Such was the man to whom Quintus betrayed his uncle. The first clue Cicero had about his treachery was a letter he received a few days later from Caesar, on his way now to fight Pompey’s forces in Spain.
En route to Massilia, 16 April
Caesar Imperator to Cicero Imperator.
I am troubled by certain reports and therefore I feel I ought to write and appeal to you in the name of our mutual goodwill not to take any hasty or imprudent step. You will be committing a grave offence against friendship. To hold aloof from civil quarrels is surely the most fitting course for a good, peace-loving man and a good citizen. Some who favoured that course were prevented from following it by fears for their safety. But you have the witness of my career and the judgement implied in our friendship. Weigh them well, and you will find no safer and no more honourable course than to keep aloof from all conflict.
Cicero told me afterwards that it was only when he read this letter that he knew for certain that he would have to take ship and join Pompey – ‘by rowing boat if necessary’ – because to submit to such a crude and sinister threat would be intolerable to him. He summoned young Quintus to Formiae and gave him a furious dressing-down. But secretly he felt quite grateful to him, and persuaded his brother not to treat the young man too harshly. ‘What did he do, after all, except tell the truth about what was in my heart – something I had not had the courage to do when I met Caesar? Then when Caesar offered me a funk hole where I could sit out the rest of the war in safety while other men died for the cause of the republic, my duty suddenly became clear to me.’
In strictest confidence he sent me a cryptic message via Atticus and Curius that he was travelling to that place where you and I were first visited by Milo and his gladiator, and if, when your health permits, you would care to join me there again, nothing would give me greater joy.
I knew at once that he was referring to Thessalonica, where Pompey’s army was now assembling. I had no desire to become involved in the civil war. It sounded highly dangerous to me. On the other hand, I was devoted to Cicero and I supported his decision. For all Pompey’s faults, he had shown himself in the end to be willing to obey the law: he had been given supreme power after the murder of Clodius and had then surrendered it; legality was on his side; it was Caesar, not he, who had invaded Italy and destroyed the republic.
My fever had passed. My health was restored. I, too, knew what I had to do. Accordingly, at the end of June, I said farewell to Curius, who had become a good friend, and set off to chance my fortunes in war.
X
I travelled by ship mostly – east across the Bay of Corinth and north along the Aegean coast. Curius had offered me one of his slaves as a manservant but I preferred to journey alone: having once been another man’s property myself, I was uneasy in the role of master. Gazing at that ancient tranquil landscape with its olive groves and goatherds, its temples and fishermen, one would never have guessed at the stupendous events now in train across the world. Only when we rounded a headland and came within sight of the harbour of Thessalonica did everything appear different. The approaches to the port were crammed with hundreds of troopships and supply vessels. One could almost have walked dry-footed from one side of the bay to the other. Inside the port, wherever one looked there were signs of war – soldiers, cavalry horses, wagons full of weapons and armour and tents, siege engines – and all that vast concourse of hangers-on who attend a great army mustering to fight.
I had no idea amid this chaos of where to find Cicero, but I remembered a man who might. Epiphanes didn’t recognise me at first, perhaps because I was wearing a toga and he had never thought of me as a Roman citizen. But when I reminded him of our past dealings, he cried out and seized my hand and pressed it to his heart. Judging by his jewelled rings and the hennaed slave girl pouting on his couch, he seemed to be prospering nicely from the war, although for my benefit he lamented it loudly. Cicero, he said, was back in the same villa he had occupied almost a decade before. ‘May the gods bring you a swift victory,’ he called after me, ‘but not perhaps before we have done good business together.’
How odd it was to make that familiar walk again, to enter that unchanged house, and to find Cicero sitting in the courtyard on the same stone bench, staring into space with the same expression of utter dejection. He jumped up when he saw me, threw wide his arms and clasped me to him. ‘But you’re too thin!’ he protested, feeling the boniness of my shoulders and ribs. ‘You’ll become ill again. We must fatten you up!’
He called to the others to come and see who was here, and from various directions came his son, Marcus, now a strapping, floppy-haired sixteen-year-old, wearing the toga of manhood; his nephew, Quintus, slightly sheepish as he must have known his uncle would have told me of his malicious blabbing; and finally Quintus senior, who smiled to see me but whose face quickly lapsed back into melancholy. Apart from young Marcus, who was training for the cavalry and loved spending his time around the soldiers, it was plainly an unhappy household.
‘Everything about our strategy is wrong,’ Cicero complained to me over dinner that evening. ‘We sit here doing nothing while Caesar rampages across Spain. Far too much notice is being taken of auguries, in my opinion – no doubt birds and entrails have their place in civilian government, but they sit badly with commanding an army. Sometimes I wonder if Pompey is quite the military genius he’s cracked up to be.’
Cicero being Cicero, he did not restrict such opinions to his own household but voiced them around Thessalonica to whoever would listen, and it was not long before I realised he was regarded as something of a defeatist. Not surprisingly Pompey hardly ever saw him, but then I suppose this may have been because he was away so much training his new legions. Close to two hundred senators with their staffs were crammed into the city by the time I arrived, many of them elderly. They hung around the Temple of Apollo with nothing to do, bickering among themselves. All wars are horrible, but civil wars especially so. Some of Cicero’s closest friends, such as young Caelius Rufus, were fighting with Caesar, while his new son-in-law, Dolabella, actually had command of a squadron of Caesar’s fleet in the Adriatic. Pompey’s first words to Cicero when he arrived had been a curt ‘Where’s your new son-in-law?’ To which Cicero had replied, ‘With your old father-in-law.’ Pompey had grunted and walked away.
I asked Cicero what Dolabella was like. He rolled his eyes. ‘An adventurer like all of Caesar’s crew; a rogue, a cynic, too full of animal spirits for his own good – I rather like him actually. But oh dear, poor Tullia! What kind of husband has she landed herself with this time? The darling girl gave birth at Cumae prematurely just before I left but the child didn’t last out the day. I fear another attempt at motherhood will kill her. And of course the more Dolabella wearies of her and her illnesses – she’s older than him – the more desperately she loves him. And still I haven’t paid him the second part of her dowry. Six hundred thousand sesterces! But where am I to find such a vast sum when I’m trapped here?’
That summer was even hotter than the one when Cicero was exiled – and now half of Rome was exiled with him. We wilted in the humidity of the teeming city. Sometimes I found it hard not to take a certain grim satisfaction at the sight of so many men who had ignored Cicero’s warnings about Caesar – who had been prepared indeed to see Cicero driven from Rome in the interests of a quiet life – and who now found themselves experiencing what it was like to be far from home and facing an uncertain future.