Cicero - Anthony Everitt [187]
During his Consulship, Marcus had the satisfaction of reading out in the Forum Octavian’s dispatch from Alexandria announcing the death of Antony; he posted a document to that effect on the Speakers’ Platform where his father’s head and hands had been displayed. During the same year, the Senate took down Antony’s statues, canceled all the other honors that he had been awarded and decreed that in future no member of his family should bear the name of Marcus. Plutarch commented with dry satisfaction: “In this way Heaven entrusted to the family of Cicero the final acts in the punishment of Antony.”
During one of his foreign postings Marcus found himself dining with a rhetorician who was critical of his father’s oratory. According to an anecdote told by Seneca the Elder in the following century:
Nature had stolen away Marcus’s memory—and anything that remained was being filched by drunkenness. He kept asking who the guest was on the bottom couch. The name Cestius was supplied a number of times, but he went on forgetting it. Finally a slave, hoping to make his memory more retentive by giving it something to hang on to, said, when his master repeated the question: “This is Cestius, who said your father didn’t know his alphabet.” Marcus called for whips on the double and, as was only right and proper, avenged Cicero on Cestius’s skin.
Terentia lived to the great age of 103 and took a third husband.
Despite his wealth, Atticus managed to avoid being listed in the proscription, although he went into hiding for a time. He took care to be on excellent terms with both Octavian and Antony, whose family he placed under his protection in Rome. His daughter, the little girl who had so delighted Cicero, grew up to marry Agrippa; and their daughter was betrothed in her infancy to the future Emperor Tiberius. At the age of seventy-seven, Atticus was taken ill with ulcerated intestines; rather than endure a painful disease, this imperturbable disciple of Epicurus starved himself to death.
During his lifetime Atticus allowed people to read his collection of Cicero’s correspondence. Probably at some time during the first century AD, this was published alongside other collections of letters to Quintus, Brutus and various other recipients (the so-called Letters to His Friends). Some collections—regrettably, his correspondence with Julius Caesar and his heir—have not survived.
The Emperor Augustus assiduously cultivated the memory of his adoptive father. The assembly hall in Pompey’s theater was walled up, the fifteenth of March was named the Day of Parricide and the Senate resolved never to meet on that date again. However, the “heaven-sent boy” remembered with admiration one of the Dictator’s greatest critics, in whose murder he had colluded. Many years later he happened to pay a visit to one of his grandsons. The lad was reading a book by Cicero and, terrified of his grandfather, tried to hide it under his cloak. Augustus noticed this and took the book from him. He stood for a long time reading the entire text. He handed it back with the words: “An eloquent man, my child, an eloquent man, and a patriot.”
A Reader’s Guide
CICERO
ANTHONY EVERITT
To print out copies of this or other Random House Reader’s Guides,
visit us at www.atrandom.com/rgg
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Discuss the nature of Caesar’s relationship with Cicero. Did the two men genuinely like and respect one another, or did Caesar cynically use Cicero to his own advantage? In return, how did Cicero play off of Caesar?
2. One of ancient Rome’s most remarkable features is its small ruling class that governed an extensive empire without many of the usual mechanisms of government—a permanent civil service, a police force, a standing army, a professional judicial system, rapid communications and so forth. How did the Romans manage to accomplish so much with so little?
3. Evaluate Cicero