Cicero - Anthony Everitt [68]
The purchase price was high, some 3.5 million sesterces, and Cicero had to borrow heavily to find the money. It was awkward that just at this juncture he found himself short of ready cash. Part of his arrangement with Antonius, his fellow Consul, had been a large loan financed by Antonius’s expected profits as governor of Macedonia. He was also rumored to have negotiated another loan with a suspected conspirator, whom he had successfully defended on a bribery charge. Unfortunately, he found it difficult to get the cash out of Antonius and had to send a freedman to Macedonia to look after “our joint profits.”
Cicero greatly enjoyed buying houses—he called his collection of eight or so villas the “gems of Italy.” In addition to the palace on the Palatine, there was his family home in Carinae, which he had inherited from his father and now passed on to Quintus, and others in Argiletum and on the Aventine Hill, which were rented out and brought in an income of 80,000 sesterces. There was the family estate at Arpinum, and he owned two small farms near Naples and Pompeii (where he also had a house); he also acquired a number of small lodges or diversaria, which wealthy Romans used as private wayside stops along the main roads in the absence of comfortable hotels. Some of his properties he bought, but others were legacies or presents from clients he had represented in the courts.
He had his preferences. The house at Formiae, on the Campanian border about 50 miles north of Pompeii, was “not a villa—it is a public lounge.” AS ever, his pride and joy was the place at Tusculum, within easy reach of Rome, where he continued to spend money on improvements. Writing about another property (acquired towards the end of his life) on the tiny wooded peninsula of Astura on the coast near Antium, he observed to Atticus: “This district, let me tell you, is charming; at any rate it’s secluded and free from observers if one wants to do some writing. And yet, somehow or other, ‘home’s best’; so my feet are soon carrying me back to Tusculum. After all, I think one would soon get tired of the picture scenery of this scrap of wooded coast.”
Now that he no longer had official duties, Cicero kept himself busy as an advocate, but he also had to appear occasionally in court as a witness. One trial at which he gave evidence followed a sensational scandal that took place at the end of 62. He broke the alibi of the unruly young aristocrat Publius Clodius Pulcher, who was accused of sacrilege. Clodius was a member of the patrician Claudius family, although he used a popular version of the name. The Claudii had produced Consuls in every generation since the foundation of the Republic and over the centuries had built up a well-deserved reputation for high-handedness and violence. In one typical incident, a Claudius was leading a Roman fleet into battle. The sacred chickens refused to give a favorable omen by feeding on some corn that was put out for them. So Claudius had them flung into the sea, with the words: “If they won’t eat, then let them drink.”
Clodius possessed a full share of ancestral genes. When serving in Asia Minor during his youth, he had helped foment a mutiny against his commander and later got himself kidnapped by pirates. On his return to Rome he had unsuccessfully prosecuted Catilina on a charge of extortion—with no very serious intent, one guesses, other than to extort money from Catilina’s rich protector, Crassus. He had joined Cicero’s bodyguard in 63, perhaps as much for the fun of it as from political conviction. Now, as Quaestor-designate, he was on the point of starting his political career in earnest. At present he was known as little more than a young roisterer and it would be a year or two before he revealed himself as a serious and ruthless popularis.
The festival of the women’s deity, the Good Goddess, was celebrated in early December every year in the house of