Cicero - Anthony Everitt [134]
Cato’s suicide was extremely damaging to Caesar’s reputation. At the beginning of the civil war, many educated Romans saw the struggle between Pompey and Caesar as no more than a competition between two overmighty generals and chose sides according to their personal and political loyalties. Inevitably, one or other of them would win. While some regarded Caesar’s whole career as a conspiracy against the state, the less pessimistic assumed that once hostilities were over political life would resume more or less as normal. There might be a bloodbath and a proscription. There would be pain and personal tragedies, but, as with Sulla, the constitution would eventually be restored in some broadly recognizable form. It would be the victor’s duty to ensure that this was done.
Although it began to look over time as if this might not, after all, be the final outcome, it was still possible at this stage to give Caesar the benefit of the doubt. So all-embracing and deeply rooted was the idea of the constitution’s permanence that it took a year or two before suspicions of his revolutionary intentions hardened into certainty that the days of the Republic were over for good. In the meantime Cato’s final act of defiance, his deliberate rejection of Caesar’s tyranny and by extension of all political servitude, harshly dramatized half-spoken fears.
Cicero was greatly moved by Cato’s death. He had found him an unbearable nuisance who bore no little responsibility for the slide into civil war. But his suicide burned away the inessentials of his character, leaving him as the symbol of pure principles and of a lost time for which he mourned. In May 46, shortly after the news from Utica had arrived in Rome, he was brooding on the possibility, indeed the desirability, of writing some kind of panegyric for the martyr, much more dangerous dead than alive. Brutus, whom Caesar had forgiven for fighting against him at Pharsalus and who was serving this year as governor of Italian Gaul, had been close to Cato and had given Cicero the idea. (They were now on good terms, the Cyprus moneylending scandal having been forgotten or forgiven.)
But how would Cicero be able to speak his mind without getting into trouble with the authorities? “It’s a problem for Archimedes,” he told Atticus. However, he was determined to find a solution and spent much of the summer at Tusculum writing his encomium, which he finished by August. The work has not survived, but it seems to have praised Cato’s strength of character and pointed out how he had predicted the political crisis, fought to prevent it and laid down his life so that he did not have to witness its consequences.
The Rome that Cicero found on return from Brundisium was a very different place from the one he had left, and in many ways he found that he was a stranger there. Politics had become the possession of a regime, not an establishment, and there was no role for him, unless he were somehow to create a new one. Many familiar faces were missing—dead, in exile or still fighting in distant corners of the empire. They had been largely replaced by the “underworld,” some of them members of the Catullan and Clodian counterculture of the early 60s and 50s, who had always rejected the old solid Roman virtues of duty and loyalty to tradition.
Cicero, now sixty years old, an old man in Roman eyes, had to find another way of leading his life. Depressed as he was, he still had reserves of energy and of social zest, and he set about making new friends. One of these was Marcus Terentius Varro, a distinguished and encyclopedic scholar. Varro had fought in the first Spanish campaign against Caesar, but after Pharsalus he had abandoned the Republican cause and was appointed to run a new project Caesar was