As far as Cicero was concerned, even the most attractive aspects of Antony’s character – his boldness, charm and generosity – served only to brand the consul all the more a menace. As did his taste in women: after years of pursuing Fulvia, Antony had finally succeeded in hitching himself to Clodius’ domineering widow. Pleasure-loving and exhibitionist as he was, Antony appeared to Cicero a worthy heir of Clodius’ bed, and as such a self-evident public danger. But there was another spectre, even grimmer, standing at Antony’s shoulder. ‘Why should it have been my fate’, Cicero pondered, ‘that for the past two decades the Republic has never had an enemy who did not turn out to be my enemy as well?’8 No doubt Catiline’s spectre would have laughed hollowly at that question. Indeed, Cicero’s conceit in 44 BC was, if anything, even greater than it had been during the year of his consulship. By denouncing Antony, he was effectively declaring war not on an open rebel, as Catiline had been, but on a man who was himself the head of state. But Cicero was unabashed. As with Catiline, so now with Antony, he believed himself confronted by a monster. Only by cutting off its head, he trusted, would the Republic be restored at least half-way to health. So it was that Cicero, the spokesman of legitimacy, prepared to work for the destruction of a consul.
As so many of his campaigns had done, the great orator’s assault on Antony was to prove inspirational and specious in equal measure. With a series of electrifying speeches to the Senate, Cicero sought to rouse his fellow citizens from the torpor of despair, to school them in their deepest ideals, to remind them of what they had been and might be still. ‘Life is not merely a matter of breathing. The slave has no true life. All other nations are capable of enduring servitude – but our city is not.’ Here, in Cicero’s oratory, was a worthy threnody for Roman freedom: both a soaring assertion of the Republic’s heroic past and a rage against the dying of the light. ‘So glorious is it to recover liberty, that it is better to die than shrink from regaining it.’9
To this claim, ancient generations had borne witness, and Cicero, by staking his life, was at last proving himself worthy of the ideals he had for so long aimed to defend. But there were other traditions, just as ancient, to which his speeches were also bearing witness. In the public life of the Republic, partisanship had always been savage, and the tricks of political rhetoric unforgiving. Now, in Cicero’s mauling of Antony, these same tricks received their apotheosis. Elevated calls to arms alternated with the crudest abuse, as, throughout Cicero’s speeches caricatures of a drunken Antony – vomiting up gobbets of meat, chasing after boys, pawing at actresses – were conjured. Malicious, rancorous, unfair – but it was the mark of a free Republic that its citizens’ speech be free too. For too long Cicero had felt himself gagged. Now, for his swansong, he spoke without inhibition. As only he could, he touched the heights and in his next breath plumbed the depths.
Yet his words, like sparks borne on a gale, needed kindling – and this Cicero could only hope to procure by the dark and time-hallowed arts of political fixing. The Caesarian warlords had to be turned against each other and poisoned against Antony, just as rival noblemen had been persuaded to turn against the over-mighty throughout the Republic’s history. Hirtius and Pansa, already suspicious of Antony, needed little encouragement, but Cicero, not content with wooing the consuls-designate, was also luring a far more dramatic recruit to the cause. Only a few months previously he had cold-shouldered Octavian; now, in the dying days of 44 BC, there were few – and certainly not Cicero – who would presume to do that.
Even the gods had blessed the young Caesar with formidable proof of their favour. As Octavian, beneath a cloudless sky, had entered Rome for the first time, a halo in the form of a rainbow had appeared around the sun. Then, three months later, an even more spectacular phenomenon occurred. While Octavian was staging games in honour of his murdered father, a comet had blazed over Rome. It was hailed by the excited spectators as the soul of Caesar ascending to the heavens. Octavian, who privately regarded the comet as a portent of his own greatness, had publicly agreed – as well he might have done, for to become the son of a god was no small promotion, even for Caesar’s heir. ‘You, boy, owe everything to your name,’10 Antony had sneered. But if Octavian’s good fortune had been prodigious, then so too was the skill that he had brought to exploiting his inheritance. Already, even Antony, the seasoned populist, was finding himself outplayed. Requested to hand over Caesar’s treasure so that certain legacies promised to the people could be paid, he had proved obstructive; meanwhile, Octavian, speculating to accumulate, had coolly auctioned off some of his own estates and paid for the legacies out of the proceeds.
His reward was spectacular popularity – not only with the urban mob, but with Caesar’s veterans too. Recruiting head to head with Antony, Octavian soon had a private – and wholly illegal – bodyguard of three thousand men. With this, he briefly occupied the Forum, and although he was soon forced to retreat in the face of Antony’s much larger army, he remained a palpable threat to his rival’s ambitions.
By now it was late in the year, and Antony’s term of office was drawing to its close. Desperate to secure a continued power base, the consul marched north, crossed the Rubicon into Gaul, and proclaimed himself the governor of the province. Blocking his path was Decimus Brutus, the assassin of Caesar, who also claimed the post. Rather than surrender his province to Antony, Decimus chose instead to barricade himself in Modena and sit out the winter. Antony, advancing, settled down to starve him out. The new civil war, long threatening, had finally begun. And all the while, as Caesar’s two former lieutenants locked horns, Caesar’s heir lurked in their rear, a menacing but imponderable factor, his loyalties uncertain, his ambitions even more so.
Only to Cicero had he claimed to open his soul. Octavian had not ceased to woo the old statesman since their first meeting. Cicero, still suspicious of such flattering attentions, had wrestled painfully with the temptation that Octavian represented to him. On the one hand, as he had wailed plaintively to Atticus, ‘Only look at his name, his age!’11 How could Cicero possibly take Caesar’s heir at face value when the young adventurer, sending endless requests for advice, addressed him as ‘Father’ and insisted that he and his followers were at the service of the Republic? But, on the other hand, bearing in mind the desperate nature of the crisis, what was there to lose? By December, with reports of war arriving from the north, Cicero had finally made up his mind. On the twentieth he addressed a packed Senate House. Even as he continued to press for the destruction of Antony, the legitimate consul, he demanded that Octavian – ‘yes, a young man still, almost a boy’12 – be rewarded for his recruitment of a private army with fulsome public honours. To waverers, who were understandably startled by this proposition, Cicero protested that Octavian was already a glittering credit to the Republic. ‘I guarantee it, Fathers of the Senate, I promise it and solemnly swear it!’ Of course, as Cicero himself knew full well, he was protesting too much. All the same, even in private, he was not entirely cynical about Octavian’s prospects. Who was to say how the young man sitting at his knee, absorbing his wisdom and the ancient ideals of the Republic, might prosper? And should Octavian, despite Cicero’s tutorship, prove an unworthy pupil, then there would be ways to deal with him, when the occasion and opportunity arrived. ‘The young man should be lauded, glorified – then raised to the skies.’13 Just as Caesar had been, in other words.