Cicero - Anthony Everitt [184]
Popilius was very proud of his achievement. He had specifically asked Antony for the commission to execute Cicero and later set up a statue of himself wearing a wreath and seated beside his victim’s severed head. Antony was greatly pleased and topped up Popilius’s advertised reward with a bonus.
The surviving accounts differ in detail but they all agree on Cicero’s bravery. He showed the same professionalism as the gladiators he had written about in Conversations at Tusculum when they received the coup de grâce in the arena: “Has even a mediocre fighter ever let out a groan or changed the expression on his face? Who of them has disgraced himself, I don’t just mean when he was on his feet, but when falling to the ground? And, once fallen, who has drawn in his neck when ordered to submit to the sword?”
The news of Cicero’s death was received variously. Antony was unreservedly delighted. His comment “Now we can end the proscription” exposes the depth of his frustration with, and hatred of, the man who on three occasions had intervened decisively and negatively in his life and who had led a relentless oratorical campaign against him. When he was in his late teens, his stepfather, Lentulus, had been arrested and executed at Cicero’s instigation. Cicero had advised the elder Curio how to break up Antony’s close friendship with his son. And through the ferocious Philippics the orator had only just failed to derail his political career. None of these things was forgotten or forgiven.
His wife, Fulvia, also felt she had grounds for joy, for she had been married to Cicero’s greatest enemy, Clodius, before graduating via Curio to the victorious Commissioner, her third and last husband. Before the dead man’s head and the right hand that had written the Philippics were nailed onto the Speakers’ Platform in the Forum, it is said that Fulvia took the head in her hands, spat on it and then set it on her knees, opened its mouth, pulled out the tongue and pierced it with hairpins.
We are not told of Atticus’s reaction; one can assume his grief but also, one suspects, that he was too discreet to reveal it. All his energies were now devoted to getting onto the best possible terms with the new regime. Pomponia, despite the fact that she and Quintus were divorced, expressed her feelings more vigorously. Antony handed the freedman Philologus over to her; she forced him to cut off his own flesh bit by bit, roast the pieces and eat them.
These terrible stories may or may not be true. Plutarch records that Tiro, the defender of Cicero’s memory, who can be presumed to have known exactly how his master died, made no reference to Philologus in his writings. However, they are not inconsistent with other recorded atrocities both at this time and on the earlier occasions during the previous century when the rule of law had broken down.
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POSTMORTEMS
Cicero’s contemporaries and historians of the period were a little cool in their assessment of him. Livy, one of the greatest of the imperial historians, wrote:
During the long flow of success he met grave setbacks from time to time—exile, the collapse of his party, his daughter’s death and his own tragic and bitter end. But of all these disasters the only one he faced as a man was his own death.… However, weighing his virtues against his faults, he was a great and memorable man. One would need a Cicero to sing his praises.
Pollio, the governor of Spain and later an eminent historian, who knew Cicero personally, observed sharply:
This man’s works, so many and so fine, will last forever and there is no need to comment on his great abilities and capacity for hard work.… However, it is a pity that he could not have been more temperate when things went well and stronger in adversity.
This view was to hold for some time. Aufidius Bassus, a historian from the next imperial generation, observed acidly: “So died Cicero, a man born to save the Republic. For a long time he defended and administered it. Then in old age it slipped from his hands, destroyed by his own