“Oh, do not talk to me about that whore!” responded Palicanus. “You must have heard? The whole city is talking about it! She is being screwed every day by Caesar!”
Cicero assured him he had not heard.
“Caesar,” said Palicanus bitterly. “Now, there is a duplicitous bastard! I ask you: is that any time to bed a comrade’s wife-when he is a thousand miles away, fighting for his country?”
“Disgraceful,” agreed Cicero. “Mind you,” he said to me after Palicanus had gone, “if you are going to do such a thing, I should have thought that was the ideal time. Not that I am an expert on such matters.” He shook his head. “Really, though, one has to wonder about Caesar. If a man would steal your wife, what wouldn’t he take from you?”
Yet again I almost told him what I had witnessed in Pompey’s house; and yet again I thought the better of it.
IT WAS ON A CLEAR AUTUMN morning that Cicero bade a tearful good-bye to Terentia, Tullia, and little Marcus, and we left the city to begin his great campaign tour of the north. Quintus, as usual, remained behind to nurse his brother’s political interests, while Frugi was entrusted with the legal casework. As for young Caelius, this became the occasion of his finally leaving Cicero and going to the household of Crassus to complete his internship.
We traveled in a convoy of three four-wheeled carriages, pulled by teams of mules-one carriage for Cicero to sleep in, another specially fitted out as an office, and a third full of luggage and documents; other, smaller vehicles trailed behind for the use of the senator’s retinue of secretaries, valets, muleteers, cooks, and heaven knows who else, including several thick-set men who acted as bodyguards. We left by the Fontinalian Gate, with no one to see us off. In those days, the hills to the north of Rome were still pine-clad, apart from the one on which Lucullus was just completing his notorious palace. The patrician general had now come back from the East, but was unable to enter the city proper without forfeiting his military imperium, and with it his right to a triumph. So he was lingering out here amid his spoils of war, waiting for his aristocratic cronies to assemble a majority in the Senate to vote him triumphator, but the supporters of Pompey, among them Cicero, kept blocking it. Mind you, even Cicero glanced up from his letters long enough to take a look at this colossal structure, the roof of which was just visible over the treetops, and I secretly hoped that we might catch a glimpse of the great man himself, but of course he was nowhere to be seen. (Incidentally, Quintus Metellus, the sole survivor of the three Metelli brothers, had also recently returned from Crete, and was also holed up outside the city in anticipation of a triumph which, again, the ever-jealous Pompey would not allow. The plight of Lucullus and Metellus was a source of endless amusement to Cicero: “a traffic jam of generals,” he called them, “all trying to get into Rome through the Triumphal Gate!”) At the Mulvian Bridge we paused while Cicero dashed off a final note of farewell to Terentia. Then we crossed the swollen waters of the Tiber and turned north onto the Flaminian Way.
We made extremely good time on that first day, and shortly before nightfall we reached Ocriculum, about thirty miles north of the city. Here we were met by a prominent local citizen who had agreed to give Cicero hospitality, and the following morning the senator went into the forum to begin his canvass. The secret of effective electioneering lies in the quality of the staff work done in advance, and here Cicero was very fortunate to have attached to his campaign two professional agents, Ranunculus and Filum, who traveled ahead of the candidate to ensure that a decent crowd of supporters would always be waiting in each town when we arrived. There was nothing about the electoral map of Italy which these two rascals did not know: who among the local knights would be offended if Cicero did not stop to pay his respects, and who should be avoided; which were the most important tribes and centuries in each particular district, and which were most likely to come his way; what were the issues which most concerned the citizens, and what were the promises they expected in return for their votes. They had no other topic of conversation except politics, yet Cicero could sit with them late into the night, swapping facts and stories, as happily as he could converse with a philosopher or a wit.
I would not weary you with all the details of the campaign, even if I could remember them. Dear gods, what a heap of ash most political careers amount to when one really stops to consider them! I used to be able to name every consul for the past one hundred years, and most praetors for the past forty. Now they have almost entirely faded out of my memory, quenched like lights at midnight around the Bay of Naples. Little wonder that the towns and crowds of Cicero’s consular campaign have all merged into one generalized impression of hands shaken, stories listened to, bores endured, petitions received, jokes told, undertakings given, and local worthies smoothed and flattered. The name of Cicero was famous by this time, even outside Rome, and people turned out to see him en masse, especially in the larger towns where law was practiced, for the speeches he had prepared for the prosecution of Verres-even those he had not delivered-had been extensively copied and circulated. He was a hero to both the lower classes and the respectable knights, who saw him as a champion against the rapacity and snobbery of the aristocracy. For this reason, not many grand houses opened their doors to him, and we had to endure taunts and even, occasionally, missiles whenever we passed close to the estates of one or other of the great patricians.
We pressed on up the Flaminian Way, devoting a day to each of the decent-sized towns-Narnia, Carsulae, Mevania, Fulginiae, Nuceria, Tadinae, and Cales-before finally reaching the Adriatic coast about two weeks after leaving Rome. It was some years since I had gazed upon the sea, and when that line of glittering blue appeared above the dust and scrub I felt as thrilled as a child. The afternoon was cloudless and balmy, a straggler left behind by a distant summer which had long since retreated. On impulse, Cicero ordered that the wagons be halted so that we could all walk on the beach. How odd the things which do lodge in one’s mind, for although I cannot now recall much of the serious politics, I can still remember every detail of that hour-long interlude-the smell of the seaweed and the taste of salt spray on my lips, the warmth of the sun on my cheeks, the rattle of the shingle as the waves broke and the hiss as they receded, and Cicero laughing as he tried to demonstrate how Demosthenes was supposed to have improved his elocution by rehearsing his speeches with a mouth full of pebbles.
A few days later, at Ariminum, we picked up the Aemilian Way and swung west, away from the sea, and into the province of Nearer Gaul. Here we could feel the nip of winter coming on. The black and purple mountains of the Apenninus rose sheer to our left, while to our right, the Po delta stretched gray and flat to the horizon. I had a curious sensation that we were mere insects, creeping along the foot of a wall at the edge of some great room. The passionate political issue in Nearer Gaul at that time was the franchise. Those who lived to the south of the River Po had been given the vote; those who lived to the north had not. The populists, led by Pompey and Caesar, favored extending citizenship across the river, all the way to the Alps; the aristocrats, whose spokesman was Catulus, suspected a plot to further dilute their power, and opposed it. Cicero, naturally, was in favor of widening the franchise to the greatest extent possible, and this was the issue he campaigned on.
They had never seen a consular candidate up here before, and in every little town crowds of several hundred would turn out to listen to him. Cicero usually spoke from the back of one of the wagons, and gave the same speech at every stop, so that after a while I could move my lips in synchronicity with his. He denounced as nonsense the logic which said that a man who lived on one side of a stretch of water was a Roman and that his cousin on the other was a barbarian, even though they both spoke Latin. “Rome is not merely a matter of geography,” he would proclaim. “Rome is not defined by rivers, or mountains, or even seas; Rome is not a question of blood, or race, or religion; Rome is an ideal. Rome is the highest embodiment of liberty and law that mankind has yet achieved in the ten thousand years since our ancestors came down from those mountains and learned how to live as communities under the rule of law.” So if his listeners had the vote, he would conclude, they must be sure to use it on behalf of those who had not, for that was their fragment of civilization, their special gift, as precious as the secret of fire. Every man should see Rome once before he died. They should go next summer, when the traveling was easy, and cast their ballots on the Field of Mars, and if anyone asked them why they had come so far, “you can tell them Marcus Cicero sent you!” Then he would jump down and pass among the crowd while they were still applauding, doling out handfuls of chickpeas from a sack carried by one of his attendants, and I would make sure I was just behind him, to catch his instructions and write down names.