Cicero - Anthony Everitt [171]
The Senate accepted most of Cicero’s advice but not all. It agreed that Antony was engaging in civil war but refused to outlaw him. It recognized Caesar and his army and confirmed all provincial governors in their posts until further notice, thereby overriding the following year’s appointments.
In his speech Cicero made a passing reference to young Quintus. He had definitively broken with Antony, who accused him of plotting his father’s and uncle’s deaths. Cicero commented: “What amazing impudence, presumption and bravado! To dare to write this about a young man whose sweetness and excellence of character make my brother and me rivals in our love for him.” The charge was routine slander and not to be taken seriously—but those who were aware of the dissensions inside the Cicero family will have smiled at this description of the orator’s unreliable nephew.
Aware of the need to secure public opinion for the Republican side, Cicero made a point throughout this period of guiding the People through complex and confusing developments. Once the Senate meeting was over, he went on to give a rousing address (the fourth Philippic) to a packed General Assembly in the Forum, in which he said: “We have for the first time and after a long interval, on my advice and by my initiative, been fired by the hope of freedom.” He compared Antony to Spartacus and, interestingly, to Catilina. AS Consul in 63, Cicero had had Catilina condemned for raising a private army, but now he was using all his powers of persuasion to have a legally appointed Consul declared a public enemy and a freebooting young privateer its savior. The lifelong conservative was standing his convictions on their head. He did not notice the contradiction, or if he did thought it a matter of no consequence.
To the conspirator Trebonius, now in Asia as its governor, he wrote: “I did not mince my words, and, more by willpower than by oratorical skill, I recalled the weak and weary Senate to its old, traditional vigor. That day, my energy and the course I took, brought to the Roman People the first hope of recovering their freedom.”
Without the letters to Atticus we no longer have a window into Cicero’s mind, his private moods and doubts; but, so far as we can tell, the process of transformation that had begun with Cato’s death was now reaching completion. Some twentieth-century historians have detected fanaticism and obsession in Cicero at this time, especially so far as his loathing of Antony is concerned. One certainly senses a coarsening of his personality, the obverse perhaps of his new decisiveness. This was the price Cicero was to pay for his return to power. Although he held no public office, the next six months saw him become the first man in Rome, with as great a dominance over the political scene as during his Consulship. The disappointments and humiliations of the intervening twenty years were behind him.
15
CICERO’S CIVIL WAR
Against Mark Antony: January–April 43 BC
January 43 opened with gales. Some tablets around the Temple of Saturn in the Forum were snapped off and scattered on the ground. An epidemic was reported across Italy and one of the new Consul’s lictors fell down and died on his first day of office. A statue representing Honor was blown over and the little image of Minerva the Guardian, which Cicero had set up in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol before his departure for exile in 58, was shattered. These were sinister omens for the new, culminating phase of Cicero’s career.
The Senate met starting on January 1 for three days to discuss the political situation. The new Consuls, Aulus Hirtius and Caius Vibius Pansa Caetronianus, took a loyally constitutionalist line, but they distrusted Cicero’s extremism against Antony. Somewhat to Cicero’s annoyance, Pansa, in the chair, called on his father-in-law, Quintus Fufius Calenus, to speak first. A supporter of Antony, Calenus argued for negotiation and proposed that a delegation be sent to meet the former Consul, who was now besieging Decimus Brutus at the