Cicero suggested I might fill in the time while we waited by giving a detailed account of the recent debates in the Senate and the public assembly, whereupon Servilia, who had ignored me up to that point, turned her fierce eye upon me and said, ‘Oh, so this is your famous spy?’
She was a female Caesar – that is the best way I can describe her: quick-brained, handsome, haughty, bone-hard. The Dictator had presented her with lavish gifts, including estates confiscated from his enemies and huge jewels picked up on his conquests, yet when her son arranged his murder and she was given the news, her eyes stayed as dry as the gemstones he had given her. In this too she was like Caesar. Cicero was slightly awed by her.
I stammered my way through the transcript of my notes, all the while conscious of Servilia’s stare, and at the end she said with great contempt, ‘A grain commissionership in Asia! It was for this that Caesar was assassinated – so that my son could become a corn merchant?’
‘Even so,’ said Cicero, ‘I think he should take it. It’s better than nothing – certainly better than staying here.’
Brutus said, ‘I agree with you on your last point at least. I can’t stay hidden from view any longer. I’m losing respect with every day that passes. But Asia? No, what I really need to do is go to Rome and do what the urban praetor always does at this time of year – stage the Games of Apollo and show myself to the Roman people.’ His sensitive face was full of anguish.
‘You can’t go to Rome,’ replied Cicero. ‘It’s far too dangerous. Listen, the rest of us are more or less expendable, but not you, Brutus – your name and your honour make you the great rallying point of freedom. My advice is to take this commission, do some honourable public work far away from Italy in safety, and await more favourable events. Things will change: in politics they always do.’
At that moment Cassius arrived and Servilia asked Cicero to repeat what he’d just said. But whereas adversity had reduced Brutus to a state of noble suffering, it had put Cassius in a rage, and he started pounding on the table: ‘I did not survive the massacre at Carrhae and save Syria from the Parthians in order to be made a grain collector in Sicily! It’s an insult.’
Cicero said, ‘Well then, what will you do?’
‘Leave Italy. Go abroad. Go to Greece.’
‘Greece,’ observed Cicero, ‘will soon be rather crowded, whereas first of all Sicily is safe, second you’ll be doing your duty like a good constitutionalist, and third and above all you’ll be closer to Italy to exploit opportunities when they arise. You must be our great military commander.’
‘What sort of opportunities?’
‘Well, for example, Octavian could yet cause all sorts of trouble for Antony.’
‘Octavian? That’s one of your jokes! He’s far more likely to come after us than he is to pursue a quarrel with Antony.’
‘Not at all – I saw the boy when he was on the Bay of Naples, and he’s not as ill-disposed towards us as you might think. “It’s my legacy I want, not vengeance” – those were his very words. His real enemy is Antony.’
‘Then Antony will crush him.’
‘But Antony has to crush Decimus first, and that’s when the war will start – when Antony tries to take Nearer Gaul away from him.’
‘Decimus,’ said Cassius bitterly, ‘is the man who has let us down more than any other. Just think what we could have done with those two legions of his if he’d brought them south in March! But it’s too late now: Antony’s Macedonian legions will outnumber him two to one.’
The mention of Decimus was like the breaking of a dam. Denunciations flowed from everyone round the table, Favonius especially, who maintained he should have warned them he was mentioned in Caesar’s wilclass="underline" ‘That did more to turn the people against us than anything else.’
Cicero listened in growing dismay. He intervened to say that there was no point in weeping over past errors, but couldn’t resist adding, ‘Besides, if it’s mistakes you’re talking about, never mind Decimus – the seeds of our present plight were sown when you failed to call a meeting of the Senate, failed to rally the people to our cause, and failed to seize control of the republic.’
‘Well upon my word!’ exclaimed Servilia. ‘I never heard anything like it – to be accused of a lack of resolution by you of all people!’
Cicero glowered at her and immediately fell silent, his cheeks burning either with fury or embarrassment, and not long after that the meeting ended. My notes record only two conclusions. Brutus and Cassius agreed grudgingly at least to consider accepting their grain commissionerships, but only after Servilia announced in her grandest manner that she would arrange for the wording of the Senate resolution to be couched in more flattering terms. And Brutus reluctantly conceded that it was impossible for him to go to Rome and that his praetorian games would have to be staged in his absence. Apart from that the conference was a failure, with nothing decided. As Cicero explained to Atticus in a letter dictated on the way home, it was now a case of ‘every man for himself’: I found the ship going to pieces, or rather its scattered fragments. No plan, no thought, no method. Hence, though I had no doubts before, I am now all the more determined to escape from here, and as soon as I possibly can.
The die was cast. He would go to Greece.
As for me, I was almost sixty and had privately resolved that the time had come for me to leave Cicero’s service and live what remained of my life alone. I knew from the way he talked that he wasn’t expecting us to part company. He assumed we would share a villa in Athens and write philosophy together until one or other of us died of old age. But I could not face leaving Italy again. My health was not good. And love him as I did, I was tired of being a mere appendage to his brain.
I dreaded having to tell him and kept postponing the fateful moment. He undertook a kind of farewell progress south through Italy, saying goodbye to all his properties and reliving old memories, until eventually we reached Puteoli at the beginning of July – or Quintilis, as he still defiantly insisted on calling it. He had one last villa he wished to visit, along the Bay of Naples in Pompeii, and he decided he would leave on the first leg of his journey abroad from there, hugging the coast down to Sicily and boarding a merchant ship in Syracuse (he judged it too dangerous to sail from Brundisium, as the Macedonian legions were due to start arriving any day). To convey all his books, his property and household staff, I hired three ten-oared boats. He took his mind off the voyage, which he dreaded, by trying to decide what literary composition we should undertake while at sea. He was working on three treatises simultaneously, moving between them as his reading and his inclination took him: On Friendship, On Duties and On Virtues. With these he would complete his great scheme of absorbing Greek philosophy into Latin and of turning it in the process from a set of abstractions into principles for living.
He said, ‘I wonder if this would be a good opportunity for us to write our version of Aristotle’s Topics? Let’s face it: what could be more useful in this time of chaos than to teach men how to use dialectics to construct reasoned arguments? It could be in the form of a dialogue, like the Disputations – you playing one part and I the other. What do you think?’
‘My friend,’ I replied hesitantly, ‘if I may call you that, I have wanted for some time to speak to you but have not been sure how to do it.’