Cicero - Anthony Everitt [116]
A worried Cicero wrote to Atticus: “He does seem very fond of his mother, as he should be, and extraordinarily fond of you. But the boy’s nature, though gifted, is complex and I have plenty to do in guiding it.” With Cicero’s encouragement, Quintus played a part in helping to reconcile his parents. The divorce did not take place.
Serious trouble was also brewing closer to home. In June 50 Cicero broached a highly sensitive topic with Atticus, writing in veiled terms and in Greek. Terentia had sent him out to Cilicia to see Cicero and his behavior had been strange. “There’s something else about which I must write to you en langue voilée, and you must lay your nose to the scent. From the confused and incoherent way he talked the other day, I formed the impression that my wife’s freedman (you know to whom I refer) has cooked the accounts regarding [a property purchase]. I am afraid that something—you’ll take my meaning. Please look into it.… I can’t put all I fear into words.” The implication is that his wife was somehow involved.
The divorced Tullia had now settled on a new husband and she could hardly have made a more unsatisfactory choice. Her eye had fallen on a handsome young aristocrat, Publius Cornelius Lentulus Dolabella. A reckless and womanizing playboy, he was not at all the match Cicero had been hoping for.
Tullia seems usually to have gotten her way with her indulgent father, and on this occasion he knew little of what was afoot until she and her mother presented him with a fait accompli. He made the best of a bad situation, although the marriage placed him in Appius Claudius’s bad books just when he thought he had gotten out of them. AS luck would have it, Dolabella was in the process of bringing Appius to trial on a treason charge. “Here I am in my province paying Appius all kinds of compliment, when out of the blue I find his prosecutor becoming my son-in-law!”
In the summer of 50, much to his relief, Cicero had reached the end of his posting and set off for Rome, despite the brief threat of another Parthian invasion. On the journey home he had plenty of time to think about the political situation he was going to find on his return. He called at Rhodes and Athens and wrote an affectionate letter to his “darling and much-longed-for Terentia,” complimenting her on her letters to him, which “covered all items most carefully,” and asking her to come and meet him in Brundisium if her health allowed. He reached the port in late November at the same time as his wife arrived at the city gates: they met in the market square. The suspicions he had raised with Atticus had evidently been lulled, at least for the time being. He was also coming to terms with Tullia’s new husband, the playboy Dolabella. “We all find him charming, Tullia, Terentia, myself,” he told Atticus. “He is as clever and agreeable as you please. Other characteristics, of which you are aware, we must put up with.”
Cicero was in no hurry to reach Rome and did not arrive there until early January 49. He would need to retain his governor’s imperium until he crossed the city boundary, if he were to be awarded a Triumph or an Ovation, and so he stayed at Pompey’s grand country house outside the capital, accompanied by his official guard of lictors, their axes now wreathed in laurel because of his title of imperator. Cicero was back where he felt he belonged, and he did not intend to be inactive.
10
“A STRANGE MADNESS”
The Battle for the Republic: 50–48 BC
In the great impending crisis Cicero cast himself in the role of a disinterested mediator and bent all his efforts towards reconciling the parties. Looking back a few weeks later, he told Tiro: “From the day I arrived in Rome all my views, words and actions were unceasingly directed towards peace. But a strange madness was abroad.”
Caelius reported in June that “Pompey the Great’s digestion is now in such a poor way that he has trouble finding anything to suit him.” This may have