All the same, his nerves cannot have been too badly on edge, else he would never have suggested a tour of the crossroads. It had been in the cramped maze of Rome’s alleyways that Catiline had sought to foster revolution, and three years after his death the spectres of debt and hunger still stalked the festering streets. As Cicero and Atticus negotiated their way through the filth they could hardly have failed to notice the signs of want. The aristocracy was not entirely oblivious to the sufferings of the poor. Cicero himself, when it suited him, might make eloquent common cause with what he privately disparaged as the ‘mob’. Others went well beyond words. The senator responsible for doubling the distribution of subsidised grain in Rome had been none other than that pillar of the establishment Marcus Cato. Of course, even while promoting welfare, he had made sure to appear as stern and rectitudinous as ever. He did not, as Caesar did, seduce his fellow citizens, make them feel loved. Differences between politicians were a matter less of policy than of image. It would have been as insulting for Cato to be labelled a demagogue as for a matron to be confused with a whore.
This was why crossroads, which were notoriously the haunt of both rabble-rousers and prostitutes, were rarely frequented by the respectable; they were good for the occasional day out, perhaps, but nothing more than that. An association with crossroads could be grievously damaging to a citizen’s good name – or to his wife’s. Clodia Metelli, for instance, had found herself stuck with the mortifying nickname of ‘Lady Copper-Bit’,11 after the low-rent hookers who plied their trade on street corners. One spurned lover described her as selling herself ‘on crossroads and back-alleys’,12 while another sent her a purse filled with copper coins. Clodia was susceptible to these slanders because of her reputation for promiscuity and her raffish sense of fashion, but slang was not the limit of her taste for gangster chic. Disrespect was invariably punished. Humiliations were answered in kind. The humorist responsible for the gift of coppers had soon had the smile wiped off his face. Publicly beaten and gang-raped, it was he who had been used like a whore.
On no one did Clodia’s glamorous blend of style and violence have a more profound influence than her younger brother. What would have been fatal to the career of a conventional politician was grasped by Clodius as a potential lifeline. He badly needed one. Acquitted of impiety he might have been, but his prospects had been severely damaged by the exposés of his trial. For a member of the Republic’s most arrogant family, the discovery of how little support he commanded from his own class had been a wounding humiliation. As Lucullus could vouch, Clodius was as sensitive to personal affronts as he was imaginative in finding ways to avenge them. Cold-shouldered by the Senate, he began to play up to the slums. The poor, like every other class of Roman, were easily dazzled by snob appeal, and Clodius had both star quality and the popular touch to excess: a man capable of provoking a mutiny in defence of his wounded honour was clearly a demagogue of genius. Even so, Clodius would need to be elected tribune before he could hope to marshal the mob – and therein lay a problem. How could a man who was patrician to his fingertips hold an office reserved exclusively for plebeians? Only by becoming a plebeian himself – a move so unorthodox that it would require a public vote to secure his adoption into a plebeian family, which in turn would need to be sanctioned by a consul. This, in 59, effectively meant Caesar, a man well aware of Clodius’ talent for making trouble. The time might come when the triumvirate would find a use for his antics; but in the meanwhile Caesar was content to leave the would-be tribune to stew.
All of which Atticus, a fixture at Clodia’s dinner parties and therefore privy to Claudian gossip, was well placed to pass on to his friend. Cicero duly breathed a deep sigh of relief. Yet even with Clodius muzzled he found that the past kept on slipping its leash. One particular embarrassment was his former colleague as consul, Antonius Hybrida. After a corrupt and inept spell as governor of Macedon, the Catilinarian turncoat had just resurfaced in Rome. Also back in town, eager to make a mark, and to obscure his own involvement with Catiline, was the precocious Marcus Caelius. On both counts Hybrida presented him with an irresistible target. In April 59 Caelius brought a prosecution. He savaged the defendant in a brilliantly witty speech, portraying him as a disgrace to the Republic, whose twin policies as governor had been to grope slave-girls and spend his whole time drunk. But Cicero, for the defence, failed to enjoy his protégé’s jokes. He had no fondness for Hybrida, but knew that the conviction of his former colleague, the man whose army had brought about Catiline’s final demise, would have ominous implications for himself. His rushed execution of the conspirators had not been forgotten, nor, by many, forgiven. When Hybrida was duly convicted the slums erupted in cheering. Bunches of flowers appeared on Catiline’s grave.
For Cicero, the disaster of Hybrida’s conviction was compounded by a fatal miscalculation. During the trial, in the course of a bad-tempered speech, he had dared to attack the members of the triumvirate by name. Caesar, aggravated by this buzzing of dissent, promptly moved to silence it. The means was ready to hand. Within hours of the speech having been given, Clodius had been declared a plebeian. Cicero, panicking, bolted from Rome. Hunkered down in a villa on the coast, he bombarded Atticus with frantic letters, begging him to milk Clodia for news of her brother’s intentions. Then, towards the end of the month, venturing out on to the Appian Way, he ran into a friend coming from Rome who confirmed for him that, yes, Clodius was indeed standing for election to the tribunate. But if that were the bad news, then there was also some good. Clodius, it appeared, mercurial as ever, had already turned on Caesar. This immediately set Cicero to building castles in the air. Perhaps his two enemies, consul and prospective tribune, might end up destroying each other? A week later and Cicero was cheerleading for Clodius. ‘Publius is our only hope,’ he confided to Atticus. ‘So yes, let him become a tribune, please, yes!’13
Even by Cicero’s standards this was a startling turnaround. Yet in a city seething with machinations no feud could ever be reckoned eternal. Nothing better illustrated this than the identity of the friend who had met Cicero on the Appian Way. Curio, Clodius’ closest political ally, was every bit as unprincipled and volatile as his friend. Since orchestrating the intimidation of Cicero at Clodius’ trial he had continued to blot his reputation with scandal. His relationship with Hybrida’s nephew, a rugged, handsome young man by the name of Mark Antony, had become the talk of Rome. Even by the standards of the time the scale of their debts was regarded as shocking. It was whispered that Antony, despite his bull-neck and muscle-bound body, dressed as a woman to play the role of Curio’s wife. When the two men had been banned from seeing each other Curio had smuggled his friend in through his father’s roof – or so the scandal-rakers claimed.* Then, in the year of Caesar’s consulship, gossip and disapproval had abruptly turned to praise. Curio, far too arrogant to cringe before anyone, raised the morale of the entire Senate by his flamboyant defiance of Caesar. There was no more talk of him now as ‘Curio’s little daughter’. Instead, his recklessness was hailed as the courage of a patriot. Respectable senators saluted him in the Forum. The circus greeted him with rapturous acclaim.