Defendi rem publicam adulescens; non deseram senex.
I defended the republic in my youth; I will not desert it in old age.
Cicero, Second Philippic, 44 BC
XII
This time no crowds turned out to cheer Cicero on his way home. With so many men away at war, the fields we passed looked untended, the towns dilapidated and half empty. People stared at us sullenly; either that or they turned away.
Venusia was our first stop. From there Cicero dictated a chilly message to Terentia:
I think I shall go to Tusculum. Kindly see that everything is ready. I may have a number of people with me and shall probably make a fairly long stay there. If there is no tub in the bathroom, get one put in; likewise whatever else is necessary for health and subsistence. Goodbye.
There was no term of endearment, no expression of eager anticipation, not even an invitation to her to meet him. I knew then he had made up his mind to divorce her, whatever she might have decided.
We broke our journey for two nights at Cumae. The villa was shuttered; most of the slaves had been sold. Cicero moved through the stuffy, unventilated rooms and tried to remember what items were missing – a citrus-wood table from the dining room, a bust of Minerva that had been in the tablinum, an ivory stool from his library. He stood in Terentia’s bedroom and contemplated the bare shelves and alcoves. It was to be the same story in Formiae; she had taken all her personal belongings – clothes, combs, perfumes, fans, parasols – and he said, ‘I feel like a ghost revisiting the scenes of my life.’
At Tusculum she was waiting for us. We knew she was inside because one of her maids was looking out for us by the gate.
I recoiled at the prospect of another terrible scene, like the one between Cicero and his brother. In the event, she was gentler than I had ever known her. I suppose it was the effect of seeing her son again after such a long and anxious separation – he was certainly the person she ran to first and she clutched him to her tightly; it was the only time in thirty years I saw her cry. Next she embraced Tullia and finally she turned to her husband. Cicero told me later that he felt all his bitterness drain away the moment she came towards him, for he saw that she had aged. Her face was creased with worry; her hair flecked grey; her once proud back was slightly stooped. ‘Only at that moment did I realise how much she must have suffered, living in Caesar’s Rome and being married to me. I cannot say I felt love for her any more, but I did feel great pity and affection and sadness, and I resolved there and then to make no mention of money or property – it was all done with, as far as I was concerned.’ They clung to one another like strangers who had survived a shipwreck, then parted, and as far as I know they never embraced again for the remainder of their lives.
Terentia returned to Rome the following morning, divorced. Some regard it as a threat to public morality that a marriage, however long its duration, may be broken so easily, without any form of ceremony or legal document. But such is the ancient freedom, and at least on this occasion the desire to end the partnership was mutual. Naturally I was not present for their private talk. Cicero said it was amicable: ‘We had been apart too much; amid the vast upheaval of public events our old shared private interests were gone.’ It was agreed that Terentia would live in the house in Rome until she moved into a property of her own. In the meantime, Cicero would remain in Tusculum. Marcus chose to go back to the city with his mother; Tullia – whose faithless husband Dolabella was about to sail to Africa with Caesar to fight Cato – stayed with her father.
If one of the miseries of being human is that happiness can be snatched away at any moment, one of the joys is that it may be restored equally unexpectedly. Cicero had long relished the tranquillity and clear air of his house in the Frascati hills; now he could enjoy it uninterrupted, and in the company of his beloved daughter. As it was to become his principal residence from now on, I shall describe the place in more detail. There was an upper gymnasium that led to his library and which he called the Lyceum in honour of Aristotle: this was where he walked in the mornings, composed his letters and talked with his visitors, and where in the old days he had practised his speeches. From here one could see the pale undulation of the seven hills of Rome, fifteen miles in the distance. But because what went on there was now entirely beyond his control, he no longer had to fret about it and was free to concentrate on his books – in that sense paradoxically dictatorship had liberated him. Below this terrace was a garden with shady walks like Plato’s, in whose memory he called it his Academy. Both these areas, Lyceum and Academy, were adorned with beautiful Greek statues in marble and bronze, of which Cicero’s favourite was the Hermathena, a Janus-like bust of Hermes and Athena staring in opposite directions, given to him by Atticus. From the various fountains came the soft music of trickling water, and that combined with the birdsong and the scent of the flowers created an atmosphere of Elysian tranquillity. Otherwise the hillside was quiet because most of the senatorial owners of the neighbouring villas were either fled or dead.
It was here that Cicero lived with Tullia for the whole of the next year, apart from occasional excursions to Rome. Afterwards he regarded this interlude as the most contented period of his life, as well as his most creative, for he made good on his undertaking to Caesar to confine his activity to writing. And such was the force of his energy, no longer dispersed into the law and politics but channelled solely into literary creation, that he produced in one year as many books on philosophy and rhetoric as most scholars might in a lifetime, turning them out one after another without pause. His objective was to put into Latin a summary of all the main arguments of Greek philosophy. His method of composition was extremely rapid. He would rise with the dawn and go straight to his library, where he would consult whatever texts he needed and scrawl notes – he had poor handwriting: I was one of the few who could decipher it – and then when I joined him an hour or two later he would stroll around the Lyceum dictating. Often he would leave me to look up quotations, or even to write whole passages according to the scheme he had laid out; usually he did not bother to correct them, as I had learned very well how to imitate his style.
The first work he completed that year was a history of oratory, which he named Brutus after Marcus Junius Brutus and dedicated to him. He had not seen his young friend since their tents stood side by side in the army camp at Dyrrachium. Even to choose such a subject as oratory was provocative, given that the art was no longer much valued in a country where the elections, the Senate and the law courts were under the control of the Dictator:
I have reason to grieve that I entered on the road of life so late that the night which has fallen upon the republic has overtaken me before my journey was ended. But I grieve more deeply when I look on you, Brutus, whose youthful career, faring in triumph amidst the general applause, has been thwarted by the onset of a malign fortune.
A malign fortune … I was surprised at the risk Cicero was willing to run in publishing such passages, especially considering that Brutus was now an important member of Caesar’s administration. Having pardoned him after Pharsalus, the Dictator had recently appointed him governor of Nearer Gaul, even though Brutus had never been praetor let alone consul. People said it was because he was the son of Caesar’s old mistress Servilia, and that the promotion was meant as a favour to her, but Cicero dismissed such talk: ‘Caesar never does anything out of sentiment. He has given him the job in part no doubt because he is talented, but mostly because he is Cato’s nephew and this is a good way for Caesar to divide his enemies.’