Cicero - Anthony Everitt [137]
Caesar enacted at great speed a number of important and well-judged reforms. To many people’s surprise he acted evenhandedly and favored neither radical nor conservative causes, making decisions on the merits of a case. His first priority concerned the social problems of Rome and Italy. An exact census of the city’s population was conducted; the free distribution of corn (Rome’s equivalent of social security or unemployment payments) was limited; many of the urban proletariat were settled in citizen “colonies” overseas; special privileges were given to the fathers of large families in an attempt to increase the birth rate and so eventually replace the heavy casualties of war. In order to discourage the replacement of jobs for citizens by slave labor in the countryside, at least one third of the cattlemen on Italy’s large ranches had to be freeborn.
From January 1, 45, the calendar was sensibly extended to 365 days. Previously the year had had ten fewer days, necessitating occasional intercalary months and every other year the College of Pontiffs had usually inserted an additional month to keep the calendar in time with the sun. During the years running up to the civil war, this procedure had been neglected and the result was that the calendar was more than two months ahead of itself (this meant that when, for example, Cicero returned to Italy after the battle of Pharsalus in mid-October 48 according to contemporary dating, the real date was sometime in August). To effect the transition, Caesar inserted 67 days between November and December 46 and introduced the solar year of 365¼ days. In an acid reference to the new calendar, Cicero refused to be pleased with an autocrat’s decisions, however benign. When someone remarked that the constellation Lyra was due to rise on the following night, he replied: “Of course. It will be following orders.”
Apart from such sour wisecracks, Cicero had little to say about all this legislation, at least in the extant correspondence. (There are no long runs of letters from this period.) He was silent in the Senate and his attendance record does not survive. His general disenchantment, though, can be deduced from a letter to a friend towards the end of the year. He wrote: “I used to sit in the poop, you see, with the helm in my hands. But now I hardly have a place in the bilge.”
In order to be able to govern effectively, Caesar assembled a personal cabinet drawn from trusted lieutenants of his in Gaul, who worked alongside the official magistrates. He also seems to have laid the foundations of what eventually became the imperial civil service. Balbus was one of its key members and spent much of his time drafting decrees. Every now and then Cicero’s name was borrowed without prior consultation as having proposed an edict. “Don’t think I am joking,” he remarked. “Let me tell you I have had letters delivered to me from monarchs at the other end of the earth thanking me for my motion to give them the royal title, when I for my part was unaware of their existence, let alone of their elevation to royalty.”
For anyone with eyes to see, the old, level arena where equal competitors could contend had disappeared. Members of the ruling class who had survived the civil war were no longer genuinely elected to office but became functionaries whose imperium was not theirs but was on loan from the Dictator.
For all his active social life, it would be wrong to regard the Cicero of these years as merely a dilettante and socialite. The creative and organizational energies he had once devoted to politics and the law were still running strongly and sought an outlet. He became very active in persuading Caesar to pardon leading opponents who were still in exile. Paradoxically, although he was profoundly