Cicero - Anthony Everitt [98]
For his part, Cicero took little pleasure in these blood sports, at least those in which there was not a fair fight. His account of the displays with animals at Pompey’s games has a flavor of modern distaste.
What pleasure can a cultivated man get out of seeing a weak human being torn to pieces by a powerful animal or a splendid animal transfixed by a hunting spear? Anyhow, if these sights are worth seeing, you have seen them often; and we spectators saw nothing new. The last day was that for the elephants. The ordinary public showed considerable astonishment at them, but no enjoyment. There was even an impulse of compassion, a feeling that the monsters had something human about them.
However, the modern reader should not be misled that Cicero was anything other than a man of his age. Just as Dr. Johnson felt that “prize fighting made people accustomed not to be alarmed at seeing their own blood,” so Cicero believed that gladiatorial contests, if well managed, were object lessons in endurance for spectators. He approved of public violence if it was a legal punishment with death as the inevitable outcome and he regretted that by his day gladiators had become professional performers whose fights, even if bloody, were exercises in virtuosity rather than courage in the face of adversity.
Pompey’s theater made a great impression. During these years when competition among politicians was fierce and the profits of empire had never been so high, the city and its environs became a vast building site with leading Romans investing heavily in prestige construction projects. Caesar had ambitious plans of his own, which would more than match Pompey’s and he recruited Cicero to help with the necessary land purchases. In 54 Cicero wrote to Atticus:
Caesar’s friends (I mean Oppius and myself, choke at that if you must) have thought nothing of spending 60 million sesterces on the work you used to be so enthusiastic about, to widen the Forum.… We couldn’t settle with the owners for a smaller sum. We shall achieve something really glorious. AS for the Field of Mars, we are going to build covered marble booths for the General Assembly and surround them with a high colonnade, a mile of it in all. At the same time the Public Residence [Villa Publica, on the Field of Mars, used mainly to house foreign envoys] will be attached to our building.
During the year that Pompey and Crassus were Consuls, Gabinius, who had failed to help Cicero during his exile and was now governor of Syria, stepped into the fray and restored King Ptolemy to power in Egypt for a huge price with the help of a Roman army. In light of the prohibition in the Sibylline Books, this was a serious flouting of the law.
At about this time unusually bad weather broke the banks of the Tiber, flooding the lower levels of the city. Some people were drowned as were many animals, and houses were damaged. In the public mind the disaster was a punishment for Gabinius’s invasion.
Cicero launched a blistering attack on Gabinius in the Senate. Pompey and Crassus responded in his defense. Crassus seems to have hurled the epithet “exile” at him, an insult that Cicero, who had never liked him, refused to forgive. Pompey, backed by a letter from Caesar, used his personal authority to impose an entente. The widowed Tullia, probably now about twenty years old, had recently married her second husband, Furius Crassipes, a member of an old but faded patrician family. Cicero’s new son-in-law held a dinner party in the garden of his house to celebrate the apparent reconciliation with Crassus. Towards the end of the year, Crassus, paying no attention to bad omens, set off on his great expedition against the Parthians. “What a rascal he is!” Cicero observed, unrepentantly.
The three members of the First Triumvirate, or now, rather, the two, persuaded Cicero, against his better judgment, fearful that they might switch their support back to Clodius again, to give evidence on Gabinius’s behalf when he faced a treason charge.