Cicero - Anthony Everitt [6]
The Dictator was again on the point of calling off the sitting when attendants announced that the Senate was ready. One of his staff intervened. “Come on, my dear fellow, there’s no time for this nonsense. Don’t put off the important business which you and this great assembly need to deal with. Make your own power an auspicious omen.” He led Caesar by the hand into the crowded chamber. On the Dictator’s appearance everyone stood up. The men gathered round his chair closed in on him as he sat down.
Cicero had a perfect view of what happened next.
A Senator called Tillius Cimber grabbed Caesar’s purple toga like a suppliant, preventing him from standing up or using his hands. Caesar was furious. “Why, this is violence!” he shouted.
“What are you waiting for, friends?” cried Tillius, pulling the toga away from Caesar’s neck.
Publius Servilius Casca, who was standing behind the chair, aimed a blow at Caesar’s throat, but Caesar, well-known for his lightning reactions, wrenched his toga from Tillius’s grasp and the blow miscarried, only wounding him in the chest. Then, springing from his seat, he whirled round to grab Casca’s hand and rammed his writing stylus into his arm. The man yelled in Greek to his brother, standing nearby, who drove a dagger into Caesar’s side, which was exposed in the act of turning.
The Senators in the body of the hall were in a state of shock. Only two of them tried to intervene, but they were driven off. No one else moved to help the stricken man.
Given no forewarning of what was to happen, Cicero saw to his astonishment that one of his closest friends, Marcus Brutus, was leading the bloodstained throng as it hacked and thrust at its victim. Cassius, who gave Caesar a glancing blow across the face, was in the melee too. Clearly, there had been a conspiracy and, equally clearly and hurtfully, Cicero had not been invited to join it.
Caesar kept twisting from side to side, bellowing like a wild animal. He was cut in the face and deep under one flank. The assassins accidentally stabbed one another rather than their target and it almost looked as if they were fighting among themselves. Then Brutus wounded Caesar in the groin. The dying man gasped: “You too, my son?” Either in response to this culminating betrayal or because he saw he had no hope of survival, he wound himself in his toga, unfastening the lower part to cover his legs, and fell neatly at the base of Pompey’s statue. No one would be allowed to see him defenseless. The conspirators went on savaging the body.
The audience of Senators had no idea whether or not they too were under threat and they were not waiting to find out. There was a scuffle at the door as everyone pushed to leave.
Then Brutus walked to the center of the hall. He brandished his dagger, shouted for Cicero by name and congratulated him on the recovery of freedom. The retired statesman, who had apparently made his peace with the tyrant, was suddenly pushed to center stage. Hitherto scarcely able to believe his eyes, he could now scarcely believe his ears. It was almost as if the assassination had been staged especially for him—as a particularly savage benefit performance.
What had happened was a mystery to him. Even in the terror of the moment he actually had no regrets for Caesar. Quite the opposite.… But he could not begin to understand why a superannuated statesman, a self-confessed collaborator, was now being hailed as a symbol of Republican values and traditional liberties by the very man, Brutus, who had not trusted him enough in the first place to let him join the conspiracy to rid Rome of its tyrant.
Cicero did not linger in the empty hall but made his way back to his house on Palatine Hill, while a thunderstorm burst overhead. One thing at least was clear to him. His shouted name meant that he was forgiven, and that after all his compromises and disappointed hopes, the steps for which