Cicero - Anthony Everitt [103]
During these years when his own career had stalled, Cicero developed an interest in nurturing the prospects of promising young men. There was Caius Trebatius Testa, a lawyer in his late twenties or early thirties, for whom he arranged a job with Caesar in Gaul. And in 53 the reprobate Curio made a reappearance, now an ardent conservative and ready for public life. Cicero recalled the good advice he had given him “in the days of your boyhood.”
But perhaps the most important of Cicero’s youthful correspondents in those years was his personal slave and secretary, Tiro. It is not certain when Tiro was born, but he was probably a young man at this time. His name is a Latin word (meaning “newcomer,” “recruit” or “beginner”) and this suggests that he may have been born in the Cicero household rather than bought at a sale. Cicero was deeply attached to him and the references in his letters present him almost as a member of the family (“a friend to us rather than a slave,” Cicero wrote to Quintus). Tiro was given his freedom in 53 but, like most former slaves in Roman society, continued to work for his onetime owner.
Tiro was the man who looked after confidential financial matters. Every month he chased up debtors and pacified creditors. He checked the management accounts of the steward Eros, which were sometimes incorrect. He negotiated with moneylenders on the not infrequent occasions when Cicero found himself embarrassed for ready cash. Once he was even commissioned with the sensitive task of pursuing an aristocratic debtor for a repayment. He was also involved in superintending building works, watching over the upkeep of gardens and generally harassing workmen. He looked after Cicero’s social life and organized the guest lists for dinner parties, often a delicate matter. “See about the dining room,” Cicero once instructed him. “Tertia will be there—provided that Publilius is not invited.”
But Tiro’s main duties were secretarial and even editorial. He devised a shorthand which allowed him to write as fast as Cicero dictated. It is reported that he even helped Cicero with his writing and this is confirmed by a letter his master sent him in 53 when he was unwell. “My (or our) literary brainchildren have been drooping their heads missing you.… Pompey is staying with me as I write, enjoying himself in cheerful mood. He wants to hear my compositions, but I told him that in your absence my tongue of authorship is tied completely.”
Tiro’s health was poor and Cicero often had reason to be seriously worried. “Aegypta arrived today,” Cicero once wrote to him solicitously. “He told me you were quite free of fever and in pretty good shape but said that you had not been able to write to me.… You cannot imagine how anxious I feel about your health.” Cicero told Atticus that Tiro “is extraordinarily useful to me when well in all sorts of ways, both in business and in my literary work, but I hope for his recovery more because he is such a nice, modest fellow than for my own convenience.” Although he was always complaining about Quintus’s overdependence on his freedman, Statius, his relationship with Tiro was just as close and trusting.
Tiro seems to have been popular with other members of the family too. In the following decade, when he had saved up enough money to buy a small farm, young Marcus congratulated him in a letter that is full of affection and good humor. “Well, you are a man of landed property! You must shed your town-bred ways—you are now a Roman squire! How amusing to picture the delightful sight of you now. I imagine you buying farm tackle, talking to the bailiff, hoarding pips at dessert in your jacket pockets!”
The past few years had been deeply unsatisfactory for Cicero, who felt he had been unfairly sidelined by the rise of the First Triumvirate. He did not anticipate the future with any greater confidence. Diehards in the Senate were determined to take revenge on Caesar for the illegalities of his