Cicero - Anthony Everitt [174]
For Cicero, these terms had to be resisted, for their real consequence would be that the two leading followers of Caesar would be left in possession of armies and sooner or later might combine against the Senate. What looked like a personal obsession concealed a reasoned determination to keep the pair at loggerheads.
The Senate, under Pansa’s chairmanship, rejected Antony’s proposals and a motion for a second embassy was defeated. Opinion was hardening and war seemed inevitable. In a bid to ward off the greater evil, outlawry, Antony’s supporters finally conceded that a state of emergency should be decreed. The following day Cicero delivered his eighth Philippic, in which he politely criticized Pansa for not having been firm enough with the opposition. Everyone knew there was a war on, he said, and it was ridiculous to suggest yet more talks. There could be no negotiations so long as Antony contrived to threaten Rome with his army. When a state of emergency was declared, all Senators except former Consuls were obliged to wear military uniform rather than their togas; despite the fact that he was excused, Cicero announced that he would follow the rule too. He proposed that anyone who switched sides from Antony to the Consuls before the Ides of March that year would be granted an amnesty and that anyone who joined him would be deemed to have acted against the interests of the state. On the following day, in his ninth Philippic, Cicero celebrated Servius Sulpicius’s career and persuaded the Senate to vote him a bronze statue in the Forum.
Cicero’s policy did not win universal support and he was regarded by some middle-of-the-road Senators as a warmonger, but he held to it unswervingly, seeing his critics as without energy and without principle. The prize was within grasp. He wrote to Cassius in February: “If I am not in error, the position is that the decision of the whole war depends entirely on D. Brutus. If, as we hope, he breaks out of Mutina, it seems unlikely that there will be any further fighting.”
Cicero had other grounds for optimism. After Marcus Brutus left Italy the previous year he settled in Athens and gave the impression that he had abandoned politics for literary and philosophical pursuits. He attended lectures at the Academy. He was genuinely unenthusiastic for war and for a time waited and watched on events in Rome; he wanted to do nothing that would give his enemies any pretext for action.
With the situation in Italy deteriorating, however, he decided he had to act. He took possession of the province of Macedonia, which had originally been promised him by Julius Caesar and was now being claimed by Marcus Antony’s brother, Caius. He was helped in this endeavor by the outgoing governor, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, the famous orator’s son and a close relative of his. Once Brutus had made up his mind, he moved with speed and efficiency and sent an agent to win over the legions based in the province. He recruited the 22-year-old Marcus Cicero, who happily abandoned his studies and accepted a military command. He intercepted the Quaestors of Asia and Syria on their homeward journey and persuaded them to hand over the tax revenues they were taking back to Rome. Caius Antonius was soon under siege in the town of Apollonia. By the end of the year Brutus was in control of most of the province.
In February he sent an official dispatch to the Senate setting out what had happened and reporting that Hortensius had handed the province over to him. This presented Cicero with a tricky problem: the allocation of governorships since Julius Caesar’s assassination had been altered so many times, and on occasion with dubious legality, that it was hard to say who was