Cicero - Anthony Everitt [145]
Cicero noted the conversation for Atticus.
“Why do you have to go?” Cicero asked.
“Debt—I haven’t even enough to pay my traveling expenses.”
Cicero, discreet for once, held his tongue.
“What upsets me most is my uncle, Atticus.”
“Why do you let him be annoyed—I prefer to say ‘let’ rather than ‘make’?”
“I won’t anymore. I’ll get rid of the reason.”
“Excellent. But if you don’t mind my asking, I would be interested to know what the reason is.”
“It’s because I couldn’t make up my mind whom to marry. My mother was cross with me, and so as a result was he. Now I don’t care what I do to put things right. I’ll do what they want.”
“Well, good luck, and congratulations on your decision.”
It seemed that the difficult, hostile teenager was beginning to settle down into an ordinary Roman young-man-about-town with debts, who realized that it would be in his interest to be on good terms again with his disappointed family. Whether or not Quintus acted as he said he would is unknown, but there is no subsequent reference to a wife in the fragmentary surviving documentation. One thing is certain, though: he did not accompany the legions to Parthia, for the expedition never took place. He must have found some alternative solution to the problem of his debts.
By now, Cicero had become less volatile than he had been in the past. He met the challenges and misfortunes that faced him with determination. In politics he made up his mind about the regime with fewer of his usual doubts and nervous questionings. Criticism did not bother him as much as it had once. He still reacted passionately to events and was no less self-absorbed, but he had learned to control himself. Family estrangements troubled him and he had nearly been broken by Tullia’s death, but he had struggled with all his might to regain his emotional balance. Tempered by the fire, he seemed to have acquired a new, steely resolve.
12
PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS
Thoughts on the Nature of Things: 46–44 BC
One explanation for Cicero’s new maturity lay in his phenomenal productivity as a writer. In 46, at the age of sixty, he started work on a succession of books which, taken together, represent one of Rome’s most valuable legacies to posterity. At their core is a summary of the philosophical issues that had concerned thinkers and moralists from Plato to Cicero’s own day. He made no claim to originality. “I only supply the words, and I have plenty of those.” However, he was a popularizer of genius. With the disappearance of the Greek language in Europe during the Dark and Middle Ages, Cicero’s compendium of classical thought had a huge influence on the continuing development of western philosophy.
Politics and war were the chief but not the only means by which a Roman could achieve status. Others were scholarship and literature. Leading figures such as Cicero’s friend the jurist Sulpicius could maintain their prestige by achieving an unrivaled knowledge of the law. Antiquarian expertise was necessary in a polity that was heavily dependent on the interpretation of tradition; thus Atticus, who eschewed the hurly-burly of the Forum, was able to make a name for himself by writing the Annals (Liber Annalis), an authoritative chronology of Rome back to its foundation. The religious apparatus of priestly colleges demanded detailed knowledge of the forms and procedures of ceremony and divination and it was necessary for some members of the elite to acquire it.
Cicero had already found poetry (when he was a young man), philosophy and research into the art of public speaking to be useful supports to his status as a public figure. A decade previously he had been able to pick up the threads of his political career after the end of his exile, but now advancing years and Caesar’s autocracy seemed to him to mean that this time there could be no recovery.
So he set about reasserting his reputation as an author. Despite all his other preoccupations, he wrote “from morning to night” (as he told Atticus), producing a flood