CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

“We are beset,” said Julius Caesar to Crassus. “Suddenly, the whole city rings with the name of Cicero, and there are indignant writings on the walls. All demand the recall of Cicero. Let us be magnanimous, and the people we rule will forget our decrees and hail us as noble friends and benefactors.”

“I say yes,” said Pompey, and raised up his thumb.

Young Porcius Cato, the tribune, squire and patrician, went to Senators who were friends of his family. “Pusillanimous men!” he cried to them. “You have exiled the man who saved Rome and yourselves. The people are in a ferment. Recall him!”

The storm of protest angered and confounded Crassus. He tried to discover those who had invoked the storm that raged now in Rome, but it was as if Cicero had raised champions from the very stones of the streets. Then indeed it became dangerous to resist, and Crassus gloomily consulted the guilty Senate. “It is not a matter to be easily overcome,” said the Senators. “If we declare ourselves in the wrong then the people must despise us. There is also Antonius Hybrida, that confused fool, who threatens to go to the new Consul, P. Cornelius Lentulus Spinther, with his confession, and all know that Lentulus is an old friend of Cicero’s. Let us consider together.”

In true Italianate fashion, they decided to so confuse the issue that no finger could be pointed at any distinct person as the man who had forced recall of Cicero, and therefore no particular man would be forced to explain. Pompey wrote a cautious letter to Cicero, reminding of his love for him, and stating that he sleeplessly worked to secure his recall, “but it now lies with Caesar, your old dear friend.” Pompey added: “Your publisher, who is now very rich and influential, ceaselessly seizes influential men by the shoulder and harangues them in your behalf. As he has many comedians in his pay, whom he calls satiric authors, many fear him.”

The noble tribune, Ninnius, who had always loved Cicero, went to Julius and looked at him with wise and sparkling eyes. “Once I introduced a bill to recall Cicero,” he said. “Clodius opposed it, and he won. Now the new tribunes elect, including your friend Titus Annius Milo, are in favor of Cicero’s recall. They will vote on it. Are you opposed?”

“I?” exclaimed Julius. “Is there ever a day that I do not pray that my dear Marcus’ exile be ended?”

“Pray harder,” said Ninnius. The wise eyes gleamed but the rest of his face was very serious. He did not fear the terrible Committee of Three who now held Rome as a slave. “You have a most eloquent tongue, dear Caesar. Speak to the Senators.”

“I have spoken often to them,” said Julius. “I shall speak again,” he added in the gravest of tones, and Ninnius, concealing a smile, bowed and left him. The people loved Ninnius for his honor. There had been a threat under the calmness of his voice, and Julius always listened to threats. “It is a stupid tyrant who is vainglorious and believes himself invincible and invulnerable,” he said to the other members of the Committee. “It is said the Xerxes listened first to the humblest of his slaves, and second only to his ministers. For the ministers were loyal for his favors, but the slave had nothing to lose by telling the truth.”

The leaves of the trees of Rome were turning red and brown and yellow when Ninnius made a new motion before the Senate for the recall of Cicero. Eight Senators promptly voted in favor, the others abstaining. But strong in their numbers, the eight Senators proposed a bill for the recall. It did not pass. However, though the exile was not ended, the Senate did return Cicero all his civil rights and former rank. He was so notified. But now his strength and pride had been restored. He refused to return to Rome unless all of his seized properties were restored to him, and a new house on the Palatine built for him. In the meantime he went to reside in Dyrrachium where he had access to a great library. There Atticus, optimistic and full of affection, visited him to tell him of events and the mighty sales in Rome of Cicero’s new book. He placed a lavish purse in his friend’s hands, half of which came from his own purse, but not to Cicero’s knowledge. He brought cheering news of the health of Cicero’s family, and the courageous work of Quintus in behalf of his brother.

“Bands from all over Italy are coming to Rome to demand your recall, and the restoration of all that was taken from you,” said Atticus. “Lentulus has declared that as soon as the Sacred Rites are completed in Janus he will bring another motion before the Senate in your favor, for the Consuls are with you.”

Atticus was overcome with delight and joy that his friend and author should be so in control of himself, for he had feared for his mind and life over these many months. Marcus appeared strong again, and even serene, and most resolute. “They would have me return with my restored rank and my civil rights,” he said to Atticus. “But, how shall I live? How governments cling to the money they steal from the citizens! One would think they had earned it themselves! If I live in poverty in Rome, the Senate would be happy, for still all men would say, ‘He is a poor thing, that Cicero, in more ways than one, and too old to rise again.’ Alas, that only money in these degenerate days bestows honor! Therefore, let the Senate fume and complain that I do not return, until the day all is restored to me.”

Atticus, on returning to Rome, kept Marcus abreast of events. “The scene is like that of a mosaic, hanging in order and pattern and story upon a wall, and then suddenly each tile falls from its place and all is confused color and chaos and formless. Resolutions are passed, revoked. Lentulus pleads, the Senate listens, then denies. Pompey has declared that only an edict of the people (lex) can recall you, and this is true. Caesar addresses the Senate, calling himself their servant, and evoking grim smiles while he pleads for you. Crassus, calling himself an even humbler slave of the Roman people, addresses the Senate, and they listen solemnly. Therefore, it seems that all Italy desires your return, and the Senate, and the Committee of Three, and the nobility, and all the ‘new’ men. But, there is Publius Clodius, who hates you, and he is very powerful.”

Atticus did not add, in his letter, that Cicero’s brother, Quintus, had been set on, in open daylight, in the Forum, by the minions of Clodius and that he had been left for dead on the stones. His life was saved only by the most ardent care and many physicians. Atticus did not deem it prudent to alarm Cicero, who might then charge back to Rome in fearful anxiety for his brother and thus tacitly agree to the terms of the Senate, that only his civil rights and his rank be restored to him. It seemed vile, to Atticus, that the corrupt mobs of Rome, whom Clodius appeared to control even more than they were controlled by the Triumvirate, should stand between Cicero and his honorable recall and restoration of properties. But every Roman, no matter his wit or lack of it, his learning or his ignorance, his character or his baseness, had a vote equal to any in Rome, and when his fellows gathered in the Forum to vote they were easily inflamed and riots were very numerous. Let them gather to vote in the case of Cicero, and Clodius, who bribed the masses constantly, would incite them to riot and disorder. Cicero was only a name to the mobs, and that name was anathema to their master, Clodius. It was enough for them. “Such are the uses of democracy,” Atticus thought, while he was writing to his friends. “The voice of the people is frequently the voice of jackasses and criminals and the demented and the avid bellies. They will believe the most monstrous lies if spoken by their current favorite and servant in politics. They will defame the best, if so commanded. They will riot and commit wholesale murder at the behest of any rascal who alleges he loves and serves them out of the nobility of his heart. The mob neither loves nor hates Cicero for himself. But they hate him because Clodius has commanded them so to hate. And this is democracy!”*

Lentulus decided to divert the mobs. As Consul of Rome, he gave them vast spectacles in the circuses, more awesome than they had ever seen before, and while they were entranced by the bloody amusements Lentulus met with the Senate in the Temple of Honor and Virtue and resolved on a bill for the complete recall of Cicero, the restorations of his properties, and marks of honor. But Clodius, suspecting the plot, was able to keep the bill from passage.

Then Pompey, the soldier who despised the reckless and undisciplined mobs, moved resolutely. In the company of many distinguished men, including Lentulus and Servilius, he addressed the people in the Forum, and appealed to their decency which he privately considered they did not possess—and their virtue—in which he did not believe—and to their honor—of which he was convinced they possessed none at all. He was a member of the terrible Triumvirate, whom all men feared, and no member of that Triumvirate had heretofore spoken publicly and directly, in the Forum, to the people, before that day in behalf of Cicero or anyone or anything else. The mob was flattered. They promised, in acclamation, to vote in favor of Cicero’s recall, momentarily forgetting their master, Clodius. Pompey then assured them of their nobleness of soul and heart and mind, and, thinking of Cicero, his voice trembled with sincerity and the emotional mob saw the tears of the great soldier and general who so humbled himself before them. Pompey said later to Lentulus, “Pray the gods keep the vehemence alive in them, at least until Cicero is recalled!”

Clodius strove with his followers, and the Praetor and three magistrates and several tribunes stood with him in his adamant enmity against Cicero. But, to Clodius’ rage and incredulity and complete bafflement, the people did not follow him this time, for though he had bribed them often enough, Pompey had flattered them and had aroused the latent instinct for decency in them—a very rare phenomenon, as Atticus wittily noted in a letter. In short, it was a miracle. “If God did not interfere occasionally in the affairs of men,” Atticus wrote, “then in truth we should fall into chaos, and no criminal or murderer would ever be apprehended and no justice ever done, and no vile politician ever exposed for the liar he is.”

The people kept their promise to Pompey and in late summer they voted for the recall of Cicero, the restoration of his civil rights and rank, all his properties, and marks of honor as a hero of Rome. The banishment was over, and Tullia met her beloved father on the shores of his homeland and threw herself in his arms. He put her from him gently, and knelt down and kissed the sacred earth and wet the soil of his fathers with his tears. All that he had endured was less than his joy.

If the people had been slow to recall him they were passionate in their acclamations in his honor all through Italy when he traveled home. He passed through Capua, Naples, Minturnae, Sinuessa, Formiae, where sumptuous villas were placed at his disposal by friends, and in the vicinity of which his own former villas had been destroyed by the government in its enthusiastic malice. Magistrates received him with laurel and bay leaf crowns, saluting him and kissing his hands, and huge crowds hailed him with cries of “Hero!” and mighty ovations. Farmers and their families lined the roads, strewing flowers in his path. Deputations rushed to meet him, to prostrate themselves at his feet, calling him the savior of all Italy. Every hamlet and town along his passage declared a fiesta in his honor, and all abandoned labor to greet him thunderously. The large car in which he rode with his daughter and friends could hardly proceed for hours, so great was the crush of the Italian populace. Judges called him the pillar of law, the foundation of the Constitution. Fellow lawyers gave banquets in his honor, exclaiming that lawyers forevermore would be sanctified in his name.

Exhausted, pale, and surfeited, thinking only that he was once more on the sacred soil of Italy, he paused one night before entering Rome for a rest in the villa of a friend. He said to Tullia, “If I were younger I should be beguiled into believing that all men formerly stood with me, and that now they are vindicated in my person. But I am no longer young; therefore, though I am happy and my heart is moved at all these demonstrations, I remember that these same acclaimers shunned me on this very same journey, in reverse, when I moved to exile. Man is a feeble thing; he acclaims when it is harmless to acclaim, and approves. When it is demanded that he denounce and defame—especially if the government so demands—then he is just as vehement and just as righteous. A word from Rome to destroy me, and tomorrow those who now kiss my hands would cut my throat—with equal enthusiasm. Man feels the happiest when he believes he is conforming to his fellows, and that is a sad and terrible augury for the future.”

Tullia, weary herself, demurred. “Surely they truly love you, my father.”

Cicero replied: “I do not trust my fellowmen, though once I trusted them. I only pray for them. They believe that universal popularity is the measure of a man’s worth.”

It was the twenty-third night of his triumphal journey through the countless throngs of his fellow Italians. At his urgent request there was no banquet, no long wearisome speeches on the part of magistrates, lawyers, judges, and exigent politicians, no exuberances from the people, for Italians, above all, love festivities and emotion and demonstrations, especially in behalf of suddenly popular men. Tomorrow he would enter Rome. He sat in his beautiful chamber, the bedroom of his host, while the large villa hummed with envoys from the Senate and the host importantly interviewed them, promised to deliver messages to Cicero in the morning, wined and dined the visitors and scurried through passageways. The bedroom was filled with flowers. Cicero was almost prostrated with exhaustion. Tullia, herself, bathed his feet and laid out his ceremonial robes for the morrow. For the first time, as he smiled at her, he noted that she appeared more subdued than he had remembered before his exile, more fragile, more delicate. Her slender face, so like his, was very pale. Her long light brown hair fell down her frail back, and her hands were too thin and trembled a little. Her eyes, again so like his own, seemed duller for all her youth, and her ways even more gentle than he remembered. He was suddenly alarmed.

“Tullia!” he said. “This has wearied you more than it has wearied me.”

She tried to smile, then all at once she burst into tears and threw herself into his arms. He held her on his knee and vaguely tried to console her, and wiped her cheeks and smoothed her soft fine hair, and kissed her. His alarm grew.

“Tell me!” he cried. “What is wrong with my darling, the sweetness of my life?”

Then, for the first time, he heard of the wounds of his beloved brother who had almost died in his service, and the death of his devoted son-in-law, Piso Frugi, who had worked so valorously for the return of Cicero from exile. Tullia was a widow, and she not yet nineteen years of age. Piso had died of a sudden fever, but physicians suspected poison. She sat on her father’s knee, bereaved, desolate, brokenhearted, and Cicero, sorrowful himself, reflected that his child could so forget her suffering as to come to meet him in the midst of her grief.

“You should have told me, dearest one,” he murmured, as he consoled and kissed her. “You should not have come to greet me, and add more burdens to the desperate one you carry. I shall sacrifice in behalf of Piso when I arrive in Rome. My brother—”

“My uncle, Quintus, has only just risen from his bed, where he almost died,” said Tullia, mortified that she had weakly brought such sad news to her father in the midst of his triumphs.

“I have been so blind!” said Cicero. “If I had taken but a moment to observe you, my daughter, I should have seen how stricken you were, and how pale. But no! I was absorbed in my own vindication, and listening too hard to plaudits and the false speeches of those who greeted me, and who had spurned me only a year ago!”

He forgot his joy in his mourning for his son-in-law, and in the terrible thought that Quintus might have been killed by his, Cicero’s, enemies. “I have brought disaster to those I love best,” he said.

But Tullia, resolutely wiping away her tears, consoled him instead. She despised herself that on the eve of her father’s greatest triumph she had weighted sorrow on him; she implored his forgiveness; she ought to have refrained and not have succumbed to female weakness, and cravenly sought consolation. Now, all was ruined. Cicero said, forcing himself to smile, “Piso would desire for me to rejoice, and Quintus will greet me on the morrow. For their sakes, alone, I shall be what they wish,” and he made a grimace, “the Hero crowned with laurel and receiving the homage of Rome.” They wept in each other’s arms, and though Cicero assured his daughter that nothing would be dimmed for him, his heart was heavy and torn. When Tullia had gone to her own chamber rebellion flared in him, and bitterness. Were it not for him Quintus should not have nearly died of wounds; the young and ardent and passionate Piso would be living, he who had so loved life, and with such humor. Cicero did not sleep that night, thinking and often hating.

A hot gray dawn had hardly appeared at the edge of the night-purple sky when Cicero was awakened by a furious and triumphant blast of trumpets, the passionate clamor of drums and the roar of thousands of voices. His first thought was, “Have they decided to murder me, after all?” Then chiding himself for what was only partly irony, he rose to stand at his window and see the flaring of crimson torches. The handsome villa was surrounded by Quintus’ legion, on foot and on horse and in chariots, and banners were already unfurled and as red as blood in the torchlight, and metal gleamed on harness and armor and spear and blade, and the horses pranced and lictors and fasces were raised and there was much shouting and wheeling and gathering in formation, and beyond the legion heaved masses of people who had come from Rome, itself, to gather in his train. A returning general, victorious and bearing coffers of looted gold and thousands of slaves, could not have received a more thunderous ovation. Tullia came running into her father’s chamber, half in excitement and half in fear, and he took her hands and said, “They would be just as vociferous and noisy if I were being led to execution!”

A gilded chariot had been sent for him and his daughter from the Senate, and after a hasty breakfast he entered the vehicle, lifting his arms high to greet the incredible crush of newly arriving people joining those who were already there. It was as if all Rome had emptied herself to rush beyond her gates to meet him and follow after him as they followed conquerers. Then the procession began, the trumpets and the drums and cymbals leading, the officers prancing on their black horses, and then Cicero in his shining chariot, and behind him tens of thousands of dancing and screaming and slapping men and women hardly held in check by the following legionnaires. He saw nothing but an ocean of heads, crowned with flowers, and new rivers of humanity flowing into it all along the Via Appia and tributary roads. The sun had raised half a red rim against the burning gray pall of the eastern sky, and a dull scarlet light began to touch tops of distant monuments along the way and the roofs of houses rising on hills, and made sanguine little pools near the road and a few thin small streams. Swallows rose with cries, and from the early autumnal earth there breathed forth the scent of hay and ripening fruit and scorched soil and warm stone and bronzed grass. Now the scarlet light in the east towered upward like a conflagration and the sides of white villas were stained with it and the climbing white walls on the hills also. There was no wind; all was very still and strangely echoing, and the tumultuous voices of the people and the trumpets and drums and cymbals were suddenly dim in Cicero’s ears, as if he dreamed. Tullia saw her father’s face; it was as pale and calm as a statue’s, and as expressionless. He held the gilded reins like a mighty hero and stood proudly and deep in thought, but she saw the bloody light of the torches and the bloody light of the rising sun in the folds of his noble white toga and in the pits of his eyes. She thought to herself that it was very ominous, for all the triumphal procession and the noise and the lifted banners, for now the dust was rising under thousands of running feet and it, too, was scarlet. There was no color at all but red and gray, and for a moment the girl’s heart was shaken with fear as if she had glimpsed a procession in Hades, and from her narrow seat in the chariot she reached out to touch her father’s arm.

Then all at once the uproarious scene sparkled into other colors as the sun mounted, yet the sky remained oddly crepuscular and sweltering. Now the walls of Rome could be seen, granite intermixed with yellow stone, and above them, the city itself, red, flaming gold, gleaming umber, light green and blue, all its tiled roofs afire as if a thousand thousand bonfires had been built upon them to hail the hero.

Cicero looked upon his distant city, his home, and for the first time his face was moved. Tears rushed into his eyes. His heart was exalted, as if he were a youth again. He did not hear the trumpets, the drums and the cymbals, the roaring of chariot wheels, the pound of hoofs, the earthquake of feet all about him. He saw and heard nothing but Rome, waiting for him, crowded and gigantic and throbbing with vital power against the sinister sky. Home, home, he murmured to himself, and wished he might be alone to walk to that mirage lifting against the sky higher and higher at every moment.

Then he was struck by the blackest melancholy and sadness. All that once was Rome was dead. The corpse remained, still vibrating from the life that had left it, the sacred life of departed men. The corpse would decompose if not today then surely tomorrow. What remained then of this city which was at once host and parasite, a corpse and a breathing monster, a still-beating heart and a skeleton? A promise and a threat to the ages, a hope and a warning. What empires lay fetal in the womb of time, still blind, still formless, still deaf, not yet stirring, which would be born as Rome had been born, and would die as she had died? All that was in the universe, Aristotle had averred, is not diminished nor increased by time. All that was is and forevermore will be, nothing added, nothing taken away, though galaxies would disappear and new rainbowed universes flash into being, and new suns rise on new planets—and, on this small world new nations would be born and would be forgotten before the sun and the moon passed away. To these nations, then, Rome was a legacy, a law, a tomb, and an omen. Ah, let them remember Rome, lest they share her fate!

Cicero came to himself with a start. He could no longer see autumnal fields; they were crowded with multitudes, waving to him, shouting, raising hands high to clap. They were a multitude of colors in their garments; they laughed gleefully to him, proud of their numbers and their demonstrations. And behind him they followed the procession like a vehement river, for all the countryside had joined the Romans who had left the city to greet him. His horses and the interior of the chariot were covered with the flowers of autumn. The sun was too brilliant in his eyes and the heat was stupendous and the noise beyond endurance. Cicero smiled, bowed to the acclamations, the shouts, the yells and the occasional Italianate derisive sound. In truth, the latter made him smile and pleased him more in his present mood than the adulation.

“I feel ridiculous,” Cicero murmured to his daughter, and when he heard his own words his mood shifted again and he was lighter of heart. Not even the whisper in his ears that Catilina had really triumphed, and not himself, could do more than, for an instant, chill his soul.

The whole Senate, in their white and scarlet robes, met him at the gates, and the tribunes, and the magistrates, and more teeming mobs with even more raucous voices. Pompey was there, and Crassus and Julius Caesar, on great white horses, as grand as statues. It was Julius who drove his horse through the ranks of the triumphant legionnaires to approach Cicero’s chariot, and it was Julius who leaped like a youth into the chariot itself to embrace Cicero and kiss his cheek. The mobs were tremendously moved at this, and smiled and wept for no discernible reason. Pompey rode beside the chariot on his horse and smiled down with a little gloom upon Cicero. Crassus trotted at the head of the procession as if he were the hero, and not Cicero, and the mobs cheered him also with exuberance.

“Happy is this day!” Julius cried in Cicero’s ear under the uproar. “My life is now complete, and that I swear, my dearest Marcus!”

But now the soldiers at the gates raised their own trumpets and drums and conversation could not be continued. It was as if the whole world had gone mad with its own cheering and yelling and cries, and all was covered with clouds of dust golden-red in the morning sunlight.

Cicero longed to rest in the house of Atticus, but first he must address the Senate, who wept openly when he sat in his old seat. They let him compose himself. He seemed to be listening to the demonstrations of joy and welcome of the huge masses of people outside, whose ovations did not lessen in intensity for a long while. He seemed to be looking about him, pondering, his eyes unreadable. But in truth his mood of sadness and despondency had returned to him, and a curious sense of strangeness as if he were a stranger in a strange land, and did not know how to speak to the inhabitants. He had dreamed of this day with longing and sorrow and despair, hardly believing that it would ever come to pass. It had come to pass—and he could bring no emotion to his mind but bitterness.

The Senate waited self-righteously to be congratulated on their magnanimity by this great and famous orator, who had so moved, enraged and stunned them by his voice and words in the past, whose eloquence had made them marvel so that they had listened with more attention than they had ever given the most celebrated actor. Whether in agreement or in hostility, they had never felt indifference toward him, or ennui. His voice had always been like the jagged lightning of Jupiter, illuminating and blinding or staggering the soul, or arousing the utmost hate or fear. There had been times when he had appeared to glow before them, incandescent with the emotion that had seized him, and which he had conveyed to them with its own power.

He wanted to blast them with fire and with anger, to reveal to them the mountebanks and liars and fearful and hypocrites and the arrogant which they were, the men who had trembled at the very name of Catilina and had pronounced his death, and then had accused the instrument of that death of violating the Constitution, of ignoring points of order, and had finally censured and exiled him, execrating his methods. He wanted to hurl the thunderbolts of his violent wrath upon them and reduce them to ashes.

But, it was not politic. He looked at them, and his treacherous heart felt pity for them that they were not men who had the fortitude to stand by their decisions nor even to agree that those decisions had been necessary in the awful face of danger. He had been their victim. He must now praise them and thank them. He rose to his feet, and a deep sigh of anticipation stirred them.

“This day,” he said, “is equivalent to immortality.” (Immortalitatis instar fuit.)

He forgot the Senate in his own sudden emotions of joy, for all at once he was flooded with the reality that he was indeed home and he remembered nothing else. Elation lifted his soul so that he felt a sense of physical elevation. He launched into a panegyric of the Senate, of the people of Rome, “who had carried me upon their shoulders into my beloved city.” His voice was like golden music, and the Senate was exalted at hearing themselves described as mighty men of honor, as the bulwark of Rome, as the repository of republican virtues and guardians of the city. It seemed to Cicero in those deliriously joyous moments that he spoke truly and that these were not the men he remembered who had condemned him to an exile that had almost cost his life. They were Romans, and he was a Roman also, and so they were brothers greeting each other after a long and bitter separation. He eulogized the people of Rome also; his soul appeared to expand to embrace the whole nation. His words were repeated by those near the door of the Senate and carried to the farthest throng so that thunderous echoes accompanied all he said. Everything to him was outlined with radiance, and his voice conveyed his jubilation and his happiness. Weariness fell from him; he was young again and valiant and believed in humanity. The Senate wept; the people wept.

When he left the Senate Chamber he was accompanied by Senators who seemed to want to be close to him, and jostled each other. The crowd hailed him in voices they used for the worship of divinity. It was not until he stood on the Senate steps and looked at the seething Forum and the vociferous faces that the morning’s despondency seized him again though in far worse measure, and his spirit sickened with a deathly nausea. None guessed it; his smile was fixed on his face. He thought, None of them means it. It is only an excuse for a fiesta, for the license to shout and scream with hysteria, to lose control, to jump and leap without fear of a frowning and censorious glance, to embrace, to romp, to behave as heedless animals all voice and exuberance. How heavy is the yoke of humanity on the shoulders of men!

Atticus’ house on the Palatine was his temporary home, where he was welcomed by a weeping and laughing Terentia and a boisterous young son, and Pomponia and her son, and hordes of friends already feasting and wining while waiting for him. Atticus, who had left for Greece only a few days before, had written a letter for him: “Alas, I do not know the exact day of your return, or if the Senate will, at the last hour, revoke the comita! But anticipating that you will be summoned home I have placed my house at your disposal and all my goods and my slaves, and have invited your family to be with you. In the meantime, I must go to Athens and other parts of Greece in pursuit of my inconsiderate and irresponsible authors who, when their hands are filled with a few sesterces, leave Rome for other parts, notably those of small taxes, to commune, as they say, with the Muses and refresh their lazy souls. Does it matter to them that I have broadcast the news of a forthcoming book of theirs, and engaged extra scribes and have given them advances on royalties—which they immediately spend without having earned them? No! They must take their surly visages and their sesterces, to lie in the sun and disport themselves with local harlots and haunt the wine shops! They have no sense of duty. I embrace you, beloved Marcus, but must also remind you that you, too, owe me another volume.”

Cicero forced himself to embrace his wife, to thank her for her efforts in his behalf, though he noticed that but a single year had aged and fattened her and had narrowed her once lovely eyes even more. But he rejoiced in his son, in whose face, red-cheeked and merry, he fancied he discerned preternatural wisdom and a love for learning and all the virtues. Terentia informed him, glowing with pride and happiness, that the Triumvirate in person were visiting him that evening for a banquet, which she, forgetting frugality, had lavishly arranged. He was shown to his apartments by bowing slaves and he looked upon the sumptuousness of them and recalled that he now had no house of his own, that Publius Clodius had built on the site a temple ironically dedicated to Liberty, and had appropriated the rest of the grounds for himself. He threw himself upon the bed and despite the continuing uproar of crowds which had accompanied him here he let himself fall into an exhausted sleep.

Before sunset he went to the house of Quintus on the Carinae—the house so full of his own memories—where he found his brother still recovering from his wounds. There, for the first time, as he sat beside Quintus holding his hand, he learned of the true and desperate state of affairs in Rome. There was a serious shortage of grain in the city. A famine had begun. Sicily and Egypt, from whence came most of the cereals which supplied Rome, had reported extremely poor harvests that year. Clodius, emulating Catilina, had formed his own gangs of malcontents and criminals and had trained them in the manner of an army, which only he could control. He had incited them, and only lately, against the Senate itself, which they had actually stoned while it was in session. Several of the Senators had been wounded. The people had some justice on their side: Anticipating famine, the storers of corn had raised their prices enormously, so much so that cereals were often beyond the means of small purses. Some of Clodius’ mobs had even threatened to burn down Caesar’s beloved Temple of Jupiter. The people, as usual, cared little for liberty, but they cared everything for their bellies, so it was easy to arouse them to inflammatory madness at a word.

In short, Cicero reflected with dismay and returning apprehension, nothing had changed in Rome. His life, in the future, would indeed be but a repetition of what he had known too many years. Freedom had gone forever, under the iron Triumvirate, whose ambitions grew day by day. Pompey had been given enormous and unprecedented military power.

Cicero wrote to Atticus, and his letter was full of melancholy. As for the situation in Rome, he wrote, “it is, for a state of prosperity, slippery; for a state of adversity, good.” He added, with gloom, “It is the national climate of a democracy.”

*From a letter to Lentulus.