Roman life in the days of Cicero

by Alfred John Church

In default of the consuls there was still some hope that Pompey might be induced to interfere, and Cicero sought an interview with him. Plutarch says that he slipped out by a back door to avoid seeing him; but Cicero's own account is that the interview was granted. "When I threw myself at his feet" (he means I suppose, humiliated himself by asking such a favor), "he could not lift me from the ground. He could do nothing, he said, against the will of Caesar."

Cicero had now to choose between two courses. He might stay and do his best with the help of his friends, to resist the passing of the law. But this would have ended, it was well known, in something like an open battle in the streets of Rome. Clodius and his partisans were ready to carry their proposal by force of arms, and would yield to nothing but superior strength. It was possible, even probable, that in such a conflict Cicero would be victorious. But he shrank from the trial, not from cowardice, for he had courage enough when occasion demanded, not even from unwillingness to risk the lives of his friends, though this weighed somewhat with him, but chiefly because he hated to confess that freedom was becoming impossible in Rome, and that the strong hand of a master was wanted to give any kind of security to life and property. The other course was to anticipate the sentence and to go into voluntary exile. This was the course which his most powerful friends pressed upon him, and this was the course which he chose. He left Rome, intending to go to Sicily, where he knew that he should find the heartiest of welcomes.

Immediately on his departure Clodius formally proposed his banishment. "Let it be enacted," so ran the proposition, "that, seeing that Marcus Tullius Cicero has put Roman citizens to death without trial, forging thereto the authority of the Senate, that he be forbidden fire and water; that no one harbor or receive him on pain of death; and that whosoever shall move, shall vote, or take any steps for the recalling of him, be dealt with as a public enemy." The bill was passed, the distance within which it was to operate being fixed at four hundred miles. The houses of the banished man were razed to the ground, the site of the mansion on the. Palatine, being dedicated to Liberty. His property was partly plundered, partly sold by auction.

Cicero meanwhile had hurried to the south of Italy. He found shelter for a while at the farm of a friend near Vibo in Brutii (now the Abruzzi), but found it necessary to leave this place because it was within the prescribed limits. Sicily was forbidden to him by its governor, who, though a personal friend, was unwilling to displease the party in power. Athens, which for many reasons he would have liked to choose for his place of exile, was unsafe. He had bitter enemies there, men who had been mixed up in Catiline's conspiracy. The place, too, was within the distance, and though this was not very strictly insisted upon—as a matter of fact, he did spend the greater part of his banishment inside the prescribed limit—it might at any moment be made a means of annoyance. Atticus invited him to take up his residence at his seat at Buthrotum in Epirus (now Albania). But the proposal did not commend itself to his taste. It was out of the way, and would be very dreary without the presence of its master, who was still at Rome, and apparently intended to remain there. After staying for about a fortnight at a friend's house near Dyrrachium—the town itself, where he was once very popular, for fear of bringing some trouble upon it, he refused to enter—he crossed over to Greece, and ultimately settled himself at Thessalonica.

Long afterward he tells us of a singular dream which seems to have given him some little comfort at this time. "I had lain awake for the greater part of the night, but fell into a heavy slumber toward morning. I was at the point of starting, but my host would not allow me to be waked. At seven o'clock, however, I rose, and then told my friend this dream. I seemed to myself to be wandering disconsolately in some lonely place when the great Marius met me. His lictors were with him, their fasces wreathed with bays. 'Why are you so sad?' he asked me. 'I have been wrongly banished from my country,' I answered. He then took my hand, and turning to the nearest lictor, bade him lead me to his own Memorial Hall. 'There,' he said, 'you will be safe.'" His friend declared that this dream portended a speedy and honorable return. Curiously enough it was in the Hall of Marius that the decree repealing the sentence of banishment was actually proposed and passed.

For the most part he was miserably unhappy and depressed. In letter after letter he poured out to Atticus his fears, his complaints, and his wants. Why had he listened to the bad advice of his friends? He had wished to stay at Rome and fight out the quarrel. Why had Hortensius advised him to retire from the struggle? It must have been jealousy, jealousy of one whom he knew to be a more successful advocate than himself. Why had Atticus hindered his purposes when he thought of putting an end to all his trouble by killing himself? Why were all his friends, why was Atticus himself, so lukewarm in his cause? In one letter he artfully reproaches himself for his neglect of his friends in times past as the cause of their present indifference. But the reproach is of course really leveled at them.

"If ever," he writes in one letter, "fortune shall restore me to my country and to you, I will certainly take care that of all my friends; none shall be more rejoiced than you. All my duty to you, a duty which I must own in time past was sadly wanting, shall be so faithfully discharged that you will feel that I have been restored to you quite as much as I shall have been restored to my brother and to my children. For whatever I have wronged you, and indeed because I have wronged you, pardon me; for I have wronged myself far worse. I do not write this as not knowing that you feel the very greatest trouble on my account; but if you were and had been under the obligation to love me, as much as you actually do love me and have loved me, you never would have allowed me to lack the wise advice which you have so abundantly at your command." This is perhaps a little obscure, as it is certainly somewhat subtle; but Cicero means that Atticus had not interested himself in his affairs as much as he would have felt bound to do, if he (Cicero) had been less remiss in the duties of friendship.

To another correspondent, his wife Terentia, he poured out his heart yet more freely. "Don't think," he writes in one of his letters to her, "that I write longer letters to others than to you, except indeed I have received some long communication which I feel I must answer. Indeed I have nothing to write; and in these days I find it the most difficult of duties. Writing to you and to my dearest Tullia I never can do without floods of tears. I see you are utterly miserable, and I wanted you to be completely happy. I might have made you so. I could have made you had I been less timid…. My heart's delight, my deepest regret is to think that you, to whom all used to look for help, should now be involved in such sorrow, such distress! and that I should be to blame, I who saved others only to ruin myself and mine!… As for expenditure, let others, who can if they will, undertake it. And if you love me, don't distress your health, which is already, I know, feeble. All night, all day I think of you. I see that you are undertaking all imaginable labors on my behalf; I only fear that you will not be able to endure them. I am aware that all depends upon you. If we are to succeed in what you wish and are now trying to compass, take care of your health." In another he writes: "Unhappy that I am! to think that one so virtuous, so loyal, so honest, so kind, should be so afflicted, and all on my account. And my dearest Tullia, too, that she should be so unhappy about a father in whom she once found so much happiness. And what shall I say about my dear little Cicero? That he should feel the bitterest sorrow and trouble as soon as he began to feel any thing! If all this was really, as you write, the work of fate, I could endure it a little more easily; but it was all brought about by my fault, thinking that I was loved by men who really were jealous of me, and keeping aloof from others who were really on my side."

This is, perhaps, a good opportunity of saying something about the lady herself. Who she was we do not certainly know. There was a family of the name in Rome, the most notable of whom perhaps was the Terentius Varro[7] whose rashness brought upon his country the terrible disaster of the defeat of Cannae. She had a half-sister, probably older than herself, of the name of Fabia, who was a vestal virgin. She brought her husband, to whom she was married about 78 B.C., a fair dowry, about three thousand five hundred pounds. We have seen how affectionately Cicero writes to her during his exile. She is his darling, his only hope; the mere thought of her makes his eyes overflow with tears. And she seems to have deserved all his praise and affection, exerting herself to the utmost to help him, and ready to impoverish herself to find him the means that he needed. Four letters of this period have been preserved. There are twenty others belonging to the years 50-47 B.C. The earlier of these are sufficiently affectionate. When he is about to return to Rome from his province (Cilicia), she is still the most amiable, the dearest of women. Then we begin to see signs of coolness, yet nothing that would strike us did we not know what was afterwards to happen. He excuses the rarity of his letters. There is no one by whom to send them. If there were, he was willing to write. The greetings became formal, the superlatives "dearest," "fondest," "best," are dropped. "You are glad," he writes after the battle of Pharsalia had dashed his hopes, "that I have got back safe to Italy; I hope that you may continue to be glad." "Don't think of coming," he goes on, "it is a long journey and not very safe; and I don't see what good you would do if you should come." In another letter he gives directions about getting ready his house at Tusculum for the reception of guests. The letter is dated on the first of October, and he and his friends would come probably to stay several days, on the seventh. If there was not a tub in the bath-room, one must be provided. The greeting is of the briefest and most formal. Meanwhile we know from what he writes to Atticus that he was greatly dissatisfied with the lady's conduct. Money matters were at the bottom of their quarrel. She was careless, he thinks, and extravagant. Though he was a rich man, yet he was often in need of ready money, and Terentia could not be relied upon to help him. His vexation takes form in a letter to Atticus. "As to Terentia—there are other things without number of which I don't speak—what can be worse than this? You wrote to her to send me bills for one hundred and eight pounds; for there was so much money left in hand. She sent me just ninety pounds, and added a note that this was all. If she was capable of abstracting such a trifle from so small a sum, don't you see what she would have done in matters of real importance?" The quarrel ended in a divorce, a thing far more common than, happily, it is among ourselves, but still a painful and discreditable end to an union which had lasted for more than five-and-twenty years. Terentia long survived her husband, dying in extreme old age (as much, it was said, as a hundred and three years), far on in the reign of Augustus; and after a considerable experience of matrimony, if it be true that she married three or even, according to some accounts, four other husbands.

[Footnote 7: Another of the same name was an eminent man of letters of
Cicero's own time.]