Cicero - Anthony Everitt [139]
The decision to pardon Marcellus persuaded the orator to break his long silence in the Senate. He delivered a brilliant speech of thanks, which reached the boundary of flattery but did not quite cross it. With psychological acuteness, he appealed to the Dictator’s desire for glory. Caesar had recently said in reference to a reported plot against him: “Whether for nature or for glory I have lived long enough.” This was unacceptable, Cicero argued: Caesar was the only person who could reunite past enemies and bring back Rome’s traditional institutions—the rule of law, the freedom of the Senate, in a word everything that Cicero meant to convey by his slogan “harmony of the classes.” The Dictator should legislate a constitutional settlement that would outlast him. Cicero was not being inconsistent here: in On the State, published six years previously, he had been explicit that on occasion a Dictator was needed to restore order.
It is interesting to observe from the tone of Cicero’s correspondence at this time that he did not suffer the agonizing doubts of the early months of the civil war. He had come to a settled view which he maintained without great mental or emotional anxiety, until it became clear that the Dictator either would not or could not live up to his expectations.
Cicero’s book on Cato was published towards the end of the year and attracted much attention. Although it argued that Cato had been an exemplar of all that was best in Roman culture, this was apparently not good enough for its dedicatee, Brutus, who went on to produce his own eulogy. The appearance of Cicero’s Cato probably undid any good that might have been achieved by the Marcellus speech. Caesar was enraged. It was not just that he objected to the canonization of a man whom he regarded as a blundering reactionary. More seriously, it was a reminder that, to Cicero and the political class for which he stood, reform and renewal meant returning to a failed model of governance rather than inventing a new one. He was so upset that he asked Hirtius to write a refutation. (It was a flop, which Cicero delightedly asked Atticus to distribute as widely as possible, on the grounds that it could only further enhance Cato’s reputation.)
In due course, the Dictator regained his equanimity. The following summer he praised Cicero’s writing style and commented wryly that reading and rereading his Cato improved his powers of expression, whereas after reading Brutus’s account he began to fancy himself as a writer. The political damage of all this furor about Cato called for his personal attention. Caesar composed his own rebuttal, the Anti-Cato (also lost). The pamphlet drew an unflattering portrait of a drunkard and miser. Cicero himself was complimented for his oratory but indirectly criticized as a political weathercock. This lack of moderation disturbed opinion in Rome and cast some doubt on the genuineness of Caesar’s clemency. For the first time since the civil war began he had incautiously allowed it to be seen that an offense had wounded him personally.
The Anti-Cato was written while Caesar was on the march again, for it turned out that despite his African victory the civil war was not quite over after all. Having escaped from Thapsus, Pompey’s two sons, Cnaeus and Sextus, went to Spain, where they raised the standard of rebellion again. Caesar appointed commanders to manage the campaign against them, but they made little headway. In November 46 he decided that the situation required his personal attention and he suddenly left Rome for the battlefront. It was to be the final confrontation.
Young Quintus joined Caesar’s army and Marcus, nervous of approaching his father directly and working through Atticus, sought permission to go too. And while he was asking for favors, he would also be grateful for a decent allowance. The second request presented no great difficulty, but Cicero told his son that, as for going to Spain, it was enough for the family to have abandoned one side without joining