Sometimes Cicero was tempted to agree. He was perfectly capable of acknowledging that ‘electioneering and scrabbling after office can be a wretched business’.21 But whether his breakdown had been purely physical, or perhaps something more, he retained his passionate conviction that public life was the ideal. Leaving Athens, he crossed the Aegean to Asia. There he met Rutilius Rufus, the old enemy of the publicani, and still in exile fifteen years after being convicted in the most notorious scandal in Roman legal history. Rutilius was an object lesson in how dangerous it could be to uphold ancient values against the predatory greed of corrupt officials, and yet, despite his hounding, he had not despaired of the Republic. For several days the old man entertained his guest with anecdotes about the heroic figures of his youth, then sent him onwards to visit his friend, the philosopher Posidonius, on Rhodes. The great sage’s conversation would have been even more motivational than that of Rutilius. Posidonius had lost none of his faith in Rome’s global destiny, nor in the traditional virtues that she could bring to such a mission: ‘Rugged fortitude; frugality; a lack of attachment to material possessions; a religion wonderful in its devotion to the gods; upright dealing; care and attention to justice when dealing with other men.’22 So the list ran on. Cicero, who had always dreamed of being the most traditional kind of Roman hero, was thrilled. What was a sore throat to stand in the way of fulfilling such a destiny? By a fortunate coincidence, the world’s most famous oratory clinic was also to be found on Rhodes. The rhetorician Molon, who ran it, was typical of a new breed of celebrity professors who had begun tailoring their courses to suit high achievers from Rome. Cicero was soon able to establish himself as Molon’s star pupil. Having encouraged him to adopt a more restrained manner of speaking, the teacher ended up in a theatrical state of despair, lamenting that even in the field of oratory Greece had now been surpassed by Rome. Cicero, always a sucker for flattery, was delighted. ‘And so I came home after two years not only more experienced,’ he recalled later, ‘but almost a new person. The excessive straining on my throat had gone, my style was less frenetic, my lungs were stronger – and I had even put on weight.’23
Energy and self-confidence now fully restored, he returned to his legal practice in the Forum, where he continued to speak for the defence. Favours were duly earned and obligations totted up. Cicero was starting to close the gap on Hortensius. At the same time he was also picking up speed in the Cursus. At the age of thirty, the youngest legitimate age, he was elected to the quaestorship, the most junior of the Republic’s great offices, it was true, but a start all the same and, considering his background, an impressive one. The provincial from Arpinum was now not only a magistrate of the Roman people, but a member of the Senate. Assigned to Sicily, he spent a year there, attempting to put the example of Rutilius to good use, earning the respect of the provincials, and efficiently organising shipments of grain back to Rome. The brilliant young quaestor, with his customary lack of modesty, imagined that his fellow citizens would be talking of little else. Landing at Puteoli on his way home, however, Cicero was appalled to discover that no one had even realised he had been away. Typically, however, he soon managed to put the lesson to good account:
I now believe the incident benefited me more than if everyone had been offering me congratulations. I realised that the Roman people are prone to deafness, but that their eyesight is keen and observant, and so I stopped worrying what people might hear of me, but made sure that they saw me in person every day. I lived in the full glare of their observation, I was always in the Forum. Neither sleep nor the bouncer by my door ever prevented anyone from getting to see me.
24
For those on the Cursus, exposure was all. A new man had to hype himself or else he was nothing. This was a lesson that Cicero would never forget.
He was now fast becoming a fixture in Rome. People who mattered were waking up to the fact that Cicero’s estimation of his own talents was not merely insufferable egotism, and that his genius as an advocate was indeed something exceptional. The more this perception gathered pace, the more Cicero could begin to eye the prospect of a real breakthrough, past the staging-post of the junior magistracies and into the laps where only the aristocracy might normally be expected to advance. To achieve that, however, he would first have to establish his dominance as an orator beyond all doubt. Hortensius had to be toppled, and not only toppled, but comprehensively drubbed. His ‘tyrannical rule of the law courts’25 had to be brought to a public end.
So it was that when Cicero finally met Hortensius face to face, in a case ripe with scandal and prurient detail, the stakes could hardly have been higher. The defendant was a former governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, and it was Cicero, breaking the habit of a lifetime, who brought the prosecution. This was a risk, but a well-calculated one. Even upon the modest record of Roman provincial administration, Verres appears to have been a spectacular blot. Treachery and greed had been the keynotes of his career. A supporter of the Marians for as long as the Marians clung to power, he had soon sensed the way the wind was blowing, and absconded to Sulla with his commanding officer’s cash box. Armed with the favour of the new regime, Verres had duly found himself launched on a series of increasingly lucrative overseas postings. Whether he was really, as Cicero was to claim, ‘distinguished by nothing except his monstrous offences and his obscene wealth’,26 he certainly seems to have had an eye for ready perks – ships, disputed wills, the daughters of his hosts. Verres’ real specialisation, however, was antiques. Years of pillaging the Greek world had given the Roman upper classes an immense enthusiasm for high art. Officially, this was despised as effete self-indulgence, but behind the scenes Roman grandees would chase frantically after any valuable painting or statue that was going. Now that the days of sacking Greek cities were over, the world’s first art market had developed to plug the gap. Prices had duly spiralled and dealers made fortunes. Verres’ own refinement had been to bring the methods of a gangster to the trade. Even as he was mass-producing fakes he was employing a team of experts, ‘bloodhounds’,27 to sniff out genuine masterpieces. Verres had a talent for making offers that no one dared refuse. One provincial elder who had tried to outface the governor had been stripped naked and lashed to an equestrian statue in the town’s main square. Since it had been the dead of winter, and the statue had been made of bronze, the old man had soon changed his mind. Other trouble-makers, even Roman citizens, Verres had simply had crucified.
This, then, was the man whom Cicero had decided to go after. Despite the defendant’s record, he knew that the case would be no walk-over. Verres had friends in high places and a long reach. When Cicero travelled to Sicily to pursue the case in person, he found that witnesses had a suspicious tendency to fall silent or disappear. Fortunately, following his quaestorship, he had plenty of Sicilian contacts of his own. Evidence was everywhere, even in the silence of the countryside, its farmers ruined by Verres’ depredations. Clearly, as a prosecutor, Cicero relished what he found, but as an aspiring statesman he was simultaneously appalled. Verres’ corruption struck at two of his most passionately held convictions: that Rome was good for the world, and that the workings of the Republic were good for Rome. This was why Cicero could argue with a perfectly straight face that the stakes in the coming trial were apocalyptic. ‘There is nowhere, no matter how distant or obscure, within the boundary of the encircling Ocean, that has not suffered from the lust for oppression which drives our people on,’ he warned. If Verres were not convicted, then ‘the Republic will be doomed, for this monster’s acquittal will serve as a precedent to encourage other monsters in the future’.28 Magnificently over the top though all this was, there was more to it than a mere lawyerly desire to make the flesh creep. For the sake of his political ideals, and his own self-respect, Cicero had to believe what he was saying. If the Cursus rewarded greed rather than patriotism, and if a man such as Verres could emerge triumphant over a man such as himself, then the Republic was rotten indeed. Here was an argument that Cicero would cling to all his life: that his own success was to be regarded as the measure of the health of Rome. Genuine principle fused seamlessly with inordinate self-regard.