Cicero - Anthony Everitt [70]
AS a bachelor Caelius lived in a block of apartments owned by Clodius, but eventually relations with his friend’s sister became strained. In 56 Clodia accused Caelius, who shared with Catullus the status of rejected lover, of attempting to poison her. Cicero successfully defended him with one of his most entertaining speeches, in which he gave a devastating exposé of the “Medea of the Palatine” or, in Caelius’s phrase, “that ten-cent Clytemnestra.”
Other members of the young circle included Mark Antony, grandson of the great orator of Cicero’s childhood and stepson of the conspirator Lentulus, and Caius Scribonius Curio. The two were close friends and, according to Cicero, lovers. Curio encouraged his young protégé to run up huge debts for which he stood surety. In one of the Philippics, the sequence of great speeches against Antony which Cicero gave nearly two decades later, this relationship is subjected to lively (perhaps overlively) scrutiny.
You [Mark Antony] assumed a man’s toga and at once turned it into a prostitute’s frock. At first you were a common rent boy; you charged a fixed fee, and a steep one at that. Curio soon turned up, though, and took you off the game. You were as firmly wedded to Curio as if he had given you a married woman’s dress. No boy bought for lust was ever as much in his master’s power as you were in Curio’s. How many times did his father throw you out of his house? How many times did he set watchmen to make sure you did not cross his front door? And yet under cover of night, driven by lust and money, you were let in through the roof tiles.
This sounds exaggerated, but Cicero should have known what he was talking about, for he was brought in as mediator and persuaded Curio’s father to pay off his son’s debts. Antony was barred from the house and for a while latched himself on to Clodius. Their relationship did not last, perhaps because Antony had an affair with Clodius’s wife, Fulvia, whom he was later to marry. Also he grew uneasy with Clodius’s extremist politics and the opposition they were arousing. Deciding it was time for a fresh start, he went to Greece for military training and to study public speaking.
In fact, although Cicero deeply disapproved of such goings-on, he knew many of the younger generation quite well. For a time he was friendly with Clodius, who had been a member of his consular bodyguard, until Terentia began to worry that he was attracted to Clodia. (It is hard to imagine a more implausible romance.) He became very fond of the brilliant but volatile Caelius, whom he first met in 66, when he took him on as an informal pupil to study public speaking. Caelius became a sharp-eyed observer of the Roman scene, delighted in gossip and had an excellent sense of humor; ten years on he kept Cicero, who would forgive a lot for a good joke, up-to-date on the latest events in the city when the reluctant elder statesman was in Asia Minor on a foreign posting.
Catullus knew Cicero too and respected him enough to write him a charming poem:
Silver-tongued among the sons of Rome,
the dead, the living and the yet unborn,
Catullus, least of poets, sends
Marcus Tullius his warmest thanks:
—as much the least of poets
as he a prince of lawyers.
It seems odd that Cicero was on such good terms with people whose behavior he found morally objectionable. The fact is that he liked young men and, as he grew older, took much pleasure in bringing them on, developing their talents and promoting their careers. He enjoyed the liveliness of their company. Caelius was the first in a succession of youthful friends—the last and trickiest of whom was to be Caesar’s adopted son, the young Octavian, later the Emperor Augustus.
None of this is to suggest that