As for Dolabella, he was striking for three attributes: the fierce handsomeness of his features, the obvious strength of his physique, and the shortness of his stature. (Cicero once joked, ‘Who has tied my son-in-law to that sword?’) This pocket Adonis, for whom I had long tended an intense dislike because of the way he treated Tullia, even though I had never met him, read Cicero’s invitation and declared that he would return with me immediately. He said, ‘My father-in-law writes here that this message is brought to me by his trusted friend Tiro. Would that be the Tiro who created the famous shorthand system? Then I am delighted to meet you! My wife has always talked of you most fondly, as a kind of second father to her. May I shake your hand?’ And such was the charm of the rogue that I felt my hostility immediately begin to wilt.
He asked Metella to send his slaves after him with his luggage, and then joined me in the carriage for the journey to Tusculum. Most of the way he slept. By the time we reached the villa, the slaves were preparing to serve dinner, and Cicero ordered an extra place to be set. Dolabella made straight for Tullia’s couch and reclined with his head in her lap. After a while I noticed she began to stroke his hair.
It was a fair spring evening with the nightingales calling to one another, and the incongruity between the charm of the setting and the horror of the story Dolabella unfolded made it all the more unsettling. First there was the battle itself, named Thapsus, at which Scipio had commanded the republican force of seventy thousand men in alliance with King Juba of the Numidians. They had used a shock force of elephant cavalry to try to break Caesar’s line, but volleys of arrows and flaming missiles from the ballistae had caused the wretched beasts to panic, turn and trample their own infantry. Thereafter it was the same story as at Pharsalus: the republican formations had broken on the iron discipline of Caesar’s legionaries, only this time Caesar had decreed there would be no prisoners taken: all ten thousand who surrendered were massacred.
‘And Cato?’ asked Cicero.
‘Cato was not present at the battle but was three days’ journey away, commanding the garrison at Utica. Caesar went there straight away. I rode with him at the head of the army. He wanted very much to capture Cato alive so that he could pardon him.’
‘A wasted mission, I could have told you that: Cato would never have accepted a pardon from Caesar.’
‘Caesar was sure he would. But you are right, as always: Cato killed himself the night before we arrived.’
‘How did he do it?’
Dolabella pulled a face. ‘I’ll tell you if you really want to know, but it’s not a fit subject for a woman’s ears.’
Tullia said firmly, ‘I’m quite strong enough, thank you.’
‘Even so, I think it would be better if you withdrew.’
‘I shall certainly do no such thing!’
‘And what does your father say about that?’
‘Tullia is stronger than she looks,’ said Cicero, adding pointedly, ‘She has had to be.’
‘Well, you asked for it. According to Cato’s slaves, when he learned that Caesar would arrive the next day, Cato bathed and dined, discussed Plato with his companions, and retired to his room. Then when he was alone he took his sword and slashed himself just here.’ Dolabella reached up and drew a finger under Tullia’s breastbone. ‘All his guts spilled out.’
Cicero, squeamish as ever, winced, but Tullia said, ‘That’s not so bad.’
‘Ah,’ said Dolabella, ‘but that’s not the end of the story. He failed to make the wound fatal and the sword slipped out of his bloodied hand. His attendants heard his groans and rushed in. They summoned a doctor. The doctor arrived and pushed his intestines back in to the cavity and sewed up the wound. I might add that Cato was entirely conscious throughout. He promised he would not make another attempt, and his staff believed him, although as a precaution they took his sword away. As soon as they had gone, he tore the wound open with his fingers and dragged his intestines out again. That killed him.’
The death of Cato had a powerful effect on Cicero. As the lurid details became more widely known, there were those who said it was proof that Cato was insane; certainly this was Hirtius’s view. Cicero disagreed. ‘He could have had an easier death. He could have thrown himself from a building, or opened his veins in a warm bath, or taken poison. Instead he chose that particular method – exposing his entrails like a human sacrifice – to demonstrate the strength of his will and his contempt for Caesar. In philosophical terms it was a good death: the death of a man who feared nothing. Indeed I would go so far as to say he died happy. Neither Caesar, nor any man, nor anything in the world could touch him.’
The effect on Brutus and Cassius – both of whom were related to Cato, the one by blood and the other by marriage – was if anything even stronger. Brutus wrote from Gaul to ask if Cicero would compose a eulogy of his uncle. His letter arrived at the same time as Cicero learned that he had been named in Cato’s will as one of the guardians of his son. Like the others who had accepted Caesar’s pardon, Cicero found the suicide of Cato shaming. So he ignored the risk of offending the Dictator, complied with Brutus’s request, and dictated a short work, Cato, in little more than a week.
Sinewy in thought and person; indifferent to what men said of him; scornful of glory, titles and decorations, and even more of those who sought them; defender of laws and freedoms; vigilant in the public interest; contemptuous of tyrants, their vulgarities and presumptions; stubborn, infuriating, harsh, dogmatic; a dreamer, a fanatic, a mystic, a soldier; willing at the last to tear the very organs from his stomach rather than submit to a conqueror – only the Roman Republic could have bred such a man as Cato, and only in the Roman Republic did such a man as Cato desire to live.
Around this time Caesar returned from Africa, and soon afterwards, at the height of summer, he staged finally four separate triumphs on successive days to commemorate his victories in Gaul, the Black Sea, Africa and on the Nile – such an epic of self-glorification as even Rome had never seen. Cicero moved back into his house on the Palatine in order to attend – not that he wanted to: In civil war, as he wrote to his old friend Sulpicius, victory is always insolent. There were five wild-beast hunts, a mock battle in the Circus Maximus that included elephants, a naval battle in a lake dug out near the Tiber, stage plays in every quarter of the city, athletics on the Field of Mars, chariot races, games in honour of the memory of the Dictator’s daughter Julia, a banquet for the entire city at which meat from the sacrifices was served, a distribution of money, a distribution of bread, endless parades of soldiers and treasure and prisoners coiling through the streets – that noble leader of the Gauls, Vercingetorix, after six years of imprisonment, was garrotted in the Carcer – and day after day we could hear the vulgar chanting of the legionaries even from the terrace:
Home we bring our bald whoremonger,
Romans, lock your wives away!
All the bags of gold you lent him
Went his Gallic tarts to pay!
Yet despite their bombast, or perhaps because of it, Cato’s reproachful ghost seemed to haunt even these proceedings. When a float went by during the Africa triumph depicting him tearing out his entrails, the crowd let out a loud groan. It was said that Cato’s death had a particular religious meaning: that he had done it to bring down the wrath of the gods on Caesar’s head. When that same day the axle on the Dictator’s triumphal chariot broke and he was pitched to the ground, it was held to be a sign of divine displeasure, and Caesar took the crowd’s disquiet seriously enough to lay on the most extraordinary spectacle of alclass="underline" at night, with forty elephants on either side of him ridden by men holding flaming torches, he mounted the slope of the Capitol on his knees to atone to Jupiter for his impiety.