Cicero - Anthony Everitt [178]
It would have been wise to placate him, but the Senate took the contrary view. It was reluctant to grant him the same honors as Decimus Brutus and excluded them both from membership of a commission established to distribute land allotments to the veterans who (it was presumed) would soon be demobilized. The Senate ruled that the commissioners should deal directly with the soldiers and not go through their commanders. It also reduced their promised bonuses. These were extraordinarily shortsighted measures, for they were bound to irritate rank-and-file opinion, which was fundamentally Caesarian. The Senators must have known this but presumably thought it did not matter. So far as they were concerned the war was over.
Cicero saw the dangers in this attitude and tried to have both generals appointed as commissioners, but the Senate, complacent now that the crisis was over, was less willing to do his bidding than it had used to be. He praised Octavian as highly as the other generals, despite the fact that he had played a subordinate role in the fighting. He proposed an Ovation for him, but it is not certain that the motion was passed.
Completely unexpectedly, Cicero’s policy was on the verge of collapse. Critics, even friendly critics, began to speak openly of the unwisdom of his cultivation of the young Caesar. In the middle of May an anxious Marcus Brutus wrote to him from Macedonia about reports that the young man was seeking the Consulship. “I am alarmed,” he commented. “I fear that your young friend Caesar may think he has climbed too high through your decrees to come down again if he is made Consul.… I only wish you could see into my heart, how I fear that young man.”
Privately, Brutus was increasingly unhappy about his friend’s behavior. He confided his feelings to Atticus, in a letter one hopes its subject never read. His judgment was that Cicero was swayed by vanity. “We’re not bragging every hour of the day about the Ides of March like Cicero with his Nones of December [the date in 63 when he put down the Catilinarian conspiracy].” The kernel of Brutus’s complaint was that Cicero was too eager to please.
You may say that he is afraid even now of the remnants of the civil war. So afraid of a war that is as good as over that he sees no cause for alarm in the power of the leader of a victorious army and the rashness of a boy? Or does he do it just because he thinks the boy’s greatness makes it advisable to lay everything at his feet without waiting to be asked? What a foolish thing is fear!… We dread death and banishment and poverty too much. For Cicero I think they are the ultimate evils. So long as he has people from whom he can get what he wants and who give him attention and flattery he does not object to servitude if only it be dignified—if there is any dignity in the sorriest depth of humiliation.
This is a powerful indictment, but it is not all there is to be said about the matter. It is true that Cicero was nervous and lacking in physical courage—but with the saving grace that he knew it, admitting that he was “susceptible to scares.” He was prone to seesaws of emotion and longed for compliments, of which he felt he did not receive nearly enough. But although his connection with Octavian fed his self-esteem, it was also based on a sound analysis of the political situation. Brutus’s judgment was distorted by his irritation with Cicero’s personality and he failed to understand that the only