Then the Ides of March. Brutus, raising his dagger wet with Caesar’s blood, had called out Cicero’s name and congratulated him on the recovery of liberty. Cicero himself, startled and delighted, had reciprocated by hailing the conspirators as heroes, and Caesar’s murder as a glorious event. But it was only a start – and maybe, Cicero was soon fretting, not even that. Brutus and Cassius might have succeeded in striking down Caesar, but they had made no attempt to destroy his regime. Instead an awkward truce had been patched up between the dictator’s assassins and his henchmen, and as a result the advantage was daily slipping through the conspirators’ grasp. Already Brutus and Cassius had been forced by the menaces of pro-Caesarian demagogues to flee Rome. Cicero, who had been urging more ruthlessness and resolution on them, lambasted their strategy as ‘absurd’. It was said that the conspirators had decided to exclude him from their plans because they feared that he had grown timid with age. Now the old man paid them back in fitting coin. To the sacred task of redeeming the Republic from tyranny, he complained, the conspirators had brought ‘the spirits of men, but the foresight of children’.4
Naturally, even in the depths of his despond, the role of knowing elder statesman was one that Cicero could not help but relish. Few would have denied his right to it. The parvenu from Arpinum had become, to younger generations, an almost iconic figure, the very embodiment of tradition, a living relic of a vanished age of giants. Despite his gloating over the murder of their leader, he remained an object of curiosity even to Caesarians. One of these, a particularly startling visitor, was a fair-haired, bright-eyed young man, no more than eighteen, who dropped by to pay his respects while Cicero was still holidaying outside Puteoli. Only a month previously Gaius Octavius, the dictator’s great-nephew, had been in the Balkans, stationed with the expeditionary force for Parthia. When the news of Caesar’s murder had reached him he had sailed at once for Brundisium. There he had learned of his formal adoption in Caesar’s will, becoming, by its terms, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, and being mobbed by crowds of his adoptive father’s veterans. With their cheers still ringing in his ears, he had set off for Rome, but, rather than rushing headlong to the capital, had first turned aside to pay a visit to the Bay of Naples. Touring the holiday villas, he had consulted with assorted Caesarian heavyweights and made his pilgrimage to Cicero. The venerable republican, for once proving impervious to flattery, had refused to be charmed. After all, it was Octavian’s sacred duty, as Caesar’s heir, to hunt down the murderers of his adoptive father. How was such an avenger ever to become a good citizen? ‘Impossible,’ Cicero sniffed.5 Pointedly, he referred to the young man by his original name, Octavius, and not – as Octavian himself now preferred to be called – Julius Caesar alone.* For Cicero, one Julius Caesar had been more than enough.
Even so, he can hardly have been seriously alarmed by Octavian’s prospects. The young man was heading on from Puteoli armed with little more than the magic of his name and a determination to claim his inheritance in full. In the snake-pit of Rome these were not decisive qualifications. Indeed, for established Caesarians, let alone Caesar’s enemies, they verged on the provocative. The dictator might have named Octavian as his legal heir, but there were others, trusted lieutenants in positions of great power, who also had their eyes fixed on their dead master’s legacy. Now that Caesar was gone, the ambitions of Rome’s leading men once again had free play, but hardly in the manner that Brutus and Cassius had anticipated. ‘Freedom has been restored,’ Cicero noted in perplexity, ‘and yet the Republic has not.’6
Which was, as he further noted, ‘unprecedented’ – and raised a terrifying prospect. Was it possible that the old rules, the old traditions, poisoned by civil war, had been placed forever beyond recovery? If so, then a disorienting and blood-sodden new order threatened, one in which a magistracy would always prove to be of less moment than an army, and legitimacy less than the threat of naked violence. Already, by the summer of 44 BC, the outlines of such a future could be glimpsed. Would-be warlords toured the colonies where Caesar had settled his veterans, currying favour, offering bribes. Even Brutus and Cassius tried to get in on the act. The welcome they received from Caesar’s veterans was, unsurprisingly, chilly. By late summer they had come to the reluctant conclusion that Italy was no longer safe for them. Quietly, they slipped away – for the East, it was said, although no one could be sure. For men who had claimed to be liberators, exile anywhere was a bitter defeat.
And for those who had looked to them for leadership it was a disaster. Now, with Brutus and Cassius gone, it would take even more courage to stay behind, to defend the Republic where it still mattered most: in the city that had given birth to its freedoms, before the Senate and the people of Rome. Who was left to make such a stand? Eyes turned to Cicero – but, panicky and a born civilian, he had also vanished from Rome. His intention, painfully arrived at after much vacillation, had been to sail to Athens, where his son, who was supposed to be studying, was instead making a name for himself as the university’s foremost drunk. But the anxious father, eager to set his heir back on the straight and narrow, had no sooner set sail than he was swept by bad weather back into port, and it was there, while waiting for the storms to subside, that he learned how his journey was being represented back in Rome. ‘Fine! Abandon your country!’7 even the imperturbable Atticus had written to him. Cicero was mortified. Both shame and vanity served to steel his fluttering nerves. But so too did the knowledge that it was his duty to stand his ground, to beard the warlords in their den. Out came his luggage from the cargo hold. Bracing himself for the fray, Cicero set off back to Rome.
It was the most courageous decision of his life. But it was not entirely reckless. True, Cicero brought no legions to the armed and carnivorous death-struggle – but he did bring his unsurpassed powers of oratory, his well-honed skills in political dog-fighting and his prestige. The news of his arrival in Rome brought out cheering crowds to welcome him, and even among the highest echelons of the Caesarian grandees he did not lack for contacts. If he could only attach some of these to the cause of the constitution, Cicero hoped, then all might yet be well. He had two particular targets: Aulus Hirtius and Vibius Pansa. Both were prominent Caesarian officers, and had been appointed by the dictator as consuls-designate for the succeeding year, 43 BC. Of course, to Cicero, the fact that magistracies had been allocated in advance, without any reference to the electorate, was an outrage, but one which, for the moment, he was prepared to swallow. Hirtius and Pansa were both, by the standards of the troubled times, moderates, even to the extent of having asked Cicero himself for lessons in public speaking. Certainly, there were other Caesarians whom Cicero would far rather have seen excluded from the consulship. And of them all, in his opinion, the most dangerous was Mark Antony, who already held the office, not to mention an army and Caesar’s treasure to boot.