Cicero - Anthony Everitt [96]
Two years later he wrote a long, reflective letter to an aristocratic friend, designed as a public rebuttal to his critics, in which he set out a comprehensive justification of his actions. He pointed out that in politics the means can vary from time to time while the end remains the same. “I believe in moving with the times,” he noted.
Unchanging consistency of standpoint has never been considered a virtue in great statesmen. At sea it is good sailing to run before the gale, even if the ship cannot make harbor; but if she can make harbor by changing tack, only a fool would risk shipwreck by holding to the original course rather than change it and still reach his destination. Similarly, while all of us as statesmen should set before our eyes the goal of peace with honor to which I have so often pointed, it is our aim, not our language, which must always be the same.
Disappointment in public affairs drove Cicero to make the most of the comforts of private life and the consolations of literature and philosophy. With Quintus away in Sardinia, he spent time superintending the rebuilding of both his and his brother’s houses.
Now that the two boys, Marcus and Cicero’s nephew Quintus, were nearing their teens, their schooling had to be thought of. Cicero hired the services of a well-known Greek grammarian and literary scholar, Tyrannio of Amisus, to teach them at home. While his own nine-year-old son was an ordinary child with no exceptional talents, Quintus, who was now eleven, was impressively precocious and, according to his uncle, was “getting on famously with his lessons.” Cicero was amused by his description of some wrangle between Terentia and his brother’s wife, the endlessly difficult Pomponia. “Quintus (a very good boy),” he wrote to his brother in the spring of 56, “talked to me at length and in the nicest way about the disagreements between our two ladies. It was really most entertaining.”
Tyrannio also helped out with a reorganization of Cicero’s library, much of which must have been dispersed or destroyed by Clodius’s gangs during his exile. A couple of Atticus’s library clerks were borrowed to help with “gluing and other operations.” The results delighted him. “Those shelves of yours are the last word in elegance, now that the labels have brightened up the volumes.”
In 55 Pompey and Crassus held their prearranged Consulships and there was even less for Cicero to do. AS with politicians throughout the ages, when events compel them to spend more time with their families, he made the best of things. He wrote to Atticus:
But seriously, while all other amusements and pleasures have lost their charm because of my age and the state of the country, literature relieves and refreshes me. I would rather sit on that little seat you have beneath Aristotle’s bust than in our Consuls’ chairs of state, and I would rather take a stroll with you at your home than with the personage [i.e., Pompey] in whose company it appears that I am obliged to walk.
Clodius was still being troublesome. A strange “rumbling and a noise,” perhaps an earth tremor, had been heard in a suburb of Rome. The Senate had referred the matter to the soothsayers, who pronounced that expiation should be offered to the gods for various offenses, including the profanation of hallowed sites and impiety in the conduct of an ancient sacrifice. Clodius ingeniously argued that the site in question was Cicero’s house on the Palatine, which the College of Pontiffs had wrongly ruled never to have been consecrated at all. In a long harangue to the Senate, Cicero retorted that the mysterious sound had nothing to do with him but must be put down to Clodius’s bad behavior. The house in question was not his at