.
That day we were due to set off again by ship to Corinth. I tried hard to carry on as normal. But I guess I must have looked ghastly and hollow-eyed. Cicero tried to persuade me to eat but I was unable to keep food in my stomach. Although I managed to board the boat unaided, I spent the day’s voyage almost comatose, and when we landed at Corinth that evening, apparently I had to be carried off the ship and put to bed.
The question now arose of what should be done with me. I was desperate not to be left behind, and Cicero did not want to abandon me. But he needed to get back to Rome, firstly to do what little was in his power to avert the impending civil war, and secondly to try to lobby for a triumph, of which, unrealistically, he still had slight hopes. He could not afford to waste days in Greece waiting for his secretary to recover. In retrospect I should have stayed in Corinth. Instead we gambled that I would be strong enough to withstand the two-day journey to Patrae, where a ship would be waiting to take us to Italy. It was a foolish decision. I was wrapped in blankets and placed in the back of a carriage and conveyed along the coastal road in great discomfort. When we reached Patrae, I begged them to go on without me. I was sure a long sea voyage would kill me. Cicero was still reluctant, but in the end he agreed. I was put to bed in a villa near the harbour belonging to Lyso, a Greek merchant. Cicero, Marcus and young Quintus gathered around my bed to say goodbye. They shook my hand. Cicero wept. I made some feeble joke about our parting scene resembling the deathbed of Socrates. And then they were gone.
Cicero wrote me a letter the following day and sent it back with Mario, one of his most trusted slaves.
I thought I could bear the want of you not too hard, but frankly I find it unendurable. I feel I did wrong to leave you. If after you are able to take nourishment you think you can overtake me, the decision is in your hands. Think it over in that clever head of yours. I miss you but I love you. Loving you I want to see you fit and well; missing you I want to see you as soon as possible. The former therefore must come first. So make it your chief concern to get well. Of your countless services to me this is the one I shall most appreciate.
He wrote me many such letters during the time I was ill – once he sent three in a single day. Naturally I missed him as much as he missed me. But my health was broken. I could not travel. It was to be eight months before I saw him again, and by then his world, our world, was utterly transformed.
Lyso was an attentive host and brought in his own doctor, a fellow Greek named Asclapo, to treat me. I was purged and sweated and starved and hydrated: all the standard remedies for a tertian fever were attempted when what I really needed was rest. Cicero, however, fretted that Lyso was a little casuaclass="underline" all Greeks are, and arranged for me to be moved after a few days to a larger and more peaceful house up the hill, away from the noise of the harbour. It belonged to a childhood friend of his, Manius Curius: All my hopes of your getting proper treatment and attention are pinned on Curius. He has the kindest of hearts and the truest affection for me. Put yourself entirely in his hands.
Curius was indeed an amiable, cultured man, a widower, a banker by profession, and he looked after me well. I was given a room with a terrace looking westwards to the sea, and later, when I started to feel strong enough, I would sit outside for an hour in the afternoons watching the merchant ships going in and out of the harbour. Curius was in regular touch with all sorts of contacts in Rome – senators, equestrians, tax farmers, shipowners – and his letters, plus mine, together with the geographical situation of Patrae as the gateway to Greece, meant that we received the political news as quickly as anyone could in that part of the world.
One day around the end of January – this must have been about three months after Cicero’s departure – Curius came into my room with a grim expression and asked me whether I was strong enough to take bad news. When I nodded, he said, ‘Caesar has invaded Italy.’
Years afterwards, Cicero used to wonder whether the three weeks we had lost on Rhodes might have made the difference between war and peace. If only, he lamented, he could have reached Rome a month earlier! He was one of the few who was listened to by both sides, and in the short time he was on the outskirts of Rome before the conflict broke out – which was barely a week – he told me he had begun to broker the beginnings of a compromise: Caesar to give up Gaul and all his legions apart from one, and in return to be allowed to stand for the consulship in absentia. But by then it was far too late. Pompey was dubious about the deal; the Senate rejected it; and Caesar, he suspected, had already made up his mind to strike, having calculated that he would never be stronger than at that moment: ‘In short, I was among madmen wild for war.’