Cicero - Anthony Everitt [22]
It was while studying with Scaevola at the house of Crassus that Cicero met other contemporaries in the little world of upper-class Roman society. Two boys in particular stood out from the crowd. Caius Julius Caesar was six years younger than Cicero, but both he and Quintus knew him personally. Through Marius’s marriage to Caesar’s aunt Julia they were, after all, distant relatives. Cicero also struck up a friendship that would last a lifetime with a boy named Titus Pomponius, who came from an old but not strictly noble family. They met at the Scaevolas’ and found that they shared a passion for literature and Roman history. Cicero’s friendship with Atticus, as he later called himself, was to be central to his life. Years later when he was adult, he wrote: “I love Pomponius … as a second brother.”
The three youngsters were not allowed to pursue their education without interruption. The few years of relative calm that had followed the assassination of the radical Tribune Saturninus came to end when Cicero was fifteen. The Republic was now battered by a succession of crises that set the scene for the politics of the boys’ adult lives. Cicero, Caesar and Pomponius watched events in the Forum and on the streets.
While most of the Senate was unwilling to countenance any constitutional change, a few of its more farsighted members realized that the status quo could not last and that it was wiser to anticipate events than react to them. It fell to yet another aristocrat to pick up the battered baton of reform. Marcus Livius Drusus was a wealthy and ambitious nobleman who became Tribune in 91. He was a friend of Cicero’s mentors, Scaurus and Crassus, and we can presume that the young student witnessed some of the events that followed at firsthand. Drusus’s main project was a renewal of the plan to extend Roman citizenship to the Italians, but the Senate, with typical shortsightedness, threw out his legislation. They were profoundly suspicious of him from the most self-interested of motives: if the Italians were enfranchised, they would join Drusus’s clientela in huge numbers and that would make him far too powerful.
The outcome was predictable. The Allied communities lost all hope that the Republic would ever share the profits of empire with them. The mood in the countryside became tense and feverish. Drusus was known to have entertained one of the Allied leaders at his house in Rome and public opinion suspected him of disloyalty. There were reports that the Italians had vowed allegiance to Drusus.
It was about this time that Crassus made his last contribution to a Senatorial debate. Cicero left a detailed account of what took place. Furious with one of the Consuls, Lucius Marcius Philippus, for criticizing the Senate, Crassus launched a tirade against him. The Consul lost his temper and threatened to fine him. The old man refused to back down: “Do you imagine that I can be deterred by the forfeit of any of my property?” The Senate unanimously passed a motion in his support. Crassus had made a fine speech, but the effort had weakened his strength and he was taken ill while delivering it; he contracted pneumonia and died a few days later. Cicero and the other boys were probably at Crassus’s house when the great orator was brought home. They were deeply upset, and Cicero describes them as going later to the Senate House to look at the spot where that last “swan song” (a phrase he popularized) had been heard.
The incident illustrates an attractive aspect of Cicero’s personality: his predisposition