c. 100 AD 2026
This is an AI modernization of Roman Lives into contemporary English. The original is available from Project Gutenberg. Also available as an epub.
Plutarch was a Greek from Chaeronea, a small town in Boeotia, born around AD 46 and a priest at Delphi for much of his later life. He wrote these biographies around AD 100, under the Roman empire, about men who had died a century and a half earlier in the republic the empire replaced. He wrote them in pairs, a Greek matched with a Roman, with a short comparison at the end of each pair.
He says what he is doing at the opening of his life of Alexander, and it is worth having in advance. He is writing lives, not histories. The most celebrated exploits do not always show what a man was; often a small thing, a phrase or a joke, reveals more of a character than battles where thousands die. So he will spend a page on a remark at a dinner and a sentence on a campaign, and a reader who wants the military narrative is reading the wrong book. He is also working from other people's books, some of them now lost, and he passes on omens, portents and dreams as part of the record without always saying what he makes of them.
This volume takes five Roman lives and puts them in the order of the story they tell together: Caesar, Cato the Younger, Cicero, Brutus, Antony. That is the fall of the Republic from five angles. The same events keep coming round — the Catiline conspiracy, the crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BC, the murder in the senate house on the Ides of March in 44, the battle at Philippi, the last campaign that ended at Actium — and each time they are seen by a different man, who wanted something different and knew something different. The repetition is the reason to read the five together. Their Greek partners in the Parallel Lives are Alexander, Phocion, Demosthenes, Dion and Demetrius, and neither those lives nor Plutarch's comparisons are included here.
All five men die violently. Caesar was stabbed in the senate house. Cato cut his own throat at Utica in 46 BC rather than accept a pardon from Caesar. Cicero was proscribed and hunted down in 43. Brutus died after Philippi in 42, Antony at Alexandria in 30. Plutarch is better on the deaths than on anything else, and he is very good on the small things that lead up to them: Caesar joking with the pirates who had captured him about coming back to crucify them, Cicero unable to resist a line that would make an enemy, Antony's cook keeping eight boars on the roast at staggered times because nobody could say when the general would want dinner.
This edition modernizes John Dryden's English translation as revised by Arthur Hugh Clough in 1859, complete for each of the five lives.
When Sulla made himself master of Rome, he wanted Caesar to divorce his wife Cornelia — the daughter of Cinna, the man who had lately held sole power in the state. He could not make it happen, not with promises and not with threats, so he settled for confiscating her dowry. The root of Sulla's grudge was Caesar's family tie to Marius. The elder Marius had married Julia, the sister of Caesar's father, which made the younger Marius Caesar's first cousin. At first, with so many people to kill and so much business to get through, Sulla simply overlooked Caesar. But the boy would not keep his head down. He presented himself to the people as a candidate for a priesthood while he was still barely more than a child, and Sulla, without opposing him openly, quietly arranged his defeat. When the question was raised of whether to have him killed outright, and someone objected that it was hardly worth the trouble to contrive the death of a boy, Sulla answered that they had no eyes at all if they could not see more than one Marius in that boy.
Word of that remark reached Caesar, and he disappeared. For a long while he kept out of sight in the Sabine country, moving from house to house — until one night, shifting quarters yet again because he was ill, he fell straight into the hands of Sulla's soldiers, who were sweeping the district for men in hiding. Caesar bribed their captain, Cornelius, with two talents to let him go, and the moment he was released he made for the sea and sailed to Bithynia. After a short stay there with King Nicomedes, he was captured on the voyage home, near the island of Pharmacusa, by pirates — who in those days controlled the seas everywhere with great fleets and swarms of smaller craft.
When the pirates demanded twenty talents for his ransom, he laughed in their faces for not knowing the value of their prisoner, and volunteered to pay them fifty. Then he sent his people off in every direction to raise the money, until he was left among the most bloodthirsty men in the world, the Cilicians, with a single friend and two attendants. He treated his captors as if they hardly existed. When he wanted to sleep, he would send someone over to order them to keep the noise down. For thirty-eight days he carried on with perfect freedom, joining their games and exercises as though they were not his keepers but his bodyguard. He wrote poems and speeches and made the pirates his audience, and anyone who failed to admire the work he called an illiterate barbarian to his face — and he would often, in the middle of the joking, promise to have them all crucified. They loved this. They put his free talk down to a kind of simple, boyish playfulness. As soon as his ransom arrived from Miletus, he paid it and was set free — and went straight to the port of Miletus, manned some ships, and sailed out after the pirates. He caught them still anchored at the island, took most of them prisoner, seized their money as his prize, and locked the men up in the prison at Pergamus. Then he applied to Junius, the governor of Asia, since punishing them fell to Junius's office as praetor. But Junius had his eye on the money — the sum was considerable — and said he would consider at his leisure what to do with the prisoners. So Caesar took polite leave of him, went back to Pergamus, had the pirates brought out, and crucified every one of them — the exact punishment he had so often promised them while he was in their hands, when they never dreamed he meant a word of it.
Meanwhile Sulla's power was fading, and Caesar's friends urged him to come home to Rome. Instead he went to Rhodes and enrolled in the school of Apollonius, the son of Molon — a famous teacher of rhetoric with a reputation as a decent man, who had counted Cicero among his students. Caesar, it is said, was fitted by nature to be a great statesman and orator, and he worked so hard at developing the gift that he could without question have claimed second place in eloquence. He aimed no higher, because he chose to be first among men of arms and power instead; and so he never reached the summit of oratory that nature had put within his range, his attention being pulled away toward the campaigns and grand designs that eventually won him the empire. He said so himself. In his reply to Cicero's tribute to Cato, he asked his readers not to compare a soldier's plain way of speaking with the polished performances of an orator who had not only brilliant gifts but a whole lifetime spent perfecting them.
When he returned to Rome, he prosecuted Dolabella for corruption in office, and many of the cities of Greece supplied evidence against him. Dolabella was acquitted; but Caesar, to repay the Greeks for their support, helped them prosecute Publius Antonius for corruption before Marcus Lucullus, the praetor of Macedonia. He pressed the case so hard that Antonius had to appeal to the tribunes at Rome, claiming that in Greece he could not get a fair trial against Greeks. At Rome, Caesar's eloquence in the courts quickly earned him a serious reputation, and the warmth and courtesy of his manner won him the people's affection — he had a tact and consideration well beyond his years. And the open house he kept, the dinners he gave, the general splendor of his way of living, all built his political influence little by little. His enemies shrugged at it at first, assuming the whole thing would collapse the moment his money ran out. But while they shrugged, it grew and flowered among the common people. By the time his power was established beyond challenge — openly aimed, now, at transforming the entire constitution — they understood, too late, that no beginning is so small that persistence will not make it great, and that a danger despised at first becomes irresistible in the end. Cicero was the first to suspect what Caesar was really after. Like a good pilot who fears the storm while the sea is still smiling, he saw the calculation underneath the charm and good humor, and said that in everything Caesar did and planned he could detect the ambition for absolute power. "But when I look at his hair, so carefully arranged," he said, "and watch him adjusting it with one finger, I cannot imagine that such a man could ever conceive of anything so enormous as overthrowing the Roman state." But more of that later.
The first proof Caesar had of the people's goodwill came when he ran for a military tribuneship and finished higher on the list than Gaius Popilius. A second and clearer proof came when he delivered a magnificent oration in the forum in praise of his aunt Julia, the wife of Marius — and at her funeral had the audacity to bring out the images of Marius himself, which no one had dared display since Sulla took power and Marius's party was declared enemies of the state. A few in the crowd started shouting against Caesar for it, but the people drowned them out with cheering and applause, delighted that he had brought the honors of Marius back from the grave, as it were, after so many years lost to the city. It had always been the custom at Rome to deliver funeral orations for elderly matrons, but never for young women — until Caesar gave one at the death of his own wife. This too won him favor: the people saw the show of grief and took him for a man of great tenderness and kindness of heart. After burying his wife, he went to Spain as quaestor under one of the praetors, a man named Vetus, whom he honored ever afterward — when Caesar himself became praetor, he made Vetus's son his own quaestor. When that service was over, he married his third wife, Pompeia; he already had a daughter by his first wife Cornelia, whom he later gave in marriage to Pompey the Great. He spent money so lavishly that before he held any public office at all he was thirteen hundred talents in debt, and many people thought he was trading a solid good for a short and uncertain return, buying popularity at ruinous cost. In truth he was buying the most valuable thing in the world, and getting it cheap. When he was made curator of the Appian Way, he poured a great deal of his own money into the work on top of the public funds; and as aedile he put on three hundred and twenty single combats of gladiators, and mounted theatrical shows, processions, and public feasts on a scale so magnificent that he washed out the memory of everyone who had come before him. The people were so taken with it all that every man of them was hunting for new offices and new honors to pay him back.
There were two factions in the city: Sulla's, which was very powerful, and Marius's, which was broken and cowed. Caesar set out to revive the latter and make it his own. At the height of his popularity from the shows of his aedileship, he had images of Marius made, along with figures of Victory carrying trophies, and had them carried up at night and set in place on the Capitol. In the morning people saw them glittering with gold, beautifully worked, their inscriptions recording Marius's victories over the Cimbrians — and they were stunned at the boldness of the man who had put them there. It was not hard to guess who that was. Word spread fast, and a great crowd came running. Some cried out that this was open rebellion against the settled government — reviving honors that had been buried by laws and decrees of the senate — and that Caesar had done it to test the temper of a people he had already softened up, to see whether they were tame enough to indulge him and let his innovations pass. Marius's people, on the other hand, took heart, and it was astonishing how many of them suddenly turned out to be, and how they came pouring into the Capitol, shouting. Many wept for joy at the sight of Marius's likeness, and Caesar was praised to the sky as the one man in Rome who was worthy of his kinship to Marius. The senate met over it, and Catulus Lutatius, one of the most respected men in Rome, rose and denounced Caesar, closing with the memorable line that Caesar was no longer tunneling under the state — he was bringing up siege engines against it in the open. But Caesar made his own defense and satisfied the senate, and his admirers were more excited than ever. They urged him to yield his ambitions to no one: with the people's favor behind him, he would beat them all in the end and be the first man in the commonwealth.
At this point Metellus, the high priest of Rome, died, and Catulus and Isauricus — men of the highest standing and great influence in the senate — competed for the office. Caesar refused to step aside for them and presented himself to the people as a rival candidate. With support running about even, Catulus, who had the most reputation to lose and was the most nervous about the outcome, sent to Caesar offering a large sum of money to withdraw. Caesar answered that he was ready to borrow an even larger sum to stay in the fight. On election day, as his mother walked him to the door in tears, he embraced her and said, "Mother, today you will see me either high priest or an exile." When the votes were counted, after a hard struggle, he won — and the senate and the nobility were seized with alarm that he would now lead the people into every kind of recklessness. Piso and Catulus blamed Cicero for letting Caesar slip away when the Catiline conspiracy had given the government such a hold on him. For Catiline had planned not merely to change the government but to overthrow the whole Roman order and throw everything into chaos; yet he had fled the city while the evidence against him was still incomplete, before his deepest designs came to light, leaving Lentulus and Cethegus behind to carry on the conspiracy in his place. Whether Caesar secretly encouraged and helped them is uncertain. What is certain is that they were overwhelmingly convicted in the senate, and when Cicero, as consul, went around the chamber asking each senator what punishment they favored, every man who spoke before Caesar said death. Then Caesar stood and delivered a prepared speech, arguing that it was without precedent, and unjust, to execute men of their birth and rank without a proper trial, unless there was absolute necessity for it. Better, he said, to hold them under guard in whatever Italian towns Cicero himself might choose, until Catiline was defeated — and then the senate could decide, in peacetime and at leisure, what should be done with them.
The proposal sounded so humane, and Caesar urged it so eloquently, that it swept the room: not only did those who spoke after him adopt it, but many who had already voted for death got up and switched sides — until the turn to speak came around to Catulus and Cato. They fought it hard, and Cato, in his speech, pointed the finger of suspicion at Caesar himself, and pressed the matter so fiercely that the conspirators were handed over for execution. As Caesar was leaving the senate house, a crowd of the young men who then served as Cicero's guard rushed at him with drawn swords. But Curio, it is said, threw his own toga over him and hustled him out, and Cicero himself, when the young men looked to him for the signal, shook his head — either out of fear of the people or because he thought the killing would be unjust and lawless. If the story is true, I cannot understand why Cicero left it out of the book he wrote about his consulship. In any case, he was blamed afterward for wasting so perfect an opportunity against Caesar — for flinching, people said, out of fear of the common people, who were extraordinarily devoted to Caesar. Indeed, a short while later, when Caesar went into the senate to clear himself of the suspicions hanging over him and the session ran long amid loud attacks on him, the crowd came surging up to the senate house, surrounded it, and shouted for Caesar, demanding that the senators let him go. That was what moved Cato, who was afraid above all of a rising among the poor — the tinder of every revolution, and men who had set all their hopes on Caesar — to persuade the senate to grant them a monthly allowance of grain. The measure added seven and a half million drachmas a year to the state's expenses, but it worked: it smothered the immediate danger, and it broke up much of Caesar's power at just the right moment, since he was about to enter his praetorship and would have been all the more formidable in office.
In fact his praetorship passed without any public disturbance. The trouble that year came inside his own house. Publius Clodius was a patrician by birth, distinguished for both wealth and eloquence, but in sheer insolence and appetite for scandal he outdid every notorious degenerate of the day. He was in love with Pompeia, Caesar's wife, and she was not unwilling. But her rooms were closely watched, and Caesar's mother Aurelia, a shrewd woman, kept so constant an eye on her that any meeting between the two was difficult and dangerous. Now, the Romans have a goddess they call Bona, the Good Goddess — the same one the Greeks call Gynaecea, the women's goddess. The Phrygians claim her as their own and say she was the mother of King Midas; the Romans say she was one of the dryads and the wife of Faunus; the Greeks say she is that mother of Bacchus whose name must never be spoken — which is why the women celebrating her festival cover their tents with vine branches, and why, in keeping with the myth, a sacred serpent sits beside the goddess. While her rites are performed, no man may be present, or even inside the house. The women conduct the sacred ceremonies by themselves, and these are said to be much like the rites of Orpheus. When the festival comes around, the host — a consul or a praetor — leaves his own house, along with every male creature in it. His wife takes the house over and puts it in order, and the main ceremonies are performed at night: a night of games and play among the women, with music of every kind.
Pompeia was hosting this festival when Clodius — who had no beard yet, and figured he could pass unnoticed — dressed himself up as a singing girl, ornaments and all, and went to the house looking like a young woman. He found the doors open and was slipped safely inside by a maid who was in on the affair, and who ran ahead to tell Pompeia. But she was gone a long time, and Clodius, too restless to wait where he had been left, went drifting through the big house, room to room, keeping away from the lights — until one of Aurelia's attendants ran into him and, taking him for a woman, invited him to play, as the women were doing among themselves. When he refused, she pulled him forward into the open and asked who he was and where he had come from. Clodius answered that he was waiting for Pompeia's own maid, Abra — which happened, in fact, to be this woman's name too — and his voice gave him away. The attendant shrieked, ran back to the lights and the company, and cried out that she had found a man in the house. The women were terrified. Aurelia covered up the sacred objects and stopped the rites, ordered the doors shut, and went through the house with torches, hunting for Clodius. He was found where he had started — hiding in the room of the maid who had let him in — and seized. The women recognized him and threw him out of the house, and that same night, before dawn, they went home and told their husbands everything. By morning the story was all over Rome: Clodius had committed sacrilege, and owed satisfaction not only to the women he had insulted but to the city and to the gods. One of the tribunes formally charged him with profaning the holy rites, and some of the leading senators joined forces to testify against him — swearing that, among a long list of other outrages, he had committed incest with his own sister, the wife of Lucullus. But the people set themselves against the nobles' campaign and defended Clodius, which counted for a great deal with the judges, who took fright and had no wish to provoke the crowd. Caesar divorced Pompeia immediately. Yet when he was called as a witness at the trial, he said he knew nothing against Clodius at all. Since that sounded absurd, the prosecutor asked him: then why had he put away his wife? "Because I wished my wife," Caesar said, "to be not so much as suspected." Some say he meant it; others, that he said it to please the people, who were determined to save Clodius. Either way, Clodius was acquitted — most of the judges turning in ballots written so illegibly that they could not be read, so as not to risk their necks with the people by convicting, nor their standing with the nobility by acquitting.
His praetorship over, Caesar was assigned the province of Spain — and found himself in serious trouble with his creditors, who descended on him as he was about to leave, loud and immovable. This drove him to Crassus, the richest man in Rome, who for his part needed Caesar's youth and fire for his own contest with Pompey. Crassus agreed to take on the most impatient and unbending of the creditors and stood surety for eight hundred and thirty talents, and with that Caesar was free to leave for his province. On the journey out, crossing the Alps, he passed a shabby little native village with a handful of wretchedly poor inhabitants, and his companions began joking among themselves: was there election campaigning here too — rivalries for first place, feuds between the local great men? Caesar answered them in complete earnest. "For my part," he said, "I would rather be first man here than second at Rome." In the same way, they say that later, in Spain, in an idle hour, he was reading from the history of Alexander and sat a long time lost in thought — and then burst into tears. His friends were astonished and asked what was wrong. "Do you not think I have cause to weep," he said, "when Alexander at my age was already king over so many nations, and I have done nothing memorable at all?" The moment he arrived in Spain he went to work. Within days he had raised ten new cohorts of infantry on top of the twenty already stationed there, marched against the Callaici and the Lusitanians, beat them, and pushed on all the way to the outer ocean, subduing tribes that had never before answered to Rome. Having managed the war so well, he did equally well at governing the peace. He worked to bring the province's communities into harmony, and took particular care to heal the running war between debtors and creditors: he ordered that each creditor take two-thirds of his debtor's annual income, with the debtor keeping the remaining third, until the whole debt was worked off. This won him a fine reputation to leave with. He departed the province a rich man himself, with soldiers he had enriched too — and they had hailed him with the honorable title of Imperator, the soldiers' salute of victory.
Roman law said that a general who wanted the honor of a triumph had to wait outside the city walls until the senate gave its answer. Another law said that a candidate for the consulship had to appear in the city in person. Caesar arrived home at the exact moment of the consular elections and found himself pinned between the two rules. So he sent word to the senate asking that, since the law obliged him to stay outside, he be allowed to stand for the consulship in absence, through his friends. Cato opposed the request, standing squarely on the letter of the law — and then, when he saw that Caesar had already talked a large part of the senate into agreeing, he switched tactics and simply played for time, speaking on and on until the whole day was wasted. At that, Caesar made his decision. He let the triumph go and went after the consulship.
He entered the city, came forward at once, and pulled off a political masterstroke that deceived everyone except Cato. He reconciled Crassus and Pompey, the two most powerful men then in Rome. There had been a quarrel between them; Caesar now patched it up, harnessed their combined strength to himself, and — under cover of an act that looked like nothing but kindness and good nature — carried out what was in reality a revolution in the government. For it was not the quarrel between Pompey and Caesar that produced the civil wars, as most people imagine. It was their union: their conspiring together, first, to pull down the aristocracy, and only afterward falling out with each other. Cato, who kept predicting exactly where this alliance would end, was written off at the time as a sour, meddling obstructionist. In the end he got the reputation of a wise counselor who was simply unlucky.
So Caesar, propped up on both sides by the interests of Crassus and Pompey, was swept into the consulship and triumphantly proclaimed, with Calpurnius Bibulus as his colleague. The moment he took office he began introducing bills that would have come more gracefully from the most reckless of the tribunes than from a consul — proposals for planting colonies and carving up public lands, designed purely to please the crowd. The best and most honorable senators opposed him, which was exactly the excuse he had been waiting for. He protested loudly that it was against all his wishes, but the senate's insults and harshness were driving him to it: there was nothing left for him now but to devote himself to the people and their cause. And out of the senate house he stormed. Presenting himself before the popular assembly, with Crassus stationed on one side of him and Pompey on the other, he asked the two men whether they approved of his bills. They said they did. He then asked them to stand by him against those who had threatened to stop the bills with their swords. They promised they would, and Pompey went further: if anyone came with swords, he said, he would bring his own sword — and a shield as well. The nobles hated this remark. It was beneath his dignity, they said, and showed none of the respect owed to the senate; it sounded like a hotheaded boy, or a madman raving. But the people loved it.
To fasten his hold on Pompey tighter still, Caesar gave him his daughter Julia — who was already engaged to Servilius Caepio — and told Servilius he could have Pompey's daughter instead, though she was not exactly free either, being promised to Sulla's son Faustus. A little later Caesar himself married Calpurnia, the daughter of Piso, and then got Piso made consul for the following year. At this Cato exploded, protesting with real heat that it was intolerable to have the government bartered away through marriages, and to watch these men trade armies, provinces, and great commands among themselves by dealing out women. Bibulus, Caesar's colleague, found that opposing the bills was useless and that he was in real danger of being murdered in the forum — as was Cato. So he shut himself up in his house and stayed there for the remainder of his term as consul. Pompey, as soon as he was married, filled the forum with soldiers, helped the people force the new laws through, and secured for Caesar the government of all Gaul — both on this side of the Alps and beyond them — together with Illyricum and the command of four legions for five years. Cato made some attempt to fight these measures, and Caesar had him seized and marched off toward prison, expecting him to appeal to the tribunes. But Cato walked along without saying a word. Caesar watched — and saw that not only were the nobles indignant, but the common people too, out of respect for Cato's virtue, were following behind him in silence with downcast faces. So Caesar quietly asked one of the tribunes, himself, to intervene and release him. As for the rest of the senators, only a few still attended the meetings; the others, disgusted, stayed away. Considius, a very old man, told Caesar one day that the senators did not come because they were afraid of his soldiers. "Then why doesn't the same fear keep you at home?" Caesar asked. Because, Considius answered, old age was his bodyguard: the little life he had left was not worth much caution. But the most disgraceful act of Caesar's entire consulship was helping win the tribuneship for Clodius — the same Clodius who had made the attempt on his wife's chastity and crashed the secret rites of the women. Clodius was elected for one purpose: to destroy Cicero. And Caesar did not leave the city to join his army until the two of them together had brought Cicero down and driven him out of Italy.
So much for Caesar's career before the wars in Gaul. From here he seems to start over — to enter a new life and a whole new field of action. The wars he now fought, and the long string of campaigns in which he conquered Gaul, proved him a soldier and a general second to none of the greatest and most admired commanders who ever led an army. Compare him with the Fabii, the Metelli, the Scipios; with the men of his own time or just before it — Sulla, Marius, the two Luculli, or even Pompey himself, whose military glory in those days seemed to reach the sky — and Caesar's achievements outstrip them all. One he surpassed in the difficulty of the country he fought in; another in the sheer extent of territory he conquered; some in the number and strength of the enemies he defeated; one in the wildness and treachery of the tribes he managed to win over; another in his humanity and mercy toward the beaten; others again in his gifts and generosity to his own soldiers; and all of them alike in the number of battles he fought and enemies he killed. For in less than ten years of war in Gaul he took more than eight hundred towns by storm, subdued three hundred nations, and — of the three million men who at one time or another stood against him — killed one million and took another million prisoner.
He commanded such devotion and loyalty from his soldiers that men who were nothing special in other campaigns became unstoppable, past defeating or even withstanding, the moment Caesar's glory was at stake. One such was Acilius, who in the sea-fight off Marseilles had his right hand sheared off by a sword — and did not drop the shield from his left. He smashed it into the enemies' faces until he had driven them all back and taken the ship. Another was Cassius Scaeva, who in the battle near Dyrrhachium had one eye shot out with an arrow, his shoulder run through with one javelin and his thigh with another, and caught one hundred and thirty darts on his shield. In that state he called out to the enemy as if he meant to surrender — and when two of them came up to take him, he sliced the shoulder off one with his sword, struck the other across the face and drove him back, and escaped with the help of his friends, who by then had reached him. In Britain, some of the leading officers blundered into a watery marsh and were attacked there by the enemy. While Caesar stood watching, a common soldier flung himself into the middle of the fight, performed one astonishing feat of courage after another, rescued the officers, and beat off the barbarians. Then, going last himself, he plunged into the marsh and struggled across, partly swimming, partly wading — but in the crossing he lost his shield. Caesar and his officers, who had seen the whole thing, came to meet him with shouts of joy and admiration. But the soldier, miserable and in tears, threw himself at Caesar's feet and begged forgiveness for letting go of his shield. And once in Africa, when Scipio captured one of Caesar's ships with Granius Petro aboard — he had just been appointed quaestor, a treasury officer — Scipio handed the other passengers over to his soldiers as plunder but offered the quaestor his life. Granius answered that Caesar's soldiers were not in the habit of taking mercy, but of giving it — and with those words he fell on his own sword and killed himself.
This appetite for honor, this passion for distinction, Caesar himself planted in his men and fed daily. He handed out money and honors without stinting, and made it plain that he was not piling up wealth from his wars for his own luxury or private pleasure: all of it was a public fund, held in trust to reward and encourage courage, and he counted every coin he gave a deserving soldier as an addition to his own riches. Beyond that, there was no danger he would not walk into willingly, no hardship he ever excused himself from. His contempt for danger did not much surprise his soldiers, because they knew how hungry he was for glory. What astonished them was his endurance of hardship — far beyond, it seemed, what his body should have been able to bear. For he was a slight man, with soft, white skin, subject to headaches and to epileptic fits, which are said to have first seized him at Corduba, in Spain. Yet he never used his frail constitution as an excuse for taking it easy. Instead he used war itself as his medicine — fighting off his ailments with relentless marches, plain food, night after night camping in the open, and constant punishing exercise, hardening his body against every attack. He usually slept in carriages or litters, putting even his rest to work. By day he had himself driven around to the forts, garrisons, and camps, with one servant riding beside him to take dictation as he traveled and a single soldier standing behind him with a drawn sword. And he drove hard: on his first departure from Rome, he reached the river Rhone in eight days. Riding had been easy for him since childhood — he used to sit with his hands clasped behind his back and put his horse to a full gallop. In this war he trained himself further still, until he could dictate letters from horseback and keep two secretaries busy at once — or, as Oppius says, even more. It is thought he was also the first to work out a way of communicating with friends in cipher, when the press of business, or the sheer size of the city, left no time to meet face to face on urgent matters. As for how little he cared about his food, one story tells it all. At Milan his host Valerius Leo served him a dinner at which the asparagus came dressed not with olive oil but with sweet perfumed ointment. Caesar ate it without a flicker of disgust — and scolded his friends for complaining. "It was enough not to eat it if you didn't like it," he said. "But a man who points out another man's bad manners shows a shortage of his own." Another time a storm drove him and his companions to shelter in a poor man's cottage on the road. Finding it held a single room, and that one barely fit to lodge one person, he told his friends that places of honor should go to the greater men, but necessities to the weaker — and so he ordered that Oppius, who was in poor health, should sleep inside, while he and the rest bedded down under a shed by the door.
His first war in Gaul was against the Helvetii and the Tigurini, who had burned their own twelve towns and four hundred villages and set out to march through the part of Gaul that belonged to the Roman province, just as the Cimbri and Teutones had done before them. They were not inferior to those invaders in courage, and in numbers they were their equals: three hundred thousand in all, of whom one hundred and ninety thousand were fighting men. The Tigurini Caesar did not engage in person; Labienus, acting under his orders, routed them near the river Arar. But the Helvetii caught Caesar by surprise, falling on him unexpectedly as he was marching his army toward an allied town. He managed to pull back to a strong position, and there, once he had mustered and drawn up his men, his horse was brought to him. "When I've won the battle," he said, "I'll use my horse for the chase. For now — let's go at the enemy." And he charged them on foot. After a long, hard fight he drove their main army off the field, but the toughest work came at their wagons and ramparts, where not only the men stood and fought but the women and children defended themselves too, until they were cut to pieces; the fighting was barely finished by midnight. To this victory Caesar added something finer still. He gathered up all the barbarians who had escaped the battle — more than one hundred thousand of them — and compelled them to return to the country they had abandoned and the cities they had burned. He did this because he feared that if the land lay empty, the Germans would cross over and take it.
His second war he fought in defense of the Gauls against the Germans — even though, not long before, he had himself arranged for their king Ariovistus to be recognized at Rome as an ally. But the Germans had become insufferable neighbors to the peoples under his government, and it was obvious that at the first opportunity they would tear up the existing arrangements and march in to seize Gaul. Caesar found his officers frightened, though — especially the young nobles who had come along on the campaign imagining it would be a road to pleasure and profit. So he called them together and told them to march off home: there was no need for men with such weak and unmanly feelings to risk a battle against their inclinations. "I will take the tenth legion alone," he said, "and march against the barbarians. I don't expect these enemies to prove more formidable than the Cimbri — and I don't think you will find me a general inferior to Marius." At this, the tenth legion sent a deputation to thank him, while the other legions turned on their own officers in shame, and the whole army, full of fire and eagerness now, followed him for many days' march, until they camped about twenty-five miles from the enemy. Their mere approach took some of the fight out of Ariovistus. He had never expected the Romans to attack the Germans — he had assumed they would not dare stand against them even in defense of their own subjects — and Caesar's boldness stunned him; he could see, too, that his own army was rattled. The Germans were discouraged even more by the prophecies of their holy women, who read the future in the eddies of rivers and took signs from the windings and murmur of streams, and who now warned them not to fight before the new moon appeared. Caesar got word of this, and seeing the Germans sitting idle, he judged it far better to attack them while they were unnerved than to wait around for their chosen moment. So he pressed assaults on the strongholds and hills where they lay camped, and stung and goaded them until at last they came storming down in a fury to fight. He won a crushing victory, and pursued them fifty miles, all the way to the Rhine, the whole distance strewn with spoils and the bodies of the dead. Ariovistus with a small remnant managed to get across the Rhine; the dead are said to have numbered eighty thousand.
After this campaign, Caesar left his army in winter quarters in the country of the Sequani and, in order to keep a hand on affairs at Rome, came down into the part of Gaul that lies along the Po, which belonged to his province — for the river Rubicon divides Gaul on this side of the Alps from the rest of Italy. There he settled in and worked at courting popularity. Crowds came to him constantly, and every man got what he asked for; no one left without something in hand and greater hopes for the future. And through this whole period of the Gallic war, Pompey never noticed what was happening: that Caesar was using the arms of Rome to conquer Gaul, and using the wealth of those conquests to buy Rome. But when Caesar heard that the Belgae — the most powerful of all the Gauls, holding a third of the country — had revolted and assembled many thousands of men in arms, he turned back immediately and moved with tremendous speed. Falling on the enemy as they plundered the lands of Rome's Gallic allies, he quickly shattered and scattered the largest and most concentrated body of them. Their numbers were huge, but they fought so feebly that the Roman infantry crossed marshes and deep rivers on the sheer mass of the dead. After that, all the rebel tribes along the ocean submitted without a fight, and Caesar led his army against the Nervii, the fiercest and most warlike people in that whole region. The Nervii live in a country of dense unbroken woods. Having stowed their families and property deep in the forest, out of harm's way, they fell on Caesar with sixty thousand men while he was still building his camp, before he was ready for them. They routed his cavalry, surrounded the twelfth and seventh legions, and killed every one of the officers. If Caesar had not snatched up a shield himself, forced his way through the press of his own men, and thrown himself at the barbarians — and if the tenth legion, seeing his danger from the hilltops where they were posted, had not come running down and smashed through the enemy ranks to reach him — in all likelihood not one Roman would have survived. As it was, with Caesar's boldness in front of them, the men fought, as the saying goes, beyond human courage. Even so they could not drive the Nervii from the field; they cut them down where they stood, still fighting. Of sixty thousand men, it is said that no more than five hundred survived the battle — and of their four hundred senators, no more than three.
When news of this reached Rome, the senate voted sacrifices and festivals to the gods, to be strictly observed for fifteen days — a longer celebration than any victory had ever earned before. The danger had been real, they felt: so many nations rising at once. And because Caesar was the people's favorite, his success shone all the brighter. He himself, after settling everything in Gaul, came back and again spent the winter in the country along the Po, working at his designs on Rome. Candidates for office lined up for his help and drew on his money to bribe the people and buy votes, and once elected, they did everything they could to increase his power. More significant still, the most eminent and powerful men in Rome came to visit him at Lucca — Pompey, and Crassus, and Appius the governor of Sardinia, and Nepos the proconsul of Spain — until there were one hundred and twenty lictors in the town at one time, and more than two hundred senators. In the conference held there, it was settled that Pompey and Crassus should be consuls again the following year, and that Caesar should have a fresh grant of money and his command renewed for five more years. Thinking people found the arrangement grotesque: the very men who had taken so much money from Caesar were now urging the senate to give him more, as if he were poor. Though in truth "urging" is the wrong word — it was compulsion, and the senators groaned over their own votes as they passed the measures. Cato was not there; they had taken care to ship him off to Cyprus in good time. But Favonius, a devoted imitator of Cato, finding his opposition useless, burst out of the senate house and loudly denounced the whole business to the people. No one listened. Some brushed him off out of deference to Crassus and Pompey; most did it to please Caesar, on whom all their hopes now hung.
Caesar then returned to his forces in Gaul, where he found the country in the grip of a dangerous war: two powerful German nations, the Usipetes and the Tencteri, had just crossed the Rhine to conquer land. Of the war with them, Caesar's own account in his commentaries is this: the barbarians sent ambassadors to negotiate with him, and then, in the middle of the truce, attacked him on the march — which is how eight hundred of their horsemen routed five thousand of his cavalry, who suspected nothing. They then sent a second embassy to try the same trick again; Caesar held the ambassadors in custody and led his army against the barbarians, judging it plain foolishness to keep faith with men who had so faithlessly broken their own agreements. But Tanusius adds this: when the senate was decreeing festivals and sacrifices for the victory, Cato rose and declared that in his opinion Caesar ought to be handed over to the barbarians — so that the guilt of his broken faith might be purged from the city and the curse carried onto the one man responsible for it. Of the Germans who had crossed the Rhine, four hundred thousand were cut down; the few who escaped found shelter with the Sugambri, a people of Germany. Caesar seized on this as his pretext to invade the Germans — and besides, he coveted the honor of being the first man ever to cross the Rhine with an army. He began throwing a bridge across it, though the river was very wide, and at that point especially the current ran full, strong, and violent, driving down tree trunks and debris that battered the bridge's foundations. But Caesar drove great piles of timber into the riverbed upstream of the crossing to catch and hold whatever came floating down — and so, setting a bridle on the stream itself, he brought his bridge to completion. It was a sight no one who saw it could believe was the work of just ten days.
The crossing itself met no resistance. Even the Suevi, the most warlike people in all Germany, would not face him; they gathered up their belongings and vanished into the deepest, most thickly wooded valleys they could find. Caesar burned the enemy's countryside, encouraged the tribes that had taken Rome's side, and after eighteen days in Germany marched back into Gaul. But it was his expedition to Britain that became the most famous proof of his daring. He was the first commander ever to bring a fleet into the western ocean, the first to sail an army out onto the Atlantic to make war. And the island he invaded was so remote, and the reports of its size so extravagant, that historians had actually argued over whether it existed at all — whether "Britain" was a real place or just a name, a fiction. By landing there, you could fairly say, Caesar carried the Roman empire beyond the limits of the known world. He crossed twice from the part of Gaul that faces the island, and in several battles he did the enemy more damage than he did himself any good, for the islanders were so miserably poor that they had nothing worth plundering. Unable to finish the war the way he wanted, he settled for taking hostages from the king, imposing a tribute, and leaving.
Back in Gaul, he found letters waiting for him, ready to be carried across the water — letters from his friends in Rome, telling him that his daughter was dead. Julia had died giving birth to Pompey's child. Caesar and Pompey were both shattered by her death, and their friends were hardly less shaken, because everyone understood that the alliance which had kept the ailing republic at peace was now broken. The baby, too, died within a few days of its mother. As for Julia's body, the people took it — over the objections of the tribunes — carried it to the Field of Mars, and held her funeral there. That is where her remains lie.
Caesar's army had by now grown so large that he had to scatter it among a number of camps for the winter, and he himself went off to Italy, as he usually did. In his absence, all of Gaul erupted at once. Great armies swept across the country, attacked the Roman winter quarters, and tried to storm the forts where the legions lay. The largest and strongest body of rebels, under the command of Ambiorix, wiped out Cotta and Titurius and every man with them, and then a force sixty thousand strong laid siege to the legion commanded by Cicero and very nearly took it by storm — every Roman soldier wounded, all of them spent, holding on by an effort beyond their natural strength. Caesar was far away when the news reached him. He instantly scraped together seven thousand men and raced to relieve Cicero. The besiegers knew he was coming and marched out to meet him, fully confident of swallowing so small a force. Caesar, to feed their overconfidence, kept seeming to avoid battle, falling back and back until he found ground suited for a few men to fight many, and there he made camp. He forbade his soldiers to attack. He ordered them instead to build the ramparts higher and barricade the gates, so that everything about the camp said fear — and the enemy's contempt grew accordingly. At last, swaggering and disordered, sure of themselves, they came on to assault the walls. Then Caesar came out, threw them into flight, and killed a great many of them.
That settled most of the uprisings in this part of Gaul, and through the winter Caesar went everywhere in person, watching sharply for any new trouble. Three fresh legions had arrived to replace the men he had lost — two of them lent by Pompey from his own command, the third newly raised in the Gaul along the Po. But the seeds of war had been quietly sown and scattered long before, by the most powerful men among those warrior nations, and now they broke out into the greatest and most dangerous war ever fought in that country. Consider the scale of it: the sheer numbers of young men in their prime, gathered and armed from every quarter; the vast sums of money collected to sustain the fight; the strength of the fortified towns; the near-impossibility of the terrain. It was winter. The rivers were frozen, the forests buried in snow, the plains flooded; in some places the roads disappeared under snowdrifts, in others the overflowing of marshes and streams made every route uncertain. All of it seemed to make a move against the rebels simply impossible. Many tribes had risen together, chief among them the Arverni and the Carnutes, and supreme command of the war belonged to Vercingetorix — a man whose own father the Gauls had put to death on suspicion of aiming at absolute power.
Vercingetorix divided his forces into several armies, set officers over each, and brought over to his side all the surrounding country as far as the river Arar. He had intelligence, too, of the opposition Caesar was now facing in Rome, and his plan was to raise all Gaul at once. Had he done it only a little later, when Caesar was tied down in the civil wars, Italy would have known a terror not felt since the Cimbri. But Caesar had, above all men who ever lived, the gift of using every advantage a war offered — and above all the gift of seizing the right moment. The instant he heard of the revolt he turned around and went back the way he had come, and the sheer speed of that march, through such a brutal season, showed the barbarians exactly what kind of army was coming for them: an unstoppable one. In the time it seemed scarcely believable that a courier could have arrived with a message from Caesar, Caesar himself arrived with his whole army — ravaging the country, reducing strongholds, taking towns, receiving the tribes that came over to him. So it went until even the Aedui declared against him. They had always called themselves brothers of the Roman people and had been showered with honors, and when they joined the rebels, Caesar's army felt the discouragement badly. He pulled out of that region and crossed the country of the Lingones, making for the territory of the Sequani, who were friendly and who stood like a rampart between Italy and the rest of Gaul. There the enemy fell on him and surrounded him with many tens of thousands of men. Caesar was eager enough to fight, and after a long and bloody struggle he won, on the whole, a complete victory — though at first he seems to have taken a beating, for the Arverni still show visitors a short sword hanging in one of their temples which they claim was captured from Caesar. Caesar himself saw it there later, and smiled, and when his friends urged him to have it taken down, he refused. It had been dedicated to the gods, and he considered it sacred.
After the defeat, most of the survivors fled with their king into the town of Alesia. Caesar besieged it, though the height of the walls and the number of defenders made the place look impregnable — and meanwhile, from outside the siege lines, he faced a danger greater than words can express. The best fighting men of Gaul, picked from every nation and well armed, were converging on Alesia to relieve it: three hundred thousand of them. And inside the town were no fewer than a hundred and seventy thousand more. Caught and squeezed between two such forces, Caesar had to build two walls — one facing the town, the other facing the relief army — because he knew that if the two enemies ever joined hands, he was finished. The danger he ran at Alesia earned him fame, and deservedly, on many counts; no other contest ever gave him such scope to display his boldness and his generalship. One marvels that he could engage and defeat so many thousands outside the town without the men inside ever noticing. But stranger still: even the Romans guarding the inner wall, the one facing the town, knew nothing of the battle. They learned of the victory only when they heard the crying of the men and the wailing of the women in Alesia, who had looked out and seen, in the distance, the Romans carrying into their camp great numbers of shields decorated with gold and silver, breastplates soaked in blood, drinking cups, and tents of Gallic workmanship. That is how quickly so vast an army dissolved and vanished — like a ghost, like a dream — with most of them killed where they stood. At last, after giving Caesar and themselves plenty of trouble, the defenders of Alesia surrendered. And Vercingetorix, the mainspring of the whole war, put on his finest armor, decked out his horse, and rode out through the gates. He made a circle around Caesar, who sat waiting; then he dismounted, stripped off his armor, and sat down quietly at Caesar's feet, and there he stayed until he was led away — a prisoner reserved for the triumph.
Caesar had long since decided to bring Pompey down, and Pompey, for that matter, had decided the same about him. Crassus, whom they had both feared, and whose existence had kept the peace between them, was now dead in Parthia. From that point the logic was simple: if either man wanted to be the greatest in Rome, he had only to destroy the other; and if either wanted to avoid being destroyed, his only move was to strike first. Pompey had come to this fear only recently. Until lately he had despised Caesar, figuring it would be no great trouble to put down a man he himself had raised up. But Caesar had been planning for this contest from the beginning. Like a champion wrestler, he had withdrawn to train for the match in private. The Gallic wars were his training ground: there he hardened his soldiers and piled up glory with his victories, until men spoke of him as a rival worthy of comparison with Pompey. And he let no advantage slip — not the openings Pompey gave him, not the openings the times gave him, not the rot in Rome's own government. In Rome, candidates for office bought votes in the open, shamelessly, with cash on the table; and the people, once paid, fought for their paymasters not with ballots but with bows, swords, and slings. More than once the voting ground was left stained with blood and littered with the dead, and the city drifted into pure anarchy, like a ship swept along with no one at the helm. Sensible people could only hope that after such a storm of madness and disorder, things might end in nothing worse than a monarchy. Some said it openly: only a monarchy could cure the state now, and the remedy ought to be taken from the gentlest physician available — meaning Pompey. Pompey made a show of declining, but in reality he worked with everything he had to be named dictator. Cato saw through him, and persuaded the senate to make him sole consul instead — offering him a more legal sort of monarchy, so that he would stop demanding the dictatorship. On top of this they voted to extend his provinces. He had two, Spain and all of Africa, which he governed through deputies while maintaining armies at the public expense — a thousand talents a year out of the treasury.
At this Caesar sent to Rome and applied, in his turn, for a consulship and an extension of his own provinces. Pompey at first said nothing, but Marcellus and Lentulus — men who had always hated Caesar — opposed him, and did everything, fair or foul, to disgrace and insult him. The people of New Comum, a colony Caesar had recently planted in Gaul, were stripped of their Roman citizenship; and Marcellus, who was then consul, had one of that town's senators, who happened to be in Rome, publicly whipped — telling him the lashes were a mark to prove he was no Roman citizen, and that he should go home and show them to Caesar. After Marcellus's consulship ended, Caesar opened the floodgates of the wealth he had taken in Gaul and let it pour over the public men of Rome. He paid off the enormous debts of the tribune Curio. He gave the consul Paulus fifteen hundred talents, with which Paulus built the splendid basilica beside the forum, the courthouse that replaced the old Fulvian one. Now Pompey was alarmed. Openly, in his own person and through his friends, he pushed to have a successor appointed to Caesar's command, and he sent to demand back the soldiers he had lent him for the Gallic wars. Caesar sent them back — with a parting gift of two hundred and fifty drachmas to every man. But the officer who conducted them home to Pompey spread ugly and dishonest reports about Caesar among the people, and fed Pompey himself on flattering delusions: Caesar's own army longed for Pompey, he said; and while envy and bad government made Pompey's position difficult at home, out there the army was his for the asking — let them once cross into Italy and they would declare for him at once, so sick were they of Caesar's endless campaigns, and so suspicious that he aimed at monarchy. On this diet Pompey grew fat with confidence. He neglected every military preparation, since he feared no danger, and fought Caesar with nothing but speeches and votes — which Caesar cared nothing about. The story goes that one of Caesar's captains, sent on an errand to Rome, was standing outside the senate house when he heard that the senate refused to give Caesar an extension of his command. The captain clapped his hand on the hilt of his sword and said, "But this shall."
And yet the demands Caesar was making had the fairest look of justice imaginable. He proposed that he lay down his arms — provided Pompey did the same — and that both become private citizens and let the public reward each man's services as it saw fit. To disarm Caesar while confirming Pompey in all his power, he argued, was simply to establish one man in the very tyranny they accused the other of plotting. When Curio laid these proposals before the people in Caesar's name, they cheered him to the sky; some threw garlands at him and sent him off crowned with flowers, like a winning athlete. Antony, who was tribune, produced a letter from Caesar on the question and read it aloud, though the consuls did all they could to prevent it. But Scipio, Pompey's father-in-law, moved in the senate that if Caesar did not lay down his arms by a fixed day, he should be declared an enemy of the state. And when the consuls put the questions — should Pompey dismiss his soldiers? should Caesar disband his? — hardly anyone voted yes to the first, and nearly everyone voted yes to the second. But then Antony moved that both men give up their commands together, and all but a very few agreed to that. Scipio raged; the consul Lentulus shouted that against a robber you need weapons, not votes; and the senate adjourned, its members putting on mourning clothes in grief at the quarrel.
Then more letters came from Caesar, and their terms seemed more moderate still. He offered to give up everything else and keep only Gaul-within-the-Alps, Illyricum, and two legions, until he could stand for his second consulship. Cicero the orator, just back from Cilicia, worked hard for a reconciliation and softened Pompey up; Pompey was ready to yield on everything but the soldiers. At last Cicero persuaded Caesar's friends to settle for the provinces and a mere six thousand men, and close the quarrel there. Pompey was inclined to accept. But the consul Lentulus would not hear of it, and went so far as to drive Antony and Curio out of the senate house with insults — handing Caesar the most plausible grievance he could have asked for, and one perfectly designed to inflame his soldiers: look, he could say, at two officers of rank and authority forced to flee Rome in a hired carriage, dressed as slaves. For that is how they had to disguise themselves to get out of the city.
Caesar at that moment had no more than three hundred cavalry and five thousand infantry with him. The rest of his army was still beyond the Alps, to be brought up later by officers already under orders. But he judged that the opening move of his enterprise did not need large forces — what it needed was to be made suddenly, with a boldness that would stun his enemies. It would be easier, he reckoned, to throw them into panic by doing what they never expected than to beat them in a fair fight after his preparations had put them on guard. So he ordered his captains and officers to take Ariminum — a large city of his province, the first inside Italy — with their swords alone, no other weapons, and with as little disturbance and bloodshed as possible. He gave the command of the force to Hortensius. He himself spent the day in public, standing around watching gladiators exercise. A little before evening he bathed and dressed, went into the hall, and chatted for a while with the guests he had invited to dinner. When it was beginning to get dark, he rose from the table, politely asked the company to wait for him until he came back, and left — having already told a few close friends, privately, to follow him, not all together but by different roads. He climbed into one of the hired carriages and drove off at first in a different direction entirely, then turned toward Ariminum.
When he came to the river Rubicon, which divides Gaul-within-the-Alps from the rest of Italy, his thoughts began to work on him. Here was the edge of the danger. He wavered, turning over in his mind the sheer size of what he was about to attempt. He slowed, then ordered a halt, and sat a long while in silence, revolving the decision this way and that, changing his mind and changing it again. This was the moment his purpose hung most in the balance. Then he began to talk it through with the friends who were with him — Asinius Pollio was one — reckoning up the calamities that his crossing of that river would let loose on mankind, and what the men of the future would say of it. At last, on a kind of passion, he threw calculation aside and flung himself at whatever was coming. Speaking the words men always use on the brink of a desperate gamble — "The die is cast." — he took the river. Once across, he moved at full speed, and before daybreak he reached Ariminum and took it. It is said that the night before he crossed, he had a monstrous dream: he dreamed that he lay with his own mother.
With Ariminum taken, it was as if wide gates had swung open to let war flood in over every land and sea alike; with the border of the province, the boundaries of the laws had been crossed too. And the panic that followed was not the usual kind, with men and women fleeing in terror from one Italian town to another. This time, you would have said, the towns themselves tore loose from their foundations and fled to one another for shelter. Rome itself was overrun, as if by a flood, with people pouring in from all the surrounding country. No magistrate could govern the city, no orator's eloquence could quiet it; it came within an inch of wrecking itself on the violence of its own storm. Everywhere the most violent and contradictory passions collided. Those who welcomed the coming upheaval made little effort to hide it, and when they ran into the frightened and dejected men of the other party — as in so great a city they constantly did — their loud confidence in what was coming started quarrels on the spot. Pompey, unsettled enough on his own account, was battered from every side. Some told him he was only getting what he deserved for arming Caesar against himself and against the state. Others blamed him for letting Lentulus insult Caesar just when Caesar was making generous concessions and offering reasonable terms of peace. Favonius told him to go ahead and stamp his foot — because once, talking big in the senate, Pompey had told the senators not to trouble themselves with preparations for war: he himself, with one stamp of his foot, would fill all Italy with soldiers. Even then, Pompey still had more forces than Caesar. But he was never allowed to think his own thoughts. Buried under false reports and alarms — the enemy at the gates, the enemy sweeping all before him — he gave way and let himself be carried off by the general panic. He issued an edict declaring the city in a state of anarchy, and left it, ordering the senate to follow and declaring that anyone who stayed behind was choosing tyranny over country and liberty.
The consuls fled at once, without even performing the sacrifices custom required before a journey. Most of the senators fled too, snatching up whatever of their own property came to hand, in as much haste as if they were looting their neighbors' houses. Some who until then had been warm supporters of Caesar's cause lost their heads in the general terror and let themselves be swept along in the current, though it did them no good at all. It was a pitiful sight: the city tossed in the tumult like a ship abandoned by her pilots, left to run on any rock in her path as chance might steer her. And yet, miserable as the flight was, people counted exile itself as home because Pompey was there, and fled from Rome as if Rome had become Caesar's camp. Even Labienus deserted — Labienus, who had been one of Caesar's closest friends and his lieutenant, who had fought at his side through all the Gallic wars — he now abandoned him and went over to Pompey. Caesar sent his money and his baggage after him. Then he sat down before Corfinium, which was held by thirty cohorts under the command of Domitius. Domitius, despairing of the defense, asked a physician among his attendants for poison, took the dose, and drank it, expecting it to finish him. But shortly afterward, when he heard that Caesar was treating his prisoners with extraordinary clemency, he began to lament his misfortune and curse the haste of his decision. His physician then set his mind at rest: what he had swallowed was a sleeping draught, not poison. Overjoyed, Domitius got up from his bed, went straight to Caesar, and gave him his hand in pledge — and then, later, went over to Pompey again anyway. When news of all this reached Rome, it calmed the people who remained there, and some of those who had fled came back.
Caesar folded Domitius's soldiers into his own army, and he did the same in every town where he found men enlisted for Pompey's service. Now strong and formidable, he marched against Pompey himself. Pompey did not wait for him. He fell back to Brundisium, sent the consuls ahead to Dyrrhachium with a body of troops, and shortly afterward, as Caesar approached, put to sea — as will be told in more detail in his own Life. Caesar wanted to pursue at once, but he had no ships, so he turned back to Rome. In sixty days, without shedding a drop of blood, he had made himself master of all Italy.
He found the city quieter than he expected, and many senators still in it. He addressed them with courtesy and deference, and asked them to send envoys to Pompey with reasonable terms for a peace. Nobody took him up on it — whether from fear of Pompey, whom they had deserted, or because they suspected Caesar did not mean a word of it and was simply saying what sounded good. When the tribune Metellus tried to stop him from taking money out of the public treasury, citing the laws against it, Caesar answered that arms and laws each had their own season. "If what I am doing displeases you, leave. War has no room for free speech. When I have laid down my arms and made peace, come back and give all the speeches you please. And in telling you even this much," he added, "I am giving up my own just rights — for you, and everyone else who took sides against me and is now in my power, may be dealt with exactly as I please." With that he walked to the doors of the treasury. The keys could not be found, so he sent for smiths to break the doors open. Metellus objected again, and some of the bystanders cheered him on — at which Caesar raised his voice and told him he would put him to death if he made any more trouble. "And you know very well, young man," he said, "that saying this is more disagreeable to me than doing it." The words sent Metellus away in fear, and from then on everything Caesar demanded for the war was supplied promptly and without argument.
Next he set out for Spain. He meant to crush Afranius and Varro first — Pompey's lieutenants there — and take over the armies and provinces they held, so that he could then move against Pompey with no enemy left at his back. In Spain his life was in constant danger from ambushes and his army from hunger, but he never let up: pursuing the enemy, daring them to fight, walling them in with his siege-works, until by main force he made himself master of their camps and their armies. Only the generals got away, and fled to Pompey.
When Caesar came back to Rome, his father-in-law Piso urged him to send envoys to Pompey and negotiate a peace; Isauricus, angling for Caesar's favor, argued against it. The senate then made him dictator, and he used the office to call home the exiles, restore citizen rights to the children of those who had suffered under Sulla, and ease the debtors by canceling part of the interest on their debts — that, and a few other measures of the same kind, but not many. Within eleven days he resigned the dictatorship, had himself declared consul alongside Servilius Isauricus, and hurried back to the war.
He marched so fast that he outran his own army. With only six hundred picked horsemen and five legions, he put to sea in the dead of winter, at the beginning of January — which corresponds roughly to the Athenian month Posideon — crossed the Ionian Sea, took Oricum and Apollonia, and sent the ships back to Brundisium for the soldiers still on the road behind him. Those soldiers, as they marched — men past the first vigor of youth, worn down by so many wars — grumbled openly against Caesar. "When will this Caesar finally let us rest, and where? He hauls us from place to place as if we could never wear out, as if we felt nothing. Even iron gets used up by hammering. Our shields and breastplates have served so long they deserve some pity. Our wounds, if nothing else, ought to remind him that the men he commands are mortal, and feel pain and suffering like any other human beings. The gods themselves cannot force the winter season or hold back the storms — yet he pushes on as if he were running from an enemy instead of chasing one." So they talked, strolling toward Brundisium at their ease. But when they got there and found Caesar already gone, the mood flipped in an instant. Now they cursed themselves as traitors to their general, railed at their officers for the slow pace, and perched on the heights facing Epirus, scanning the sea for the ships that would carry them across to Caesar.
Caesar, meanwhile, sat at Apollonia without an army strong enough to fight, and the forces from Brundisium were so long in coming that he was in an agony of suspense over what to do. At last he settled on a desperate experiment. Without telling anyone, he would cross back to Brundisium himself in a twelve-oared boat, though the sea was covered with the enemy's fleets. He went aboard at night dressed as a slave, threw himself down like a passenger of no account, and lay flat in the bottom of the boat. The river Anius was to carry them down to the sea. Most mornings a gentle breeze off the land smoothed the waves at the river's mouth, driving them outward; but that night a strong wind had blown in from the sea and overpowered the land breeze, so that where the river met the incoming seawater and the push of the waves, it turned rough and angry. The current was beaten back with such a violent swell that the master of the boat could not force the passage, and ordered his sailors to come about and turn back. At this Caesar revealed himself, took the astonished man by the hand, and said, "Go on, my friend, and fear nothing — you carry Caesar and his fortune in your boat." The sailors forgot the storm. They threw all their strength into their oars and fought to force their way down the river. But it was no use; the boat kept taking on water, and Caesar, finding himself in real danger at the river's very mouth, very reluctantly allowed the master to turn back. When he came ashore, his soldiers ran to him in a crowd, reproaching him and demanding to know why he thought he could not win with their help alone — why he had to torment himself and risk his life for the absent, as if he could not trust the men he had.
After this, Antony came over with the forces from Brundisium, and Caesar felt strong enough to offer Pompey battle. Pompey was superbly encamped, with supplies flowing in by land and sea, while Caesar was short of everything at the start and desperately pinched before the end. His soldiers were reduced to digging up a local root, mixing it with milk, and eating that. Sometimes they baked it into a kind of bread, and they would run up to the enemy's outposts and throw the loaves over, shouting that as long as the earth produced roots like these, they would never give up the blockade of Pompey. Pompey did what he could to keep both the loaves and the words from reaching his men, who were already disheartened — terrified of the enemy's ferocity and toughness, as if they were fighting some breed of wild beast. There was constant skirmishing around Pompey's outworks, and Caesar got the better of all of it except once — one fight in which his men were routed so badly that he nearly lost his camp. Pompey's sortie swept everything before it. Not a man stood his ground; the trenches filled with the slain; men fell at their own ramparts and palisades, driven onto them in headlong flight. Caesar met the fugitives and tried to turn them around, and could not. When he grabbed at the standards, the bearers dropped them and ran — the enemy captured thirty-two of them. He himself barely escaped with his life. Seizing a big, powerful soldier who was running past, he ordered him to stand and face the enemy; and the man, out of his mind with panic, raised his sword to strike him — before Caesar's armor-bearer sliced off his arm. That day Caesar's cause was so far gone that when Pompey — whether from over-caution or plain bad luck — failed to deliver the finishing blow, and pulled back after driving the routed enemy inside their camp, Caesar said to his friends as he watched the withdrawal, "Today the victory belonged to the enemy — if they had had a general who knew how to win it." Then he went to his tent and lay down, and spent the most miserable night of his life, turning it all over and concluding that he had managed the war badly. With fertile country in front of him, and all the rich cities of Macedonia and Thessaly, he had failed to carry the war inland and had instead planted himself by the sea, where the enemy's fleet ruled — so that in truth he was less besieging his enemy with arms than being besieged himself by hunger. Wrestling with the difficulty and distress of his position, he broke camp, resolved to march against Scipio, who lay in Macedonia. Either he would draw Pompey after him into country where Pompey would have to fight without his seaborne supplies, or he would crush Scipio unaided.
The move set Pompey's whole army and officer corps on fire to chase Caesar, whom they took for a beaten man on the run. But Pompey was afraid to stake everything on a single battle. He was stocked and supplied for a long war, and he meant to let time grind down Caesar's army, which could not last. The best of Caesar's men had enormous experience and an irresistible courage in any engagement; but the endless marching, the shifting of camps, the assaults on fortifications, the long night watches, were wearing them out and breaking them down. They were getting old. Their bodies were less fit for labor, and their spirit was starting to sag as their strength failed. On top of that, an infectious disease, bred by their wretched diet, was said to be running through Caesar's army — and worst of all, he had neither money nor provisions, so that in a little while he must simply collapse on his own.
For all these reasons Pompey refused battle, and only one man thanked him for it: Cato, who rejoiced at the prospect of sparing the lives of fellow citizens. Cato had seen the bodies of the thousand men who fell on Caesar's side in the last battle, and had turned away, covered his face, and wept. Everyone else berated Pompey for ducking the fight and needled him with nicknames — Agamemnon, King of Kings — as if he were in no hurry to lay down his supreme command, and enjoyed the sight of so many commanders dancing attendance at his tent. Favonius, who liked to copy Cato's blunt way of speaking his mind, complained bitterly that thanks to Pompey's love of command they would not taste figs at Tusculum even this year. Afranius, just back from Spain and suspected — given how badly things had gone there — of having sold his army for a bribe, demanded to know why they were not fighting this merchant who bought up provinces. Goaded by talk like this, Pompey was driven, against his own judgment, into offering battle, and set off after Caesar. Caesar's march had been hard going. Nobody would supply him with provisions; since his recent defeat, his reputation had fallen everywhere. But once he took Gomphi, a town in Thessaly, he found not only food for his army but medicine too. The place was full of wine, and the men drank it freely; heated with it, romping and reveling along the march like one long festival of Bacchus, they shook off the disease entirely, their whole condition washed clean and made new.
The two armies came into the plain of Pharsalia and encamped facing each other. Pompey's thoughts swung back to their old track, away from fighting — all the more because of unlucky omens and a vision that came to him in a dream. But the men around him were so confident of success that Domitius, and Spinther, and Scipio quarreled, as if they had already won, over which of them would succeed Caesar as high priest; and many sent ahead to Rome to rent houses suitable for consuls and praetors, sure of stepping into those offices the moment the battle was over. The cavalry above all were spoiling for a fight. They were splendidly armed and superbly mounted, proud of their fine horses and of their own handsome persons — and of their numbers: five thousand of them against Caesar's one thousand. The infantry odds were just as lopsided: forty-five thousand on Pompey's side against twenty-two thousand.
Caesar called his soldiers together and told them that Corfinius was on the way with two legions, and that fifteen more cohorts under Calenus were posted at Megara and Athens. Did they want to wait for these to join them, he asked, or hazard the battle by themselves? They shouted back at him not to wait — to do whatever it took to bring on an engagement as soon as possible. When he sacrificed to the gods for the purification of his army, the first victim was no sooner killed than the augur told him that within three days matters would come to a decisive action. Caesar asked whether he saw anything in the entrails that promised a happy outcome. "That," said the priest, "you can answer better than I can. The gods announce a great change from the present state of things. If you think yourself well off now, expect worse fortune; if badly off, hope for better." The night before the battle, as Caesar walked the rounds about midnight, a light appeared in the sky, bright and flaming, and seemed to pass over his camp and fall into Pompey's. And when his soldiers came to relieve the watch at dawn, they could hear a panicked confusion in the enemy's lines. Even so, he did not expect to fight that day, and began breaking camp to march for Scotussa.
The tents were already down when his scouts rode up with word that the enemy was coming out to give battle. The news delighted him. He performed his devotions to the gods and drew up his army in three divisions. Domitius Calvinus took the center, Antony commanded the left wing, and Caesar himself the right, where he meant to fight at the head of the tenth legion. But when he saw the enemy's cavalry taking position opposite him — struck by their gleaming turnout and their sheer numbers — he quietly ordered six cohorts up from the rear of the army and posted them behind his right wing, with exact instructions for what to do when the enemy horse charged. On the other side, Pompey commanded his own right wing, Domitius the left, and Scipio, Pompey's father-in-law, the center. The whole weight of the cavalry was massed on the left, with one purpose: to swing around the enemy's right wing and rout the very part of the line where the general himself stood. No block of infantry, they reckoned, could be packed solid enough to take that shock; under the charge of so immense a force of horse, it must be broken and smashed to pieces. When both sides were ready to sound the signal, Pompey ordered his front ranks to stand their ground — to hold formation and quietly absorb the enemy's first attack until they came within javelin range. Here too Caesar finds fault with his generalship: Pompey did not understand that the first collision, delivered on the run, puts weight and force behind every blow and sets the men's spirits blazing, the roar of the whole mass fanning them to full heat. Caesar himself was just setting his lines in motion and advancing to the action when he noticed one of his captains, a steady and experienced soldier, urging his men to give their utmost. Caesar called him by name. "What are our hopes, Gaius Crassinius? What are our grounds for confidence?" Crassinius flung out his hand and shouted, "We shall conquer nobly, Caesar — and today, alive or dead, I will earn your praise." So he said, and he was the first man to run in upon the enemy, the hundred and twenty soldiers of his command at his back. He tore through the first rank and was still driving forward, cutting men down, when at last he was stopped by a sword-thrust that entered his mouth with such force that it came out at the back of his neck.
While the infantry ground against each other in the center, Pompey's cavalry rode up confidently on the flank, spreading their ranks wide to envelop Caesar's right wing. Before they could charge, Caesar's cohorts sprang out at them — and they did not hurl their javelins from a distance, or stab at thighs and legs as men usually do in close fighting. They aimed at the faces. Those were Caesar's orders. These young gentlemen, he reasoned, had seen little of battle or wounds; they wore their hair long, in the flower of their youth and the height of their good looks; and a blow like that they would dread twice over — the danger now, and the disfigurement forever. It worked exactly as he hoped. Far from standing up to the javelins, they could not even bear the sight of them. They twisted away and covered their faces to protect them; and once in disorder, they turned and fled — and most shamefully ruined everything. For the men who had beaten them wheeled at once around the flank of the infantry, fell on it from behind, and cut it to pieces. When Pompey, from the other wing, saw his cavalry scattered and flying, he was no longer himself. He no longer remembered that he was Pompey the Great. Like a man robbed of his senses by some god, he walked to his tent without a word and sat there, waiting to see how it would end, until the whole army was routed and the enemy was on the ramparts of the camp, fighting hand to hand with the men posted to defend it. Then at last he seemed to come back to himself, and saying — so it is reported — only these words, "What, into the camp too?" he took off his general's dress, put on clothes better suited to a fugitive, and stole away. What became of him afterward — how he took refuge in Egypt, and was murdered there — we tell in his own Life.
When Caesar came to look over Pompey's camp and saw some of his opponents lying dead on the ground and others still dying, he groaned and said, "They would have it so. They drove me to this. After winning so many wars, I — Gaius Caesar — would have stood condemned in their courts if I had dismissed my army." Pollio says Caesar spoke these words in Latin at the time, and that he himself later wrote them down in Greek; he adds that most of those killed in the taking of the camp were servants, and that no more than six thousand soldiers fell. Most of the infantry taken prisoner Caesar folded into his own legions, and he granted a free pardon to many distinguished men — among them Brutus, who would later kill him. Brutus did not appear right away when the battle was over, which is said to have thrown Caesar into great anxiety for him; and his pleasure was just as great when Brutus presented himself alive.
Many prodigies were said to have foretold this victory, but the most remarkable on record happened at Tralles. In the temple of Victory there stood a statue of Caesar. The ground it stood on was naturally hard and solid, and the stone paving on top of it harder still — yet a palm tree, they say, shot up beside the statue's pedestal. And at Padua, one Gaius Cornelius, a man with the reputation of a good augur — a fellow citizen and acquaintance of Livy the historian — happened to be taking the auguries on the very day the battle was fought. First, as Livy tells it, he marked the exact moment of the fight, announcing to those around him that just then the battle had begun and the men were engaging. When he looked a second time and read the signs, he leapt up as if inspired and cried out, "Caesar, you are victorious!" The bystanders were astonished; but he took the garland from his head and swore he would never wear it again until the outcome had proved his art true. Livy insists this really happened.
As a memorial of his victory, Caesar gave the Thessalians their freedom, and then went in pursuit of Pompey. When he reached Asia, he made the Cnidians a free people as a favor to Theopompus, the collector of fables, and cut the taxes of the whole province of Asia by a third. He came to Alexandria to find Pompey already murdered. When Theodotus presented him with the head, Caesar turned away and would not look at it; he took only the signet ring, and wept. Every one of Pompey's friends the king of Egypt had seized as they wandered the country, Caesar took under his protection and offered his own friendship. He wrote to his friends at Rome that the greatest and sweetest pleasure of his victory was this: that he could go on saving the lives of fellow citizens who had fought against him.
As for the war in Egypt, some say it was dangerous, inglorious, and entirely unnecessary — fought for no reason but his passion for Cleopatra. Others blame the king's ministers, above all the eunuch Pothinus, the power behind the throne, who had just had Pompey killed and Cleopatra banished, and was now secretly plotting Caesar's murder — which is why, from that time on, Caesar took to sitting up whole nights, under the pretense of drinking parties, to guard his own life. In the open, meanwhile, Pothinus was insufferable, insulting Caesar in everything he said and did. When Caesar's soldiers were issued moldy, foul grain, Pothinus told them to be content with it, since they were eating at another man's expense. He had the royal table set with wooden and earthenware dishes, claiming Caesar had carried off all the gold and silver plate against a supposed debt. In fact, the reigning king's father had owed Caesar seventeen and a half million; Caesar had earlier forgiven the king's children the greater part of it, but now demanded ten million to maintain his army. Pothinus advised him to go away for the present and attend to his great affairs elsewhere — he would receive his money later, with thanks. Caesar replied that he had no need of Egyptians as his advisers, and shortly afterward, in secret, he sent for Cleopatra from her exile.
She took a small boat and a single companion — Apollodorus the Sicilian — and came ashore near the palace at dusk. There was no way to get in unseen, until she hit on the idea of rolling herself up full-length inside a bed-sack; Apollodorus tied up the bedding, hoisted it onto his back, and carried it straight through the gates to Caesar's rooms. That piece of bold wit was what first captivated Caesar; the charm of her company did the rest. He arranged a reconciliation between Cleopatra and her brother, on the condition that she rule beside him as his colleague in the kingdom. A festival was held to celebrate the settlement, and at it Caesar's barber — a busy, listening fellow whose sheer timidity kept him poking his nose into everything — discovered that a plot was under way against Caesar, laid by Achillas, the general of the king's forces, and Pothinus the eunuch. The moment Caesar learned of it, he threw a guard around the banquet hall and had Pothinus killed. Achillas escaped to the army and raised a troublesome, dangerous war — no easy thing for Caesar to manage with his handful of soldiers against so powerful a city and so large an army. His first difficulty was water: the enemy had blocked the canals. The second came when they tried to cut him off from the sea. To head off that danger he set fire to his own ships, and the flames, after consuming the docks, spread onward and destroyed the great library. The third came in the fighting near the Pharos, when he leaped from the mole into a small boat to help his soldiers, who were in trouble. The Egyptians pressed in on him from every side, so he threw himself into the sea and swam clear only with great difficulty. This was the moment, the story goes, when he had a bundle of manuscripts in his hand and refused to let them go: though missiles rained down on him the whole way and he was forced again and again to duck his head under the water, he held the papers up dry in one hand and swam with the other, while his little boat sank behind him. At last, once the king had gone over to Achillas and his party, Caesar attacked and beat them. Many died in that battle, and the king himself was never seen again. Caesar left Cleopatra on the throne as queen of Egypt — soon afterward she bore him a son, whom the Alexandrians called Caesarion — and then set out for Syria.
From Syria he crossed into Asia, where he learned that Domitius had been beaten by Pharnaces, son of Mithridates, and had fled Pontus with a handful of men — and that Pharnaces, pressing his victory hungrily, had already made himself master of Bithynia and Cappadocia, had designs on Lesser Armenia besides, and was calling on all the kings and princes of the region to rise. Caesar marched against him at once with three legions, fought him near Zela, drove him out of Pontus, and destroyed his army entirely. Reporting the action to Amantius, a friend of his in Rome, he caught its whole speed and suddenness in three words: I came, I saw, I conquered. In Latin — veni, vidi, vici — the three words share the same clipped cadence, and the brevity could not be more fitting.
From there he crossed to Italy and reached Rome at the close of the year for which he had been chosen dictator a second time — though that office had never before lasted a whole year — and he was elected consul for the year to come. People spoke badly of him because, after mutinous soldiers killed two men of praetorian rank, Cosconius and Galba, he gave the mutineers nothing worse than the mild rebuke of addressing them as "citizens" instead of "fellow soldiers" — and then handed each man a thousand drachmas and a share of land in Italy besides. He was blamed, too, for the behavior of his lieutenants: Dolabella's extravagance, Amantius's greed, Antony's debauchery, and Corfinius, who pulled down Pompey's house and rebuilt it on the grounds that it was not magnificent enough. The Romans were disgusted by all of this. Caesar knew exactly what these men were, and disapproved of them — but for the sake of his own scheme of government he was forced to use the instruments that would serve him.
After the battle of Pharsalia, Cato and Scipio had fled to Africa, and there, with the help of King Juba, they assembled a considerable army. Caesar resolved to fight it. He crossed to Sicily around the winter solstice, and to knock every hope of delay out of his officers' heads he pitched his camp right on the beach; the moment he had a fair wind he put to sea with three thousand infantry and a few horsemen. Once he had landed them, he slipped back secretly, anxious about the larger part of his army — but he met those troops already at sea and brought the whole force into the same camp. There he learned that the enemy were leaning on an ancient oracle: the family of the Scipios would always be victorious in Africa. Now, there happened to be in his own army a man of the house of the Africani — an otherwise obscure and unimpressive fellow — whose name was Scipio Sallutio. This man Caesar put at the head of his troops, as though he were the general, in every one of the frequent battles he was compelled to fight. Whether he did it in mockery, to ridicule the enemy's Scipio, or in earnest, to steal the omen for his own side, is hard to say. And he was compelled to fight often, because he was desperately short of food for his men and forage for his horses — so short that he fed the horses on seaweed, rinsed thoroughly to take off the salt and mixed with a little grass to make it more palatable. The Numidians, numerous and superbly mounted, commanded the countryside wherever he went. One day Caesar's cavalry, having nothing to do, were amusing themselves watching an African man who danced and played the flute at the same time, marvelously well. They were so absorbed that they dismounted and handed their horses to some boys — and at that moment the enemy swept around them, killed some, and chased the rest headlong into their own camp. If Caesar himself, with Asinius Pollio, had not rushed to help and stopped the rout, the war would have ended right there. In another engagement, too, the enemy got the better of the fight, and Caesar, it is said, seized a fleeing standard-bearer by the neck, spun him around, and said, "Look — that is the way to the enemy."
Scipio, flushed with these early successes, decided to risk one decisive battle. Leaving Afranius and Juba in two separate camps not far off, he marched to Thapsus and began building a fortified camp above a lake, to serve as a center for operations and a refuge if things went wrong. While Scipio was busy with the work, Caesar moved with unbelievable speed. He made his way through thick woods and country everyone thought impassable, cut off one body of the enemy, and struck another head-on. Having routed them, he rode his opportunity and the current of his good fortune: at the first onset he carried Afranius's camp and sacked the camp of the Numidians, whose king, Juba, was glad to escape with his life. In a small part of a single day he had made himself master of three camps and killed fifty thousand of the enemy, at the cost of only fifty of his own men. That is one account of the battle. Others say Caesar was not in the action at all — that his old sickness, the epilepsy, took hold of him just as he was drawing up his army. He felt it coming, and before it could scramble his senses completely — he was already beginning to shake under it — he had himself carried into a nearby fort and rested there. Of the men of consular and praetorian rank captured after the battle, Caesar put several to death; others saved him the trouble by killing themselves.
Cato had undertaken the defense of Utica, and for that reason was not in the battle. Caesar wanted badly to take him alive, and hurried toward the city — and when word came that Cato had killed himself, he was visibly shaken, though exactly why is not agreed. What he certainly said was this: "Cato, I grudge you your death, as you grudged me the honor of saving your life." Yet the treatise he wrote against Cato after his death hardly suggests kindness, or any inclination to be reconciled. How likely is it that he would have spared the living man when he poured such bitterness on the dead one's memory? Then again, from his clemency to Cicero, to Brutus, and to many others who had fought against him, people have concluded that the book was written not so much out of hatred of Cato as in Caesar's own defense. It came about like this. Cicero had written a tribute to Cato and given it his name; and a composition by so great a master, on so excellent a subject, was bound to end up in everyone's hands. That stung Caesar, who regarded praise of his dead enemy as nothing less than an indictment of himself. So he wrote his Anti-Cato, a collection of everything that could be said against the man. The two works — like Cato and Caesar themselves — have each their own admirers to this day.
On his return to Rome, Caesar did not fail to stand before the people and deliver a magnificent account of his victory: he had subdued a country, he told them, that would supply the public every year with two hundred thousand Attic bushels of grain and three million pounds of olive oil. He then celebrated three triumphs — for Egypt, for Pontus, and for Africa — the last of them, officially, for the victory over King Juba, not over Scipio. Juba's little son was carried in that triumph, and he proved the luckiest captive who ever walked in one: from a barbarian Numidian prince, he went on to earn a place among the most learned historians of Greece. After the triumphs, Caesar distributed rewards to his soldiers and treated the people to feasts and shows. He banqueted the entire population at a single sitting, at twenty-two thousand dining couches, and put on displays of gladiators and mock naval battles in honor, as he said, of his daughter Julia — though she had been dead for years. When the shows were over, a count was taken of the people. Where there had been three hundred and twenty thousand, there were now one hundred and fifty thousand. So great was the wound the civil war had cut into Rome alone — to say nothing of what the rest of Italy and the provinces had suffered.
He was now chosen consul a fourth time, and went into Spain against Pompey's sons. They were young, but they had gathered a very large army and showed they had the courage and the skill to command it, and they put Caesar in extreme danger. The great battle came near the town of Munda. Caesar, seeing his men hard pressed and putting up a feeble resistance, ran through the ranks shouting at his soldiers, asking whether they were not ashamed to hand him over to boys. With enormous difficulty, and the best effort he had in him, he forced the enemy back, killing thirty thousand of them — though at the cost of a thousand of his own best men. Coming back from the fight, he told his friends that he had often fought for victory, but this was the first time he had ever fought for his life. He won the battle on the feast of Bacchus, the very day on which, four years earlier, Pompey had set out for the war. The younger of Pompey's sons escaped; a few days after the battle, Didius brought Caesar the head of the elder. This was the last war he ever fought — and the triumph he celebrated for it displeased the Romans beyond anything he had done. This time he had not defeated foreign generals or barbarian kings; he had destroyed the children and the family of one of the greatest men Rome had produced, however unfortunate. It did not look well to lead a parade celebrating his country's calamities — to rejoice in things whose only possible excuse, before gods or men, was that they had been absolutely necessary. And until then he had never sent so much as a letter or a messenger to announce a victory over his fellow citizens; he had seemed ashamed of such actions, not eager for credit.
Nevertheless the Romans bowed to his fortune and accepted the bit, hoping that one-man rule would give them room to breathe after so many civil wars and calamities: they made him dictator for life. This was tyranny openly admitted — his power was now not only absolute but permanent. Cicero made the first proposals in the senate for conferring honors on him, and those at least might be said to stay within the limits of ordinary human moderation. But others competed to outdo one another, and piled the honors so extravagantly high that they made Caesar odious even to mild and indifferent men, by the sheer pretension and excess of the titles they decreed him. His enemies are thought to have had a hand in this along with his flatterers: it gave them ammunition against him, a ready justification for whatever move they might make — for now that the civil wars were over, there was nothing else to charge him with. And in fairness, the senate had good reason to decree a temple to Clemency in thanks for the mildness with which he used his victory. He not only pardoned many of the men who had fought against him — to some he gave honors and offices, notably Brutus and Cassius, who both became praetors. Pompey's statues had been thrown down; Caesar set them up again, which drew from Cicero the remark that by raising Pompey's statues, Caesar had fixed his own in place. When his friends urged him to keep a bodyguard, and several volunteered for the duty, he refused to hear of it: better to suffer death once, he said, than to live always in fear of it. The affection of the people, he believed, was the best and surest guard a man could have; so he courted them again with public feasts and general distributions of grain, and to satisfy his army he sent out colonies to several places. The most remarkable were Carthage and Corinth — two cities that had been destroyed at the same time, and now, together, were rebuilt and repeopled.
As for the men of high rank, he promised some of them future consulships and praetorships, consoled others with different offices and honors, and gave everyone hope of his favor by the eagerness he showed to rule with the general good will. When the consul Maximus died with a single day of his term remaining, Caesar made Caninius Revilius consul for that one day. Crowds set off to pay the customary compliments and attentions to the new consul, and Cicero said, "Let us hurry — or the man will be out of office before we get there."
Caesar was born to do great things, and his passion was for honor. The many brilliant exploits behind him did not incline him to sit still and enjoy the fruit of his labors; they were fuel and provocation instead, kindling ideas of still greater actions and an appetite for fresh glory, as though the present supply were all used up. The feeling was really a kind of contest with himself, as if with a rival: a struggle to make his future outdo his past. His plan was to make war on the Parthians; once they were subdued, to pass through Hyrcania and march along the Caspian Sea to the Caucasus; then to swing around the Black Sea into Scythia, overrun the countries bordering Germany and then Germany itself, and return through Gaul to Italy — closing the circle of his intended empire and bounding it on every side by the ocean. While preparations for this expedition went forward, he proposed to cut a canal through the isthmus at Corinth, and appointed Anienus to superintend the work. He planned to divert the Tiber into a deep channel running straight from Rome to Circeii and into the sea near Tarracina, giving the merchants who traded to Rome a safe and easy passage. Beyond that, he intended to drain the marshes at Pomentium and Setia, reclaiming enough ground from the water to employ many thousands of men in farming; to raise great seawalls on the shore nearest Rome, to keep the sea from breaking in on the land; to clear the coast at Ostia of the hidden rocks and shoals that made it unsafe for shipping; and to build ports and harbors fit to receive the great number of vessels that would crowd into them.
All these designs stayed on paper. But his reform of the calendar, undertaken to fix the irregularity in the reckoning of time, was not only worked out with great scientific ingenuity but carried through to completion — and it proved enormously useful. From ancient times the Romans had lacked any reliable rule for keeping the cycle of their months in step with the course of the year, so their festivals and days of sacrifice drifted little by little until they were finally being kept in seasons opposite to the ones intended. Even in Caesar's day the people had no way of computing the solar year at all; only the priests could say what time it was, and they, at their own pleasure and without any notice, would slip in the extra month they called Mercedonius. Numa had been the first to insert that month, but his expedient was a poor patch, entirely inadequate to correct the errors that piled up in the annual cycles — as we have shown in his Life. Caesar called in the best philosophers and mathematicians of his time to settle the question, and out of the systems laid before him he built a new and more exact method of correcting the calendar — the one the Romans use to this day, and it serves them better than any other nation in avoiding the errors of the cycles. Yet even this gave offense to the men who looked on his position with an evil eye and felt the weight of his power. When someone in Cicero's company happened to remark that the constellation Lyra would rise the next morning, the orator answered, "Yes — by edict," as if even the stars now rose on compulsion.
But what brought down on him the most open and deadly hatred was his desire to be king. It gave the common people their first real grievance against him, and it handed the men who had long been his secret enemies their most plausible excuse. Those who wanted to procure him the title spread a story that, according to the Sibylline books, the Romans could conquer the Parthians only when they fought under the command of a king — and not before. And one day, as Caesar was coming down from Alba to Rome, some in the crowd were bold enough to hail him as king. Seeing that the people took it badly, he put on an air of being offended himself, and said his name was Caesar, not King. A general silence followed, and he passed on looking far from pleased. Another time, the senate voted him some extravagant honors, and the consuls and praetors came to deliver the message — the whole body of the senate attending them — while he sat on the rostra. He did not rise. He received them as though they were private citizens, and remarked that his honors wanted trimming back rather than adding to. This offended not only the senate but the common people too, who felt that an insult to the senate fell on the whole republic; and everyone who could decently leave walked away, deeply upset. Caesar, realizing the false step he had made, went straight home, bared his throat, and told his friends he was ready to offer it to anyone who wanted to strike. Later he made his illness the excuse for staying seated: those who suffer from it, he said, lose command of their senses if they talk long on their feet — they grow dizzy, fall into convulsions, and lose their reason entirely. But that was not the truth. He had been perfectly willing to rise for the senate, and was held back, the story goes, by Cornelius Balbus — a friend, or rather a flatterer — who said, "Will you not remember that you are Caesar, and claim the honor that is owed to your merit?"
Then came his affront to the tribunes, and fresh fuel for the resentment. The feast of the Lupercalia was being celebrated — a festival that at its founding belonged, some writers say, to the shepherds, with some connection to the Arcadian Lycaea. Many young noblemen and magistrates run through the city with their upper garments off, striking everyone they meet with strips of hide, all in sport; and many women, even of the highest rank, deliberately put themselves in the way and hold out their hands to the lash, the way schoolboys do to a master — believing that it grants an easy delivery to those who are pregnant, and children to those who are barren. Caesar, dressed in his triumphal robe, seated himself in a golden chair at the rostra to watch the ceremony. Antony, as consul, was one of the runners, and when he came into the forum the crowd parted for him. He went up to Caesar holding out a diadem — the band of kingship — wreathed with laurel. At this there was a shout, but a thin one, raised by the few men planted in the crowd for the purpose; and when Caesar pushed the diadem away, the whole forum applauded. Antony offered it a second time, and again only a few cheered; Caesar refused a second time, and again everyone applauded. The experiment had plainly failed. Caesar rose and ordered the crown carried up to the Capitol. But afterward his statues were found wearing royal diadems on their heads. Two tribunes of the people, Flavius and Marullus, went and tore the diadems off, then hunted down the men who had first hailed Caesar as king and marched them to prison. The people followed the two tribunes with cheers, calling them by the name of Brutus — because it was Brutus, long ago, who had ended the succession of kings and transferred the power once lodged in one man into the hands of the senate and the people. Caesar was stung. He stripped Marullus and Flavius of their office, and in pressing his charges against them he ridiculed the people into the bargain, calling the men over and over "Bruti" — brutes — and "Cumaeans," a byword for dullness.
All this talk turned people's thoughts toward Marcus Brutus. On his father's side he was believed to descend from the first Brutus, the man who had driven out the kings; on his mother's side he came from the Servilii, another noble house; and he was Cato's nephew and son-in-law besides. But the honors and kindnesses Caesar had heaped on him had dulled whatever appetite he might have had for overthrowing the new monarchy himself. Caesar had not only pardoned him after Pompey's defeat at Pharsalia, and pardoned many of his friends at his request — he trusted him, personally and particularly. Brutus held the most honorable praetorship of the year, and was marked out for the consulship four years later, chosen over Cassius, his rival for the post. When the choice was being weighed, Caesar is said to have remarked that Cassius had the stronger claim — but he could not pass over Brutus. Later, when the conspiracy was already in motion and people came to him with accusations against Brutus, he refused to listen. Laying a hand on his own body, he told the informers, "Brutus will wait for this skin of mine" — meaning that Brutus deserved power for his virtue, but would never be base and ungrateful to get it. Meanwhile, the people who wanted a change, and who looked on Brutus as the only man — or at least the likeliest man — to bring it about, did not dare speak to him directly. Instead they came at night and left notes on the tribunal chair where he sat to hear cases: "You are asleep, Brutus." "You are no longer Brutus." When Cassius saw Brutus's ambition beginning to stir at this, he pressed him harder than before. Cassius had a private grudge of his own against Caesar, for reasons we have mentioned in the Life of Brutus. And Caesar suspected him too. He once said to his friends, "What do you think Cassius is aiming at? I don't like him — he looks so pale." Another time, when he was told that Antony and Dolabella were plotting against him, he said it was not the fat, luxurious men he feared, but the pale, lean ones — meaning Cassius and Brutus.
Fate, it seems, is not so much unexpected as unavoidable. Strange signs and apparitions were reported in the days before the event. Lights in the sky, crashing noises in the night, wild birds settling in the forum — perhaps those are not worth much notice in a case as great as this. But Strabo the philosopher records that crowds of men were seen fighting one another, all of them seemingly ablaze; and that flame streamed from the hand of a soldier's servant, so that the onlookers were sure he was burning — yet when it passed, he was unhurt. When Caesar himself offered sacrifice, the victim's heart was missing — a very bad omen, since no living creature can exist without a heart. And many writers tell us that a soothsayer had given him warning of grave danger to come: "Beware the Ides of March." When the day arrived and Caesar was on his way to the senate, he met the soothsayer and greeted him with a joke: "The Ides of March have come." "Yes," the man answered calmly, "they have come — but they have not gone." The evening before the assassination, Caesar dined with Marcus Lepidus, and as he reclined at the table signing letters, as his habit was, the conversation turned to the question of which kind of death is best. Before anyone else could speak, Caesar answered, "A sudden one."
That night, as he lay in bed with his wife, every door and window in the house flew open at once. Startled by the noise and by the light that broke into the room, he sat up, and by the moonlight he could see Calpurnia fast asleep — but murmuring broken words and groaning in her dreams. She was dreaming, in fact, that she was weeping over Caesar, holding his butchered body in her arms. Others say her dream was different: that the ornamental gable the senate had voted to raise on Caesar's house as a mark of grandeur — Livy tells us this — was tumbling down, and that this was what made her weep and cry out. Either way, when morning came she begged Caesar not to go out if he could possibly avoid it, and to postpone the senate to another day. If he thought nothing of her dreams, she begged him at least to consult his fate by sacrifices and every other kind of divination. And Caesar himself, it seems, was not free of suspicion and fear. He had never before known Calpurnia to show any womanish superstition, and here she was in real terror. When the priests reported that they had killed several victims and found every one of them inauspicious, he made up his mind to send Antony to dismiss the senate.
At this critical moment Decimus Brutus, surnamed Albinus — a man Caesar trusted so completely that he had named him his second heir, and who was nevertheless in the conspiracy with the other Brutus and with Cassius — grew afraid that if Caesar put the senate off to another day, the plot might leak out. So he scoffed at the diviners and told Caesar he was handing the senate a perfect excuse to say he had insulted them. They had assembled at his summons; they were ready to vote unanimously that he be declared king of all the provinces outside Italy, free to wear a diadem anywhere by land or sea except in Italy itself. If someone were sent now to tell them to go home and come back whenever Calpurnia happened to have better dreams, what would his enemies say? Who would listen patiently while his friends tried to argue that his rule was not arbitrary and tyrannical? And if he was truly determined to treat the day as unlucky, then it was more gracious to go in person and adjourn the senate himself. With these words Brutus took Caesar by the hand and led him out. He had not gone far from the door when another man's servant tried to reach him, but could not get through the crowd pressing around him. So the servant forced his way into the house and put himself in Calpurnia's hands, begging her to keep him safe until Caesar came home — he had matters of great importance to tell him.
Artemidorus, a Cnidian who taught Greek logic, and who through that profession had come to know Brutus and his circle well enough to learn the secret, brought Caesar a small written scroll containing the essentials of what he had to reveal. He had noticed that Caesar handed every paper he received straight to the attendants around him; so he pushed in as close as he could and said, "Read this one, Caesar — alone, and quickly. It contains matters of great importance that concern you personally." Caesar took it and tried several times to read it, but was blocked at every attempt by the crush of people who came to speak with him. It was the one paper he kept in his own hand, and he was still holding it when he entered the senate. Some say it was another man who gave Caesar this note, and that Artemidorus never got near him at all — the crowd kept him off the whole way.
All of that, you might say, could have happened by chance. But the place appointed for the scene of the murder — the hall where the senate met that day — held a statue of Pompey, and was one of the buildings Pompey himself had raised and dedicated, along with his theater, for public use. It is hard not to see some higher power guiding the action and calling it to that particular spot. Cassius, just before the act, is said to have turned toward Pompey's statue and silently asked for its help — Cassius, who inclined to the doctrines of Epicurus, which leave no room for such prayers. But the occasion, and the danger of the instant, carried him past all his reasoning and filled him with something like inspiration. As for Antony, who was loyal to Caesar and a physically powerful man, Decimus Brutus Albinus kept him outside the hall, detaining him with a long conversation invented for the purpose.
When Caesar entered, the senate rose to its feet in respect. Some of Brutus's confederates gathered around his chair and stood behind it; others came forward to meet him, pretending to add their voices to the petition of Tillius Cimber on behalf of his exiled brother, and they trailed Caesar with their pleas all the way to his seat. He sat down and refused the request, and when they kept pressing, he began to scold them one by one for their persistence — at which Tillius seized his toga with both hands and yanked it down from his neck. That was the signal. Casca struck the first blow, a cut to the neck, neither deep nor dangerous — the stroke of a man badly shaken, no doubt, at the opening of so enormous a piece of daring. Caesar spun around, seized the dagger, and held on. In the same instant both men cried out — Caesar, in Latin, "Casca, you villain, what are you doing?" and Casca, in Greek, to his brother: "Brother, help!"
At that first assault, the senators who knew nothing of the plot were so stunned, so frozen with horror at what they were watching, that they could neither run nor come to Caesar's aid — they could not even make a sound. But the men who had come prepared closed around him on every side, naked daggers in their hands. Whichever way he turned he met a blow. The blades were leveled at his face and his eyes; he was hemmed in like a wild animal in the hunters' nets. For they had agreed that every one of them would strike him, every one would flesh his blade in the blood — which is why even Brutus gave him one thrust, in the groin. Some say Caesar fought all the rest of them, twisting his body away from the blows and shouting for help; but when he saw Brutus's sword drawn, he pulled his toga over his face and gave up the struggle. He fell — whether by chance, or pushed that way by his killers — against the pedestal of Pompey's statue, which was soaked with his blood. So Pompey himself seemed to preside over the vengeance taken on his old enemy, who now lay at his feet, breathing out his life through his wounds. He had received, they say, twenty-three. And many of the conspirators wounded one another, so many blows aimed at a single body.
When Caesar was dead, Brutus stepped forward to give the reasons for what they had done, but the senate would not hear him. The senators bolted for the doors, and their flight filled the city with such alarm and confusion that some men barred up their houses while others abandoned their counters and shops. Everyone was running — some toward the place, to see the terrible sight; others away from it, having seen. Antony and Lepidus, Caesar's most faithful friends, slipped off quietly and hid in the houses of friends. But Brutus and his followers, still hot from the deed itself, marched in a body from the senate house up to the Capitol with drawn swords — not like men trying to escape, but with an air of confidence and assurance — calling on the people as they went to take back their liberty, and inviting the distinguished men they met to join them. And some did join the procession and walk up with them, as if they too had been in the conspiracy and could claim a share of the glory — Gaius Octavius, for instance, and Lentulus Spinther. Their vanity cost them dearly afterward: Antony and the young Octavian put them to death, and they lost the honor they had claimed along with their lives, since no one ever believed they had actually been involved. Even the men who punished them were not avenging the deed — they were punishing the wish. The next day Brutus and the rest came down from the Capitol, and Brutus made a speech to the people, who listened without showing either pleasure or resentment. Their silence said plainly enough that they pitied Caesar and respected Brutus. The senate passed a general amnesty for what was past and set about reconciling all parties. It decreed that Caesar should be worshipped as a god, and that nothing he had enacted while in power, down to the smallest measure, should be revoked; at the same time it gave Brutus and his followers provinces and other important posts. So everyone now assumed that matters were settled, and settled as happily as they could possibly be.
But then Caesar's will was opened, and it was found that he had left a generous legacy to every single Roman citizen. And then his body was carried through the forum, mangled with wounds. After that the crowd could no longer be kept within any bounds of order. They heaped up benches, railings, and tables into a pyre, laid the corpse on it, and burned it where it stood. Then, snatching burning brands from the pile, some ran to set fire to the conspirators' houses, while others ranged up and down the city hunting for the men themselves, to tear them to pieces. They found not one of them; the conspirators had taken good care to secure themselves.
One of Caesar's friends, a man named Cinna, happened to have a strange dream the night before. He dreamed that Caesar invited him to dinner, and that when he declined, Caesar took him by the hand and pulled him along, forcing him though he hung back. Now, hearing that Caesar's body was burning in the forum, Cinna got up and went there to pay his respects, though the dream gave him misgivings and he was running a fever. Someone in the crowd saw him and asked a neighbor who he was; the name, once learned, was passed from mouth to mouth; and in a moment it was taken for certain that this was one of Caesar's murderers — for there was in fact a conspirator named Cinna, another man entirely. Believing this was he, the mob seized him and tore him limb from limb on the spot.
That, more than anything, frightened Brutus and Cassius, and within a few days they withdrew from the city. What they afterward did and suffered, and how they died, is told in the Life of Brutus. Caesar died in his fifty-sixth year, having outlived Pompey by little more than four. The empire and the power he had chased his whole life through so much danger he did at last achieve, with enormous difficulty — and reaped from it nothing but the name itself, and a glory that drew envy from his fellow citizens. But the great genius that had watched over him all his life remained, even after his death, as the avenger of his murder, pursuing the men who had a hand in it across every sea and every land, letting not one escape — reaching every man who had either joined in the killing or in any way encouraged the plot.
Of the merely human coincidences, the most remarkable was the one that befell Cassius: defeated at Philippi, he killed himself with the same dagger he had used against Caesar. Of the supernatural signs, the greatest were the great comet, which blazed bright for seven nights after Caesar's death and then disappeared, and the dimming of the sun, whose disk stayed pale and dull for that whole year, rising without its usual radiance and giving only a weak and feeble heat. The air hung damp and heavy for want of stronger rays to clear it, and the fruits of that year never properly ripened — they withered and dropped half-formed for lack of warmth. But above all, the phantom that appeared to Brutus showed that the murder was not pleasing to the gods. The story goes like this.
Brutus was about to take his army across from Abydos to the mainland on the other side. The night before, he lay in his tent as usual — not asleep, but thinking over his situation and what might be coming. Of all the men who have ever commanded armies, they say, he needed sleep the least, with the greatest natural capacity for staying awake and working without rest. He thought he heard a noise at the door of the tent, and looking that way by the light of his lamp, which was almost out, he saw a terrifying figure — shaped like a man, but unnaturally tall, with a grim and forbidding face. He was frightened at first; but when the thing neither did nor said anything, only stood silently at his bedside, he asked who it was. The specter answered, "I am your evil genius, Brutus. You will see me at Philippi." And Brutus answered steadily, "Then I will see you," and the apparition vanished at once. When the time came, he drew up his army at Philippi against Antony and Octavian, and in the first battle he won the day, routing the enemy in front of him and plundering Octavian's camp. The night before the second battle, the same phantom came to him again. It said nothing this time; but Brutus understood that his hour had arrived, and threw himself into the thickest danger of the fighting. Yet he did not die in the battle. When he saw his men beaten, he climbed to the top of a rock, set his naked sword against his breast — helped, they say, by a friend who drove the thrust home — and so met his death.
The Cato family first became famous through this Cato's great-grandfather — the elder Cato, whose virtue won him such standing and authority among the Romans that I have told his story in a life of its own.
Our Cato lost both his parents and was left an orphan, along with his brother Caepio and his sister Porcia. He also had a half-sister on his mother's side, Servilia. All of these children lived together and were raised in the house of Livius Drusus, their uncle on their mother's side, who at that time carried real weight in the government. He was a powerful speaker, a man of exceptional self-control, and in dignity second to no Roman alive.
They say that even as a small child, Cato showed — in the way he spoke, in the look on his face, even in his games — a nature that would not bend. Nothing swayed him; he was steady in everything. Once he set himself a purpose, he pushed through to the end with a determination far beyond his years. He was gruff and cold toward anyone who flattered him, and even more immovable toward anyone who threatened him. It was hard to make him laugh; his face rarely relaxed even into a smile. He was not quickly or easily provoked to anger — but once his anger was up, it was just as hard to bring it down again.
When he began his lessons, he proved a dull student, slow to take things in — but whatever he did take in, his memory held with a remarkable grip. And this, in fact, is generally how nature works. Quick, brilliant minds recall things readily, but those who learn with the most pain and difficulty remember best; everything new they learn is, so to speak, burned and branded into their minds. Cato's natural stubbornness, his resistance to being persuaded, probably also made him harder to teach. For to learn is to submit — to let something be done to you — and persuasion works fastest on those with the least strength to resist it. That is why the young are more easily persuaded than the old, and the sick more easily than the healthy. In short, wherever there is the least doubt and resistance standing in the way, a new impression settles in most easily. Still, they say Cato was very obedient to his tutor and would do whatever he was told — but he would also ask the reason, and want to know the why of everything. His teacher, to be fair, was a cultivated man, more inclined to explain than to beat his students. His name was Sarpedon.
While Cato was still a child, Rome's Italian allies were petitioning to be made full Roman citizens. One of their delegates, Pompaedius Silo, a brave soldier and a man of great reputation, was a friend of Drusus and stayed at his house for several days. In that time he became familiar with the children. "Well," he said to them, "will you ask your uncle to help us in our cause?" Caepio smiled and agreed, but Cato said nothing at all — he just stared at the strangers, hard and fierce. So Pompaedius pressed him: "And you, young sir — what do you say? Won't you plead with your uncle for us, like your brother?" Cato still gave no answer, and his silence and his expression seemed to refuse the whole petition. So Pompaedius snatched him up and held him out the window, as if he meant to drop him, and told him to consent or down he would go. He put on a harsher voice, dangled the boy's body out over the drop, and shook him — more than once. Cato endured all of it, unmoved and unafraid, until at last Pompaedius set him down and murmured to his friend, "What a blessing for Italy that he is only a child. If he were a man, I don't believe we would win a single vote among the people."
Another time, a relative celebrating his birthday invited Cato and some other children to dinner. The children went off to play in another part of the house, older and younger together, and their game was to act out trials before the judges — accusing one another and hauling the convicted off to prison. In the middle of this, a very beautiful young boy was bound and dragged off to "prison" by an older one, and he cried out to Cato. The moment Cato saw what was happening, he ran to the door, shoved aside the boys standing guard, pulled the child out, and marched home in a fury, with several of his companions trailing after him.
In time Cato grew so admired among the young that when Sulla decided to stage the sacred equestrian game called Troy — a ceremonial cavalry exercise for well-born boys — he gathered the youth of good families and appointed two leaders over them. One of the two the boys accepted for his mother's sake, since he was the son of Metella, Sulla's wife. But the other — Sextus, Pompey's nephew — they flatly refused. They would not follow him or drill under him. When Sulla asked whom they wanted instead, they all shouted, "Cato!" — and Sextus willingly gave up the honor to him, as the worthier of the two.
Sulla, an old friend of their family, would send for Cato and his brother from time to time, to see them and talk with them — a favor he showed to very few once he had seized his great power. Sarpedon, alert to the advantage of this — for his students' honor and for their safety — often brought Cato to pay his respects at Sulla's house. And that house, in those days, crowded with people being dragged in and tortured, looked like nothing so much as a place of execution. Cato was then in his fourteenth year. Watching the heads of reportedly distinguished men being carried in, and noticing the stifled groans of those standing by, he asked his tutor, "Why does nobody kill this man?" "Because, child," said Sarpedon, "they fear him even more than they hate him." "Then why," Cato answered, "didn't you give me a sword, so that I could stab him and free my country from this slavery?" When Sarpedon heard that — and saw the boy's face swelling with anger and resolve — he watched him closely from then on, afraid he might attempt something desperate.
While Cato was still very young, some people asked him whom he loved best. "My brother," he answered. And whom next? "My brother," again. And the third time the same, until they gave up asking. As he grew older, this love for his brother only grew stronger. By the time he was about twenty, he never ate supper, never left town, never went into the forum without Caepio. But when his brother took to using expensive oils and perfumes, Cato refused them; in all his habits he was strict and austere. So when Caepio was praised for his moderation and self-restraint, he would admit that yes, he might count as moderate — compared with most men. "But," he said, "when I compare myself with Cato, I find I'm hardly any different from Sippius" — naming a man notorious at the time for his soft and luxurious living.
When Cato was made a priest of Apollo, he moved to a house of his own, took his share of the family inheritance — a hundred and twenty talents — and began to live even more simply than before. He became close to Antipater of Tyre, the Stoic philosopher, and devoted himself above all to the study of ethics and politics. He pursued every virtue as if driven by a kind of inspiration, but the one that seized his devotion most of all was justice — the rigid, unbending kind, the kind that cannot be worked on by favors or by pity. He also trained himself in the art of public speaking and debate, reasoning that political philosophy, like a great city, ought to keep a fighting force on hand for its defense. But he would never practice his exercises in front of company, and no one ever heard him declaim. When someone told him that people blamed him for his silence, he replied, "As long as they don't blame my life. I will begin to speak when I have something to say that is better said than left unsaid."
The great Porcian Hall, as it was called, had been built and dedicated to public use by the old Cato during his term as aedile. The tribunes of the people conducted their business there, and because one of the pillars seemed to be in the way of their seats, they debated whether to move it elsewhere or remove it altogether. This was the occasion that first drew Cato — very much against his will — into the forum. He opposed the tribunes' demand, and in doing so gave a first display of both his courage and his power as a speaker, which won him great admiration. There was nothing youthful or polished about his speech; it was direct, packed with substance, and rough. And yet there was a certain grace in his rough statements that held people's attention, and the speaker's character, showing through everything he said, gave his severe language something that people found naturally pleasing and interesting. His voice was full and carrying, strong enough to reach that whole crowd, and its stamina was simply inexhaustible — he could often speak an entire day and never stop.
Once he had won this case, he went back to his studies and his quiet life. He hardened his body with labor and strenuous exercise. He trained himself to go bareheaded in the hottest weather and the coldest, and to travel on foot in every season. When he journeyed with friends who rode on horseback while he walked, he would drop back and move up along the line, joining first one and then another to talk with them on the road. In sickness, his patience in enduring an illness — and the strict self-denial he used to cure it — were remarkable. When he had a fever, he would stay alone and let no one see him until he began to recover and knew the attack had passed. At supper, when the dice were thrown for choice of portions and he lost, and the company offered him his pick anyway, he declined — he would not, as he put it, argue with the ruling of Venus. At first he was in the habit of drinking a single cup after supper and then leaving; but over time he came to drink more, so much so that he would often sit over the wine until morning. His friends explained this by saying that public business and affairs of state took up his whole day, and that Cato, hungry for knowledge, liked to spend his nights over wine in the company of philosophers. So when a certain Memmius remarked in public that Cato spent whole nights drinking, Cicero shot back, "You should add that he spends whole days gambling."
Cato, in general, considered the customs and manners of his era so corrupt, and so badly in need of reform, that he thought it necessary to go against the ordinary way of the world in many things — deliberately. Seeing that the lightest, brightest purple was then the height of fashion, he always wore the shade nearest to black. He would often go out after his morning meal with no shoes and no tunic. He was not fishing for attention with these oddities. He was training himself to be ashamed only of what truly deserves shame, and to shrug off every other kind of disgrace.
When the estate of a cousin — another Cato — fell to him, worth a hundred talents, he turned all of it into ready cash and kept it on hand for any friend who found himself in need, lending it out without interest. For some of them, he even allowed his own land and slaves to be pledged to the public treasury as security.
When he judged himself old enough to marry — having never yet been with any woman — he was engaged to Lepida. She had previously been engaged to Metellus Scipio, but Scipio had backed out, the contract had been dissolved, and she was free. Yet afterward Scipio changed his mind, did everything he could to win her back before Cato's marriage could take place — and succeeded. Cato was furious. At first he resolved to take the matter to court, but his friends talked him out of it. Still, so hot was his young blood that he wrote a stream of iambic verses against Scipio, in the biting, sarcastic style of Archilochus — though without that poet's license and vulgarity. After this he married Atilia, the daughter of Soranus. She was the first woman he ever knew — the first, but not the only one. In that he was less fortunate than Laelius, the friend of Scipio Africanus, who through the whole course of a very long life knew only the one woman he wed in his first and only marriage.
In the slave war — the one named for Spartacus, its ringleader — Gellius held the command, and Cato went along as a volunteer for the sake of his brother Caepio, who was serving as a tribune in the army. The general's incompetence gave Cato no real opening to show his zeal or prove his courage. But amid all the corruption and disorder of that army, he showed such devotion to discipline, such bravery when the moment called for it, and such steady good judgment in everything, that it seemed clear he was in no way inferior to the old Cato. Gellius offered him substantial rewards and would have voted him the first honors; Cato refused them all, saying he had done nothing to deserve them. Which made people think him a strange, eccentric character.
There was, moreover, a law that candidates standing for office could not use prompters in their campaigns — hired men who whispered them the names of the citizens they greeted. When Cato ran for military tribune, he was the only candidate who obeyed it. He took great pains to learn, from his own memory, how to greet the voters he had to address and call each of them by name. Yet even the people who praised him for this could not do it without a touch of envy and resentment — for the more they reflected on how fine the thing was, the more it stung them how hard it would be to do the same.
Elected military tribune, he was sent to Macedon to join Rubrius, the general there. The story goes that his wife was distressed and in tears at his leaving, and Munatius, one of Cato's friends, said to her, "Don't worry, Atilia — I promise to watch over him for you." "By all means," said Cato. And after they had traveled one day's journey together, he turned to Munatius as soon as they had finished supper. "Now," he said, "so that you're sure to keep your promise to Atilia, you must not leave me day or night." From then on he ordered two beds made up in his own chamber so that Munatius would sleep there — and so it continued, Cato making a running joke of it: it was he who kept watch over Munatius. He traveled with fifteen slaves, two freedmen, and four friends. They rode on horseback; Cato always went on foot — yet he kept pace beside them, talking with each in turn as they went.
When he reached the army, which consisted of several legions, the general gave him command of one. Cato considered it a small thing, hardly worthy of a commander, to put his own personal bravery on display; what he resolved to do was make his soldiers, as far as he could, like himself. He did not soften the fear his office carried, but he joined reason to his authority. He persuaded and instructed every man individually, and handed out rewards and punishments strictly by what each deserved. In the end his men were so well disciplined that it was hard to say whether they were more peaceable or more warlike, more brave or more just. They were formidable to their enemies and courteous to their allies, afraid to do wrong and eager to earn honor. And Cato himself won, in the fullest measure, exactly what he had least set out to seek — glory and a great name. He was highly esteemed by everyone and completely beloved by his soldiers. Whatever he ordered done, he took part in doing himself. In his dress, his food, and his manner of traveling, he was more like a common soldier than an officer — but in character, in high purpose, and in wisdom, he towered over everyone who carried the names and titles of commander. And so, without knowing it, he made himself the object of universal affection. For a true love of virtue grows, in all of us, out of love and respect for the person who teaches it. People who praise good men without loving them may honor their reputation, but they do not truly admire their virtue — and they will never imitate it.
There lived at that time in Pergamus a man named Athenodorus, surnamed Cordylio, of high repute for his mastery of Stoic philosophy. He was now old, and he had always firmly refused the friendship and acquaintance of princes and great men. Cato understood this. Figuring he would never win the man over by messages or letters, and being allowed by law two months' leave from the army, he resolved to sail to Asia and see him in person, trusting that his own qualities would keep the trip from being wasted. He talked with Athenodorus, succeeded in arguing him out of his old resolutions, and brought him back to camp — as delighted and as proud of this conquest as if he had pulled off some heroic feat greater than anything done by Pompey or Lucullus, who at that very moment were subduing whole nations and kingdoms with their armies.
While Cato was still in the service, his brother, traveling toward Asia, fell sick at Aenus in Thrace. Letters with the news were sent to Cato at once. The sea was running very rough and no decent-sized ship could be found, so Cato boarded a small trading vessel with only two friends and three servants and set sail from Thessalonica. He very nearly drowned on the crossing — and arrived at Aenus just as Caepio died. On this occasion, people felt, he showed himself more a devoted brother than a philosopher: not only in the extravagance of his grief, weeping and embracing the dead body, but in the enormous cost of the funeral — the huge quantity of rich perfumes and costly garments burned with the corpse, and the monument of Thasian marble he raised, at a cost of eight talents, in the public square of Aenus. Some people made a point of carping at all this as inconsistent with his usual calm restraint. What they failed to see was that for all his steel — firm and unbending against pleasure, fear, and shameless begging — Cato was full of natural tenderness and brotherly affection. Various cities and princes of the region sent him many gifts to honor his brother's funeral. He took none of their money; he accepted only the perfumes and ornaments, and paid for those. And afterward, when the inheritance was divided between him and Caepio's daughter, he did not ask for any share of the funeral expenses to be paid out of it. Despite all this, it has been claimed that he had his brother's ashes passed through a sieve, to sift out the gold that had melted in the fire with the body. But the man who wrote that, it seems, assumed that his pen, like his sword, stood above all question and criticism.
When Cato's term of service ended, he left the army carrying not just the prayers and praises of the soldiers, but their tears and embraces. They spread their cloaks under his feet and kissed his hand as he passed — an honor the Romans of that day rarely paid even to their generals and commanders-in-chief. Having left the army, he resolved that before he went home and threw himself into public life, he would travel through Asia and study the customs, the character, and the strength of every province. He was also reluctant to refuse the kindness of Deiotarus, king of Galatia, who had been a close friend of his father's and was very eager for a visit. Cato's travel arrangements ran like this. Early in the morning he would send his baker and his cook ahead to the town where he planned to spend the next night. They would enter quietly and without fuss, and if Cato had no friend or family acquaintance in the place, they arranged for him at an inn and bothered no one. If there was no inn — then, and only then — they went to the magistrates, asked for help finding lodgings, and accepted without complaint whatever they were given. Because his servants approached the magistrates without bluster or threats, they were often not believed, or simply ignored, so that Cato frequently arrived to find nothing prepared for him. And it was worse when he appeared in person; he counted for even less. Seeing him sit down on his baggage without a word, the officials wrote him off at once as a nobody who wouldn't dare demand anything. On such occasions he would sometimes call them over and say, "You foolish people — drop this inhospitality. Not all your visitors will be Catos. Use courtesy to blunt the sharp edge of power. There are plenty of men who want nothing but an excuse to take from you by force what you give so grudgingly."
While traveling this way he had a comic misadventure in Syria. As he approached Antioch, he saw a great crowd outside the gates, lined up in order on both sides of the road — young men in long cloaks here, children neatly dressed there, and others in garlands and white robes, the priests and the magistrates. Cato, assuming all this could only be a ceremony of welcome in his honor, grew angry with the servants he had sent ahead for allowing it. He made his friends dismount, and walked in with them on foot. But as soon as he neared the gate, an elderly man who seemed to be the master of ceremonies, wand and garland in hand, came up to Cato and — without so much as a greeting — asked where he had left Demetrius, and how soon he would arrive. Demetrius was Pompey's servant; and since at that moment the whole world, so to speak, had its eyes fixed on Pompey, even this man was treated with high honor because of his influence with his master. Cato's friends collapsed into such laughter that they couldn't compose themselves as they walked through the crowd. Cato himself, ashamed and mortified, said only, "Unfortunate city!" — and not another word. Afterward, though, it always made him laugh, whenever he told the story or was reminded of it.
Pompey himself soon made the people of Antioch ashamed of their ignorance and foolishness in slighting Cato that way. For when Cato's journey brought him to Ephesus, he went to pay his respects to Pompey — the older man, loaded with honors, and then the general of a great army. Yet Pompey would not receive him sitting down. The moment he saw him he rose, went to meet him as the more distinguished of the two, gave him his hand, and embraced him with a great show of warmth. He praised Cato's virtue lavishly to his face at the reception, and even more lavishly after he had gone. And so at once everyone began to show Cato open respect — discovering, in the very habits they had despised before, an admirable mildness of temper and greatness of spirit. It was clear enough, though, that Pompey's own courtesy came from a man who respected Cato rather than loved him. The general impression was that Pompey admired him while he was present and was not sorry when he left. When other young men came to visit, Pompey usually pressed and begged them to stay on with him. Cato he did not invite to stay at all — as if his own power shrank in the man's presence, he was quite willing to let him go. And yet, of all those departing for Rome, Cato was the only one to whom Pompey entrusted his children and his wife — who was, it is true, a relation of Cato's.
After that, every city he passed through on the way home competed with its neighbors in showing him respect and honor. There were feasts and receptions at every stop — so many that Cato asked his friends to keep strict watch over him, in case he ended up proving Curio right. Curio was a friend of his, but he disliked Cato's austere temper, and he had once asked him whether he planned to see Asia when he left the army. "Yes, by all means," Cato answered. "Good," said Curio. "You'll come back with a better temper and pleasanter manners." Those were pretty nearly his exact words.
Deiotarus, the Galatian king, was an old man by now, and he had sent for Cato to place his children and his household under Cato's protection. The moment Cato arrived, the king began pressing gifts of every sort on him, begging and pleading with him to accept. All that pleading annoyed Cato so much that although he had come in the evening, he stayed only that one night and left early the next morning. After a single day's travel he reached Pessinus — and found an even bigger store of presents waiting for him there, along with letters from Deiotarus entreating him to take them, or at least to let his friends take them, since they deserved some reward for his sake and Cato could hardly provide for them out of his own means. Cato refused even that, though he could see that some of his friends were quite willing to accept and were ready to grumble at his severity. Corruption, he answered, would never lack an excuse; and his friends would share with him in whatever he obtained justly and honestly — nothing more. He sent the presents back to Deiotarus.
When he was about to take ship for Brundisium, his friends urged him to put his brother's ashes aboard a different vessel. He said he would sooner part with his life than with those ashes, and set sail. And as it happened, we are told, his crossing was a genuinely dangerous one, while other ships making the passage at the same time came through safely enough.
Back in Rome, he spent his time for the most part either at home, in conversation with Athenodorus, or in the forum, in the service of his friends. It was now time for him to stand for the quaestorship — but he refused to run for the office until he had studied the laws governing it, questioned men of experience, and gained a precise understanding of its duties and its authority. Armed with that knowledge, he began a sweeping reform of the treasury's clerks and under-officers the moment he took office. These were men with long practice and total familiarity with the public records and the laws; and since the new magistrates who came in year after year were so ignorant and unskilled that they positively needed someone to teach them their own jobs, the clerks never submitted to them or gave way. They kept the real power in their own hands. They were, in effect, the treasurers themselves. Until Cato. He threw himself squarely into the work and showed that he possessed not just the title and honor of a quaestor but the knowledge, the understanding, and the full authority of the office. He treated the clerks and under-officers as what they were — servants — exposing their corrupt practices and correcting their ignorance. They were bold, shameless men, and they flattered the other quaestors, Cato's colleagues, and tried through them to keep up an opposition against him. But Cato convicted the chief of them of a breach of trust in the handling of an inheritance and threw him out of his place. He brought a second to trial for dishonesty — a man defended by Lutatius Catulus, the censor at that time, a man of great weight because of his office and of greater weight because of his character, for he stood above all the Romans of his age in his reputation for wisdom and integrity. Catulus was also close to Cato and admired his way of living. Seeing that he could not get his client off in a fair trial, he began openly begging him off. Cato objected to his doing it. Catulus kept pleading. At last Cato said, "It would be shameful, Catulus, if the censor — the judge of all our lives — had to be removed from court by our officers." Catulus looked as if he wanted to make some answer; but he said nothing, and — whether from anger or from shame — walked away silent and out of countenance. Even so, the man was not convicted: the votes to acquit fell just one short of the votes to condemn, and Marcus Lollius, one of Cato's colleagues, who was absent sick, was sent for by Catulus and begged to come and save the man. So Lollius was carried into court in a chair and cast his vote for acquittal. Cato, for his part, never employed that clerk again, never paid him his salary, and refused to count Lollius' vote for anything.
Having humbled the clerks and brought them to heel, he managed the books and registers as he saw fit, and within a short time he had given the treasury a higher name than the Senate house itself. Everyone said that Cato had made the office of quaestor equal to the dignity of a consul. When he found that many people owed the state money on old accounts, and that the state likewise owed money to many private citizens, he made sure the public would no longer either commit wrongs or suffer them: he exacted what was due to the treasury strictly and punctually, and paid the state's creditors promptly and in full. People watched with awe and respect as men who had expected to slip away with their plunder were made to pay, and men who had despaired of ever seeing their money received every bit of it. And whereas those who showed up with false claims and pretended senate orders had usually managed, through favoritism, to get them accepted, Cato was never once taken in. In one particular case, when a question arose over whether an order had actually passed the senate, he refused to believe the many witnesses who attested to it, and would not admit it until the consuls came and swore to it on oath.
There were at that time a great many men Sulla had used as his agents in the proscriptions — men he had paid twelve thousand drachmas apiece for their service in putting the condemned to death. Everybody hated them as wicked, polluted wretches, but nobody dared take revenge on them. Cato called every one of them to account as wrongful holders of public money, exacted repayment, and in the same breath denounced them for their lawless and unholy actions. Immediately after this they found themselves charged with murder — already, in a sense, prejudged as guilty — and they were easily convicted, and paid the penalty. The whole people rejoiced at it, feeling that the old tyranny had finally been abolished and that Sulla himself, so to speak, had at last been brought to punishment.
His sheer diligence won the people over too — the man never stopped. He was always the first of his colleagues to arrive at the treasury and the last to leave. He never missed an assembly of the people or a sitting of the senate, always anxious, always on the watch for those who would casually, or as a favor to someone, vote to remit a debt or grant away customs owed to the state. And in the end, having kept the exchequer clean of cheats and informers while filling it with treasure, he showed that the state could be rich without oppressing the people. Some of his colleagues found him irritating at first, but after a while they were well contented with him, since he was perfectly willing to take all the blame on himself when they declined to hand out public money to their friends or to pass dishonest accounts. When petitioners pressed them hard, they could simply answer that nothing could be done unless Cato consented. On the last day of his term, nearly the whole people escorted him home in honor — but on the way he learned that several powerful men were at the treasury with Marcellus at that very moment, using all their influence to get him to record a certain debt to the public revenue as if it were a gift. Marcellus had been one of Cato's friends since childhood, and so long as Cato was at his side he was one of the best colleagues in the office; but on his own he could not resist the pressure of petitioners, and was prone to do anybody a kindness. Cato turned straight around, and finding that Marcellus had given in and passed the entry, he took the book and — while Marcellus stood silently by, watching — struck it out. That done, he led Marcellus out of the treasury and took him home with him. And Marcellus never complained of it, not then and not afterward, but remained his friend and intimate ever after.
Even after he laid down the office, Cato did not stop watching the treasury. He kept servants who continually copied out the details of public expenditure, and he always had by him a set of account books containing the state revenues from Sulla's time down to his own quaestorship — books he had bought for five talents.
He was always the first man into the senate and the last one out; and often, while the others were slowly gathering, he would sit and read quietly by himself, holding his gown up in front of his book. He was never once out of town when the senate was due to meet. Later, when Pompey and his party found that Cato could be neither persuaded nor pressured into favoring their unjust designs, they tried to keep him away from the senate by tangling him up in business for his friends — pleading their cases, arbitrating their disputes, and so on. Cato saw through the trick quickly, and to defeat it he told all his acquaintances flatly that he would never touch private business while the senate was in session. For it was not in hope of honor or riches, nor on impulse, nor by chance that he had gone into politics; he had taken up the service of the state as the proper business of an honest man, and he considered himself as bound to his public duty as a bee to its honeycomb. To that end he arranged to have friends and correspondents everywhere, sending him reports of the edicts, decrees, judgments, and all the important proceedings in the provinces. Once, when Clodius, the seditious agitator, was pushing his violent, revolutionary projects by slandering some of the priests and priestesses before the people — Fabia, sister of Cicero's wife Terentia, stood in real danger — Cato stepped in boldly, made Clodius look so disgraceful that he was forced to leave town, and, when it was over, was approached by Cicero, who came to thank him for what he had done. "You must thank the commonwealth," Cato said — for the commonwealth's sake, he insisted, was the only reason he did anything. Out of all this grew a great and remarkable reputation. An advocate in one case, facing a single witness on the other side, told the judges they ought not to rely on one witness even if it were Cato himself. And it became a kind of proverb with many people, when some wildly unlikely claim was asserted, to say they would not believe it even if Cato himself affirmed it. One day, while a debauched and extravagant liver was lecturing the senate on frugality and temperance, Amnaeus jumped up and cried, "Who can stand this, sir — you feast like Crassus, you build like Lucullus, and you talk like Cato!" And in the same spirit, men whose lives were vicious and dissolute but whose language was grave and severe were mockingly called Catos.
At first, when his friends urged him to stand for tribune of the people, he thought it a bad idea: the power of so great an office, he felt, should be held in reserve, like the strongest medicines, for occasions of last necessity. But later, during a court vacation, as he was traveling with his books and his philosophers to Lucania, where he had lands and a pleasant house, they met on the road a long train of horses, carriages, and attendants — belonging, they learned, to Metellus Nepos, who was heading to Rome to stand for the tribunate. Cato stopped. He was silent for a moment; then he gave orders to turn back at once. His companions looked amazed, and he said, "Don't you know how dangerous the madness of Metellus is all by itself? Now he comes armed with Pompey's backing, and he will fall on the state like lightning and throw everything into disorder. This is no time for holidays and leisure. We must get ahead of this man and stop his designs — or die honorably in defense of our liberty." At his friends' urging he did go on first to his country house, but he stayed only a very short time before returning to town.
He arrived in the evening, and first thing the next morning he went down to the forum and began campaigning for the tribuneship, in opposition to Metellus. The power of that office lies more in blocking business than in doing it: even if every other tribune agreed to a measure, the refusal of a single one could stop the whole thing cold. At first Cato had few supporters; but as soon as his intention became known, all the good and distinguished men of the city quickly came forward to encourage and support him. They saw him not as a man asking a favor of them, but as a man offering a great favor to his country and to every honest citizen — a man who had refused this same office many times when he could have had it without trouble, and who now sought it at real risk so that he might defend their liberty and their government. It is reported that so great a crowd pressed around him that he was nearly crushed, and could barely make his way through. He was declared tribune, along with several others — Metellus among them.
Once elected, Cato saw that the election of consuls had become a matter of open purchase, and he rebuked the people sharply for the corruption, ending his speech with a vow to prosecute whomever he found handing out money — with one exception, Silanus, on account of their close connection: Silanus was married to Servilia, Cato's sister. So he let Silanus alone and instead accused Lucius Murena, who had won the consulship by bribery alongside him. There was a law allowing the accused to appoint a man to keep watch on his accuser, so that he could know fairly how the prosecution was being prepared. The watcher Murena set on Cato followed him closely at first, observing everything — and never once caught him doing anything unfair or underhanded. Cato went about the accusation generously and candidly, by the just and open methods. The man came to admire his great spirit so much, and to trust his integrity so completely, that he would simply walk up to Cato in the forum, or call at his house, and ask whether he planned to do anything on the case that day; and if Cato said no, he went away satisfied, relying on his word. When the case was pleaded, Cicero — consul that year, and defending Murena — spent a good deal of the trial being witty at Cato's expense, poking fun at the Stoic philosophers and their so-called paradoxes until the judges were roaring with laughter. Cato smiled and remarked to the bystanders, "What a pleasant consul we have, my friends." Murena was acquitted — and afterward showed himself neither resentful nor a fool, for as consul he took Cato's advice in the weightiest affairs, and treated him with honor and respect throughout his entire term. The credit for that belongs to Murena's good sense, but also to Cato's own behavior: terrible and severe as he was in matters of justice, in the senate and at the bar, once the fight was over his manner toward everyone was perfectly friendly and humane.
Before he entered on the tribunate, he supported Cicero, then consul, in many of the struggles of his office — above all in his great and noble handling of Catiline's conspiracy, which owed its final successful outcome to Cato. Catiline had plotted the total overthrow of the Roman state by sedition and open war, but Cicero exposed and convicted him, and he was forced to flee the city. Yet Lentulus and Cethegus remained behind, with several others, to carry the plot forward; and blaming Catiline for cowardice and timid, small-scale thinking, they resolved to set the whole town on fire, overthrow the empire outright, rouse whole nations to revolt, and stir up foreign wars. But Cicero discovered the design — as I have written in his life — and laid the matter before the senate. Silanus, speaking first, gave his opinion that the conspirators should suffer the ultimate punishment, and every speaker after him agreed — until it came to Caesar. Caesar was an excellent speaker, and he regarded every upheaval and commotion in the state as raw material for his own purposes — better fed than put out. He rose and delivered a very merciful, very persuasive speech: the men ought not to be put to death without fair trial according to law, and he moved that they be held instead under guard in whatever Italian towns Cicero himself might choose. The house swung almost entirely to Caesar's side, dreading also the anger of the people; even Silanus backtracked and explained that he had never meant death, only imprisonment — since that was the utmost a Roman could suffer.
The whole senate was tipping toward the milder, more merciful opinion when Cato stood up. He tore at once, with passion and vehemence, into Silanus for changing his position — and then he turned and pointed the finger of suspicion at Caesar himself. Here was a man, he said, working to ruin the commonwealth with soft words and crowd-pleasing speeches; a man trying to frighten the senate when he himself ought to be afraid, and grateful if he walked out unpunished and unsuspected, since he so openly and boldly dared to protect the enemies of the state. For his own native country, glorious as it was and brought to the very edge of destruction, this man could find no compassion; yet he could be full of pity for men who should never have been born, and whose deaths would deliver the commonwealth from bloodshed and ruin. Of all Cato's speeches, it is said, this is the only one preserved — because Cicero, as consul, had stationed around the senate house a number of exceptionally quick writers whom he had taught to make small strokes standing for many words. Up to that time Rome had no shorthand writers, as we call them; this occasion, it is said, was the first real example of the art. Cato carried the day, and turned the house around once more, and it was decreed that the conspirators should be put to death.
I will not leave out the small things that show Cato's temper and add a stroke or two to the portrait of his mind. At the very height of this duel, it is reported, with the whole senate watching the two of them, a little note was brought in and handed to Caesar. Cato declared it suspicious — some piece of sedition in motion, he said — and demanded the letter be read aloud. Caesar handed the paper straight across to Cato. And Cato found himself holding a love letter from his own sister Servilia to Caesar, who had seduced her. He flung it back. "Keep it, you drunkard," he said — and went on with his speech. Indeed, Cato seems to have had poor luck in the women of his family. This sister got an ugly name for her intimacy with Caesar; and the other Servilia, also Cato's sister, conducted herself worse still: married to Lucullus, one of the greatest men in Rome, and having borne him a son, she was eventually divorced for infidelity. Worst of all, Cato's own wife Atilia was not free from the same fault; after she had given him two children, he was forced to divorce her for her misconduct. He then married Marcia, the daughter of Philippus, a woman of good reputation — and yet a woman about whom there has been endless talk; for the life of Cato, like a stage play, contains this one scene full of perplexity and doubtful meaning.
Here is how Thrasea tells it, on the authority of Munatius, Cato's friend and constant companion. Among the many who loved and admired Cato, some stood out more than others. One was Quintus Hortensius, a man of high reputation and proven character, who wanted not merely Cato's friendship and company but some tie of marriage that would unite their two houses into one. So he set about persuading Cato that his daughter Portia — already married to Bibulus, and the mother of his two children — might nevertheless be given over to him, like a fine plot of land, to bear fruit for him as well. "In the opinion of the world," he argued, "this may seem strange; but in nature it is honorable, and good for the public, that a woman in the prime of her youth should not sit idle and let the fruit of her womb go to waste — nor, on the other side, wear down and impoverish one man by bearing him more children than he needs. If worthy men shared their families in this way, virtue would increase and spread through their bloodlines, and the commonwealth would be knit and cemented together by their alliances." And if Bibulus was altogether unwilling to give up his wife, Hortensius would return her as soon as she had borne him a child, so that he would then be bound to both families. Cato answered that he loved Hortensius well and thoroughly approved of uniting their houses — but it was a strange thing to talk of marrying a daughter who was already given to another man. At that, Hortensius simply shifted ground, and did not hesitate to speak openly and ask for Cato's own wife; for Marcia was still young and fertile, and Cato had children enough. And it cannot be supposed that Hortensius did this because he imagined Cato indifferent to Marcia — she was, we are told, pregnant at the time. Cato, seeing how much in earnest he was, did not refuse; but he said that Philippus, Marcia's father, would have to be consulted as well. So Philippus was sent for and came; and finding the two men agreed, he gave his daughter Marcia to Hortensius in Cato's presence — with Cato himself assisting at the wedding. This happened at a later time; but since I was on the subject of the women, I thought it best to tell it now.
Lentulus and the rest of the conspirators were put to death. But Caesar, finding so much insinuated and charged against him in the senate, turned to the people, and began stirring up the most corrupt and rotten elements of the state to form a party behind him. Cato, alarmed at what might follow, persuaded the senate to win over the poor, unprovided-for multitude with a distribution of grain — an act of humanity and kindness that cost the state twelve hundred and fifty talents a year, and that unquestionably dissipated the immediate danger. But then Metellus, entering on his tribunate, began holding riotous assemblies, and had prepared a decree that Pompey the Great should be summoned into Italy at once, with all his forces, to preserve the city from the danger of Catiline's conspiracy. That was the fair-sounding pretext. The real design was to hand everything over to Pompey and give him absolute power. The senate was assembled, and Cato — who so often went straight at Metellus — did not do it this time. He urged his advice in the most reasonable and moderate tone he could manage; at last he descended even to entreaty, praising the house of Metellus for having always stood with the nobility. This only made Metellus more insolent. Concluding that Cato was yielding out of fear, he let himself run on into the most audacious threats, openly declaring that he would do whatever he pleased in spite of the senate. At that, Cato's expression changed, and his voice, and his language; and after many sharp exchanges he ended with the bold declaration that while he lived, Pompey would never enter the city armed. The senate, watching the two of them, concluded that neither man was entirely in his right and sober senses. Metellus' course seemed sheer rage and frenzy — an excess of malice dragging everything toward ruin and confusion — while Cato's virtue looked like a kind of ecstasy of contention in the cause of everything good and just.
When the day came for the people to vote on the decree, Metellus got to the forum first and packed it with armed men — foreigners, gladiators, slaves. A good part of the crowd was for Pompey too, hoping a change of regime would pay off for them, and there was powerful help besides from Caesar, who was praetor that year. The best and most distinguished men of the city were every bit as disgusted by all this as Cato was, but they looked more likely to suffer alongside him than to be of any use to him. Meanwhile Cato's whole household was in an agony of fear for him. Some of his friends never ate or slept that night; they passed the hours arguing in circles and getting nowhere. His wife and sisters wept and pleaded. He himself, without a trace of fear, was the one comforting everyone else, steadying them with his talk. After supper he went to bed at his usual hour, and the next morning had to be shaken out of a deep sleep by Minucius Thermus, one of his fellow tribunes. The two of them walked down to the forum together, accompanied by only a handful of people but met by a great many more, who kept urging them to be careful. When Cato saw the temple of Castor and Pollux ringed with armed men, the steps held by gladiators, and Metellus and Caesar seated together at the top, he turned to his friends. "Look at this bold coward," he said, "who has recruited a regiment of soldiers against one unarmed man." And he walked on with Thermus. The men holding the approaches let those two through and no one else — though Cato caught Munatius by the hand and with a good deal of trouble hauled him along too. Then he went straight up to Metellus and Caesar and sat down between them, cutting off their conversation, which left them both staring in confusion. The honest citizens, watching Cato's face and marveling at his spirit and audacity, pressed closer and shouted to him to have courage, and called out to one another to stand together and not betray their liberty, or the man defending it.
Then the clerk produced the bill, and Cato forbade him to read it. Metellus took it to read it out himself; Cato snatched the document out of his hands. Metellus knew the decree by heart and started reciting it from memory — and Thermus clapped a hand over his mouth. Seeing the two of them determined to block him by any means, and the people cowed but leaning toward the better side, Metellus sent to his house for armed men. They came rushing in with a roar, and in the terror everyone scattered — everyone but Cato, who stood alone while the other party pelted him with sticks and stones from above, until Murena, the very man he had once prosecuted, came up to protect him, holding his own gown in front of him as a shield and shouting at them to stop throwing. In the end, half persuading and half dragging, Murena got him into the temple of Castor and Pollux. Metellus, seeing the ground clear and the whole opposition fled from the forum, thought the thing was as good as done. He ordered his soldiers to withdraw, and resuming in proper form, began to put the decree to the vote. But the other side had recovered themselves, and they came back with a bold, deafening shout — at which Metellus's followers panicked, took the noise for the arrival of armed reinforcements, and fled the place to the last man. With them scattered, Cato came forward again, praising the people's courage and cheering on their resolve, and now the majority were for stripping Metellus of his office by any means available. The senate, too, assembled and gave orders once again to back Cato and resist the bill as a measure designed to breed sedition in the city — perhaps civil war.
Metellus himself remained bold and unbending; but he could see that his followers were thoroughly frightened of Cato, whom they regarded as unbeatable, so he rushed out of the senate into the forum, called the people together, and gave a bitter, poisonous speech against him — crying out that he was fleeing from Cato's tyranny and from this conspiracy against Pompey, and that the city would soon be sorry for having dishonored so great a man. And with that he set off for Asia, to lay before Pompey, everyone assumed, the full catalogue of his injuries. Cato was showered with praise for having delivered the state from a dangerous tribuneship and for having, in the person of Metellus, dealt a blow to the power of Pompey himself. But he was admired even more for what came next: when the senate moved to disgrace Metellus and formally depose him, Cato opposed the whole proceeding and finally talked them out of it. The common people admired his moderation and humanity — he would not trample a beaten enemy for the pleasure of it — while shrewder men recognized the policy in it: he was not going to provoke Pompey needlessly.
Soon after this, Lucullus came home from the war in Asia — a war whose finishing stroke, and with it the glory of the whole campaign, had to all appearances been lifted out of his hands by Pompey. He came close to losing his triumph as well, because Gaius Memmius attacked him before the people and threatened prosecution — more out of devotion to Pompey than any real grudge of his own. But Cato was tied to Lucullus, who had married his sister Servilia, and he thought the whole business a gross injustice besides, so he stood up to Memmius — and exposed himself to a storm of slander for it. They came near to throwing him out of his office, on the pretense that he was wielding his power like a tyrant. Yet in the end Cato got the better of Memmius, who was forced to drop the charges and abandon the fight. Lucullus got his triumph, and from then on cultivated Cato's friendship all the more carefully, regarding it as his best wall and defense against the power of Pompey.
And now Pompey himself came home from the war in glory. The splendor of his reception convinced him the people would refuse him nothing, so he sent word to the senate asking them to postpone the consular elections until he could be there in person to campaign for Piso, who was standing for the office. Most of the senators were ready to go along. Cato was not — and not because he thought the delay itself mattered much. He wanted to cut down Pompey's swelling expectations at a stroke. He opposed the request and swung the senate against it. This shook Pompey more than a little. He could see he was going to fail, and fail often, unless he could bring Cato over to his side. So he sent for Munatius, Cato's friend, and made an offer: Cato had two nieces of marriageable age, and Pompey proposed to marry the elder himself and take the younger for his son. (Some say they were not his nieces but his daughters.) Munatius laid the proposal before Cato in the presence of his wife and sisters, and the women were overjoyed at the prospect of an alliance with so great and important a man. Cato, without a pause and without a moment's deliberation, made up his mind on the spot. "Go, Munatius," he said, "go tell Pompey that Cato cannot be captured by way of the women's rooms. I am grateful for the kindness he intends, and so long as his conduct is honest, I promise him a friendship more solid than any marriage alliance. But I will not hand over hostages to Pompey's glory against my country's safety." The women were badly disappointed by this answer, and even his friends thought it harsh and high-handed. But later, when Pompey was trying to get the consulship for one of his friends and paid the people outright for their votes — a bribery so notorious that the money was counted out in Pompey's own gardens — Cato said to the women that they would necessarily have shared in the dirt of these dealings if they had been joined to Pompey's family; and they admitted he had judged best in refusing. And yet, if we go by what actually happened, Cato was badly at fault in rejecting that alliance — because it fell instead to Caesar. That was the match that fused Caesar's power with Pompey's, all but ruined the Roman empire, and did destroy the republic. None of it, perhaps, would have come to pass if Cato had not been so alarmed by Pompey's small faults that he drove him into handing another man the opportunity for the greatest ones.
But all that lay in the future. In the meantime Lucullus and Pompey fell into a great dispute over their rival arrangements in Pontus, each fighting to have his own ordinances stand. Cato took the side of Lucullus, who was plainly the wronged party; and Pompey, finding himself the weaker in the senate, went over its head to the people and proposed a law dividing lands among his soldiers to buy their votes. Cato opposed him there too, and the bill was thrown out. At that, Pompey attached himself to Clodius, the most violent demagogue of the day — and struck up his friendship with Caesar. And for that, too, Cato was in a way responsible. Here is how. Caesar, back from his governorship in Spain, wanted to stand for the consulship and keep his claim to a triumph at the same time. But the law required candidates for office to be present in the city, while a man awaiting a triumph had to remain outside the walls. So Caesar asked the senate for permission to canvass through his friends in his absence. Many senators were willing to allow it. Cato was not — and seeing them inclined to oblige Caesar, he spoke for the entire day and talked the session into the ground, so that the senate could reach no decision at all. Caesar thereupon let the triumph go, came into the city, and immediately made his alliance with Pompey and stood for the consulship. The moment he was declared consul-elect, he married his daughter Julia to Pompey. And having leagued themselves together against the commonwealth, the one proposed laws distributing land to the poor, and the other stood by to push the proposals through. Lucullus, Cicero, and their friends lined up with Bibulus, the other consul, to block the laws — and at the front of them all stood Cato, who already saw the friendship and alliance of Pompey and Caesar for the dangerous thing it was. What he objected to, he declared, was not the advantage the poor would get from the land — it was the price these men meant to collect for it, this courting and cozening of the people. On that argument he carried the senate with him, along with many outside it who were disgusted at Caesar's conduct — that a consul should flatter the mob so basely, using tricks that had always belonged to the rashest and most rebellious tribunes. So Caesar and his party, afraid they could not win by fair means, turned to open force. First a basket of dung was dumped on Bibulus on his way to the forum. Then they set on his lictors and broke their rods. Finally darts flew and men were wounded, and everyone who opposed the laws fled the forum — the rest at a dead run, and Cato last of all, walking out slowly, turning back again and again to call down the vengeance of heaven on them.
So the other party not only carried their land law, but tacked on a decree that the whole senate should swear to uphold it and defend it against any attempt at repeal, with heavy penalties for refusing the oath. The senators all swore — necessity staring them in the face, and with it the memory of the elder Metellus, long ago, who had refused an oath in just such a case and been driven out of Italy for it. As for Cato, his wife and children begged him with tears, and his friends and familiars pressed and pleaded with him to give way and swear. But the man who prevailed with him above all was Cicero, the orator, who urged that it was perhaps not even right in itself for one private citizen to set himself against what the public had decreed; that with the thing done and past altering, it was folly and madness to throw himself into danger when it could do his country no good at all; and that the worst of all evils would be to seize the excuse, as it were, to abandon the commonwealth he did everything for, and hand it over to the men bent on its ruin — as if he were glad to be relieved of the trouble of defending it. "For though Cato may have no need of Rome," Cicero said, "Rome has need of Cato — and so do all his friends." Of these, Cicero professed, he himself was the first, since Clodius was even then taking aim at him, openly threatening to come after him the moment he got the tribuneship. So Cato, they say, worn down by the entreaties and arguments of his friends, went unwillingly and took the oath — last of all, except only Favonius, one of his closest acquaintance.
Riding high on this success, Caesar brought in another law, this one distributing almost the whole territory of Campania among the poor and needy citizens. No one dared speak against it but Cato — so Caesar had him pulled off the rostra and dragged toward prison. Even that did not check his freedom of speech: as he went along he kept on denouncing the law, and advised the people to put down every legislator who proposed the like. The senate and the best of the citizens followed after him with sad, dejected faces, their grief and indignation showing in their silence, so Caesar could hardly miss how offended they were; but for pure contention's sake he pressed on, waiting for Cato to beg off or file an appeal. When he saw that Cato would not so much as consider doing either, ashamed of what he was doing and of what the city thought of it, Caesar himself quietly asked one of the tribunes to intervene and release him. For all that, with these laws and gratifications the multitude was won, and they decreed Caesar the government of Illyricum and all Gaul, with an army of four legions, for five years — while Cato cried out that they were voting, with their own hands, to install a tyrant in their citadel. Publius Clodius, who had gotten himself illegally transferred from patrician to plebeian, was declared tribune of the people, having promised to do everything according to Caesar's and Pompey's pleasure on one condition: that he be allowed to banish Cicero. And for consuls they set up Calpurnius Piso, the father of Caesar's wife, and Aulus Gabinius — one of Pompey's creatures, as we are told by the people best acquainted with his life and habits.
Yet even with everything locked down — one half of the city mastered by favors, the other by fear — they were still afraid of Cato. They remembered, with some bitterness, what pains and trouble their victories over him had cost, and what shame and disgrace besides, when they had been driven at last to lay violent hands on him. Clodius, for one, despaired of forcing Cicero out of Italy while Cato remained in Rome. So, with his scheme laid in advance, the first thing he did on entering office was send for Cato and tell him that he regarded him as the most incorruptible man in Rome, and was ready to prove he meant it. "Plenty of men," he said, "have applied for the commission to Cyprus in the case of Ptolemy, and lobbied for the appointment. But you are the only man worthy of it, and I am pleased to give you the favor." Cato cried out at once that the thing was a trap — no favor, but an injury. To which Clodius answered, proud and fierce: "Then if you will not take it as a kindness, you shall make the voyage as a punishment," and going straight out to the assembly of the people, he had them pass a decree that Cato be sent to Cyprus. So Cato was shipped off — and they voted him neither ship, nor soldier, nor any staff except two secretaries, one of whom was a thief and a scoundrel, and the other a hanger-on of Clodius. And as if Cyprus and Ptolemy were not work enough, he was ordered to restore the refugees of Byzantium into the bargain. Clodius meant to keep him far away for as long as his own tribuneship lasted.
Forced to go, Cato advised Cicero — next on the list — to make no resistance, for fear of throwing the state into civil war and chaos, but to bow to the times, and so become his country's preserver a second time. He sent his friend Canidius ahead to Cyprus to persuade Ptolemy to yield without a fight, promising that if he did he would lack for neither riches nor honor, for the Romans would give him the priesthood of the goddess at Paphos. Cato himself waited at Rhodes, making his preparations and expecting an answer from Cyprus. While he waited, the other Ptolemy — the king of Egypt, who had abandoned Alexandria after a quarrel with his subjects and was sailing for Rome in hopes that Pompey and Caesar would send an army to restore him — asked, on his way, to see Cato, and sent word to him, assuming Cato would come to him. Cato had taken a purgative that morning, and sent back the answer that Ptolemy was welcome to come to him, if he saw fit. When the king came, Cato neither went out to meet him nor so much as rose from his seat; he greeted him like any ordinary visitor and told him to sit down. This threw Ptolemy off balance at first — he was startled to meet such stern, lofty manners in a man of so plain and unassuming an appearance. But when they began to talk over his affairs, he was still more astonished at the wisdom and the bluntness of what he heard. For Cato criticized the whole course he had taken. He pointed out what honor and happiness the king was walking away from, and what humiliations and miseries he was walking into — the bribing he would have to do, the greed he would have to feed when he reached the leading men of Rome, whom all Egypt turned into silver would scarcely satisfy. His advice was to sail home and be reconciled with his subjects — and he offered to go along himself and help settle the differences. Brought back to his senses by this talk, as if out of a fit of madness or delirium, and seeing the truth and good sense in what Cato said, Ptolemy resolved to follow his advice. But his friends talked him around again, and he went on to Rome as he had first planned. When he got there, and found himself cooling his heels at the door of one magistrate after another, he began to curse his own folly — feeling he had refused not the counsel of a good and wise man so much as the oracle of a god.
Meanwhile the other Ptolemy, the one in Cyprus, very conveniently for Cato, poisoned himself. He was reported to have left great riches; so Cato, who meant to go first to Byzantium, sent his nephew Brutus to Cyprus, since he did not entirely trust Canidius. Then he reconciled the refugees with the people of Byzantium, left that city quiet and at peace, and sailed for Cyprus, where he found a royal treasure — plate, furniture, precious stones, purple — all of which had to be turned into ready money. Determined to do everything with perfect exactness, and to drive the price of every item to the top, he attended the sales in person and went carefully through all the accounts. He would not trust the customs of the market; he looked with suspicion on everyone alike — the officers, the criers, the bidders, even his own friends — and ended by talking with the buyers himself, pressing them to bid higher, and running the greater part of the sales in that fashion.
This distrust gave offense to a number of his friends, and one of them in particular — Munatius, the closest of them all — was left almost beyond reconciling. When Caesar came to write his book against Cato, this affair supplied him with his most savage passages. Munatius himself, though, says the quarrel came not so much from Cato's distrust as from Cato's neglect of him — and from his own jealousy of Canidius. For Munatius also wrote a book about Cato, and it is the main authority Thrasea follows. Munatius tells it this way: he arrived in Cyprus after the others, and found miserable lodgings provided for him; he went to Cato's house and was turned away at the door, because Cato was closeted with Canidius. He later complained about this, in quite mild terms — and got a very harsh answer: too much love, according to Theophrastus, often turns to hatred. "And you," Cato told him, "because you bear me so much love, think you receive too little honor, and so you lose your temper. I employ Canidius for his industry and his fidelity. He has been with me from the first, and I have found him worthy of trust." All this was said privately, between the two of them; but Cato afterward repeated it to Canidius — and when Munatius found that out, he refused to come to Cato's suppers anymore, and refused to come when he was invited to give counsel. Cato then threatened to seize his goods, the customary penalty for the disobedient; Munatius ignored the threats, went back to Rome, and nursed the grievance a long time. But later, when Cato had come home too, Marcia — who at this time was still living with him — arranged for the two men to be invited to supper together at the house of one Barca. Cato arrived last, when the rest were already reclining, and asked where he should take his place. Wherever he pleased, said Barca. Cato looked around the room, said he would be near Munatius — and went and placed himself on the couch beside him. But that was the only mark of kindness he showed him all through the meal. Another time, at Marcia's urging, Cato wrote to Munatius that he wished to speak with him. Munatius came to the house in the morning, and Marcia kept him there until all the other company had gone. Then Cato came in, threw both arms around him, embraced him warmly, and the two were friends again. I have told this little story at full length because I think the characters and tempers of men show themselves more clearly in things of this kind than in great and famous actions.
Cato collected not much less than seven thousand talents of silver. Anxious about what might happen on so long a sea voyage, he had a great many chests made, each holding two talents and five hundred drachmas; to every chest he fastened a long rope, and to the far end of the rope a piece of cork, so that if the ship went down, the floats would mark where the chests lay under water. And in fact the money, all but a very little, was carried over safely. But he had also kept two account books, in which every transaction of his commission was carefully written out — and neither of them survived. One was in the charge of his freedman Philargyrus, who sailed from Cenchreae and went down with the ship and all its freight. The other Cato kept safe himself as far as Corcyra, where he pitched his tent in the marketplace; the sailors, bitterly cold in the night, built a great many fires, some of the tents caught, and the book was burned. He had brought along several of Ptolemy's stewards, who could vouch for his integrity and shut the mouths of enemies and false accusers; even so, the loss gnawed at him, and he was angry with himself over it — for he had intended those books not so much as proof of his own honesty, but as a pattern of exactness for other men to follow.
Word that he was coming up the river reached Rome ahead of him. Every magistrate, the priests, the whole senate, and a great part of the people went out to meet him; both banks of the Tiber were lined with spectators, so that his arrival had all the solemnity and honor of a triumph. But it struck many as strange — willful, even proud — that when the consuls and praetors appeared, Cato neither disembarked nor paused to salute them, but swept on upstream in a royal galley of six banks of oars and did not stop until he had brought his vessels to the dockyard. Still, when the money was carried through the streets, the people marveled at the sheer quantity of it, and the senate, once assembled, decreed him in handsome terms an extraordinary praetorship, along with the privilege of watching the public games in a purple-bordered robe. Cato declined every one of these honors. Instead, telling the senate what diligence and honesty he had found in Nicias, Ptolemy's steward, he asked them to grant the man his freedom.
Philippus, Marcia's father, was consul that year, and the power and authority of the office rested, in effect, with Cato — for the other consul deferred to him for his virtue's sake no less than Philippus did on account of the family connection. Cicero, meanwhile, had returned from the exile into which Clodius had driven him and had recovered great standing with the people; and while Clodius was away, he went to the Capitol and carried off by force the records of Clodius's tribuneship that had been stored there. The senate assembled, Clodius made his complaint, and Cicero answered that Clodius had never legally been tribune at all, so that everything done in his tribuneship was void and carried no authority. But Cato interrupted him as he spoke, and at last stood up and declared that he in no way justified or approved of Clodius's conduct — but if they questioned the validity of everything done in his tribuneship, they might just as well question everything Cato himself had done at Cyprus, since that expedition was unlawful if the man who sent him held no lawful office. For his own part, he thought Clodius had been legally made tribune, since the law allowed a patrician to be adopted into a plebeian family. If he had done wrong in office, he could be called to account for it — but the authority of the magistracy ought not to suffer for the faults of the magistrate. Cicero took this hard, and for a long time dropped his friendship with Cato; later, though, the two were reconciled.
Pompey and Crassus, in agreement with Caesar — who crossed the Alps to meet them — had now formed a plan: the two of them would stand for a second consulship, and once in office they would extend Caesar's command by five more years and take for themselves the greatest provinces, with armies and money to hold them. This looked like nothing less than an open conspiracy to subvert the constitution and carve up the empire. Several men of high character had intended to run for the consulship that year, but at the sight of these enormous competitors they all withdrew — all except Lucius Domitius, the husband of Cato's sister Porcia, whom Cato persuaded to stand his ground and not abandon the contest, which, he said, was not about winning a consulship but about saving the liberty of Rome. Meanwhile the more sober part of the citizens were telling one another that the power of Pompey and Crassus must not be allowed to combine — united, it would swell past all bounds and become dangerous to the state — and that one of the two must therefore be refused. So they took Domitius's side, urging and encouraging him to press on and assuring him that many who were afraid to support him openly would help him in private. Pompey's party feared exactly that, and laid an ambush for Domitius as he went down before daybreak, by torchlight, to the Field of Mars. The torchbearer walking just ahead of Domitius was struck down first and killed; then others were wounded, and everyone fled except Cato and Domitius. Cato held him there — though he himself had taken a wound in the arm — crying out, imploring the rest to stay and not abandon, while they had breath in their bodies, the defense of their liberty against tyrants who showed plainly enough, by grasping at power through this kind of violence, how moderately they were likely to use it once they had it. But in the end Domitius, unwilling to face the danger any longer, fled to his own house, and Pompey and Crassus were declared consuls.
Even then Cato refused to give up. He resolved to stand for praetor himself that year, to have some footing for his campaign against them — he did not want to be a private citizen contending with public magistrates. Pompey and Crassus saw the danger, and fearing that the praetorship in Cato's hands might carry as much weight as a consulship, they convened the senate suddenly, without notice to a great many of the senators, and pushed through an order that the praetors-elect should take office immediately, without waiting out the usual interval during which, by law, they could be prosecuted for buying votes. Having thus licensed themselves to bribe freely without being called to account, they put up their own friends and dependents as candidates for the praetorship, handing out money and standing watch over the people as they voted. Even so, Cato's virtue and reputation were on the point of triumphing over all these stratagems, for the people generally felt it was shameful that a price should be paid to reject Cato, when he was the man who ought rather to be paid to accept the office. He carried the first tribe. At that, Pompey immediately manufactured a lie, crying out that he had heard thunder, and abruptly broke up the assembly — for the Romans held thunder a matter of religion and a bad omen, and would conclude no business after it. Before the next election they distributed still larger bribes, drove the best men from the Field, and by these foul means got Vatinius chosen praetor instead of Cato. The story goes that those who had sold their votes so corruptly and dishonestly hurried out of the Field the moment it was done, as if in flight. The rest stayed, gathered together and loudly indignant; one of the tribunes kept the assembly in session, and Cato stood up and, as if by inspiration, foretold all the miseries that were afterward to befall the state. He urged the people to beware of Pompey and Crassus, men whose guilt and whose secret designs were exactly what made them so afraid of having Cato for praetor. When he had finished, a larger crowd followed him home than escorted all the new praetors-elect put together.
Gaius Trebonius now proposed the law assigning provinces to the consuls: one was to have Spain and Africa, the other Egypt and Syria, with full power to make war by land and sea however they saw fit. Once it was proposed, everyone else despaired of stopping it, and neither did nor said anything against it. But Cato, before the voting began, mounted the speaker's platform and demanded a hearing; with great difficulty he was allowed two hours. He spent them informing the people, reasoning with them, foretelling much of what was to come — and then he was permitted to speak no longer. As he pressed on, an officer came up and pulled him down; and once down, he went on shouting, and found plenty of listeners ready to share his outrage. The officer seized him again and forced him out of the forum; the moment Cato broke loose, he turned back toward the platform, shouting to the people to stand by him. After this had happened several times, Trebonius lost his temper and ordered him hauled to prison — but the crowd followed, listening to the speech Cato made as he went, until Trebonius took fright again and ordered him released. That whole day was used up, and Cato had staved the business off. But in the days that followed, some of the citizens were overawed by fears and threats, and others were won with gifts and favors. Aquillius, one of the tribunes, they penned inside the senate house with armed men; Cato, crying out that it was thundering, they drove from the forum; a number of people were wounded, and some were killed; and at last, by open force, they passed the law. Feeling ran so high that a crowd gathered to pull down the statues of Pompey — until Cato went and turned them from the attempt.
Then another law was proposed, this one concerning Caesar's provinces and legions. This time Cato did not appeal to the people; he went to Pompey himself. He told him he did not realize it yet, but he was hoisting Caesar onto his own shoulders; and when Caesar grew too heavy for him, Pompey would find he could neither set the burden down nor bear it any longer, and would come crashing with it — burden and bearer together — onto the commonwealth. Then he would remember Cato's advice, and remember that it had been as much to Pompey's own advantage as it was just and honest in itself. Pompey heard warnings like this again and again, and every time he shrugged them off and let them go, never suspecting that Caesar could change, and trusting always in his own power and good fortune.
Cato was made praetor the following year — and, it must be said, he did the office no more honor and credit by his conspicuous integrity than he did it disgrace and damage by his strange behavior. He would often come to court without shoes, sit on the bench with no tunic under his toga, and in that attire pass judgment in capital cases on men of the highest rank. It was said, too, that he used to drink wine after his morning meal and then transact the business of his office — but that report was false. What was true was this: the people at that time had been thoroughly corrupted by the handouts of office-seekers, and most of them treated the selling of their votes as a regular trade. Cato was determined to root this corruption out of the commonwealth altogether, so he persuaded the senate to order that men elected to any office, even if no one accused them, must come into court and give an account under oath of their conduct during the election. This was intensely hateful to the candidates, and more hateful still to the vast numbers who took the bribes. So it happened that one morning, as Cato was on his way to the tribunal, a great mob crowded around him, shouting curses and abuse and throwing stones. Everyone around the tribunal fled at once; Cato himself was forced off it and jostled through the crush, barely escaping the stones, until with great difficulty he caught hold of the Rostra. There he stood up, bold-faced and unshaken, and mastered the tumult at once; the clamor died, and addressing the crowd in words fit for the occasion, he was heard in complete attention and quelled the disturbance entirely. When the senate afterward praised him for it, he answered, "But I do not commend you — for abandoning your praetor in danger, and bringing him no help."
Meanwhile the candidates for office were in an agony of perplexity: each man dreaded to spend money himself, yet dreaded even more that his rivals would. At last they agreed that each should put down 125,000 drachmas, and then all canvass fairly and honestly, on the condition that anyone caught using bribery forfeited his deposit. The bargain struck, they chose Cato to hold the stakes and judge the matter; they brought him the agreed sums and signed the agreement in his presence. He chose not to take the actual money, but accepted securities from men who stood bound for the candidates. On election day he stationed himself beside the tribune who took the votes and watched everything that passed; he caught one candidate breaking the agreement and promptly ordered him to pay his forfeit to the rest. But they, loudly praising Cato's justice, let the penalty go, judging the exposure punishment enough. The affair brought Cato as much envy as reputation, and many resented his taking upon himself, single-handed, the whole authority of the senate, the courts, and the magistracies. For there is no virtue whose honor and credit earn a man more ill-will than justice — and this because justice, more than any other virtue, wins a man power and standing with the common people. Men merely honor the brave and admire the wise, but the just they also love, and trust, and rely on completely. The bold man they fear and the clever man they suspect; and besides, they credit courage and cleverness to a man's natural makeup rather than to any goodness of his will — courage being a kind of natural vigor of the mind, and wisdom a built-in sharpness. But any man can be just if he only wills it; and that is why injustice is held the most dishonorable of vices — because it is the least excusable.
For exactly this reason all the great men opposed Cato: his virtue felt like a standing rebuke. Pompey in particular regarded the growth of Cato's credit as the ruin of his own power, and kept putting men up to rail against him. Among them was the agitator Clodius, now back in league with Pompey, who openly charged that Cato had pocketed a great deal of the treasure found in Cyprus, and that he hated Pompey only because Pompey had refused to marry his daughter. Cato answered that although they had given him neither a horse nor a single soldier, he had brought home more treasure from Cyprus alone than Pompey had from all his wars and triumphs over the ransacked world; and that he had never sought an alliance with Pompey — not because he thought him unworthy of the connection, but because they differed so much in matters that concerned the commonwealth. "I laid down the province that was offered me when my praetorship ended," he said. "Pompey, on the contrary, keeps many provinces for himself and hands out many more to others. Just now he lent Caesar a force of six thousand men for Gaul — which Caesar never asked the people for, and which Pompey never got the people's consent to give. Men, horses, and arms by the thousand have become the private gifts that private men make to one another. Pompey keeps the titles of commander and general while handing over the armies and provinces to others to govern, and he himself stays home to preside over the contests of the canvass and to stir up riots at the elections — and out of the anarchy he creates among us, we can all see well enough, he is seeking a monarchy for himself." So he paid Pompey back in kind.
Cato had a devoted friend and admirer named Marcus Favonius — much what Apollodorus of Phalerum is said to have been, long before, to Socrates: a man whose master's words went to his head like strong wine and threw him into raptures bordering on frenzy. This Favonius stood for the aedileship and was on the point of losing when Cato, there to help him, noticed that all the ballots were written in a single hand; he exposed the fraud and appealed to the tribunes, who stopped the election. Favonius was afterward elected, and Cato, who assisted him in everything the office involved, also took charge of the shows exhibited in the theater. He gave the actors crowns not of gold but of wild olive, such as they give at the Olympic games; and in place of the usual magnificent presents he offered the Greeks beetroot, lettuces, radishes, and pears, and the Romans earthenware jars of wine, pork, figs, cucumbers, and little bundles of firewood. Some ridiculed the economy of it; others watched with respect this gentle unbending of Cato's usual rigor and austerity. In the end Favonius himself slipped into the crowd, took a seat among the spectators, and applauded Cato — shouting to him to reward the performers who did well, and calling on the people to give their honors to Cato, since he for his own part had placed his whole authority in Cato's hands. Meanwhile, in another theater, Curio, Favonius's colleague, was giving magnificent entertainments; but the people left his shows for Favonius's, and joined heartily in the fun, delighted to watch Favonius playing the private citizen and Cato the master of the games. Cato did all this, in truth, to mock the great sums that others spent, and to teach a lesson: that in amusements men ought to seek amusement and nothing more — the display of a decent cheerfulness, not elaborate productions and costly magnificence that demand endless care and trouble over things of no importance at all.
After this, Scipio, Hypsaeus, and Milo stood for the consulship — and not merely with the by-now familiar and accepted disorders of bribery and corruption, but with weapons and slaughter, driving their recklessness and desperation to the very edge of open civil war. It was proposed that Pompey be empowered to preside over the election. Cato at first opposed this, saying that the laws ought not to look to Pompey for protection — Pompey should look for protection to the laws. But the confusion dragged on, three armies in effect besieged the forum day after day, and when no possible end to the disorder appeared, Cato at last decided that rather than let things reach the final extremity, the senate should freely confer everything on Pompey: better to use a lesser illegality as the cure for the greatest of all, and better to set up a more legal sort of monarchy themselves than to let the chaos run on into a sedition that could only end in one anyway. So Bibulus, a friend of Cato's, moved in the senate that Pompey be created sole consul — for either he would restore lawful government, or Rome would at least be serving its best master. Cato stood up and, against all expectation, seconded the motion, concluding that any government was better than pure confusion, and that he did not doubt Pompey would deal honorably with the commonwealth committed to his charge. Pompey, declared consul, invited Cato to visit him at his house in the suburbs. When he came, Pompey greeted and embraced him warmly, acknowledged what Cato had done for him, and asked for his counsel and support in managing the office. Cato answered that nothing he had said in the past had been said out of hatred for Pompey, and nothing he had done now had been done out of love for him: all of it was for the good of the commonwealth. In private, if Pompey asked, he would freely give his advice; in public, whether he asked or not, he would always speak his mind. And he was as good as his word. First, when Pompey drew up severe laws with heavy fines for those who had bribed the people, Cato advised him to let the past alone and provide for the future — if he went digging up old misdemeanors, it would be hard to know where to stop, and if he decreed new penalties for past acts, it would be unreasonable to punish men under a law they had never had the opportunity of breaking. Later, when a number of prominent men, some of them Pompey's own relations, stood accused, and Pompey went slack and lost his appetite for prosecution, Cato reproved him sharply and pushed him on. Pompey had also made a law forbidding the custom of delivering speeches in praise of men on trial; yet he himself wrote one for Munatius Plancus and sent it in while the case was being pleaded. Cato, who was sitting as one of the judges, clapped his hands over his ears and refused to hear it read. Plancus objected to him before the verdict was given — and was condemned anyway. In fact Cato had become a great trouble and perplexity to defendants in general: they dreaded to have him among their judges, yet did not dare demand his removal. Many men had been condemned precisely because, by refusing Cato, they seemed to admit they could not trust their own innocence; and there were some whose enemies threw it in their teeth as a reproach that they had not accepted Cato for a judge.
In the meantime, Caesar kept close with his forces in Gaul and stayed in arms — while at the same time using his gifts, his riches, and above all his friends to build up his power in the city. And now Cato's old warnings began to rouse Pompey out of the careless security he had been lying in, into a kind of dawning sense of danger at hand. But seeing him slow, unwilling, and timid about taking any step to head Caesar off, Cato resolved to stand for the consulship himself and force Caesar's hand at once: either lay down his arms or show his intentions. Both of Cato's competitors were men of good standing; one of them, Sulpicius, owed a great deal to Cato's credit and authority in the city, and people thought it ungracious and ungrateful of him to run against him. Cato himself took no offense. "It is no wonder," he said, "if a man will not yield to another the thing he counts the greatest good." He had persuaded the senate to order that candidates must ask the people for their votes in person — no soliciting through go-betweens, no bringing others along to speak for them on their rounds. This made the common people bitterly hostile to him: he was taking from them not only the money, but the chance of putting important men in their debt — leaving them, at a stroke, both poorer and less courted. On top of that, Cato was by nature completely unsuited to the business of canvassing; he cared more about sustaining the dignity of his life and character than about winning the office. So he solicited in his own fashion, would not let his friends do the things that win over a crowd, and was rejected: he lost the consulship.
Now, the custom on such occasions was for the loser — and his friends and relations with him — to feel disgraced and humiliated, and to observe a kind of mourning for days afterward. Cato took it so lightly that he oiled himself and played ball in the Field of Mars, ate his breakfast, and went down to the forum as usual, shoeless and tunicless, to stroll about with his friends. Cicero faulted him for this: at a moment when affairs demanded such a consul, he said, Cato would neither exert himself nor condescend to pay the people a little court — and then he gave up and never tried again, though he had stood a second time for the praetorship. Cato answered that he had lost the praetorship the first time not by the honest vote of the people but by the violence and corrupt dealing of his adversaries, whereas in the consular election there had been no foul play at all. He could see perfectly well that the people simply did not like his manners; and an honest man ought not to change his manners for their sake — nor would a wise man attempt the same thing again while the same prejudices stood in his way.
Caesar, all this while, was off fighting warlike nations and subduing them at great risk to himself. Among other things, it was widely believed that he had attacked the Germans during a truce and slaughtered three hundred thousand of them. Some of his friends moved that the senate declare a public thanksgiving for the victory. Cato's counter-proposal was that they hand Caesar over to the people he had wronged, and so wash away the offense rather than bring its curse down on the city. "Still, we do have reason to thank the gods," he added, "for sparing the commonwealth — for not taking vengeance on the army for the madness and folly of its general." Caesar answered with a letter to the senate, which was read aloud, and which was packed with insults and accusations against Cato. Cato stood up looking entirely unconcerned. Without heat, without passion — in a calm and, you might say, rehearsed manner — he made all of Caesar's charges sound like common scolding and abuse, a kind of joke Caesar was amusing himself with. Then he got down to business. He went through Caesar's whole political career, explaining and exposing his conduct and his purpose from the very beginning — not like a lifelong opponent, but like a fellow conspirator letting out the secrets — and he closed by telling the senators that it was not the sons of the Britons or the Gauls they needed to fear, but Caesar himself, if they had any sense. The speech so stirred and awakened the senate that Caesar's friends were sorry they had ever had the letter read, since it had handed Cato the opportunity to say so many reasonable things and so many hard truths. Yet nothing was actually decided. The only suggestion made was that it might be well to send Caesar a successor. At that, Caesar's friends demanded that Pompey also lay down his arms and give up his provinces — or else Caesar should not be required to do either. Now, Cato cried out, exactly what he had foretold had come to pass: it was plain that Caesar was using his army to force their judgment, turning against the state the very forces he had wheedled out of it by imposture and trickery. But outside the Senate house Cato could accomplish little. The common people were always eager to build Caesar up, and the senate, though Cato had convinced it, was afraid of the people.
Then the news arrived that Caesar had seized Ariminum and was marching on Rome with his army — and suddenly everyone, Pompey and the common people included, turned their eyes to Cato, the one man who had seen Caesar's intentions from the start and said so plainly. "If you had believed me," he told them, "or taken my advice, you would not now be reduced to fearing one man — or to pinning all your hopes on one man either." Pompey admitted that Cato had spoken like a prophet, while he himself had acted too much like a friend. And Cato advised the senate to put everything into Pompey's hands. "Those who can raise up great evils," he said, "are best at putting them down."
Pompey, finding his forces insufficient and the men he could raise halfhearted, abandoned the city. Cato, resolved to follow him into exile, sent his younger son to Munatius, who was then in Bruttium, and took his eldest with him. But he needed someone to keep his house and look after his daughters, so he took Marcia back — she was a rich widow now, for Hortensius had died and left her his whole estate. Caesar later used this, too, as ammunition, charging Cato with greed and with trafficking in marriage for profit. "If he needed a wife," Caesar asked, "why did he give her away? And if he didn't, why did he take her back? Unless he offered her to Hortensius as bait from the beginning — lent her out young to get her back rich." To that, the fair answer is the line from Euripides:
Some things are past discussing; and the first is calling Hercules a coward.
Charging Cato with greed is about as sensible as charging Hercules with cowardice. Whether the marriage itself was entirely rightly handled is another question, and open to dispute. In any case, as soon as he had taken Marcia back, he put his house and his daughters in her charge, and himself followed Pompey. And it is said that from that day forward he never cut his hair or shaved his beard or wore a garland, but carried the same sadness, grief, and dejection over his country's calamities to the very end, whichever side happened to be winning or losing.
The government of Sicily fell to him by lot, and he crossed over to Syracuse. Learning that Asinius Pollio had landed at Messena with a force from the enemy, Cato sent to him demanding the reason for his coming; Pollio replied by demanding that Cato explain the reason for the whole upheaval of the times. And when word came at the same moment that Pompey had abandoned Italy altogether and lay encamped at Dyrrhachium, Cato remarked on how strange and unfathomable the divine government of the world is: "When Pompey did nothing wisely or honestly, he was always successful; and now that he wants to save his country and defend her liberty, nothing goes right for him." As for Asinius, Cato said he could drive him out of Sicily easily enough — but larger forces were on their way to reinforce him, and Cato would not plunge the island into war. So he advised the Syracusans to join the winning side and look to their own safety, and sailed away.
When he reached Pompey, his advice never varied: drag the war out. He always hoped matters could still be settled, and he had no wish to see things come to battle, for the commonwealth would suffer terribly and would be the author of its own ruin no matter whose sword won. In the same spirit he persuaded Pompey and his council to decree that no city subject to Rome should be sacked, and that no Roman should be killed except in the heat of battle. This won him great honor, and it drew many people over to Pompey's side, attracted by such moderation and humanity. Afterward he was sent into Asia, to help those who were raising men and fitting out ships there, and he took along his sister Servilia and the little boy she had borne to Lucullus. Since her widowhood she had lived with her brother, and she had recovered much of her reputation by placing herself under his care, following him on his voyages, and accepting his severe way of life. Caesar, naturally, did not fail to sling mud at Cato on her account as well.
As it turned out, Pompey's officers in Asia had little need of Cato; but he did talk the people of Rhodes over to the cause, and, leaving Servilia and her child on the island, he returned to Pompey — who by now had assembled very great forces by land and sea. And here, more than in any other single act, Pompey betrayed what he was really thinking. His first intention was to give Cato command of the navy, which counted no fewer than five hundred warships, besides a huge number of light galleys, scouts, and open boats. But then it occurred to him — or his friends pointed out — that Cato's one guiding aim was to free his country from all usurpation, and that if Cato held forces on that scale, the moment Caesar was beaten he would call on Pompey, too, to lay down his arms and submit to the laws. So Pompey changed his mind, though he had already mentioned the appointment to Cato, and made Bibulus admiral instead. For all that, he had no reason to think Cato's zeal for the cause had cooled. Before one of the battles at Dyrrhachium, we are told, Pompey himself addressed the soldiers and ordered his officers to do the same, and the men listened coldly, in silence — until Cato, last of all, came forward and spoke to them as a philosopher would, saying what the occasion demanded about liberty, and manly virtue, and death, and a good name. He delivered it all with strong natural feeling, and he finished by calling on the gods directly, addressing them as though they stood present to watch men fight for their country. At that the army raised such a shout, and showed such fire, that the officers led them into the danger full of hope and confidence. Caesar's men were routed and driven off — but Caesar's presiding fortune used Pompey's caution and self-distrust to leave the victory incomplete. That story, though, has been told in the life of Pompey. And while everyone else was celebrating and glorying in the success, Cato alone turned away, covered his face, and wept for his country, cursing the fatal ambition that had set so many brave Romans to murdering one another.
After this, when Pompey followed Caesar into Thessaly, he left behind at Dyrrhachium a mass of munitions, money, and stores, along with many of his own household and relations, and put the whole charge of it in Cato's hands — with a command of only fifteen cohorts. He trusted Cato greatly, but he feared him too, knowing perfectly well that if things went badly, Cato would be the last man to desert him; but that if he conquered, Cato would never let him use the victory however he pleased. A good many men of high rank also stayed with Cato at Dyrrhachium. When they heard of the disaster at Pharsalia, Cato settled his course in his own mind: if Pompey were dead, he would lead the men in his charge back to Italy, and then withdraw as far from Caesar's tyranny as he could and live in exile; if Pompey were alive, he would hold the army together for him. On that resolution he crossed over to Corcyra, where the fleet lay, and there he offered to hand his command to Cicero, on the grounds that Cicero had been consul and he himself only a praetor. But Cicero refused it, and was setting out for Italy. Pompey's son, furious at this, was ready in his rashness and heat to punish everyone who was quitting the cause — starting by laying hands on Cicero. Cato spoke with the young man privately and talked him out of it. So he plainly saved Cicero's life, and rescued several others from rough treatment besides.
Guessing that Pompey the Great had fled toward Egypt or Africa, Cato resolved to hurry after him, and he put all his men aboard and set sail — but first he gave free leave to depart to everyone whose heart was not in continuing the fight. On the African coast they fell in with Sextus, Pompey's younger son, who told them of his father's death in Egypt. The grief was overwhelming, and to a man they declared that after Pompey they would follow no leader but Cato. Out of compassion, then, for so many worthy men who had given such proof of their loyalty — men he could not for shame abandon in a desert country in the middle of so many dangers — he took the command upon himself, and marched toward the city of Cyrene, which opened its gates to him at once, though not long before it had shut them against Labienus. There he learned that Scipio, Pompey's father-in-law, had been received by King Juba, and that Attius Varus, whom Pompey had made governor of Africa, had joined them with his forces. Cato resolved to march to them overland, though it was now winter. He collected a train of donkeys to carry water, laid in plenty of every other provision, and gathered a number of wagons. He also brought along some of the people called Psylli, who cure snakebite by sucking the venom out with their mouths, and who have charms besides, with which they drug the serpents into a stupor.
They marched seven days straight, Cato on foot the whole time at the head of his men, never once using a horse or a chariot. Ever since the battle of Pharsalia, moreover, he had taken his meals sitting upright — adding this to his other habits of mourning, that he never lay down except to sleep.
The winter passed in Africa, and Cato led out his army, which came to little short of ten thousand men. The affairs of Scipio and Varus were going badly, because of the quarrels and dissensions between them and their fawning submission to King Juba, whose vanity, and whose swollen pride in his own power and riches, made him insufferable. The first time he came to a conference with Cato, Juba had his own seat placed in the middle, between Scipio and Cato. Cato saw it, picked up his chair, and set himself down on the far side of Scipio — putting Scipio in the place of honor in the middle, though Scipio was his enemy and had once published a pamphlet full of slanders against him. There are people who treat that moment as a trifle, and who nonetheless criticize Cato because in Sicily one day, walking with Philostratus, he gave the philosopher the middle place, to show his respect for philosophy. However that may be, he now succeeded both in humbling Juba, who had been treating Scipio and Varus like a pair of satraps under his orders, and in reconciling the two Romans with each other. All the troops wanted Cato for their general; Scipio and Varus, too, gave way and offered him the command. But he said he would not break the very laws he was fighting to defend: he was only a propraetor, and a propraetor had no business commanding in the presence of a proconsul — for Scipio had been made proconsul. Besides, people took it as a good omen to see a Scipio in command in Africa, and the mere name put hope of victory into the soldiers.
No sooner had Scipio taken up the command than he resolved — Juba urging him on — to put the whole population of Utica to the sword and level the city, on the charge that it had taken Caesar's side. Cato would not stand for it. Invoking the gods, crying out and protesting in the council of war, he managed with great difficulty to save the poor people from that cruelty. Afterward, at the request of the inhabitants and at Scipio's own instance, Cato took over the government of Utica himself, so that the city should not fall into Caesar's hands one way or another — for it was a strong place, and valuable to either side. Under Cato it became stronger and better supplied still. He brought in vast stores of grain, repaired the walls, raised towers, and ran deep trenches and palisades around the town. The young men of Utica he quartered in these outworks, having first taken their weapons from them; the rest of the inhabitants he kept inside the town, and he took the greatest care that the Romans did them no injury and offered them no insult. From this base he sent great quantities of arms, money, and provisions to the camp, and the city became the war's chief magazine.
His advice to Scipio was the same he had once given Pompey: do not stake everything on a battle against a man experienced in war and formidable in the field, but play for time — for time gradually wears down the fury of a crisis, and fury is what usurpation lives on. Scipio, out of pride, rejected the counsel, and wrote Cato a letter taunting him with cowardice: apparently it was not enough for him to sit safe himself behind walls and trenches; he had to stop other men from boldly using their own good judgment to seize the right opportunity. Cato wrote back offering to take the horse and foot he had brought to Africa and cross into Italy, to make a diversion there and pull Caesar off after him. Scipio ridiculed that proposal too. Then Cato let it be seen openly that he was sorry he had yielded the command — sorry because Scipio would clearly not conduct the war with any wisdom, and because, if against all likelihood he somehow succeeded, he would use his success just as unjustly at home. Cato had made up his mind by then, and said as much to his friends: he could have only slender hopes of generals with so much boldness and so little judgment; and yet if anything happened beyond all expectation, and Caesar were overthrown, he for his part would not stay in Rome, but would get away from the cruelty and inhumanity of Scipio, who was already flinging fierce, arrogant threats at many men.
What Cato had been bracing for came sooner than he expected. Late one evening a man arrived from the army, three days on the road, with word that a great battle had been fought near Thapsus; that everything was utterly lost; that Caesar had taken the camps; that Scipio and Juba had escaped with only a handful, and all the rest of the army was destroyed. Arriving in wartime, and at night, news like that drove the people nearly out of their minds; they could scarcely be kept inside the city walls. But Cato came out to meet them in their uproar and confusion, and did everything he could to comfort and steady them, easing their terror and bewilderment a little by suggesting that things were probably not as bad as the reports made out — rumor always exaggerates. For the moment, the panic subsided. The next morning he sent for the three hundred men he used as his council — Romans who were in Africa on business, in trade and money-lending — along with the senators who were present, and their sons, summoning them all to the temple of Jupiter. While they were gathering, Cato walked about quietly, perfectly composed, as though nothing had happened, reading a book he carried in his hand. It was his inventory of war supplies: armor, grain, ammunition, soldiers.
When they had assembled, he began. First he addressed the three hundred themselves, praising warmly the courage and loyalty they had shown, and their good service to their country with their persons, their money, and their counsel. Then he begged them on no account to scatter, as if any man alone could find safety by deserting his companions. On the contrary: as long as they held together, Caesar would have less reason to despise them if they fought, and more readiness to pardon them if they submitted. So he urged them to deliberate among themselves, and said he would find no fault with either choice. If they decided to bow to fortune, he would put their change of course down to necessity. But if they resolved to stand firm and face the danger for liberty's sake, he would do more than commend them — he would admire their courage, and he would make himself their leader and their companion, until they had tried the last fortune of their country. And their country was not Utica or Adrumetum: it was Rome, which had often, by her own sheer greatness, lifted herself up from worse disasters than this. Besides, many things argued for their safety, and chiefly this: they would be fighting a man whose affairs were dragging him urgently in every direction at once. Spain had already gone over to the younger Pompey; Rome itself, unused to the bridle and chafing under it, was ready to rise at any turn of events. As for danger — they should not flinch from it, and they could take a lesson there from their enemy, who spent his own life so freely to accomplish the most unrighteous ends, but who could never hope for the ending they could promise themselves. For all the uncertainty of war, they were sure of one or the other: a most happy life if they won, or a most glorious death if they failed. Still, the decision was theirs to make among themselves, he said; and for his part he joined them in praying that the gods, in payment for their past courage and goodwill, would prosper whatever they now determined. When Cato finished, some of his hearers were moved and heartened by the arguments themselves; but the greater part, watching his fearlessness, his generosity, his goodness, all but forgot the danger they were in. Here, they felt, was the one leader no fortune could conquer; and they begged him to use their persons, their arms, and their estates however he saw fit — better to meet death following his counsel than to save their skins by betraying such virtue. Someone in the assembly proposed a decree freeing the slaves, and most of the rest approved the motion. Cato refused: it was neither just nor lawful, he said; but if individual masters chose to free their slaves willingly, those of military age should be accepted for service. Many promised to do so; he ordered their names enrolled, and withdrew.
Soon afterward letters reached him from Juba and Scipio. Juba, with a few of his men, had withdrawn to a mountain, and was waiting to hear what Cato would decide — intending to wait there for him if he chose to abandon Utica, or to march to his relief if he were besieged. Scipio was aboard ship off a promontory not far from Utica, waiting for an answer on the same question. Cato thought it best to hold the messengers until the three hundred should come to some resolution.
The senators, for their part, showed real spirit: they freed their slaves at once and armed them. But the three hundred were businessmen and moneylenders, with much of their wealth held in slaves, and the enthusiasm Cato's speech had kindled in them did not last long. Just as some substances take heat easily and lose it the moment the fire is removed, so these men glowed while Cato was in front of them; but when they began reasoning among themselves, their fear of Caesar soon overpowered their reverence for Cato and for virtue. "Who are we, after all," they said, "and who is it we are refusing to obey? Isn't this the Caesar who now holds the whole power of Rome? And which of us is a Scipio, a Pompey, a Cato? Now, when every man is letting fear outweigh honor, shall we of all people take up the fight for the liberty of Rome — shall we, in Utica, declare war on the man before whom Cato and Pompey the Great fled out of Italy? Shall we free our slaves to fight Caesar, when we ourselves have exactly as much liberty as he chooses to allow us? No — poor creatures that we are, let us know ourselves, submit to the victor, and send envoys to beg his mercy." That was the moderate faction talking. The greater part were for seizing the senators and holding them, hoping to appease Caesar's anger by handing him prisoners. Cato saw the change come over them, and gave no sign of it; but he wrote to Juba and Scipio to keep away from Utica, because he did not trust the three hundred.
Now a considerable body of cavalry that had escaped from the lost battle came riding toward Utica, and sent three men ahead to Cato — who did not, between them, carry a single coherent message, for one party in the squadrons was for going to Juba, another for joining Cato, and some were simply afraid to enter Utica at all. On hearing this, Cato ordered Marcus Rubrius to keep an eye on the three hundred — quietly taking down the names of those who freed their slaves of their own accord, and forcing no one. Then, taking the senators with him, he went out of the town to meet the cavalry's senior officers. He pleaded with them not to abandon so many Roman senators, and not to take Juba for their commander in place of Cato, but to think of the common safety and come into the city — a city impregnable, and stocked with grain and every other provision enough for years. The senators added their own pleas, with tears. The officers went off to consult their soldiers, and Cato sat down with the senators on an embankment to await the answer. At that moment Rubrius came up in great agitation, crying out that the three hundred were all in commotion, stirring up revolt and tumult in the city. At this the rest gave way to despair, weeping and lamenting their condition; Cato did what he could to comfort them, and sent word to the three hundred asking them to be patient. Then the cavalry officers came back with demands that were anything but reasonable. They said they did not want to serve Juba for his pay, and they would not fear Caesar so long as they followed Cato; but they dreaded being shut up inside with the men of Utica — a treacherous breed, they said, of Carthaginian blood; quiet enough for now, but certain, the moment Caesar appeared, to conspire together and betray the Romans. If Cato expected them to join him, he must first drive every Utican out of the town, or kill them, and receive his cavalry into a place cleansed of enemies and barbarians alike. Cato thought this utterly cruel and barbarous; but he answered mildly that he would consult the three hundred.
Then he rode back into the city, where he found the three hundred no longer making excuses or hiding their feelings out of respect for him. Now they said it openly: no one was going to force them into a war against Caesar. They were not able to fight him, they said, and they were not willing. Some of them were even muttering about holding the senators in the city until Caesar arrived — a hostage offering. Cato acted as though he had not heard it; he had, in fairness, the excuse of being slightly deaf. At that moment a man came running to tell him the cavalry were riding away. Afraid that the three hundred, left to themselves, might do something desperate to the senators, Cato immediately went out with a few of his friends, and seeing that the horsemen had already gone some distance, he took a horse and rode after them. They were delighted when they saw him coming, welcomed him warmly, and begged him to save himself along with them. And it was then, they say, that Cato wept — pleading for the senators, stretching out his hands in supplication. He turned some of their horses around bodily; he grabbed hold of the men by their armor; until at last, out of sheer compassion, they gave in and agreed to stay one day — just one — to cover the senators' escape. So they rode back with him, and he posted some of them at the town gates and gave others charge of the citadel. Now it was the three hundred who grew frightened, sure they would be made to pay for their wavering, and they sent to Cato begging him to come to them by any means. But the senators crowded around him and refused to let him go. They would not, they said, hand their guardian and savior over to a pack of traitors.
There was never, perhaps, a moment when Cato's virtue showed more plainly. Every class of person in Utica could see it, with sorrow and with admiration: nothing he was doing carried the slightest trace of hidden motive or self-interest. Here was a man who had long since settled on his own death, taking infinite pains, labor, and care — entirely for the sake of others — so that once he had made their lives safe, he could put an end to his own. For it was easy enough to perceive that he had determined to die, though he never let it show.
So, after calming the senators, he did what the three hundred asked and went to them alone, without a single attendant. They thanked him over and over, and begged him to use them and trust them in whatever came next. If they were not Catos, they said — if they could not rise to his greatness of soul — then let him at least pity their weakness. They had decided to send to Caesar and plead with him, first and above all, for Cato; and if they could not win his case, they would not accept a pardon for themselves, but would fight in his defense as long as they had breath in their bodies. Cato thanked them for their good intentions and advised them to send quickly, for their own safety's sake — but to ask nothing whatsoever on his behalf. "Entreaties are for the conquered," he said, "and begging pardon is for those who have done wrong. As for me, I have never been beaten in my life. So far as I chose to be, I have been the winner — I have conquered Caesar on every point of justice and honesty. It is Caesar who has been caught and defeated. The designs against his country that he denied for so long — he now stands convicted of them all." With that he left the assembly. Told that Caesar was already approaching with his whole army, he said, "Ah — he expects to find us brave men." Then he went to the senators and urged them not to delay another hour, but to get away while the horsemen were still in the city. He ordered every gate shut except the one facing the sea, assigned ships to those who were leaving, and handed out money and provisions to those in need — all of it done with perfect order and exactness, keeping down every disturbance, making sure no one did the townspeople any wrong.
Marcus Octavius now arrived with two legions, camped near Utica, and sent to Cato to settle the question of who held supreme command. Cato sent him no answer at all; to his friends he said, "And we wonder why everything has gone to ruin — when even here, in the wreck itself, our love of office survives." Meanwhile word came that the cavalry, on their way out, had begun to loot and plunder the citizens. Cato ran straight at them. From the first man he reached, he snatched back what had been taken; the rest threw down their spoils and rode off in silence, ashamed of themselves. Then he called together the people of Utica and asked them, for the three hundred's sake, not to inflame Caesar against them, but to join with them in seeking safety for everyone together. After that he went down to the port again to watch over those who were embarking, and there he embraced the friends and companions he had persuaded to go, and sent them on their way. His own son he did not advise to leave; he did not think it was his place to make a son abandon his father. But there was a young man named Statyllius, in the very flower of his age, high-spirited and burning to imitate Cato's iron constancy. Cato pressed him to leave — he was a known enemy of Caesar — and got nowhere. So Cato turned to Apollonides the Stoic philosopher and Demetrius the Peripatetic. "This one is your job," he said. "Cool this young man's fever, and teach him what is good for him." And so, seeing his friends off and dispatching the business of everyone who came to him, he spent that night and the greater part of the following day.
Lucius Caesar, a kinsman of Caesar's, had been chosen to go as envoy for the three hundred, and he came to Cato asking for help in preparing a persuasive speech on their behalf. "And for you yourself," he added, "it will be an honor for me to kiss Caesar's hands and fall at his knees, pleading your cause." Cato would not hear of it. "If I were willing to be saved by Caesar's favor," he said, "I should go to him myself. But I will not be indebted to a tyrant for his acts of tyranny. And tyranny is what it is — it is usurpation for him to play the rightful lord, graciously sparing the lives of men he has no title to rule at all. But come — if you like, let us work out what you should say for the three hundred." They spent some time at it together, and as Lucius was leaving, Cato commended his son and the rest of his friends to his care, took his hand, and said goodbye.
Then he withdrew to his house again and gathered his son and his friends around him. He talked with them about many things — among the rest, he forbade his son ever to go into politics. To act in public life as a Cato should, he said, had become impossible; and to act any other way would be shameful. Toward evening he went to his bath. As he was bathing, he remembered Statyllius and called out loudly, "Apollonides! Have you tamed that high spirit of Statyllius'? Has he gone, without even saying goodbye to us?" "No," said Apollonides. "I have said a great deal, and it has done very little good. He is resolute and immovable. He declares he is determined to follow your example." At this, they say, Cato smiled, and answered, "That will soon be tried."
After his bath he went to supper with a large company. He sat upright at the table, as he had done ever since the battle of Pharsalia; from that day on he never lay down except to sleep. At supper with him were all his own circle and the magistrates of Utica.
After the meal, the wine brought on a great deal of lively, agreeable conversation, and one philosophical question after another went around the table. At length they came down to the strange Stoic doctrines known as the paradoxes — and to one in particular: that only the good man is free, and every wicked man is a slave. The Peripatetic, as you might expect, objected — and Cato came down on him hard. Raising his voice, he argued the point at astonishing length and with such passionate vehemence that it became obvious to everyone at the table: he had resolved to put an end to his life, and set himself free. When he finished speaking, there was a long silence, and every face fell. Cato saw it, and to draw them off from suspecting his design, he turned the conversation back to the present — worrying aloud over the men now at sea, and over the others who were traveling by land across a dry and barbarous desert.
When the company broke up, he took his usual after-supper walk with his friends, gave the necessary orders to the officers of the watch, and went to his chamber — but first he embraced his son, and then each of his friends, with more than his usual warmth, which set them all suspecting again. Then he lay down and took up Plato's dialogue on the soul — the Phaedo. He had read more than half the book when he glanced up and noticed his sword was missing; his son had carried it off while he was at supper. He called a servant and asked who had taken his sword. The servant said nothing, and Cato went back to his reading. A little later — not pressing, not seeming in any hurry, as if he merely wanted to know what had become of it — he told the man to bring it. He waited a while; he finished the whole book; still no one brought the sword. At that he called up all his servants and demanded it in a louder voice. One of them he struck across the mouth so hard that he bloodied his own hand — and now his anger rose in earnest, and he shouted that his son and his servants were betraying him, handing him over naked to the enemy. Then his son came running into the room with the rest of his friends, and they fell at his feet, weeping and begging. But Cato rose up and fixed them with a terrible look. "When did I lose my mind," he said, "and how, without my noticing? No one argues with me. No one shows me a better course, if my judgment is supposed to be so bad — I am simply to be disarmed, and prevented from using my own reason. Why don't you go further, young man, and tie your father's hands behind his back, so that when Caesar comes he'll find me unable to defend myself? To kill myself I need no sword. I need only hold my breath a while, or dash my head once against the wall."
At this his son went out of the chamber weeping, and all the rest with him, except Demetrius and Apollonides. Left alone with those two, Cato began to speak more calmly. "And you," he said. "Do you also propose to keep a man of my age alive by force — to sit here and watch me in silence? Or have you brought me arguments — some proof that it is not base and unworthy, when Cato can find safety nowhere else, to go begging for it from his enemy? If so, make your case. Show me why we should unlearn everything we were ever taught — why we should throw over every conviction we have lived by, so that Caesar can make us wiser, and we can owe him even more than our lives. Not that I have decided anything about myself. But when I do decide, I must have the power to carry out my own resolution. And I will decide it, be assured, in counsel with you — in counsel with the doctrines your own philosophy teaches. So set your minds at rest. And go tell my son that he should not try to compel his father where he cannot persuade him." They gave him no answer, but went out weeping. Then the sword was carried in by a small boy. Cato took it, drew it, and looked it over; and when he saw the point was true, he said, "The sword is now my own." He laid it down, picked up his book again, and — so it is related — read it through twice from the beginning. After that he slept so soundly that the men outside the door could hear him snoring.
About midnight he called up two of his freedmen — Cleanthes, his physician, and Butas, his chief agent in public business. Butas he sent down to the port, to see whether all his friends had gotten safely to sea. To the physician he gave his hand to be dressed, swollen as it was from the blow he had struck his servant. At this everyone in the house took heart, hoping it meant he intended to live.
After a while Butas returned with word that all had sailed except Crassus, who had been delayed by some business but was on the point of departing; the wind, he added, was high, and the sea running very rough. Cato sighed when he heard it, out of pity for the men on the water, and sent Butas down again — in case anyone had been driven back and needed something, he was to come and report it.
By now the birds were beginning to sing, and Cato drifted off into a short sleep. At last Butas came back and told him all was quiet in the port. Then Cato lay down as if to sleep out what remained of the night, and told him to shut the door behind him. But the moment Butas was gone, he took his sword and drove it into his chest. The swollen hand robbed the blow of its force, and he did not die of it at once; struggling, he fell from the bed, knocking over a small geometrical table that stood beside it, and the crash brought the servants crying out, and his son and all his friends running into the chamber. They found him lying in his blood, with a great part of his bowels forced out of the wound — but still alive, still able to look at them — and they stood frozen in horror. The physician went to him and, finding the bowels unpierced, tried to put them back and sew up the wound. But Cato came to himself, and understood what the man intended. He thrust the physician away, tore at his own bowels with his hands, ripped the wound wide — and died.
In less time than you would think his own household could have learned what had happened, the three hundred were at the door. A little later the people of Utica came flooding in, all crying out with one voice that he was their benefactor and their savior — the only free man, the only man undefeated. And this at the very hour word arrived that Caesar was coming. Yet neither fear of the danger at hand, nor any urge to flatter the conqueror, nor their own quarrels and divisions could turn them from honoring Cato. They laid out his body magnificently, gave him a splendid funeral, and buried him by the seashore — where a statue of him now stands, sword in hand. Only when all this was done did they turn to the business of saving themselves and their city.
Caesar had been told that Cato was staying in Utica and making no attempt to escape — that he had sent the other Romans away while he himself, with his son and a handful of friends, remained there entirely unconcerned — and he could not fathom what the man intended. Holding him in great consideration, he hurried toward the city with his army. When he heard of the death, this, it is related, is what he said: "Cato, I grudge you your death, as you grudged me the honor of saving your life." And in truth, had Cato allowed himself to owe his life to Caesar, he would not so much have tarnished his own honor as added to Caesar's glory. What would actually have happened, of course, we cannot know — though from Caesar's usual clemency, we may guess it would have been the kindest outcome.
Cato was forty-eight years old when he died. His son suffered no harm from Caesar; but he grew idle, it is said, and got a reputation for wasting himself on women. In Cappadocia he stayed at the house of Marphadates, a member of the royal family there who had a very beautiful wife; and he stretched the visit so far past what was decent that he became the butt of epigrams — such as this one:
Tomorrow — the thirtieth day — they say, Cato at last will go away.
and this:
Porcius and Marphadates, friends so true — one Soul, they say, suffices for the two.
For Soul — Psyche — was the wife's name. And again:
To Cato's greatness all confess: a royal Soul he does possess.
But every one of these stains was wiped away by the bravery of his death. At Philippi, fighting for his country's liberty against Octavian and Antony, when the ranks were breaking, he scorned to run and scorned to slip away unnoticed. He shouted his defiance at the enemy, showed himself out in front where they could see him, rallied those of his side who stood their ground — and fell at last, leaving his enemies in awe of his courage.
Nor was Cato's daughter Portia one whit behind the rest of her family in sober living and greatness of spirit. She married Brutus, the man who killed Caesar; she was in on the conspiracy; and she ended her life in a manner worthy of her birth and her virtue. All of which is told in the life of Brutus.
And Statyllius — the young man who swore he would imitate Cato — was stopped by the philosophers at the time, when he wanted to end his life. Afterward he followed Brutus, served him with complete loyalty and great usefulness, and died on the field of Philippi.
Cicero's mother, Helvia, is generally agreed to have been well born and to have lived an honorable life. About his father, the reports run to opposite extremes. Some say he was the son of a fuller — a cloth-worker — and raised in that trade; others trace the family all the way back to Tullus Attius, a famous king of the Volscians who fought the Romans with some distinction. Whatever the truth, the first man of the family to carry the surname Cicero must have been somebody worth remembering, because his descendants refused to drop the name — in fact they were fond of it — even though people made fun of it. The Latin word cicer means chickpea, and that first Cicero apparently had a notch or dimple at the tip of his nose that looked like the cleft in a chickpea. Hence the name.
The Cicero whose story I am telling had spirit on this subject. When he first stood for office and got into politics, some of his friends advised him to drop the name or trade it for a better one. "No," he told them. "I intend to make the name Cicero more glorious than Scaurus or Catulus ever were." And later, when he was quaestor in Sicily and dedicated a piece of silver plate to the gods, he had his first two names, Marcus and Tullius, engraved on it — and then, as his little joke, told the craftsman to carve a chickpea where the third name should go. So much for the name.
As for his birth, the story goes that his mother delivered him without pain or labor, on the third of January — the same day on which, now, the magistrates of Rome offer prayers and sacrifices for the emperor. It is also said that a vision appeared to his nurse and foretold that the baby at her breast would grow up to be a great blessing to Rome. Omens like these can usually be written off as fancy and idle talk, but Cicero himself soon made them look like genuine prophecy. The moment he was old enough for lessons, his talent was so obvious, and his name among the schoolboys so great, that their fathers used to drop in at the school just to lay eyes on young Cicero and be able to say they had personally witnessed the quickness in learning he was famous for. The cruder ones got annoyed with their own sons when they saw the boys walking along with Cicero respectfully placed in the middle. He had exactly the temperament Plato asks of the scholar and philosopher — hungry for every kind of learning, turning up his nose at no branch of knowledge — but his special pull was toward poetry, and a poem he wrote as a boy, in tetrameter verse, called Pontius Glaucus, still survives. As he grew and worked at these arts more seriously, he came to be considered not just the best orator in Rome but the best poet too. The glory of his oratory holds up to this day, despite all the new fashions in speaking that have come along since; but his poetry has been forgotten and fallen completely out of favor, so many gifted poets having come after him.
When he finished his boyhood studies, he attached himself to Philo the Academic, the student of Clitomachus the Romans admired most for his eloquence and loved best for his character. At the same time he kept company with the Mucii, distinguished statesmen and leaders of the senate, and picked up his knowledge of the law from them. For a short stretch he even served in the army under Sulla, in the Marsian war — Rome's war with its Italian allies. But when he saw the state splitting into factions, and the factions dragging everything toward one-man rule, he withdrew into a quiet, contemplative life, keeping company with learned Greeks and devoting himself to his books, until Sulla got control of the government and things settled into some sort of order.
Around this time Chrysogonus, a freed slave of Sulla's, had put in a claim about the estate of a man said to have been executed in the proscriptions, and had bought it himself for 2,000 drachmas. Roscius, the dead man's son and heir, protested, and demonstrated that the estate was actually worth 250 talents. Sulla was furious at having his dealings questioned, and — with Chrysogonus managing the evidence — brought a prosecution against Roscius for the murder of his own father. Not one advocate would help the man; every one of them, dreading Sulla's cruelty, backed away from the case. Abandoned on all sides, the young man came to Cicero for refuge. Cicero's friends urged him on, telling him he would never have a finer or more honorable entry into public life. So he took the defense, won the case, and was widely admired for it.
But he was afraid of Sulla, so he traveled to Greece, putting the word out that he went for his health. And in fairness, there was something to that. He was thin and undernourished, with a stomach so weak that he could keep down only a light, plain diet, and that only late in the evening. His voice was loud and strong but harsh and untrained, and in the heat and vehemence of speaking he always drove it up to such a pitch that people genuinely worried for his health.
When he got to Athens he attended the lectures of Antiochus of Ascalon, and was charmed by the fluency and elegance of the man's language, though he did not approve of his novelties in doctrine. For Antiochus had by now broken away from the so-called New Academy and abandoned the school of Carneades — maybe won over by the argument from the plain evidence of the senses, maybe, as some say, pushed by rivalry and spite against the followers of Clitomachus and Philo into changing his views and adopting, on most points, the doctrine of the Stoics. Cicero preferred the New Academy and held to it, and he made himself a plan: if he found no place in public life, he would retire here, away from the courts and politics, and live out his days quietly in the study of philosophy.
Then came the news of Sulla's death. By now Cicero's body, rebuilt by exercise, had come into vigorous condition; his voice had been trained until it was sweet and full on the ear and properly matched to his constitution. His friends at Rome were writing letter after letter begging him to come back, and Antiochus too kept urging him toward public affairs. So he set to work again on rhetoric — the orator's instrument — and summoned up his political faculties, drilling himself in practice speeches and attending the most celebrated rhetoricians of the day. He sailed from Athens for Asia and Rhodes. Among the Asian masters he worked with Xenocles of Adramyttium, Dionysius of Magnesia, and Menippus of Caria; at Rhodes he studied oratory with Apollonius, the son of Molon, and philosophy with Posidonius. Apollonius, the story goes, knew no Latin, so he asked Cicero to declaim in Greek. Cicero was glad to do it, figuring his faults would be more easily pointed out that way. When he finished, the rest of the audience was astonished, and they fell over one another competing to praise him. But Apollonius, who had shown no excitement while listening, now sat lost in thought for a long while, saying nothing at all. And when Cicero began to look crushed, Apollonius said, "You have my praise and admiration, Cicero — and Greece has my pity. The only glories she had left were learning and eloquence, and now you are carrying those off to Rome as well."
So Cicero, full of expectation, was once more set on a political career — when an oracle took the edge off his ambition. He asked the god at Delphi how he could win the most glory, and the priestess answered: by making his own nature, and not the opinion of the crowd, the guide of his life. Because of that he went cautiously at first in Rome, hanging back from public office, and so was little regarded, and picked up the labels that Rome's crude and ignorant sorts hand out so freely — "the Greek," "the Scholar." But when his own appetite for fame, and his father's and relatives' eagerness, drove him seriously into pleading, he did not rise to the top by slow degrees. He blazed out at full brilliance all at once and left every other advocate at the bar far behind. Yet at first, they say, he was as weak in delivery as Demosthenes had been, and so he studied carefully under Roscius the comic actor and Aesop the tragic one. Of this Aesop they tell a story: playing Atreus on stage, plotting his revenge on Thyestes, he was so carried out of himself in the heat of the scene that he struck a servant running across the stage with his scepter — and killed him on the spot. That was the kind of intensity Cicero learned, and his delivery became no small part of what made his eloquence so persuasive. He used to mock orators who bellowed. "They shout because they cannot speak," he said, "the way lame men get on horseback because they cannot walk." That readiness with a jab — that gift for the witty line — was thought to suit a courtroom advocate perfectly, and audiences loved it; but he overused it, offended a good many people, and got a reputation for spite.
He was appointed quaestor at a time of severe grain shortage, and drew Sicily as his province. At first he made himself unpopular there by forcing the Sicilians to ship their grain to Rome, but once they had experience of his diligence, fairness, and mildness, they honored him beyond any governor they had ever had. And when a number of young Romans from good and noble families were brought before the praetor in Sicily on charges of indiscipline and misconduct on military service, Cicero took their defense, argued it superbly, and got them all acquitted. So he headed back to Rome feeling very pleased with himself — and then, as he tells the story on himself, something absurd happened. In Campania he ran into a prominent citizen he counted as a friend, and asked him what Rome was saying about his achievements — what Rome thought of them — as if the whole city must be ringing with the glory of what he had done. His friend replied, "So where have you been all this time, Cicero?" That flattened him completely. He saw that the news of his deeds had sunk into the city of Rome as into a vast ocean, without leaving one visible ripple of reputation. Later, thinking it over, he concluded that the glory he was chasing was an infinite thing — there was no fixed finish line, no way to measure done — and he scaled back his ambitions considerably. All the same, he remained excessively delighted by his own praise, and stayed passionately hungry for glory to the very end of his life; and that hunger often got in the way of his soundest judgment.
As he threw himself more seriously into public business, one thought struck him as absurd: a craftsman working with tools and vessels — dead objects — knows the name, the place, and the use of every one of them; should a statesman, whose instruments for public work are human beings, be careless and lazy about knowing people? So he memorized not only the names but everything else: exactly where each of the more prominent citizens lived, what land he owned, who his friends were, who his neighbors were; and traveling any road in Italy, Cicero could point out his friends' and acquaintances' estates and country houses as he passed. His own fortune was small — enough to live on, no more — and so people marveled that he took neither fees nor gifts from his clients, and marveled most of all when he took on the prosecution of Verres. This Verres had been praetor of Sicily, and the Sicilians charged him with a long list of crimes committed during his governorship. Cicero got him convicted not by speaking, but, in a sense, by declining to speak. The praetors favored Verres and had stalled the trial with adjournment after adjournment until the very last day, when it was obvious there wouldn't be time for the advocates to be heard and the case brought to a verdict. So Cicero stood up and said there was no need for speeches; he simply produced and examined his witnesses, and then called on the judges to vote. Even so, the record preserves plenty of Cicero's wit from that case. When a man named Caecilius, a former slave who was said to keep Jewish practices, tried to shove the Sicilians aside and take over the prosecution of Verres himself, Cicero asked, "What does a Jew have to do with a pig?" — verres being Latin for a boar. And when Verres started sneering that Cicero lived like a woman, he shot back, "You ought to save that lecture for your sons, at home" — Verres having a son who had gone down a disgraceful road. The orator Hortensius did not dare defend Verres outright, but he was persuaded to appear for him at the assessment of the fine, and took an ivory sphinx as his fee. When Cicero worked an oblique dig at him into one of his speeches and Hortensius protested that he was no good at solving riddles, Cicero said, "Really? And you with the Sphinx in your house."
So Verres was convicted — though Cicero, who set the fine at 750,000 denarii, fell under suspicion of having been bribed to keep the figure low. Still, the grateful Sicilians came to him when he was aedile bringing all sorts of presents from the island; he took no personal profit from any of it, using their generosity only to bring down the public price of food.
He had a very pleasant place at Arpinum, plus a farm near Naples and another near Pompeii, neither worth much. His wife Terentia's dowry came to 100,000 denarii, and he received a bequest worth 90,000 denarii; on this he lived generously but temperately, surrounded by the learned Greeks and Romans of his circle. He rarely if ever sat down to eat before sunset — not because of the press of business so much as for his health and that weak stomach. He was altogether careful and precise about his body, keeping to a fixed regimen of walks and massages, and by managing his constitution this way he built it up, in time, into something healthy, equal to serious strains and hardships. His father's house he turned over to his brother; he himself lived near the Palatine hill so that the people who came to pay court to him would be spared a long walk. And come they did — every day, as many at his door as ever came to Crassus for his riches or to Pompey for his standing with the soldiers, and those two were then the most admired and powerful men in Rome. In fact, Pompey himself used to pay court to Cicero, and Cicero's political work did a great deal to build up Pompey's authority and reputation in the state.
A crowd of distinguished candidates stood with him for the praetorship, and he was elected ahead of them all; and he handled the cases before him with justice and integrity. There is a story that Licinius Macer, a man of real power in the city with Crassus backing him besides, was tried before Cicero for extortion, and was so confident in his own influence and his friends' efforts that while the judges were still voting he went home, got a quick haircut, put on a clean toga as if already acquitted, and was setting off for the Forum again — when at his front door he met Crassus, who told him he had been convicted by every single vote. Macer went back inside, lay down on his bed, and died on the spot. The verdict brought Cicero great credit for running an honest court. Another time a man named Vatinius — rough-mannered, often insolent to the magistrates in court, with his neck covered in swollen tumors — came before the tribunal with some request, and when Cicero said he needed time to consider it, Vatinius remarked that he wouldn't hesitate over such a thing if he were praetor. Cicero turned on him instantly: "Ah, but I don't have your neck."
With only two or three days left in his term, Manilius was brought before him, charged with embezzlement. Manilius had the goodwill and support of the common people, who believed he was being prosecuted only to get at Pompey, whose particular friend he was. So when he asked for time before his trial and Cicero granted him just one day — the very next — the people were furious, because the custom was for praetors to give the accused ten days at least. The tribunes hauled Cicero before the assembly and accused him; he asked to be heard, and said that he had always treated defendants with as much fairness and humanity as the law allowed, so he thought it would be hard to deny the same to Manilius — and that he had deliberately assigned the one day of which, as praetor, he was still master, since it was hardly the move of a man trying to help Manilius to toss his case into another praetor's court. These words produced a wonderful change in the crowd. Loud in his praise, they asked him to take on Manilius' defense himself. He willingly agreed — chiefly for the sake of Pompey, who was away — and taking his place before the people again, he delivered a bold attack on the oligarchical party and on the men who envied Pompey.
Yet when it came to the consulship, the nobles pushed him forward as eagerly as the common people did, for the good of the city, and both parties worked together for his election — and here is why. The new order Sulla had imposed on the state had seemed senseless at first, but with time and habit most people had come to regard it as a settlement they could live with. There were men, however, who wanted to shake and overturn the whole existing arrangement — not from any honorable motive, but for their own private gain — and with Pompey off fighting the kings of Pontus and Armenia, there was no force at Rome sufficient to put down a revolution. These men had for their leader Lucius Catiline, a bold, daring, restless character who stood accused, among other enormous crimes, of taking his own virgin daughter's honor and of killing his own brother — and, fearing prosecution for that murder, he had persuaded Sulla to enter his brother's name, as though the man were still alive, on the proscription lists of those to be executed. With this man as their captain, the city's worst citizens pledged themselves to one another, sealing the pact, among other rites, by sacrificing a man and tasting his flesh. Catiline corrupted a large part of the young men of Rome, keeping each supplied with pleasures, drink, and women, and freely covering the bills for all of it. Beyond the city, all Etruria had been stirred to the edge of revolt, along with much of Gaul this side of the Alps. And Rome itself was primed for upheaval by the lopsided distribution of wealth: men of the highest rank and proudest spirit had bankrupted themselves on shows, banquets, election campaigns, and extravagant building, and the city's riches had drained into the hands of low-born nobodies. It would have taken only a slight push to bring the whole thing down — any man with enough daring could have toppled a commonwealth that sick.
Catiline, wanting a strong base from which to launch his plans, stood for the consulship, and his hopes were high: he expected to share the office with Gaius Antonius, a man fit to lead in neither a good cause nor a bad one, but a useful addition to someone else's power. Most of the good and honest citizens saw what was coming, and they put Cicero up for the consulship. The people embraced him gladly; Catiline was rejected; and Cicero and Gaius Antonius were elected — even though, of all the candidates, Cicero was the only one whose father belonged to the equestrian order rather than the senatorial.
Though Catiline's plot was not yet public knowledge, Cicero's consulship ran into serious preliminary trouble at once, from two directions. On one side, the men whom Sulla's laws had barred from holding office — no small group, in numbers or in influence — came forward as candidates and courted the people, saying much about Sulla's tyranny that was perfectly true and just, except that they were shaking the government at the wrong and most dangerous moment. On the other side, the tribunes were pushing laws to the same effect, proposing a commission of ten men with unlimited powers: as supreme governors they would have the right to sell the public lands of all Italy and Syria, and everything Pompey had newly conquered; to try and to banish whomever they pleased; to plant colonies; to draw money from the treasury; and to levy and pay whatever soldiers they saw fit. Several of the nobles favored this law — none more than Gaius Antonius, Cicero's colleague, who hoped to be one of the ten. What frightened the nobles most was that Antonius was thought to know about Catiline's conspiracy and, buried in debt as he was, not to mind it.
Cicero dealt with that danger first. He arranged a decree assigning Antonius the province of Macedonia, while declining for himself the province of Gaul that was offered to him. That single favor so completely bought Antonius that he was ready, like a hired actor, to play the supporting part in whatever Cicero said for the good of the country. With his colleague tamed and manageable, Cicero could go after the plotters with more confidence. In the senate he delivered a speech against the law of the ten commissioners that left its sponsors with nothing to say for it. They tried again, and, with everything prepared beforehand, summoned the consuls before the popular assembly; Cicero, entirely unafraid, walked out first, ordered the senate to follow him, and not only got the law thrown out but so overwhelmed the tribunes with his oratory that they dropped the rest of their projects altogether.
For Cicero, more than any man, showed the Romans how much charm eloquence can lend to what is good; that justice is invincible if it is well spoken; and that a statesman who means to govern skillfully must, in his actions, always choose what is honest over what is popular, and, in his speaking, know how to present the right and useful course stripped of whatever might give offense. One incident in the theater during his consulship shows what his speaking could do. In the old days the knights of Rome sat mixed in among the common people in the theater, taking whatever seats they found; Marcus Otho, as praetor, was the first to separate them out and assign them their own section, a mark of distinction they hold to this day. The common people took this as an insult, and when Otho appeared in the theater they hissed him, while the knights received him with loud applause. The people hissed harder; the knights clapped louder. Then the two sides turned on each other with insults, and the whole theater fell into chaos. When Cicero heard of it, he came to the theater himself, called the people out to the temple of Bellona, and there scolded and shamed them so effectively that they went straight back into the theater and applauded Otho thunderously, competing with the knights over who could show him the greater honor and respect.
Catiline's fellow conspirators had been cowed at first, even discouraged. But before long their nerve came back. They began meeting again, urging one another to strike boldly and get the thing done before Pompey returned — for word had it that he was already marching his army home toward Rome. The sharpest goads driving Catiline forward, though, were Sulla's old soldiers. They had been discharged and scattered all over Italy, and the largest and fiercest concentration of them lay seeded through the towns of Etruria, passing their days in daydreams of fresh plunder — of looting the piled-up riches of Italy all over again. With Manlius for their leader, a man who had served with real distinction in Sulla's campaigns, they attached themselves to Catiline and came into Rome to back him with their votes at the election. For he was standing for the consulship a second time, and his plan was to kill Cicero in the chaos of election day itself. Even the gods seemed to be signaling the trouble ahead, with earthquakes, lightning strikes, and strange apparitions. Human informants were not lacking either — reliable enough in themselves, but not yet enough to convict a man as noble and as powerful as Catiline. So Cicero postponed the election, summoned Catiline before the senate, and questioned him directly about the reports. Catiline, believing that plenty of senators secretly wanted a revolution — and wanting to give the conspirators in the room a taste of what he was made of — gave back an answer of pure audacity. "What harm am I doing," he said, "if I see two bodies — one lean and wasting, but with a head; the other big and strong, but with no head at all — and I simply give a head to the body that lacks one?" The riddle meant the senate and the people, and it deepened Cicero's alarm considerably. He put on a breastplate, and the leading citizens escorted him from his house in a body, with a crowd of young men accompanying him down to the Field of Mars, where the voting was held. There, quite deliberately, he let his tunic slip from his shoulder so that the armor underneath showed, putting his danger on display for everyone watching. The crowd was outraged on his behalf and packed in close around him to protect him. In the end Catiline was voted down once again, and Silanus and Murena were elected consuls.
Not long afterward, Catiline's soldiers began assembling in Etruria and forming themselves into companies, for the day fixed for the uprising was drawing near. And around midnight, some of the most prominent and powerful men in Rome — Marcus Crassus, Marcus Marcellus, and Scipio Metellus — came to Cicero's house, pounded on the gate, roused the porter, and told him to wake his master and say who was waiting. Here was the story. After dinner, Crassus's porter had handed him a bundle of letters delivered by a stranger. They were addressed to various men, but one — unsigned — was for Crassus himself. That one alone he read. It told him that a great massacre was coming at Catiline's hands, and advised him to slip out of the city. The others he did not open. He came straight to Cicero with the lot, shaken by the danger, and eager to clear himself of the suspicion he lay under because of his friendship with Catiline. Cicero weighed the matter and summoned the senate at daybreak. He brought the letters with him, handed each to the man it was addressed to, and ordered them read aloud. Every one of them told the same story of conspiracy. And when Quintus Arrius, a former praetor, reported to the house that soldiers were mustering in companies across Etruria, and that Manlius was said to be on the move with a large force, hovering near those towns and waiting for news from Rome, the senate passed its decree: everything was placed in the hands of the consuls, who were to take charge of affairs and do whatever they could to save the state. This was no routine measure. The senate reserved it for moments of imminent danger.
Once Cicero had received this power, he handed the situation outside the city to Quintus Metellus and kept the management of Rome itself in his own hands. So enormous was the escort that guarded him whenever he went out that his train filled most of the forum the moment he entered it. Catiline, unable to bear any more delay, resolved to break out and join Manlius himself — but first he ordered Marcius and Cethegus to take their swords, go to Cicero's gates early in the morning as if merely paying a courtesy call, and there fall on him and cut him down. This plot a noblewoman named Fulvia carried to Cicero by night, warning him to be on his guard against Cethegus and Marcius. They came at daybreak, and when they were refused entry they made such an angry scene at the gates that they only deepened the suspicion against them. Cicero then went out and summoned the senate to the temple of Jupiter Stator, which stands at the top of the Sacred Street on the way up to the Palatine. Catiline arrived with the rest, as though he meant to make his defense — and not one senator would sit beside him. Every man on his bench got up and moved away. When he began to speak, they shouted him down. At last Cicero rose and ordered him to leave the city: since one of them did his work with words, he said, and the other with weapons, there needed to be a wall between them. So Catiline marched straight out of Rome with three hundred armed men, surrounded himself — as though he were a lawful magistrate — with the rods, the axes, and the military standards, and made his way to Manlius. With a force now numbering nearly twenty thousand, he moved from town to town, working to talk or terrify them into revolt. It was open war now, and Antonius was sent out to fight him.
The conspirators Catiline had left corrupted inside the city were held together and kept in heart by Cornelius Lentulus, surnamed Sura — a man of noble family but a dissolute life, who had once been expelled from the senate for his debaucheries and was now serving his second term as praetor, the customary route for men trying to win back senatorial rank. The story goes that he picked up the surname Sura like this. As quaestor in Sulla's day, he had run through and squandered an enormous amount of public money. Sulla, furious, called him before the senate to account for it. Lentulus strolled in with perfect coolness and contempt and announced that he had no accounting to give — but they were welcome to this, and he stuck out the calf of his leg, the way boys do at ball when they miss a catch. And since sura is the Latin word for the calf of the leg, the name stuck. On another occasion he was on trial and had bribed some of the jurors; when he was acquitted by a margin of only two votes, he complained that he'd wasted his money on the second one — a single vote would have done the job. This was the man, such by his own nature, whom Catiline had set aflame — and false prophets and fortune-tellers had finished the corruption with empty hopes. They fed him invented verses and oracles, claiming to prove from the Sibylline prophecies that three men named Cornelius were fated to rule Rome as monarchs; that two of them, Cinna and Sulla, had already fulfilled the decree; and that destiny was now hurrying toward the third and last Cornelius with the gift of monarchy in her hands. He must seize it by every means, they said, and not ruin his chance by dawdling, the way Catiline had.
What Lentulus had in mind, then, was nothing small or trivial. He had resolved to kill the entire senate and as many other citizens as he could manage, to burn the city to the ground, and to spare nobody — nobody except Pompey's children, whom he intended to seize and hold as hostages to secure his peace with Pompey. For by now the report was loud and everywhere that Pompey was on his way home from his great eastern campaign. The night chosen for the strike was during the Saturnalia, the December festival. Swords, flax, and sulfur were carried into Cethegus's house and hidden there. They assigned a hundred men to a hundred districts, the city carved up so that with that many fires kindled at once, all of Rome would go up in a single blaze. Others had their orders too: block the aqueducts, and kill anyone who tried to carry water to the flames. While all this was in preparation, it happened that two ambassadors from the Allobroges — a Gallic people then in miserable straits and chafing badly under Roman rule — were staying in Rome. Lentulus and his circle judged them the perfect instruments for stirring Gaul to revolt, and admitted them to the conspiracy. They gave them letters for their own magistrates and letters for Catiline: to the Gauls they promised liberty; Catiline they urged to proclaim freedom for the slaves and march them on Rome. And they sent along with the ambassadors, to carry the letters to Catiline, a man named Titus, a native of Croton.
Such were the schemes of careless men who did their plotting over wine and among women — and Cicero tracked them with sober patience, hard thinking, and truly remarkable intelligence. He had agents everywhere outside, following and tracing every move, and he kept up secret communication with many men who pretended to be in the conspiracy. So he knew all their dealings with the strangers; and lying in wait by night, he took the Crotonian, letters and all — the Allobrogian ambassadors secretly working with him the entire time.
At daybreak he summoned the senate to the temple of Concord, where he read out the letters and examined the informers. Junius Silanus added that several people had heard Cethegus say three consuls and four praetors were marked for death; Piso, an ex-consul, testified to more of the same; and Gaius Sulpicius, one of the praetors, was sent to Cethegus's house, where he found a stockpile of javelins and armor, and a still larger number of swords and daggers, every one freshly sharpened. In the end the senate voted immunity for the Crotonian in exchange for a full confession, and Lentulus stood convicted. He resigned his office — he was still praetor — stripped off his purple-bordered robe there in the senate, and exchanged it for clothing better suited to his new circumstances. Then he and his confederates were handed over to the praetors to be held in open custody.
By evening the common people were massed outside, waiting. Cicero went out to them, told them what had been done, and then, with the crowd escorting him, went to the house of a friend and near neighbor — for his own house was occupied by the women, who were celebrating their secret rites in honor of the goddess the Romans call Bona, the Good Goddess, and the Greeks the Women's Goddess. Her sacrifice is performed every year in the consul's house by his wife or his mother, with the Vestal Virgins attending. Slipping quietly into his friend's house, with only a few men present, Cicero began to turn over what he should do with these prisoners. The severest penalty — the only one that fit crimes so enormous — he shrank from, hesitant and uneasy. Partly it was the gentleness of his own nature; partly he feared looking like a man drunk on his new authority, crushing too harshly men of the noblest families, with the most powerful friends in the city. Yet if he dealt with them mildly, the danger ahead looked dreadful. If they suffered anything short of death, there was no chance they would be reconciled; far more likely they would add fresh rage to their old wickedness and hurl themselves into every kind of recklessness — while he himself, whose reputation for courage did not stand especially high with the crowd as it was, would be written off as the worst sort of coward.
While Cicero sat wavering, a sign came to the women at their sacrifice. On the altar, where the fire seemed to have gone completely out, a great bright flame burst up from the ashes of the burnt wood. The other women were terrified, but the holy virgins told Terentia, Cicero's wife, to go quickly to her husband and tell him to carry out what he had resolved for his country's good — for the goddess had sent a great light on the road to his safety and his glory. Now Terentia was by no nature soft-hearted or timid; she was an ambitious woman who, as Cicero himself says, was far more likely to push her way into his public business than to share her domestic affairs with him. She delivered the message and sharpened him against the conspirators. So did his brother Quintus, and so did Publius Nigidius, one of his philosophical friends, whose counsel he used in his greatest and weightiest affairs of state.
The next day the senate took up the question of punishment. Silanus, asked his opinion first, said the men should be taken to the prison and there suffer the ultimate penalty. One after another, every senator agreed — until it came to Gaius Caesar, the man who was afterward dictator. He was young then, at the very start of his rise, but he had already set his hopes and his policy on the road by which he would eventually turn the Roman state into a monarchy. Others saw none of this coming. Cicero had strong suspicions, though he had never obtained solid proof; and some indeed said that Caesar came within a whisker of exposure and only just slipped clear of him. Others hold that Cicero deliberately looked away from the evidence against him, out of fear of his friends and his power — since it was obvious to everyone that if Caesar were charged alongside the conspirators, they were likelier to be saved with him than he was to be punished with them.
So when Caesar's turn came to speak, he stood up and proposed that the conspirators not be put to death, but that their property be confiscated and the men held instead under guard in whatever Italian towns Cicero himself might choose, until Catiline was defeated. The proposal was the moderate one, and the man delivering it was a formidable speaker — and Cicero himself added no small weight to it, for when he rose he argued the scale both ways, speaking partly for the first motion and partly for Caesar's. His friends all judged Caesar's motion the safer course for Cicero — he would carry less blame afterward if the conspirators were not executed — and so they came down on that side; and Silanus too changed course and walked his own opinion back, saying he had never meant capital punishment, only the "ultimate penalty," which for a Roman senator was imprisonment — the utmost a Roman could suffer. The first man to speak against Caesar's motion was Catulus Lutatius. Cato followed, and in his speech he pointed the finger of suspicion at Caesar himself with such vehemence, and so filled the senate with anger and resolve, that a decree was passed for the conspirators' execution. But Caesar fought the confiscation of their property, thinking it hardly fair that the senators who had thrown out the mildest part of his proposal should help themselves to the harshest. When many insisted, he appealed to the tribunes, who would do nothing; and Cicero himself gave way and dropped that part of the sentence.
Then Cicero went out with the senate to fetch the conspirators. They were not being held together in one place; each praetor had one or another of them in custody. First he took Lentulus from the Palatine and led him down the Sacred Street and through the middle of the forum, a ring of the most eminent citizens encircling and guarding him. The people, frightened by what was happening, filed past in silence — the young men especially, as if, trembling and afraid, they were being initiated into some ancient sacred mystery of aristocratic power. When he had crossed the forum and reached the prison, he handed Lentulus to the executioner and gave the order. Then Cethegus, and after him each of the rest in turn, he brought down and delivered to death. And when he saw many of the conspirators still standing about the forum in knots, ignorant of what had been done and waiting for nightfall, still supposing the men were alive and might yet be rescued, he called out to them in a loud voice: "They have lived." That is how Romans speak of the dead when they want to avoid words of ill omen.
It was evening by the time he made his way home through the forum, and now the citizens no longer escorted him in silence and good order. Instead they received him, as he passed, with shouts and applause, hailing him as the savior and founder of his country. The streets blazed with light from the lamps and torches set up at every doorway, and the women held lights out from the rooftops in his honor, to watch him going home in a magnificent procession of the city's greatest men. Among them were many who had commanded great wars, celebrated triumphs, and added to the Roman empire by land and by sea — and as they walked with him they admitted to one another that although the Roman people owed many commanders of that age a debt for riches, spoils, and power, they owed their safety — the security of everything else — to Cicero alone, for delivering them from a danger so great and so near. Not that stopping the plot and punishing the plotters seemed so wonderful in itself; the extraordinary thing was that the greatest conspiracy ever formed had been crushed with so little disturbance, so little tumult, so little cost. For most of the men who had flocked to Catiline deserted him the moment they heard the fate of Lentulus and Cethegus; and Catiline himself, giving battle to Antonius with the forces that remained to him, was destroyed along with his army.
And yet there were men quite ready to speak ill of Cicero for all this, and to do him harm as well — with leaders among the incoming magistrates of the following year: Caesar, now one of the praetors, and Metellus and Bestia, the tribunes. Taking office a few days before Cicero's consulship expired, they refused to let him address the people, and threw their benches in front of the Rostra to prevent it, telling him that he could, if he liked, take the oath of withdrawal from office and then come straight down again. Cicero accepted the terms and came forward to lay down his consulship; and when silence fell, he recited his oath — not in the usual form, but in a new one all his own: that he had, in truth, saved his country and preserved the empire. And the whole people swore the oath after him, confirming it. This only exasperated Caesar and the tribunes further, and they set about brewing new trouble for him, proposing a law to recall Pompey and his army to put an end to what they called Cicero's tyranny. But it was an enormous piece of luck for Cicero, and for the whole commonwealth, that Cato was a tribune that year. Holding equal power with the others and greater public standing, Cato could block their designs. He swept aside their other projects easily, and in a speech to the people he praised Cicero's consulship so highly that the greatest honors ever given were voted him, and he was publicly proclaimed Father of his Country. He seems to have been the first man ever to receive that title, when Cato gave it to him before the assembled people.
His authority in the city stood very high at this moment. But he made himself widely envied, and offended a great many people — not by any wicked act, but simply because he never stopped praising and glorifying himself. No senate, no assembly of the people, no court of law could convene without being treated to another round of Catiline and Lentulus. He went on to fill his books and writings with self-congratulation, until a prose style that was in itself delightful — a pleasure to hear — became tiresome and grating to his audiences; the ugly habit clung to him like a chronic disease. Still, however greedy he was for his own glory, he was remarkably free of envy toward anyone else's, and was in fact lavishly generous in praising both the ancients and his own contemporaries, as his writings show on every page. Many of these sayings are still remembered. He called Aristotle "a river of flowing gold," and said of Plato's dialogues that "if Jupiter were to speak, he would speak in language like theirs." Theophrastus he liked to call "my own special luxury." Asked which of Demosthenes's orations he thought the best, he answered, "The longest." True, certain would-be imitators of Demosthenes have made a fuss over a line in one of his letters to the effect that Demosthenes sometimes nods off in his speeches — conveniently forgetting the extravagant praise Cicero heaped on the man throughout his career, and the compliment he paid him in naming his own most labored orations, the ones against Antony, his "Philippics." As for the eminent men of his own day, in eloquence or in philosophy, there was not one of them whom he did not make more famous by speaking or writing kindly about him. He obtained Roman citizenship from Caesar, when Caesar was in power, for Cratippus the Peripatetic philosopher, and got the court of the Areopagus to pass a public decree asking Cratippus to remain in Athens to teach their young men and adorn their city. There are letters from Cicero to Herodes, and others to his own son, in which he directs the boy to study philosophy under Cratippus. There is one letter in which he blames Gorgias the rhetoric teacher for luring his son into drinking and high living, and bans the man from his company. That letter, and one other to Pelops of Byzantium, are the only two of his Greek letters written in anger — and rightly enough in the case of Gorgias, if he really was the dissolute character he was reputed to be; but with Pelops, Cicero comes off rather small, whining that the man had failed to arrange certain honors for him by decree of the Byzantines.
Here is another illustration of his hunger for praise: his habit, in the heat of making a speech more striking, of trampling right over decorum and dignity. When Munatius, who had escaped conviction thanks to Cicero's advocacy, promptly turned around and prosecuted Cicero's friend Sabinus, Cicero snapped in the heat of his resentment, "Do you imagine you were acquitted on your own merits, Munatius? Wasn't it rather that I threw so much darkness over the case that the court couldn't see your guilt?" From the Rostra he once delivered a eulogy of Marcus Crassus to great applause — and then, within a few days, publicly abused him from the same spot. "Didn't you stand in this very place two days ago," Crassus called out, "and praise me?" "Yes," said Cicero. "I was exercising my eloquence on a poor subject." On another occasion Crassus declared that no member of his family had ever lived past sixty, then later denied saying it, and demanded, "What could have put it into my head to say such a thing?" "You knew how delighted the people would be to hear it," Cicero answered. "You were fishing for their favor." When Crassus once professed admiration for the Stoic doctrine that the good man is always rich, Cicero said, "Are you sure you don't mean their doctrine that everything belongs to the wise?" — Crassus being notorious for his greed. One of Crassus's sons was thought to look so exactly like a certain Axius that it cast a shadow on his mother's honor; when the young man made a successful speech in the senate and Cicero was asked what he thought of it, he answered in Greek: "Axios Crassou" — worthy of Crassus, and of Axius too.
When Crassus was about to leave for Syria, he preferred to have Cicero as a friend rather than an enemy, so one day he greeted him warmly and said he would come and dine with him — and Cicero received him just as graciously. A few days later, some of his acquaintances came to intercede for Vatinius, then his enemy, saying the man wanted reconciliation and friendship. "What," said Cicero, "does Vatinius want to come to dinner too?" So much for his way with Crassus. As for Vatinius, who had swellings on his neck, Cicero once heard him pleading a case and called him "the swollen orator." And having been told once that Vatinius was dead, then learning shortly afterward that he was alive, Cicero said, "Then may the rascal perish — for bringing news that wasn't true."
When Caesar brought forward a law to divide the farmland of Campania among his soldiers, many senators opposed it. One of the oldest men in the house, Lucius Gellius, declared that it would never pass while he lived. "Then let's postpone it," said Cicero. "Gellius isn't asking us to wait long." There was a man named Octavius, rumored to be of African descent. When he complained during one of Cicero's pleadings that he couldn't hear him, Cicero answered, "Strange — you have holes in your ears." When Metellus Nepos told him he had ruined more men as a witness than he had ever saved as an advocate, Cicero agreed: "I admit it. I have more truth in me than eloquence." A young man suspected of serving his father a poisoned cake was talking loudly about the abuse he planned to heap on Cicero. "Better that," Cicero replied, "than one of your cakes." Publius Sextius hired Cicero as one of his advocates in a case, then insisted on doing all the talking himself and wouldn't let anyone else get in a word. When it was clear the judges were about to acquit him and the ballots were already being cast, Cicero called out, "Speak fast, Sextius — use your time. Tomorrow you'll be a nobody again." He once summoned Publius Cotta as a witness — a man who liked to pass for a lawyer, though he was ignorant and unread. When Cotta answered, "I know nothing about the matter," Cicero said, "You think, perhaps, that we're asking you about a point of law." When Metellus Nepos, in the middle of a quarrel, kept demanding, "Who was your father, Cicero?" he shot back, "In your case, your mother has made that question much harder to answer" — for Nepos's mother had a scandalous reputation. The son was cut from flighty cloth himself. At one point he abruptly threw up his office of tribune and sailed off to Syria to join Pompey — then sailed straight back again, with just as little reason. He buried his tutor Philagrus with far more ceremony than the occasion called for, and set a stone crow on top of the tomb. "That, at least, is fitting," said Cicero. "The man didn't teach you to speak — he taught you to fly around." And when Marcus Appius opened a courtroom speech by saying that his friend had begged him to bring industry, eloquence, and loyalty to the case, Cicero asked, "Then how did you have the heart to supply not one of the three?"
Sharp needling of opponents and rival advocates counts as fair courtroom rhetoric. But Cicero would attack anyone at all for the sake of a joke, and that earned him real hatred. A few samples will show the habit. Marcus Aquinius, who had two sons-in-law in exile, was dubbed King Adrastus, after the legendary king whose daughters likewise both married exiles. Lucius Cotta, a devoted lover of wine, happened to be censor when Cicero was running for the consulship. Cicero, thirsty at the election, took a drink of water while his friends crowded around to screen him. "You're right to be worried," he told them. "The censor might be angry with me — for drinking water." Meeting Voconius one day with his three strikingly ugly daughters, he quoted the verse:
He raised a family without Apollo's blessing.
When Marcus Gellius, who was reputed to be the son of a slave, read out some letters in the senate in a piercing, carrying voice, Cicero remarked, "Don't be surprised. He comes from a family of criers." And when Faustus Sulla, son of Sulla the dictator — the man whose posted bills had proscribed and condemned so many citizens during his dictatorship — had so wasted his estate and sunk into debt that he was forced to post bills of his own advertising his goods for sale, Cicero observed that he liked the son's bills much better than the father's. Habits like these made him hateful to many people.
And it was over just such grievances that Clodius's faction formed against him. Here is how it began. Clodius was a man of noble family, in the flower of his youth, bold and headstrong. Being in love with Pompeia, Caesar's wife, he slipped secretly into Caesar's house dressed as a music-girl. The women were celebrating there the sacrifice of Bona, the Good Goddess — the rite no man is permitted to see — and there was no man in the house. Clodius, still young and beardless, hoped to pass among the women and reach Pompeia unnoticed. But finding himself inside a great house at night, he lost his way in the corridors, and a maidservant of Aurelia, Caesar's mother, spotted him wandering about and asked his name. Forced to speak, he said he was looking for one of Pompeia's maids, a girl named Abra — and the servant, hearing that this was no woman's voice, shrieked and called the women together. They barred the gates and searched every corner, and at last found Clodius hiding in the room of the very maid who had let him in. The scandal ran through the whole city. Caesar divorced Pompeia, and Clodius was prosecuted for profaning the sacred rites.
Cicero at this time was Clodius's friend, for during the Catiline conspiracy Clodius had been one of his most energetic supporters and protectors. But when Clodius rested his defense on the claim that he had not even been in Rome that day, but far away in the country, Cicero testified that Clodius had come to his own house that very day and talked with him about a number of matters. Which was true — though people believed Cicero testified not so much for the truth's sake as to keep the peace with his wife Terentia. She bore a grudge against Clodius on account of his sister Clodia, who, it was alleged, wanted to marry Cicero and had been working at it through Tullus, one of Cicero's closest friends. Cicero's frequent visits and attentions to Clodia, who lived in their neighborhood, had roused Terentia's suspicions; and being a woman of fierce temper who held the upper hand over Cicero, she pushed him into taking sides against Clodius and giving his testimony. Many other good and honest citizens gave evidence against Clodius as well — for perjuries, for public disorders, for bribing the people, for seducing women. Lucullus produced women-servants who testified that Clodius had slept with his own youngest sister while she was Lucullus's wife; and it was widely believed he had done the same with his two other sisters — Tertia, married to Marcius Rex, and Clodia, married to Metellus Celer. This Clodia was nicknamed Quadrantia, because one of her lovers had slipped her a purse of small copper coins instead of silver, and the smallest copper coin was called a quadrant. It was on this sister's account, above all, that Clodius's name became a byword. Yet for all this, when the common people massed against the accusers and witnesses and the whole prosecution, the judges panicked. A guard had to be posted around them, and most of them scrawled their ballots so that no one could read the letters. The count showed a majority for acquittal, and bribery was said to have done the work. Catulus, when he next met the judges, remarked, "You were quite right to ask for a guard — someone might have taken your money." And when Clodius taunted Cicero that the judges hadn't believed his testimony, Cicero answered, "On the contrary. Twenty-five of them believed me — they voted against you. And the other thirty didn't believe you, because they wouldn't vote to acquit until they had your money in hand."
Caesar, though summoned, gave no testimony against Clodius. He declared that he was not convinced of his wife's adultery, but that he had put her away because Caesar's house had to be clear not only of guilt but of rumor. "Because I wished my wife," Caesar said, "to be not so much as suspected."
Clodius escaped the danger, got himself elected tribune, and immediately turned on Cicero, piling up every charge and stirring up every person he could against him. He won over the common people with crowd-pleasing laws; he decreed rich provinces to each of the consuls — Macedonia to Piso, Syria to Gabinius; he organized the poorest citizens into a standing party for his purposes, and kept a bodyguard of armed slaves around him. Of the three men then holding the greatest power, Crassus was Cicero's open enemy, Pompey played coy with both sides, and Caesar was about to march for Gaul with an army. It was to Caesar — no friend of his, for the suspicions born in the days of the conspiracy still stood between them — that Cicero applied, asking to go along as one of his lieutenants in the province. Caesar accepted him. But Clodius, seeing that Cicero was about to slip beyond the reach of his power as tribune, put on a show of wanting reconciliation. He laid the whole blame on Terentia, spoke of Cicero always in generous terms, and addressed him kindly, as a man who felt no hatred — only a few complaints to raise, in a moderate, friendly way. He so completely talked Cicero out of his fears that Cicero resigned his post with Caesar and returned to public life. At this Caesar was exasperated. He joined Clodius's party against him, turned Pompey away from him entirely, and declared before a public assembly that in his own view the execution of Lentulus and Cethegus and their accomplices without trial had been neither fair nor legal. For this was the charge against Cicero, and this was the accusation he was summoned to answer. So, as a defendant in danger of the verdict, he changed into mourning clothes and went about with his hair untrimmed, in the dress of a suppliant, begging the people for mercy. But Clodius met him at every corner with a gang of insolent ruffians who jeered at his mourning dress and his humiliation, and often broke up his appeals to the people by pelting him with mud and stones.
Even so, nearly the whole equestrian order changed into mourning with him, and no fewer than twenty thousand young men followed him about with untrimmed hair, joining his supplications to the people. Then the senate met to decree that the people should put on mourning as in a time of public grief. When the consuls opposed it, and Clodius surrounded the senate-house with armed men, many senators ran out into the open, crying aloud and tearing their clothes. But even that sight stirred neither shame nor pity. Cicero had to flee, or settle it with Clodius by the sword. He begged Pompey for help — but Pompey had deliberately gotten out of the way and was staying at his country house in the Alban hills. First Cicero sent Pompey's son-in-law Piso to intercede; then he set out to go himself. Pompey, hearing of it, could not bring himself to face the man. He was ashamed, remembering the great battles Cicero had fought for his sake in the commonwealth and all the policy he had shaped for his advantage; but he was Caesar's son-in-law now, and at Caesar's bidding he had set aside every old kindness. He slipped out by another door and dodged the interview. Deserted by Pompey and left standing alone, Cicero turned to the consuls. Gabinius was harsh with him, as usual. Piso spoke more gently: give way, he urged, step aside for a while before the fury of Clodius, wait for the times to change — and be, once again, his country's savior from the storms Clodius was raising.
Cicero took this answer and consulted his friends. Lucullus advised him to stay, certain he would win in the end; others said to flee, because the people would want him back soon enough, once they had had their fill of Clodius's rage and madness. Cicero chose flight. But first he took a statue of Minerva that had long stood honored in his house, carried it up to the capitol, and dedicated it there with the inscription, "To Minerva, Patroness of Rome." Then, with an escort of friends, he left the city in the middle of the night and traveled by land through Lucania, making for Sicily.
The moment his flight became public, Clodius put a decree of exile to the vote and posted an edict barring him from fire and water — the Roman formula of outlawry — and forbidding anyone within five hundred miles of Italy to take him under a roof. Out of respect for Cicero, most people ignored the edict entirely, showing him every courtesy and escorting him along his way. But at Hipponium, a city of Lucania now called Vibo, a certain Vibius — a Sicilian by birth who owed Cicero many favors, among them an appointment as head of the state engineers during his consulship — refused to receive him into his house, sending word instead that he would assign him a spot somewhere in the countryside. And Gaius Vergilius, the praetor of Sicily, who had been on the closest terms with him, wrote telling him to stay out of Sicily. Disheartened by these snubs, Cicero went to Brundisium and put out with a fair wind — but a gale blowing in from the sea carried him back to Italy the next day. He put to sea again and reached Dyrrachium, and it is reported that just as he came ashore, an earthquake struck and the sea convulsed at the same moment — signs, the diviners said, that his exile would not last long, for such things foretell change. Many people visited him out of respect, and the cities of Greece competed over which could honor him most; yet he stayed dejected and inconsolable, gazing back toward Italy like a heartbroken lover. The misfortune had left him so small-spirited, so humbled and crushed, as no one would have expected in a man who had spent so much of his life with study and philosophy. He had often asked his friends, after all, to call him not an orator but a philosopher — philosophy, he said, was his real business; rhetoric was merely the tool he used to get things done in public life. But the hunger for glory has great power to wash the tinctures of philosophy out of a man's soul. Spend enough time governing the crowd and you catch the crowd's passions, by sheer custom and contact — unless a politician engages with public business very carefully indeed, taking on the problems themselves without taking on the passions that ride along with them.
Clodius, having driven Cicero out, burned his farms and country villas, and then his city house, and built a temple to Liberty on the empty site. The rest of his property he put up for auction, advertising it day after day; nobody came to buy. All this made him terrifying to the nobles, and with the common people — whom he had filled with insolence and license — trailing behind him, he finally began testing his strength against Pompey himself, attacking some of the settlements Pompey had made in his conquered territories. The disgrace of this stung Pompey into reproaching himself for his cowardice in abandoning Cicero, and, reversing course, he set himself and his friends to work for a recall. When Clodius blocked it, the senate voted to ratify no public business of any kind until Cicero was brought home. In the consulship of Lentulus the violence over the question rose so high that tribunes were wounded in the Forum, and Cicero's brother Quintus was left for dead, lying unnoticed among the corpses. At that the people's mood began to turn. Annius Milo, one of the tribunes, was the first to find the nerve to summon Clodius to trial for violence. Crowds of ordinary citizens, from Rome and the neighboring towns, formed up behind Pompey, and with them at his back he drove Clodius out of the Forum and called the people to vote. It is said the people never passed any measure more unanimously. The senate, competing to outdo the people, sent letters of thanks to the cities that had cared for Cicero in his exile, and decreed that his house and his country estates, which Clodius had destroyed, should be rebuilt at public expense.
So Cicero came home, sixteen months after his exile began. The cities were so joyful, and people so eager to meet him, that his own boast afterward — that Italy had carried him home to Rome on her shoulders — actually fell short of the truth. Even Crassus, his enemy before the exile, went out to meet him voluntarily and made peace — to please his son Publius, as he said, who was one of Cicero's devoted admirers.
Cicero had not been back long when, seizing a day Clodius was out of town, he went up to the capitol with a large following and tore down and destroyed the tribunes' tablets, on which the official acts of Clodius's term were recorded. When Clodius called him to account for it, Cicero answered that Clodius, a patrician, had gotten himself made tribune against the law, so that nothing done in his term was valid. Cato was displeased at this and spoke against Cicero — not that he had any praise for Clodius; he detested the man's whole administration — but he argued that it was an irregular and violent step for the senate to vote so many decrees and acts null, including the acts of Cato's own commission in Cyprus and at Byzantium. The clash opened a breach between Cato and Cicero. It never came to open enmity, but their friendship was cooler and more guarded afterward.
After this, Milo killed Clodius. Arraigned for the murder, he secured Cicero as his advocate. The senate, fearing that the trial of a man as prominent and hot-spirited as Milo might set off riots in the city, gave Pompey the oversight of this and the other trials, to keep both the city and the courts secure. Pompey moved in the night before, posting soldiers on the high ground and ringing the whole Forum with troops. Milo, worried that so unusual a sight would rattle Cicero and hurt his performance, persuaded him to be carried into the Forum in a covered litter and to wait there quietly until the judges were seated and the court was full. For Cicero, it seems, was timid not only in arms but in speaking too: he began nearly every speech in a fright, and in many cases he had barely stopped shaking and trembling by the time his oratory hit its full current and force. Once, defending Licinius Murena against Cato's prosecution and burning to outdo Hortensius, who had made his argument to great applause, he took so little rest the night before, and wore himself so ragged with worry and lying awake, that he spoke well below his usual level. So now, at the trial of Milo, when he stepped out of his litter and saw Pompey posted on the heights as if encamped for war, and arms glittering all around the Forum, he fell apart. He could barely begin his speech; his body shook and his voice caught — while Milo himself sat through the proceedings bold and fearless, having disdained to grow his hair out or put on mourning. That bearing, in fact, seems to have contributed as much as anything to his condemnation. Still, in Cicero's case, people judged it less cowardice for himself than sheer anxiety for his friend.
He was made one of the priests the Romans call augurs, taking the place of the younger Crassus, who had died in Parthia. Then the lot assigned him the province of Cilicia, and he sailed out to it with twelve thousand infantry and two thousand six hundred cavalry. His orders included restoring Cappadocia to the allegiance of its king, Ariobarzanes — which he settled completely without lifting a weapon. Seeing that the Cilicians, watching the great Roman losses in Parthia and the upheavals in Syria, were leaning toward revolt, he steadied them back into loyalty by governing gently. He would accept none of the presents the local kings offered him. He canceled the public banquets the province owed him, and instead entertained its educated and accomplished men daily at his own table — not lavishly, but generously. His house had no doorkeeper, and no visitor ever found him in bed: from early morning he stood or walked in front of his door, receiving whoever came to pay respects. He is said never once to have ordered a man under his authority beaten with rods or stripped of his garments; he never hurled insults in anger, never attached humiliation to punishment. He uncovered an embezzlement of public money on a large scale, and by recovering it relieved the cities of their burdens — while letting those who paid back what they had taken keep their full rights as citizens, with no further penalty. He got a taste of war, too: he defeated the bandits who infested Mount Amanus, and for it his army saluted him imperator. When Caecilius the orator asked him to send panthers from Cilicia for the shows in the theater at Rome, Cicero wrote back, in a spirit of self-congratulation, that there were no panthers left in Cilicia: they had all fled into Caria, indignant that in a province so entirely at peace, they were the only creatures anyone still hunted. Leaving his province, he touched at Rhodes and lingered a while at Athens, savoring the memory of his old studies. He called on the leading men of learning, saw his old friends and companions, and, after receiving from Greece the honors due to him, returned to Rome — where everything was now, as it were, in flames, tipping into civil war.
When the senate would have voted him a triumph, he said he would rather walk behind Caesar's triumphal chariot, if only terms could be made. Privately, he gave advice to both men — writing letter after letter to Caesar, entreating Pompey face to face — doing his best to soothe each of them and talk them back from the edge. But when the thing became incurable, and Caesar was marching on Rome, and Pompey did not dare stay but abandoned the city with many good men beside him, Cicero did not join the flight, and people counted him as siding with Caesar. It is quite clear he was torn, and swung painfully between the two. In his letters he writes, "Which way should I turn? Pompey has the honorable case for war; but Caesar has managed his affairs better, and is more able to protect himself and his friends. I know whom to flee — I just don't know whom to flee to." Then Trebatius, one of Caesar's friends, wrote to him: Caesar's view was that Cicero's best course was to join his side and share his hopes — but if he thought himself too old for that, he should go to Greece and sit quietly there, out of everyone's way. Cicero, offended that Caesar had not written himself, sent back an angry answer: he would do nothing unworthy of his past life. That, at least, is what can be gathered from his letters.
But the moment Caesar marched for Spain, Cicero sailed off to join Pompey. Everyone welcomed him — except Cato, who took him aside privately and scolded him for coming. For his own part, Cato said, it would have been dishonorable to abandon the side he had chosen in politics from the beginning; but Cicero could have been more useful to his country and his friends if he had stayed neutral at home and used his influence to soften whatever came, instead of sailing out here to make himself Caesar's enemy — without reason, without necessity — and a partner in enormous danger. The argument shook Cicero's resolve; so did the fact that Pompey made no real use of him. Though, in truth, he had himself to blame for that. He didn't deny that he was sorry he had come. He belittled Pompey's resources, sniped behind hands at his plans, and could not stop cracking jokes at the expense of his fellow soldiers. He went around the camp wearing a gloomy, sour face himself, yet was forever raising laughs in others whether they wanted to laugh or not. A few examples are worth giving. When Domitius promoted a man with no soldiering in him and defended the choice by saying he was modest and prudent, Cicero asked, "Then why didn't you keep him to tutor your children?" Hearing people praise Theophanes the Lesbian, the army's chief of engineers, for how admirably he had consoled the Rhodians on the loss of their fleet, he said, "What a thing it is to have a Greek in command!" When Caesar was getting the better of it and all but had Pompey under siege, Lentulus remarked that he'd heard Caesar's friends were downcast. "You mean," said Cicero, "that they wish Caesar ill." To a man named Marcius, newly arrived from Italy with word that a rumor was running around Rome that Pompey was blockaded, he said, "And you sailed all the way out here to see it with your own eyes?" After one defeat, Nonius tried to raise spirits by pointing out that seven eagles still remained in Pompey's camp. "That would be very encouraging," said Cicero, "if we were fighting jackdaws." When Labienus kept insisting on certain prophecies that promised Pompey the victory, Cicero said, "Yes — and by that strategy we have opened the campaign by losing our camp."
Cicero was not at the battle of Pharsalia. His health had kept him away. And when it was over, and Pompey had fled, Cato — who still held a considerable army and a great fleet at Dyrrachium — offered Cicero the supreme command. The law was on his side: Cicero had been consul, and his rank came first. But Cicero refused the command, refused, in fact, to have anything more to do with the war at all — and the refusal nearly killed him. Young Pompey and his friends called him a traitor and drew their swords on him, and it was only Cato, throwing himself between them, who plainly saved Cicero's life and got him out of the camp.
He made his way to Brundusium and waited there a long while for Caesar, who was tied up with his affairs in Asia and Egypt. When word came that Caesar had landed at Tarentum and was coming overland toward Brundusium, Cicero set out to meet him — not without hope, but not without dread, either, at the prospect of testing the temper of a conquering enemy in front of a crowd of witnesses. As it turned out, he never had to say or do anything unworthy of himself. The moment Caesar saw him coming, well ahead of the rest of the company, he got down, went to meet him, greeted him, and walked on with him for a good mile or more, talking with him alone. From that day forward Caesar treated him with honor and respect. Even when Cicero published his tribute to Cato, Caesar's reply — praising Cato was hardly something Caesar could let stand — took care to compliment Cicero's own life and eloquence, comparing him to Pericles and Theramenes. Cicero's essay was called the Cato; Caesar's, the Anti-Cato.
There is a story from the same period. When Quintus Ligarius was prosecuted for having borne arms against Caesar, and Cicero took up his defense, Caesar remarked to his friends, "Why not hear a speech from Cicero once more? Ligarius is a guilty man and an enemy — there's no question about that." But once Cicero began to speak, he was extraordinarily moving, and as the speech went on — shifting register after register of feeling, with that charm of language no one else commanded — the color came and went in Caesar's face, and it was plain that every passion in his soul was being stirred in turn. At last, when the orator touched on the battle of Pharsalia, Caesar was so shaken that his body trembled and some of the papers he was holding dropped from his hands. He was simply overpowered — and he acquitted Ligarius.
After that, with the republic changed into a monarchy, Cicero withdrew from public life. He spent his leisure teaching philosophy to any young men who wanted it, and since these tended to be from the noblest and highest-ranking families, the connection made him once again a man of great influence in the city. His real project now was to compose and translate philosophical dialogues, and to find Roman words for the technical terms of Greek logic and physics. It was Cicero, they say, who first — or at least principally — gave Latin names to phantasia, syncatathesis, epokhe, catalepsis, atomon, ameres, kenon, and the rest of that vocabulary, working by metaphor or whatever other device would serve, until the ideas could actually be said, and understood, in Latin. For recreation he turned his facility to poetry; when he set himself to it he could produce five hundred verses in a night. He spent most of his time at his country house near Tusculum, and wrote to his friends that he was living the life of Laertes — Odysseus' old father, digging his garden far from power. Perhaps he was only joking, as was his habit; more likely it was ambition talking, an appetite for public life that made him restless under the new order of things. He rarely went into the city except to pay his court to Caesar. He was usually first among those voting Caesar new honors, and forever hunting for some fresh turn of praise for the man and his works. Take his remark about the statues of Pompey, which had been torn down and which Caesar ordered set up again: Cicero said that by this act of generosity Caesar had raised Pompey's statues — and fixed his own in place.
He had a plan, it is said, to write a history of his country, weaving into it much of the history of Greece and all the stories and legends of the past he had collected. But the plan was overtaken by troubles public and private, misfortunes for most of which he had himself to blame. First, he divorced his wife Terentia. She had neglected him during the war — sent him off short of even the necessities for his journey — and she was no kinder when he returned to Italy. She never joined him at Brundusium in all his long stay there, and when their young daughter made that whole long journey to him, Terentia provided her with neither a decent escort nor the money for her expenses. She had also stripped Cicero's house bare and emptied it, while loading him with many large debts. These were the most respectable reasons given for the divorce. But Terentia denied every one of them, and her husband promptly handed her the most unanswerable defense imaginable: not long afterward he married a young girl. For love of her beauty, Terentia said scornfully. For her money, said Tiro, Cicero's freedman — to clear his debts. The girl was very rich, and Cicero was trustee of her estate, having been left her guardian; and being many millions in debt, he was persuaded by his friends and relations to marry her, disparity of age notwithstanding, and use her fortune to satisfy his creditors. Antony, who brings up this marriage in his answer to the Philippics, jeers at him for putting away a wife he had grown old with — and adds some well-aimed sarcasm about Cicero's habits: domestic, idle, nothing of the soldier about him. Not long after the marriage, Cicero's daughter died in childbirth at the house of Lentulus, whom she had married after the death of her former husband, Piso. Philosophers came from every quarter to console Cicero, but his grief was beyond all bounds — so far beyond that he put away his new bride, because she seemed pleased at Tullia's death. So stood Cicero's domestic affairs.
In the plot now forming against Caesar he had no part at all, although he was among Brutus' closest confidants, and although no man alive was more aggrieved at the present state of things or longed harder for the old republic. The conspirators simply did not trust him: not his temperament, which lacked daring, and not his age — for even the boldest natures grow timid when they are old.
So the deed was done by Brutus and Cassius. And with Caesar's friends gathering, and the city facing the fear of a new civil war, Antony, as consul, convened the senate and made a short speech recommending concord. Cicero followed with a longer one, suited to the moment, and persuaded the senate to imitate the Athenians of old: to decree an amnesty for everything done in Caesar's case, and to assign provinces to Brutus and Cassius. Neither measure came to anything. For the common people were already tender-hearted on their own account, and when they saw Caesar's dead body carried through the forum — when Antony held up the dead man's clothes, soaked in blood and stabbed through in every part — they went mad with rage, hunted the marketplace for the murderers, and ran with firebrands to burn their houses down. The conspirators, forewarned, escaped that danger; but expecting more and worse to come, they left the city.
Antony was instantly riding high, and everyone feared he meant to make himself sole ruler — Cicero more than anyone. Antony, for his part, watching Cicero's influence revive in the state, and knowing how close he stood to Brutus, did not want him in the city. There was old bad blood between them anyway; their characters could hardly have been less alike. Cicero, afraid of what was coming, first thought of going out to Syria as a lieutenant under Dolabella. But Hirtius and Pansa, the consuls-elect who would succeed Antony — good men, and fond of Cicero — begged him not to abandon them, and undertook to put Antony down if only he would stay in Rome. Cicero, neither quite trusting them nor quite distrusting them, let Dolabella go without him and promised Hirtius he would spend the summer in Athens and return when the new consuls took office. So he set out. But his crossing was delayed, and in the meantime — as so often happens — fresh news came suddenly from Rome: Antony had undergone an astonishing change, was doing everything and managing all public business according to the will of the senate, and nothing was wanting but Cicero's presence to settle affairs completely. Cursing his own cowardice, he turned back to Rome. And his first hopes were not disappointed: such crowds poured out to meet him that the greetings and compliments at the gates and along his entrance into the city took up nearly an entire day.
The next day Antony convened the senate and summoned Cicero to it. Cicero did not come. He kept to his bed, claiming to be worn out from his journey; but the true reason seems to have been fear of a plot, based on a warning that had reached him on the road. Antony took the affront badly and sent soldiers with orders to bring Cicero or burn his house down. Many people interceded and pleaded, and Antony settled for taking sureties. After that, when the two men met, they passed each other in silence, each on his guard — until the young Caesar arrived from Apollonia, took up the elder Caesar's inheritance, and fell into a dispute with Antony over twenty-five million in money that Antony was withholding from the estate.
At this point Philippus, who had married the young man's mother, and Marcellus, who had married his sister, brought him to Cicero, and a bargain was struck: Cicero would lend the young man his eloquence and his political influence with the senate and the people, and the young man would give Cicero the protection of his wealth and his arms — for he already had a large following among the dead Caesar's veterans. But there was said to be a stronger reason still for Cicero's readiness. Back when Pompey and Caesar were both alive, Cicero had dreamed that someone was summoning the sons of the senators to the Capitol, because Jupiter intended to declare one of them the future ruler of Rome. The citizens came running and stood around the temple, and the boys sat waiting in their purple-bordered robes, in silence. Suddenly the doors opened, and the boys rose one by one and filed past the god, who reviewed each of them and, to their sorrow, dismissed them — until this one boy passed, and the god stretched out his right hand and said, "Romans, this young man, when he is lord of Rome, shall put an end to all your civil wars." They say the dream left Cicero with a distinct image of the boy's face, which he retained perfectly, though he did not know who he was. The next day, going down to the Campus Martius, he met the boys just leaving their exercises — and the first of them was the very face from his dream. Astonished, Cicero asked who his parents were. And he turned out to be this young Caesar: son of Octavius, a man of no great eminence, and of Atia, daughter of Caesar's sister — which was why Caesar, having no children of his own, had made the boy heir to his house and property by his will. From then on, they say, Cicero made a point of greeting the boy whenever they met, and the boy took the attention kindly. And by one more turn of fortune, he had been born in the very year of Cicero's consulship.
Those were the reasons people talked about. But what really bound Cicero to Octavian was, first, his hatred of Antony, and then his nature, which could never resist an honor. He meant to fold Octavian's power into his own political designs — and the young man courted him so far as to call him Father. Brutus was disgusted. In his letters to Atticus he said flatly that Cicero, by courting Octavian out of fear of Antony, had shown he was not working for his country's liberty at all — he was bidding for a kinder master. All the same, Brutus took up Cicero's son, then studying philosophy at Athens, gave him a command, and employed him in various services, with good results. Cicero's own power in the city now stood at its greatest height. He did whatever he pleased. He engineered Antony's defeat and expulsion, and sent out the two consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, with an army to finish him — and meanwhile persuaded the senate to vote Octavian the lictors and insignia of a praetor, as though the young man were the republic's defender. But then Antony was beaten in battle, both consuls died of it, and the two armies combined and went over to Octavian. The senate, now frightened of this young man and his extraordinary luck, tried with honors and gifts to draw the soldiers away from him and cut his power down — arguing that with Antony in flight, the state had no further need of armies.
That alarmed Octavian, and he privately sent friends to beg Cicero to procure the consulship for the two of them together. Cicero, they said, should run things however he pleased once they were in office; he would hold the real power and govern the young man, who wanted nothing but the name and the glory of it. Octavian himself admitted afterward that this was exactly what it had been: afraid of ruin and in danger of being abandoned, he had made timely use of Cicero's ambition, coaxing him to stand for the consulship with his help and support.
And here, more than at any other moment of his life, Cicero let himself be carried away — an old man taken in by the flattery of a boy. He canvassed for him; he brought the senate around for him; and his friends blamed him for it even at the time. Soon enough he saw what he had done: he had ruined himself and betrayed the liberty of his country. For the young man, once established in the consulship, said his farewells to Cicero — and reconciled himself with Antony and Lepidus, pooled his power with theirs, and divided up the government among the three of them like a piece of family property. Together they drew up a list of more than two hundred men who were to die. The bitterest fight in all their bargaining was over Cicero. Antony would agree to nothing unless Cicero was the first man killed; Lepidus sided with Antony; Octavian held out against them both. They met secretly, just the three of them, for three days, near the town of Bononia, at a spot not far from the camp, ringed round by a river. For the first two days, it is said, Octavian fought for Cicero's life. On the third day he yielded, and gave him up.
The exchange ran like this: Octavian abandoned Cicero; Lepidus abandoned his own brother Paulus; Antony abandoned Lucius Caesar, his uncle on his mother's side. So completely did rage and fury strip them of their humanity — proof, if any were needed, that no beast is more savage than man when his power is as great as his anger.
While all this was being arranged, Cicero was with his brother at his country house near Tusculum. When news of the proscriptions reached them, they decided to move to Astura, a seaside villa of Cicero's, and take ship from there for Macedonia, to join Brutus — for word had already come of his strength in that province. They traveled in separate litters, crushed with grief, stopping again and again along the road so the litters could be brought together and the two of them could grieve side by side. Quintus was the more despairing of the two, for he had begun to think about how little he had for the journey — he had brought, as he said, nothing from home — and even Cicero's provision was slender. Better, they decided, for Cicero to hurry on ahead while Quintus went home to gather what they needed. So it was resolved; and they embraced, weeping, and parted.
Within a few days Quintus was betrayed by his own servants to the men searching for him, and was killed, together with his young son. Cicero was carried on to Astura, found a vessel there, boarded at once, and sailed as far as Circeii with a favorable wind. The pilots wanted to put straight out to sea again; but Cicero — whether he feared the sea, or had not yet wholly given up his faith in Octavian — went ashore, and walked a dozen miles inland, as if making for Rome. Then his resolution failed him. He changed his mind, turned back to the coast, and passed the night there in fearful, tangled thoughts. At moments he resolved to slip secretly into Octavian's house and kill himself on the altar of the household gods, to fasten a divine vengeance upon him; but fear of torture drove him off that course too. And so, after churning through one confused and broken plan after another, he finally let his servants carry him by sea to Caieta, where he had a house — a pleasant retreat in the heat of summer, when the cool seasonal winds come in off the water.
There was a temple of Apollo at that place, a little way up from the shore. As Cicero's vessel rowed in toward land, a flight of crows rose from the temple with a great racket and made straight for the ship, settling along both ends of the yard, some croaking, some pecking at the ends of the ropes. Everyone took it for an evil omen. Cicero went ashore anyway, entered his house, and lay down on his bed to rest. But many of the crows settled at the window, cawing dismally, and one of them flew down onto the bed where Cicero lay wrapped up, and with its beak, little by little, dragged the covering away from his face. At the sight of that, his servants turned on themselves: were they going to stand there as spectators at their master's murder, doing nothing to defend him, while the very birds came to help him and keep watch over his undeserved suffering? Partly by pleading, partly by force, they got him up and carried him in his litter down toward the sea.
But by now the assassins had arrived with a squad of soldiers — Herennius, a centurion, and Popillius, a tribune whom Cicero had once defended when he was prosecuted for the murder of his own father. Finding the doors barred, they broke them open. Cicero was not there, and the people in the house said they did not know where he was; but a young man, it is stated — a freedman of Cicero's brother Quintus, educated by Cicero himself in liberal learning, Philologus by name — told the tribune that the litter was being carried down to the sea through the walks, where the trees grew close and shady. The tribune took a few men and ran round to the spot where it would come out. Cicero saw Herennius running through the walks, and he ordered his servants to set the litter down. Then, stroking his chin with his left hand, the old familiar gesture, he looked steadily at his murderers — covered in dust, his hair and beard untrimmed, his face worn down with his troubles — and most of the men standing there covered their own faces while Herennius killed him. He stretched his neck out of the litter to take the blow. He was in his sixty-fourth year. Herennius cut off his head, and, on Antony's orders, his hands too — the hands that had written the Philippics. For that was Cicero's own name for his speeches against Antony, and the Philippics they are called to this day.
When these remnants of Cicero were brought to Rome, Antony was holding an assembly for the election of officials. Hearing the news, and seeing the head and hands, he cried out, "Now let there be an end of our proscriptions." He ordered the head and hands fastened up over the Rostra, the speakers' platform — a sight that made the Roman people shudder, for they believed they were looking not at the face of Cicero but at the image of Antony's own soul. In all of this he did do one just thing: he handed Philologus over to Pomponia, the wife of Quintus. And she, once she had the man in her power, among other terrible punishments made him cut off his own flesh piece by piece, and roast it, and eat it — so, at least, some writers have related. But Tiro, Cicero's own freedman, never so much as mentions Philologus' treachery.
A long time afterward, I have been told, Octavian — Augustus by then — was visiting one of his daughter's sons, and found the boy with a book of Cicero's in his hands. The boy, frightened, tried to hide it under his gown. Augustus saw, took the book from him, and stood there reading a great part of it; then he handed it back and said, "An eloquent man, my child — an eloquent man, and a lover of his country." And as soon as he had finally defeated Antony, being then consul himself, he chose Cicero's son as his colleague in the office. It was under that consulship that the senate took down Antony's statues, canceled every other honor he had held, and decreed that from then on no man of his family should ever bear the name Marcus. Thus the final acts of Antony's punishment were handed, by the divine powers, to the family of Cicero.
Marcus Brutus was descended from the famous Junius Brutus — the man the ancient Romans honored with a bronze statue on the Capitol, set among the images of their kings with a drawn sword in his hand, in memory of the courage and resolve with which he drove out the Tarquins and destroyed the monarchy. But that ancient Brutus was hard by nature, inflexible, like steel tempered too far, and his character had never been softened by study and reflection. His rage and hatred against tyrants carried him so far that when his own sons conspired with the Tarquins, he had them executed. The Brutus whose life we are now writing was a different kind of man. To a naturally good disposition he added the improvements of learning and the study of philosophy, and a temperament that was by nature serious and gentle he roused into action by throwing himself into business and public affairs — so that he seemed a character framed, piece by piece, for virtue. Even his bitterest enemies, the people who hated him on account of the conspiracy against Caesar, granted him this much: whatever was honorable or generous in that whole affair they credited entirely to Brutus, and whatever was savage and cruel they laid at the door of Cassius — his kinsman and close friend, but not his equal in honesty or purity of purpose.
His mother, Servilia, came from the family of Servilius Ahala. When Spurius Maelius was whipping the people into rebellion and scheming to make himself king, this Ahala tucked a dagger under his arm, walked out into the marketplace, and, on the pretense of having some private business with him, came up close. As Maelius bent his head to hear what he had to say, Ahala struck him with the dagger and killed him. That much — the descent on his mother's side — everyone admits. As for his father's family, those who bore Brutus any hatred or ill will over Caesar's murder claimed he was no descendant of the Brutus who expelled the Tarquins at all: that line, they said, was wiped out with the execution of the two sons, and this man's ancestor was a commoner, the son of a steward named Brutus, whose family rose to office and dignity only in recent times. But the philosopher Posidonius writes that the history is accurate about the two grown sons being put to death — and that a third son, still an infant, was left alive, and from him the family came down to Marcus Brutus. He adds that in his own day there were several distinguished men of the house whose faces bore a striking resemblance to the statue of Junius Brutus. But enough on that subject.
Cato the philosopher was the brother of Servilia, Brutus's mother, and of all the Romans it was Cato whom his nephew most admired and studied to imitate; later he married Cato's daughter Portia. As for the Greek schools of philosophy, there was hardly one Brutus had not heard out and made some progress in, but his deepest loyalty went to the Platonists — and to the ancient Academy at that, for he never much approved of what is called the modern, or middle, Academy. All his life he was a great admirer of Antiochus of the city of Ascalon, and he took Antiochus's brother Aristus into his own house as a friend and companion — a man inferior to many philosophers in learning, but the equal of the best of them in evenness of temper and steadiness of conduct. As for Empylus, whom Brutus and his friends mention often in their letters as one of the household, he was a rhetorician, and he left behind a short but well-written history of the death of Caesar, titled Brutus.
In Latin, Brutus had trained himself well enough to deliver public addresses and plead a case. But in Greek he cultivated the terse, pointed, Spartan manner of speaking — the famous Laconic style — and many passages of his letters show it. At the beginning of the war he wrote to the people of Pergamum: "I hear you have given Dolabella money. If you gave it willingly, admit that you have wronged me; if unwillingly, prove it by giving willingly to me." Another time, to the Samians: "Your counsels are careless and your performance slow. What do you suppose the end will be?" And of the Patareans: "The Xanthians distrusted my kindness and made their country the grave of their despair. The Patareans trusted themselves to me and enjoy their liberty in every particular. You may choose: the judgment of the Patareans, or the fortune of the Xanthians." That is the style for which some of his letters are remembered.
While he was still a very young man he accompanied his uncle Cato to Cyprus, on the mission against Ptolemy. When Ptolemy killed himself, Cato — detained on the island of Rhodes by some necessary business — had already sent one of his friends, a man named Canidius, to take charge of the king's treasure. But soon, not feeling sure of Canidius's honesty, he wrote to Brutus to sail for Cyprus at once from Pamphylia, where Brutus was resting after just recovering from an illness. Brutus obeyed, but with real reluctance — partly out of respect for Canidius, who was being tossed out of the job by Cato with such disgrace, and partly because he considered the whole commission beneath him: petty accounting work, unsuited to a young man in the prime of life who lived for books and study. Still, he applied himself to the business and handled it so well that Cato praised him highly. Having converted all of Ptolemy's goods into ready money, he sailed with the greater part of it in his own ship to Rome.
But when the state split into two great factions — when Pompey and Caesar took up arms against each other and the whole empire dissolved into confusion — everyone assumed Brutus would choose Caesar's side. For his father, years before, had been put to death by Pompey. Brutus, however, held that it was his duty to put the public interest ahead of his private feelings, and judging Pompey's to be the better cause, he took Pompey's part — this, though formerly he would not so much as greet Pompey or acknowledge him if they happened to meet, counting it a pollution to exchange a single word with his father's murderer. Now, looking on him as the general of his country, he placed himself under Pompey's command and sailed for Cilicia as lieutenant to Sestius, who governed that province. But he found no opportunity there for any great service, and hearing that Pompey and Caesar were now closing on each other and preparing for the battle on which everything depended, he came of his own accord to Macedonia to share the danger. At his arrival, it is said, Pompey was so surprised and so pleased that he rose from his chair in full view of everyone around him and saluted and embraced Brutus as one of the chief men of his party. All the time he was in the camp, apart from the hours he spent in Pompey's company, he gave to reading and study — and he did not neglect them even on the day before the great battle. It was the middle of summer, the heat was crushing, the camp had been pitched beside marshy ground, and the men carrying Brutus's tent took forever to arrive. Though he was worn out and out of sorts on every count, and had barely managed by midday to anoint himself and eat a sparing meal, he spent his time until evening — while most of the others were asleep, or lost in dread of what the battle would bring — writing a condensed edition of Polybius.
It is said that Caesar had such regard for him that he ordered his commanders on no account to kill Brutus in the battle, but to spare him: if he surrendered willingly, they were to bring him in safe; if he resisted, they were to let him escape rather than do him any violence. And this, it is believed, Caesar did out of tenderness for Servilia, Brutus's mother. In his youth Caesar had been intimate with her, and she passionately in love with him, and since Brutus was born about the time their love was at its height, Caesar had some belief that the boy was his own child. There is a story told about this. When the great matter of Catiline's conspiracy — the plot that came near destroying the state — was being debated in the senate, Cato and Caesar were both on their feet, arguing opposite sides, when a little note was carried in and handed to Caesar, who read it silently to himself. At this Cato cried out that Caesar was corresponding with and receiving letters from the enemies of the state; and when a number of other senators joined the outcry, Caesar handed the note, just as he had received it, to Cato — who read it and found it to be a love letter from his own sister Servilia. He threw it back at Caesar with the words, "Keep it, you drunkard," and returned to the business of the debate. That is how public and notorious Servilia's love for Caesar was.
After the great defeat at Pharsalia, with Pompey escaped to the sea and Caesar's army storming the camp, Brutus slipped out privately by one of the gates that led to marshy ground, thick with water and reeds, and traveling through the night got safely to Larissa. From Larissa he wrote to Caesar, who expressed great joy to hear he was safe, told him to come, and not only forgave him freely but honored him and esteemed him among his closest friends. At that moment no one could say with any certainty which way Pompey had fled; so Caesar took a short journey alone with Brutus and sounded out his opinion, and after some discussion between them, concluding that Brutus's guess was the right one, he dropped every other consideration and set out straight for Egypt in pursuit. Pompey had indeed reached Egypt, just as Brutus guessed he would — and there he met his fate.
Brutus meanwhile obtained Caesar's forgiveness for his friend Cassius. He also pleaded the cause of the king of Libya, and though the man was buried under the sheer weight of the charges against him, by entreaties on his behalf Brutus preserved for him a great part of his kingdom. It is reported that Caesar, hearing Brutus speak in public for the first time, said to his friends, "I don't know what this young man intends — but whatever he intends, he intends it intensely." For that was Brutus's nature: a firmness of mind that did not easily bend or grant favors to everyone who asked, but which, once set in motion by reasoned judgment and deliberate moral choice, drove toward its object in whatever direction it took and was almost certain not to fail. To unjust petitions he was unmovable; no flattery could reach him. He held that being conquered by shameless, fawning importunity — which some people dress up with the name of modesty or soft-heartedness — was the worst disgrace a great man could suffer. And he used to say that people who could deny nothing had, he suspected, not behaved very well in the flower of their youth.
When Caesar was about to cross to Africa on his expedition against Cato and Scipio, he entrusted Brutus with the government of Cisalpine Gaul — to the great good fortune of that province. For while the people of other provinces groaned under the violence and greed of their governors, suffering as much oppression as slaves or captives of war, Brutus governed so mildly that he actually made his subjects amends for their miseries under previous rulers — and he directed all their gratitude for it to Caesar himself. So it was a most welcome and pleasant spectacle for Caesar, passing through Italy on his return, to see the cities under Brutus's command flourishing, and Brutus himself adding to his honor and traveling agreeably in his company.
Now several praetorships fell vacant, and everyone expected that the most distinguished of them — the one called the praetorship of the city — would go either to Brutus or to Cassius. Some say the two men, who already had certain small differences between them, were set much further at odds by this competition, even though they were connected by family: Cassius had married Junia, Brutus's sister. Others say the rivalry was Caesar's own doing — that he had privately encouraged each of them with hopes of his favor until he led them on and provoked them into open competition. Brutus had only his reputation for honor and virtue to set against Cassius's many brilliant exploits against the Parthians. Caesar heard both sides, and deliberating on the matter among his friends, said, "Cassius has the stronger claim — but Brutus must have the first praetorship." So another praetorship was given to Cassius, who was less grateful for the one he gained than furious over the one he lost. And in all other respects Brutus had as large a share of Caesar's power as he cared to take. Had he wished, he could have been first among all Caesar's friends, with authority and command beyond any of them. But Cassius, and the company Cassius kept, kept pulling him away from Caesar. He had not yet fully reconciled with Cassius after their rivalry, but he listened to Cassius's friends, who were forever warning him not to be so blind as to let Caesar soften and tame him — to shun the kindness and favors of a tyrant, which Caesar showed him, they hinted, not to honor his merit but to unstring his strength and sap the vigor of his purpose.
Nor was Caesar entirely without suspicion of Brutus; there was no shortage of informers accusing him. But while Caesar feared the man's high spirit, his great name, and his powerful friends, he trusted in his character. When he was told that Antony and Dolabella were plotting some disturbance, he said, "It's not the fat, long-haired men I'm afraid of — it's the pale, lean ones," meaning Brutus and Cassius. And later, when people were running Brutus down to him and warning him to beware, he took hold of his own flesh with his hand and said, "What — do you think Brutus cannot wait out the time of this little body?" — as if to say that no one but Brutus was fit to succeed him in his power. And indeed it seems beyond doubt that Brutus could have been the first man in Rome if he had only had the patience to be second to Caesar for a little while — to let Caesar's power pass its peak and decline, and the fame of his great deeds fade by degrees. But Cassius — a violent-tempered man, and one who hated Caesar out of private grievance rather than love of the public, hated the man and not the tyranny — kept firing him up and driving him on. Brutus resented the rule; Cassius hated the ruler. Among the grudges Cassius counted against Caesar was the loss of his lions, which he had procured when he was aedile-elect: Caesar found them at Megara when Calenus took that city, and seized them for himself. Those beasts, they say, proved a calamity for the Megarians. When the city was on the point of falling, the Megarians broke open the lions' dens and struck off their chains, meaning to loose them on the enemy coming through the gates — but the lions turned on the Megarians themselves, tearing apart crowds of unarmed people as they ran, so that even the enemy pitied the sight.
Some say this was the chief provocation that drove Cassius to conspire against Caesar — but they are quite wrong. From his boyhood Cassius carried a natural hatred and bitterness toward the whole race of tyrants, and he showed it while still a schoolboy, when he attended the same school as Faustus, the son of Sulla. Faustus was boasting among the boys, glorifying his father's absolute power, and Cassius stood up and boxed his ears — two or three good blows. Faustus's guardians and relatives meant to take the matter to law, but Pompey forbade it, and sending for both boys, examined the business himself. And Cassius is reported to have said, "Go on, then, Faustus — dare to repeat, right here, the words that provoked me, and I'll hit you again just as I did before." That was the temper of Cassius.
Brutus, though, was roused and pushed toward the undertaking by many voices: the urging of his close friends, and letters and appeals from citizens he did not know. Under the statue of his ancestor Brutus — the Brutus who overthrew the kings — people wrote: "If only we had a Brutus now!" and "If only Brutus were alive!" And Brutus's own tribunal, the platform where he sat as praetor, was found covered every morning with writings like these: "You are asleep, Brutus." and "You are no longer Brutus." The ones responsible for all this were Caesar's flatterers, who among the other invidious honors they kept fastening on him crowned his statues at night with diadems, hoping to lead the people into hailing him king instead of dictator. But exactly the opposite came to pass — as I have told more fully in the life of Caesar.
When Cassius went around sounding out friends for the plot against Caesar, every man he approached agreed readily — on one condition: that Brutus lead it. What the enterprise needed, in their view, was not hands or daring but the reputation and authority of a man like Brutus, to consecrate the deed, as it were, by his mere presence — to justify it simply by being part of it. Without him, they felt, they would go into the act with less heart and lie under heavier suspicion afterward; for if the cause had been just and honorable, people would be certain Brutus would not have refused it. Cassius thought all this over, and then paid Brutus his first visit since their falling-out. When the courtesies of reconciliation had been exchanged and their old friendship renewed, he asked whether Brutus intended to be present in the senate on the first of March; for word was going around, he said, that Caesar's friends meant to move on that day that he be made king. When Brutus answered that he would not be there, Cassius pressed him: "But what if they send for us?" "Then it will be my business," Brutus replied, "not to hold my peace, but to stand up boldly and die for the liberty of my country." And Cassius, stirred, answered: "But what Roman will let you die? Do you not know yourself, Brutus? Do you imagine the writings on your praetor's tribunal were left there by weavers and shopkeepers, and not by the first and most powerful men of Rome? From other praetors they expect handouts and shows and gladiators — but from you they claim, as a debt of your inheritance, the destruction of tyranny. They are ready to suffer anything for your sake, if you will only show yourself to be the man they believe you are, and expect you to be." With that he threw his arms around Brutus and embraced him; and so, agreed, they parted, each to sound out his own friends.
Among Pompey's old friends there was a certain Gaius Ligarius, whom Caesar had pardoned after he was accused of bearing arms against him. This man — feeling not so much gratitude for the pardon as resentment of the power that had made a pardon necessary — hated Caesar, and was one of Brutus's most intimate friends. Brutus visited him and found him sick. "Ligarius," he said, "what a time you've picked to be sick!" At those words Ligarius raised himself on his elbow, took Brutus by the hand, and said, "But Brutus — if you are on any design worthy of yourself, I am well."
From that time on they tested the inclinations of every acquaintance they dared trust, shared the secret, and drew into the plot not only their close friends but every man they believed bold, brave, and unafraid of death. That is why they hid the plot from Cicero, though they all trusted him fully and loved him well: they feared that his naturally timid disposition, with the caution of old age now added to it — his habit of weighing every particular, refusing to take a single step without absolute security — would blunt the edge of their resolve in a business that demanded all possible speed. There were two other companions of Brutus whom he likewise left out: Statilius the Epicurean, and Favonius, the devoted admirer of Cato. His reason was this. One day, in conversation with them, testing them at a safe distance, he floated a question of the kind philosophers dispute, to see where they stood; and Favonius gave it as his judgment that civil war was worse than the most lawless monarchy, while Statilius held that a wise and sensible man ought not to plunge himself into danger and turmoil on account of wicked or foolish people. But Labeo, who was present, contradicted them both; and Brutus, as though the question were a knotty one and hard to settle, held his peace for the moment — and afterward revealed the whole design to Labeo, who readily took it up. The next step, they agreed, was to win over the other Brutus — Decimus Brutus, surnamed Albinus — a man of no great daring or courage in himself, but valuable for the number of gladiators he was maintaining for a public show, and for the great confidence Caesar placed in him. When Cassius and Labeo raised the matter with him, he gave them no answer; but he sought out a private interview with Brutus himself, and on learning that Brutus was their captain, he readily agreed to take part. Among the rest, too, it was the name of Brutus that won over the most men and the best. And though they swore no oath of secrecy and used no sacred rite to bind their loyalty to one another, they all kept the design so close, so warily, so silently among themselves, that although the gods gave warning of it through prophecies and apparitions and signs in the sacrifices, no one could believe it was real.
Brutus now carried the knowledge that the best men in Rome — the noblest in birth, in character, in courage — were staking everything on him, and as he ran through all the dangers they were walking into, the weight of it began to tell. In public he mastered himself as well as he could, keeping his uneasiness locked away and his face composed. But at home, and above all at night, he was a different man. Sometimes the working of his cares jolted him out of sleep against his will; sometimes he lay awake for hours, turning his difficulties over and over. His wife, lying beside him, could not help noticing that he was full of some unusual trouble, and that he was wrestling with a question both dangerous and hard to resolve.
Portia, as was said before, was the daughter of Cato. Brutus, her cousin, had married her when she was still very young — not a girl, though, but a widow, for her first husband had died leaving her a son named Bibulus; a little book of his, the Memoirs of Brutus, survives to this day. Portia was devoted to philosophy, deeply in love with her husband, and full of a courage that had thought behind it, and she resolved not to pry into Brutus's secrets until she had first put herself to the test. She sent all her attendants out of her room, took a little knife of the kind used for trimming nails, and gave herself a deep gash in the thigh. Blood poured out, and soon afterward came violent pain and a shivering fever from the wound. Brutus was beside himself with worry for her, and at the very height of her pain she spoke to him: "I am Cato's daughter, Brutus, and I was brought into your house not like a concubine, to share only your bed and your table, but to be your partner in everything — your good fortune and your bad alike. On your side of the marriage I have no complaint. But on mine, what proof of my love, what satisfaction can I offer you, if I may not share your hidden griefs, or be admitted to the counsels that call for secrecy and trust? I know women are supposed to be too weak by nature to be trusted with a secret. But surely, Brutus, a good birth, a good upbringing, and the company of honorable people count for something in the forming of character. I can say this: I am the daughter of Cato and the wife of Brutus. Before now I put less confidence in those titles than I do today — for I have tested myself, and I find I can defy pain." With that she showed him her wound and told him of the trial she had made of her own constancy. Brutus was astonished. He lifted his hands to heaven and begged the gods to stand by his enterprise, so that he might show himself a husband worthy of such a wife as Portia. Then he set about comforting her.
A meeting of the senate was called at which Caesar was expected to appear, and the conspirators agreed this was their opportunity. There they could all gather without drawing suspicion, and there, they hoped, the noblest and leading men of the state, assembled in one place, would stand up the moment the great deed was done and claim the common liberty. Even the setting seemed heaven-sent. The senate was to meet in a portico attached to the theater, with a large recess in which stood a statue of Pompey, put up by the state when Pompey beautified that quarter of the city with the porticos and the theater. To this place the senate was summoned for the middle of March — the Ides of March, as the Romans call the day — as if some power greater than human were steering Caesar there, to meet his punishment for the death of Pompey.
As soon as it was light, Brutus went out with a dagger that no one but his wife knew he carried. The rest met at Cassius's house, and together they escorted Cassius's son down to the forum — this was the day the boy was to put on the toga of manhood, as it is called. From there they all went to Pompey's porch and waited, expecting Caesar to come to the senate without delay. And here, more than anywhere, anyone who had known what these men intended would have marveled at their unshaken calm and their steady nerve on the edge of so dangerous an undertaking. Several of them were praetors, obliged by their office to hear and decide cases, and they not only listened patiently to everyone who came before them pleading against one another, as if they had nothing else on their minds — they decided the cases with as much precision and good judgment as they had shown attention in hearing them. When one man refused to accept Brutus's ruling and appealed loudly to Caesar, with much shouting and calling of witnesses, Brutus looked around at the bystanders and said, "Caesar does not hinder me, nor will he hinder me, from acting according to the laws."
Yet a whole string of unnerving accidents was thrown in their way by pure chance. First and worst was Caesar's long delay: the day was wearing on, and he was being kept at home by his wife, forbidden to go out by the soothsayers because of some defect in his sacrifice. Then a man came up to Casca, one of the company, took him by the hand, and said, "You hid the secret from us, but Brutus has told me everything." While Casca stood there stunned, the man laughed and went on, "How did you get rich so fast, that you can afford to stand for aedile?" That was how close Casca came to letting the secret slip, on nothing more than the ambiguity of a phrase. Next Popilius Laenas, a senator, greeted Brutus and Cassius more warmly than usual, leaned in, and whispered, "My prayers are with you, that you may accomplish what you have in mind — and my advice is not to delay, for the thing is no secret now." Then he walked away, leaving them deeply afraid that the plot had leaked. Meanwhile a messenger came running from Brutus's house with the news that his wife was dying. For Portia, strung tight with waiting for the event and unable to bear the weight of her anxiety, could hardly keep herself indoors. At every little noise or cry she would start up like a woman in a bacchic frenzy, demanding of everyone who came in from the forum what Brutus was doing, and sending out one messenger after another. At last, after the long waiting, her body simply gave out. Her mind was overwhelmed by doubt and fear; she lost her hold on herself and began to faint. There was no time even to reach her room — sitting where she was among her women, she was seized by a sudden swoon and a great stupor; her color drained away and her speech failed entirely. At the sight her women screamed, neighbors came running to Brutus's door to ask what was wrong, and the report quickly spread that Portia was dead — though in fact, with her women's help, she revived after a little while and came to herself again. When the news reached Brutus he was badly shaken, and no wonder; but he did not let his private grief carry him away from his public purpose.
For now came word that Caesar was on his way, carried in a litter. Discouraged by the bad omens of his sacrifice, he had decided to take up no serious business that day but to put everything off, pleading illness. The moment he stepped out of the litter, Popilius Laenas — the same man who a little earlier had wished Brutus success in his undertaking — went up to him and talked with him at length, Caesar standing still all the while and appearing to listen closely. The conspirators (to give them that name) could not hear what was said; but guessing, from what their own consciences told them, that this conversation was the betrayal of their plot, they lost heart again, and looking at one another they agreed from each other's faces that they must not wait to be arrested but should kill themselves at once. Cassius and some of the others already had their hands on the daggers under their robes and were drawing them out when Brutus, watching Laenas's expression and gestures closely, saw that the man was earnestly pleading a case, not making an accusation. He said nothing — too many outsiders were mingled in the crowd — but with a cheerful face he steadied Cassius. And after a little while Laenas kissed Caesar's hand and went his way, making it plain that all his talk had been about some private business of his own.
When the senators had gone in ahead to the chamber where they were to sit, the rest of the company gathered close around Caesar's chair as if they had some petition to bring him, and Cassius, turning his face toward Pompey's statue, is said to have invoked it, as though the marble could hear his prayers. Trebonius, meanwhile, engaged Antony in a long conversation at the door and kept him talking outside. As Caesar entered, the whole senate rose. As soon as he sat down, the conspirators crowded around him, and they put forward one of their own number, Tillius Cimber, to plead for his brother, who was in exile. The others joined their prayers to his, taking Caesar's hand and kissing his head and his chest. At first Caesar brushed their appeals aside; then, when they would not stop, he rose violently to his feet — and Tillius caught his toga with both hands and tore it down from his neck, which was the signal. Casca, standing behind him, drew his dagger and struck the first blow, a shallow wound near the shoulder. Caesar seized the handle of the dagger and cried out in Latin, "Casca, you villain, what are you doing?" — while Casca, in Greek, shouted to his brother, "Brother, help!" By now blows were coming at Caesar from many hands. He looked around for a way to break out — and then he saw Brutus with his dagger drawn against him. At that he let go of Casca's hand, covered his head with his robe, and gave his body up to their blows. They pressed in on him so eagerly, so many daggers hacking at once, that they cut one another; Brutus took a wound in the hand, and every one of them was smeared with blood.
With Caesar dead, Brutus stepped out into the middle of the chamber meaning to make a speech, calling on the senators to stay and take heart. Instead they bolted in terror and total disorder, jamming the doorway in the crush — though no one was chasing them. For the conspirators had firmly resolved to kill no one but Caesar, and to summon everyone else to liberty. Indeed, when they had been planning the deed, all the others had thought it essential to cut down Antony along with Caesar. He was an arrogant man, they argued, a would-be monarch, and one who by his easy familiarity had built up real influence with the soldiers — and on top of his naturally lofty and ambitious temper he now held the dignity of the consulship, as Caesar's colleague. But Brutus opposed the plan, insisting first on the plain injustice of it, and then holding out the hope that Antony might change. He refused to despair of so gifted and honorable a man, such a lover of glory: once Caesar was gone, Antony might well be stirred by the nobility of their attempt to seize the chance and join them in restoring his country's liberty. So Brutus saved Antony's life. But Antony, in the general panic, put on a plebeian's clothes and fled. Brutus and his party marched up to the Capitol, holding up their bloody hands and naked swords as they went and proclaiming liberty to the people. At first every street was full of shouting and cries, and the wild running back and forth of people caught up in the shock and passion of the moment only added to the tumult in the city. But no more blood was shed, and no shops were plundered, and so the senators and many of the people took courage and went up to the men on the Capitol. When a crowd had gathered, Brutus made a speech well calculated to win the people over and well suited to the state of affairs. They applauded and shouted for him to come down, and at that the whole party took confidence and descended into the forum. Most of them walked mixed in with the crowd, but many of the most eminent men escorted Brutus in the midst of them, with great honor, all the way from the Capitol, and set him on the rostra. At the sight of him the crowd — a jumbled mass, primed for a riot — was struck with awe, and waited for what he would say in order and in silence; and when he began to speak, they heard him out quietly and attentively. But that not everyone was pleased with the deed became clear soon enough: when Cinna began to speak and to accuse Caesar, the crowd erupted in sudden rage and abused him so violently that the whole party thought it best to withdraw again to the Capitol. There Brutus, expecting a siege, sent away the most eminent of those who had accompanied them up, thinking it wrong that men who had no share in the deed should share in the danger.
The next day the senate met in the temple of the Earth. Antony, Plancus, and Cicero gave speeches urging concord and a general amnesty, and it was decreed not only that the men should be free of all fear and danger, but that the consuls should consider what honors and dignities ought to be conferred on them. With that the senate adjourned; and when Antony had sent his son up to the Capitol as a hostage, Brutus and his company came down, and greetings and invitations passed back and forth through the whole gathering. Antony invited Cassius to dinner and entertained him; Lepidus did the same for Brutus; and the rest were taken in by their various friends and acquaintances. At daybreak the senate met again and voted thanks to Antony for having smothered a civil war in its cradle; then Brutus and his associates who were present received formal praise, and the provinces were assigned and distributed among them. Crete was allotted to Brutus, Africa to Cassius, Asia to Trebonius, Bithynia to Cimber, and to Decimus Brutus (Albinus) the Gaul that lies along the Po.
After this they took up the question of Caesar's will and the arrangements for his funeral. Antony asked that the will be read publicly, and that the body be given no mean or private burial, for fear of further inflaming the people. Cassius fought this fiercely, but Brutus yielded and gave his consent — and in doing so he seems to have made his second great mistake. Sparing Antony's life had already earned him some blame from his own party, as the setting up of a dangerous and formidable enemy against the conspiracy; now, in letting Antony manage the funeral, he fell into an error that was total and beyond recovery. For first, when the will revealed that Caesar had left seventy-five drachmas to every single Roman citizen, and had given the public his gardens beyond the Tiber, where the temple of Fortune now stands, the whole city was set ablaze with love for him and a passionate sense of what they had lost. And then, when the body was carried into the forum and Antony, as custom required, delivered the funeral oration in Caesar's praise, he saw the crowd moved by his words — and shifting into the register of grief, he unfolded Caesar's bloody garment and held it up, showing them how many places it was pierced, and the number of his wounds. After that there was nothing to be seen but chaos. Some screamed for the murderers to be killed; others — as had happened long before, in the days when Clodius led the people — tore the benches and tables out of the surrounding shops and heaped them together into one great funeral pyre, laid Caesar's body on it, and set it alight, there in the middle of a district ringed with temples and sacred precincts, so that the burning took on the look of a religious rite. As soon as the flames leaped up, the crowd surged in from every side, snatched half-burnt brands off the pyre, and ran through the city to set fire to the houses of Caesar's murderers. But the conspirators had fortified themselves well beforehand, and turned the danger back.
There was, however, a certain poet named Cinna, who had no part whatever in the conspiracy — he was, on the contrary, one of Caesar's friends. This man dreamed that Caesar invited him to supper, and that he declined, but Caesar pressed and urged him until at last, taking him by the hand, he led him into a deep, dark place, where Cinna was forced against his will to follow, in dread and bewilderment. After this vision he lay in a fever most of the night. Even so, in the morning, hearing that Caesar's body was to be carried out for burial, he was ashamed to stay away from the ceremony, and went out and joined the crowd — which Antony's speech had already whipped into fury. They caught sight of him, and mistaking him not for the Cinna he was but for the man who had lately denounced Caesar in a speech to the people, they fell on him and tore him limb from limb.
It was this, above all, together with the change Antony had worked in the city, that alarmed Brutus and his friends into leaving Rome for their own safety. They stopped first at Antium, planning to return as soon as the people's fury had burned itself out — which they expected would happen soon and easily in a crowd so unsettled, so easily swept by any sudden gust of passion, especially since they had the senate on their side. The senate, though it turned a blind eye to the men who had torn Cinna to pieces, made a strict search for those who had attacked the houses of Brutus's and Cassius's friends, and arrested them for punishment. By now the people, too, were growing unhappy with Antony, who they saw was setting up a kind of monarchy of his own. They longed for Brutus to come back, and they expected him to appear in person at the games and spectacles which, as praetor, he owed the public. But Brutus had intelligence that many of Caesar's old soldiers — men who had received lands and towns from him — were lying in wait, slipping into the city a few at a time, and he did not dare come himself. In his absence, though, the people got shows of the utmost magnificence and expense: he had bought up great numbers of wild beasts of every kind and ordered that none be returned or held back — all were to be spent freely on the public spectacles. He traveled to Naples himself to engage a large company of performers, and hearing of one Canutius, an actor everyone praised, he wrote to his friends to use every persuasion to bring him to Rome — for as a Greek, Canutius could not be compelled. He wrote to Cicero as well, begging him on no account to miss the shows.
This was how matters stood when everything was suddenly changed again by the arrival in Rome of the young Octavian. He was the son of Caesar's niece, and Caesar had adopted him and made him heir by his will. At the time of the murder he was pursuing his studies at Apollonia, where he was also waiting to meet Caesar on his way to the Parthian expedition he had planned. The moment he heard of Caesar's death he came to Rome; and to win the people's favor he took the name of Caesar for himself and paid out, to the letter, the money the will had left the citizens — and by that stroke he outmaneuvered Antony. By money and gifts, freely scattered among the soldiers, he gathered to his side a great number of the men who had served under Caesar. Cicero himself, out of sheer hatred of Antony, took the young man's part — and Brutus took this so hard that he lashed him in his letters. Cicero, he wrote, evidently had no objection to a master; what he feared was a master who disliked him; and all his speaking and writing in the young man's praise showed that his real aim was a comfortable slavery. "But our forefathers," Brutus wrote, "could not stomach even gentle masters." For his own part, he said, he had not yet finally decided between war and peace; but on one point he was fixed and settled — he would never be a slave. He was amazed, he added, that Cicero should dread the dangers of a civil war and not be far more afraid of a dishonorable and shameful peace; and that the reward Cicero sought for pulling down Antony's tyranny was the privilege of setting up the young Caesar as tyrant in his place. Such is the tone of Brutus's first letters to Cicero.
The city had now split into two armed factions, one gathering around Octavian and the other around Antony, while the soldiers sold themselves practically at public auction, going over to whichever bidder paid the most. Brutus despaired of anything good coming out of such a scramble. He resolved to leave Italy, traveled overland through Lucania, and came down to Elea on the coast.
From there it was decided that Portia should return to Rome. She was overwhelmed with grief at parting from Brutus, and did everything she could to hide it — but for all her self-command, a painting she happened upon betrayed her. Its subject was Greek: Hector parting from Andromache as he went out to fight, handing her their little son Astyanax while her eyes stayed fixed on her husband. The likeness to her own situation undid her. She burst into tears at the sight of it, and went back several times a day to look at the picture and weep before it. On one of these occasions, when Acilius, one of Brutus's friends, quoted the lines Andromache speaks to Hector in Homer —
Hector, you are father and mother to me, and brother too, and my own dear husband —
Brutus smiled and answered, "But I could never say to Portia what Hector says back to Andromache:
Go tend your loom, and give your maids their orders.
Her body may lack the strength for what only men's strength can do, but in spirit she fights for her country as bravely as any of us." The story comes from the memoirs of Brutus written by Bibulus, Portia's own son.
From Elea Brutus took ship and sailed to Athens, where the people received him with open delight — acclamations in the streets, public honors voted in his name. He lodged with a private friend and became a faithful listener at the lectures of Theomnestus the Academic and Cratippus the Peripatetic, throwing himself into philosophy so completely that he seemed to have set aside all thought of public business and to be entirely at leisure for study. All the while, unsuspected, he was secretly preparing for war. He sent Herostratus into Macedonia to win the commanders there over to his side, and he himself quietly recruited every young Roman then studying at Athens and kept them at his disposal. One of them was Cicero's son, whom Brutus praised everywhere, saying that sleeping or waking he could not help admiring a young man of so great a spirit and so fierce a hatred of tyranny.
At last he began to act in the open. Learning that several Roman ships loaded with treasure were coming that way from Asia, commanded by a friend of his, he went to meet him near Carystus. He found him there, persuaded him to hand over the ships, and then gave an unusually splendid dinner — it happened to be Brutus's birthday. When the drinking began and the cups were being filled with toasts to victory for Brutus and liberty for Rome, Brutus, wanting to stir the company further, called for a larger bowl. Then, holding it in his hand, with no prompting and no forethought, he suddenly recited this verse aloud:
But deadly fate and Leto's son have killed me.
Some writers add that at the last battle he fought at Philippi, the watchword he gave his soldiers was "Apollo" — and they conclude from this that his sudden, unaccountable outburst was an omen of the defeat he suffered there.
Antistius, the commander of the treasure ships, gave him at parting five hundred thousand from the money he was carrying to Italy. And all the soldiers still left over from Pompey's army — men who had been wandering Thessaly since their general's defeat — flocked to him readily and joyfully. He also took from Cinna five hundred horsemen being led to Dolabella in Asia. Then he sailed to Demetrias and seized a great store of weapons that had been made on the dead Caesar's orders for the Parthian war and were now due to be shipped to Antony. Macedonia itself was put into his hands, surrendered by Hortensius the praetor, and all the kings and princes of the surrounding country came offering their services.
Then came word that Gaius, Antony's brother, had crossed over from Italy and was marching straight to join the forces Vatinius commanded at Dyrrhachium and Apollonia. Brutus decided to get there first and seize those troops himself, and set off at once with the men he had around him. The march was brutal — rough country, deep snow — but so fast that he left the servants carrying the morning's provisions far behind. Near Dyrrhachium, worn down by fatigue and cold, he fell into the condition called bulimia — a ravenous, fainting hunger that seizes both men and animals after hard labor, especially in deep snow. Perhaps the body's natural heat, driven inward when the cold takes hold, burns up all its nourishment at once; or perhaps the sharp, thin vapor that rises off melting snow cuts into the body and destroys the warmth as it escapes through the pores — for sweating seems to happen when the heat meets the cold at the body's surface and is quenched there. But I have discussed all this more fully in another place.
Brutus was growing faint, and no one in the whole army had anything for him to eat, so his servants were driven to turn to the enemy: they went right up to the city gates and begged bread from the sentries on duty. The moment the sentries heard what condition Brutus was in, they came out themselves, bringing food and drink with them. In return, when Brutus took the city, he showed the greatest kindness not only to those men but to all the inhabitants, for their sake.
Meanwhile Gaius Antonius reached Apollonia and summoned all the soldiers in the area to join him there. But they kept going over to Brutus instead, and suspecting that even the people of Apollonia leaned the same way, he abandoned the city and moved to Buthrotum — losing on the way three cohorts, cut to pieces by Brutus as they marched. He then tried to seize some strongpoints around Byllis that the enemy had occupied first, and was beaten in a pitched battle by young Cicero, to whom Brutus had given the command — an officer he used often, and with great success. Not long after, Gaius himself was caught in marshy ground, far from his supports. With the man in his power, Brutus would not let his soldiers attack. Instead he circled the enemy with his cavalry and gave orders that no one was to be killed — in a little while, he said, they would all be on his side. And so it proved: they surrendered, the men and their general together, and Brutus now had a large and formidable army.
For a long time he treated Gaius with every mark of honor and respect, and left him the insignia of his office, even though — as some report — letters kept arriving from Rome, from Cicero in particular, urging Brutus to put him to death. But when he found that Gaius was tampering with his officers and trying to stir up a mutiny among the soldiers, he put him aboard a ship and held him there under close guard. The soldiers Gaius had corrupted withdrew to Apollonia and sent word asking Brutus to come to them there. He answered that this was not the Roman custom: those who had given offense must come to their general themselves and beg forgiveness for it. They came, and he pardoned them.
As he was preparing to cross into Asia, news reached him of the upheaval at Rome. The young Octavian, backed by the senate against Antony, had driven his rival out of Italy and begun to grow formidable in his own right — standing for the consulship against all law, and keeping up great bodies of troops the commonwealth had no need of. And when he saw that the senate, unhappy with his conduct, was beginning to look abroad to Brutus, decreeing and confirming province after province under his command, he took alarm. He sent messengers to Antony proposing reconciliation and friendship; then he ringed the city with his troops and got himself chosen consul — though he was hardly more than a boy, barely twenty years old, as he says himself in his memoirs.
The moment he entered office he opened a judicial process against Brutus and his associates, for murdering the first man of the city — a holder of the highest offices of Rome — without trial or condemnation. He appointed Lucius Cornificius to accuse Brutus and Marcus Agrippa to accuse Cassius. No one appeared to answer the charges, so the judges were compelled to pass sentence and condemn them both. It is said that when the crier, following custom, called out from the tribunal in a loud voice summoning Brutus to appear, the people groaned aloud and the noblest citizens hung their heads in grief. Publius Silicius was seen to burst into tears — and for that, not long afterward, his name went down on the list of the proscribed. After this the three men — Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus — settled their quarrels completely, divided the provinces among themselves, and drew up the proscription list: the catalogue of those marked for slaughter, two hundred men in all. Cicero was among the slain.
When this news reached Brutus in Macedonia, he felt himself under a compulsion, and sent orders to Hortensius to kill Gaius Antonius — in revenge for Cicero his friend and for a Brutus who was his own kinsman, both proscribed, both dead. It was on this account that Antony, when he later captured Hortensius at the battle of Philippi, slaughtered him on his brother's tomb. As for Brutus, he wrote that he felt more shame at the cause of Cicero's death than grief at the event itself, and that he could not help blaming his friends at Rome. They were slaves, he said, more by their own doing than by that of the men who now tyrannized them: they could stand there, and watch, and endure things that ought to have been unbearable even to hear about.
He now moved his army — already very large — across into Asia, and ordered a fleet fitted out in Bithynia and around Cyzicus. Traveling overland himself, he made it his business to settle and secure the cities as he went, and gave audiences to the princes of every region he passed through. And he sent orders into Syria for Cassius to give up his planned expedition into Egypt and come to him. It was not to win an empire for themselves, he reminded him, but to free their country, that they were wandering like this with an army they had gathered for one purpose: destroying the tyrants. If they remembered that first resolve and meant to hold to it, they should not stray far from Italy, but hurry back and rescue their fellow citizens from oppression.
Cassius obeyed the summons and turned back, and Brutus went out to meet him. They met at Smyrna — the first time they had seen each other since parting at the Piraeus in Athens, one bound for Syria, the other for Macedonia. The sight of each other's forces filled them both with joy and confidence. They had fled Italy like the most miserable of exiles — no money, no arms, not a ship, not a soldier, not a city to rely on — and in this short time they had come together again so well furnished with shipping and money, with an army of horse and foot, that they were in a condition to contend for the empire of Rome.
Cassius wanted to show Brutus every bit as much honor as Brutus showed him, but Brutus generally beat him to it, coming to Cassius most of the time because Cassius was the older man and his health was the weaker. Men generally rated Cassius an expert soldier, but harsh-tempered and hot, a commander who preferred to rule by fear rather than love — though among his close friends he gave way easily to joking and would happily play the clown. Brutus, on the other hand, was esteemed by the people for his virtue, loved by his friends, admired by the best men, and not hated even by his enemies. For he was a man of singularly gentle nature and great spirit, untouched by anger or pleasure or greed, steady and unbending in holding to whatever he judged right and honorable. And what won him the deepest affection and the highest standing was the complete trust men placed in his intentions.
For no one had ever supposed that even Pompey the Great, had he beaten Caesar, would have submitted his power to the laws. He would have kept the management of the state in his own hands, soothing the people with the milder name of consul or dictator or some other title softer than king. And everyone was persuaded that Cassius — a man governed by anger and passion, and often carried beyond the bounds of justice for his own advantage — was enduring all these hardships of war and travel and danger to win dominion for himself, not liberty for the people. As for the earlier disturbers of Rome's peace — a Cinna, a Marius, a Carbo — it is plain that they set their country up as a stake for the winner, and all but admitted in so many words that they were fighting for empire. But even Brutus's enemies, we are told, never laid that charge against him. Many people, indeed, heard Antony himself say that Brutus was the only man who conspired against Caesar out of a sense of the glory and the apparent justice of the deed; the rest rose against the man himself, out of private envy and grudges of their own.
And it is plain from his own letters that Brutus relied not so much on his forces as on his own virtue. Shortly before the final engagement he wrote to Atticus that his affairs stood as well as fortune could make them: either he would conquer and restore liberty to the Roman people, or he would die and be beyond the reach of slavery. With everything else, he said, settled and certain, one question alone remained open — whether they would live or die as free men. He added that Mark Antony had paid a fitting price for his folly: he could have been counted alongside Brutus and Cassius and Cato, and had chosen instead to attach himself to Octavian — and even if the two of them were not beaten now, they would soon enough be fighting each other. In this he proved no bad prophet.
While they were at Smyrna, Brutus asked Cassius for a share of the great treasure he had piled up, because his own funds were all spent fitting out a fleet large enough to command the whole Mediterranean. Cassius's friends argued against it. "It is not right," they said, "that the money you keep so frugally, and gathered at the cost of so much resentment, should be handed to him to spend making himself popular and buying the favor of the soldiers." Cassius gave him a third of everything anyway. Then they parted, each to his own command.
Cassius took Rhodes and behaved there with no mercy at all — though at his first entry, when some of the people hailed him as lord and king, he had answered that he was neither king nor lord, but the destroyer and punisher of a king and lord. Brutus, for his part, sent to the Lycians demanding a supply of money and men. But Naucrates, their popular leader, persuaded the cities to resist, and they occupied a string of hills and small mountains to block Brutus's passage. Brutus first sent out a party of cavalry, who caught them at their meal and killed six hundred. Then, after taking the small towns and villages all around, he released every prisoner without ransom, hoping to win the whole nation over by goodwill. But they stayed stubborn, angry at what they had suffered and contemptuous of his kindness, until at last he drove the most warlike of them into the city of Xanthus and laid siege to it. They tried to escape by swimming and diving down the river that flows past the town, but were caught by nets let down across the channel, with little bells at the top that rang the moment anyone was taken. Then they made a sortie by night, seized some of the siege engines, and set them on fire; but the Romans spotted them and beat them back to the walls — and a strong wind was blowing, and it drove the flames onto the battlements so fiercely that several of the nearby houses caught fire. Brutus, afraid the whole city would be destroyed, ordered his own soldiers to help put the fire out.
But the Lycians were suddenly seized by a strange, unbelievable desperation — a frenzy that can hardly be described except as a violent appetite for death. Women and children, slave and free, people of every age and every condition fought from the walls to drive off the very soldiers who had come to help them, and with their own hands gathered reeds and wood and anything that would burn, spreading the fire through the whole city, feeding it with whatever fuel they could find and goading its fury by every possible means. When the flames had run through Xanthus and ringed it and blazed up on every side, Brutus, sick at heart over their calamity, rode around the walls on horseback, desperate to save the city, stretching out his hands to the Xanthians and begging them to spare themselves and their town. No one listened. They sought their own destruction by every means there was — not just men and women, but even boys and small children, with a hideous outcry, leaping into the fire, or from the walls, or onto their parents' swords, baring their throats and begging to be struck. After the city was destroyed, a woman was found who had hanged herself, her young child hanging at her neck, and in her hand the torch with which she had set her own house alight. So tragic was the sight that Brutus could not bear to look at it, and wept when it was merely described to him. He proclaimed a reward for any soldier who could save a Xanthian; and only a hundred and fifty, it is said, were found — saved against their wills. So the Xanthians, after a long stretch of years, as though the fated cycle of their destruction had come round at last, repeated by their own desperate act the calamity of their ancestors, who in the Persian war had burned their city and destroyed themselves in the very same way.
After this, finding the people of Patara resolved to resist and hold their city against him, Brutus was very reluctant to besiege it, dreading that the same madness might seize them too. But he held some of their women as prisoners, and he released them all without ransom. They went home to husbands and fathers of the highest rank and told them what a man Brutus was — how temperate, how just — and persuaded them to yield and put their city into his hands. From then on all the cities of the region came over to him, surrendering themselves, and found him kind and merciful beyond anything they had hoped. And the contrast told. Cassius, at that same time, was forcing every Rhodian to hand in all the silver and gold he privately owned — which raised eight thousand talents — and on top of that had fined the city another five hundred. Brutus took no more than a hundred and fifty talents from the Lycians, and having done them no other injury of any kind, marched away with his army into Ionia.
Through the whole course of this expedition Brutus did many memorable acts of justice, in rewards and punishments alike; but I will tell one in particular, because it gratified him — and the noblest Romans with him — more than all the rest. When Pompey the Great, stripped of his great power by Caesar, fled to Egypt and landed near Pelusium, the guardians of the boy king held a council on what to do, and could not agree — some were for receiving him, others for driving him away from Egypt. But Theodotus, a Chian by birth, then attached to the king as a paid teacher of rhetoric and admitted to the council only for want of better men, undertook to prove that both sides were wrong — those who advised welcoming Pompey and those who advised sending him off. In their situation, he argued, only one course was truly expedient: seize him and kill him. And he closed his argument with the proverb: "Dead men don't bite." The council came round to his opinion, and Pompey the Great — a lesson in how incredible and unforeseen events can be — was slain, thanks, as the sophist himself later had the impudence to boast, to the rhetoric and cleverness of Theodotus. Not long afterward, when Caesar came to Egypt, some of the murderers got their just reward and died the wretched deaths they deserved. Theodotus borrowed a little more time from fortune — time for a poor, despised, vagrant life — but he did not stay hidden from Brutus as he passed through Asia. He was seized and executed, and his death made him more memorable than his life ever had.
About this time Brutus sent word to Cassius to join him at the city of Sardis, and when Cassius was on the road, Brutus went out with his friends to meet him. The whole army, drawn up in formation, saluted each of the two men as imperator. But as usually happens in great enterprises, where many friends and many commanders are engaged, jealousies had been building between Brutus and Cassius — grievances, private accusations, things carried back and forth by other men — and they decided to settle all of it before they took up any other business. The moment they arrived, they withdrew into a room together and shut the door. Alone, just the two of them, they began first to air their complaints, then to argue hotly, then to accuse each other outright — and at last they were so carried away by passion that they fell to harsh words and finally burst into tears. Their friends standing outside were astonished to hear them so loud and so angry, and feared something worse might follow; but they had been ordered not to enter, and no one dared interrupt. No one, that is, except Marcus Favonius. He had been a devoted admirer of Cato, and he kept up the character of a philosopher not so much by learning or wisdom as by a wild, vehement manner all his own. Now he came charging at the door, and the attendants tried to hold him back — but stopping Favonius was hard work once his wildness had seized him. He was fierce in everything he did and would try anything to get his way. He was a senator, but he considered that among the least of his distinctions; what he really prized was a kind of Cynic's license to say whatever he pleased to anyone — rudeness so free and so badly timed that people who chose to take it as a joke could sometimes forgive it. This Favonius forced his way past the men guarding the doors, burst into the chamber, and in a theatrical voice declaimed the lines Homer gives to old Nestor:
Take my advice — for I am older than you both.
At this Cassius burst out laughing. But Brutus threw him out, calling him an impudent dog and a counterfeit Cynic. Still, for the moment, the interruption put an end to their quarrel, and they parted. That night Cassius gave a supper, and Brutus invited the guests; and when everyone had taken their places, in came Favonius, fresh from his bath. Brutus called out that he had not been invited and told him to take the farthest couch. Instead Favonius shoved his way in and lay down on the middle one, the place of honor — and the evening passed in playful talk, with no shortage of either wit or philosophy.
The next day, on a complaint brought by the people of Sardis, Brutus publicly disgraced and condemned Lucius Pella, a man who had been a censor of Rome and whom Brutus himself had trusted with responsible posts — the charge was embezzling public money. The verdict stung Cassius badly. Only a few days earlier, two friends of his own had been accused of exactly the same crime; he had scolded them in private, cleared them in public, and kept them in his service. Now he accused Brutus of too much rigor, too much strict justice, at a time that called for policy and accommodation. But Brutus told him to remember the Ides of March — the day they had killed Caesar, a man who did not himself plunder and squeeze mankind, but who was the strength and shelter of the men who did. "If there were any decent excuse for setting justice aside," he said, "it would have been better to put up with the crimes of Caesar's friends than to let our own go unpunished. Then we could have been accused of nothing worse than cowardice. Now, after all our pains and all our dangers, we lay ourselves open to the charge of injustice." That was Brutus's purpose, and that was the rule he acted by.
About the time they were preparing to cross from Asia into Europe, it is said that a strange and wonderful sign appeared to Brutus. He was by nature a man of little sleep, and by discipline and a spare diet he had trimmed his hours of rest down to almost nothing. He never slept during the day, and at night only when all his business was done and there was no one left awake to talk with. But now, with the war begun, the whole weight of it on his mind, and the outcome pressing on him, he would take a short first sleep after supper and then spend the rest of the night on his most urgent affairs. If he could dispatch them early and save a little time, he read — until the third watch of the night, when the centurions and tribunes were accustomed to come to him for orders. So it was that one night, before the army left Asia, he was very late alone in his tent, a dim lamp burning beside him, the whole camp hushed and silent. He was deep in thought, turning something over in his mind, when he sensed that someone had come in. He looked up toward the door and saw a terrible, strange apparition — a monstrous, frightening figure standing beside him, saying nothing. Brutus asked it boldly, "What are you — man or god? And what business brings you to me?" The figure answered, "I am your evil genius, Brutus. You will see me at Philippi." And Brutus, not shaken in the least, replied, "Then I will see you."
As soon as the apparition vanished, he called his servants. They told him they had heard no voice and seen no vision. So he stayed awake until morning, then went to Cassius and told him what he had seen. Cassius, who followed the philosophy of Epicurus and often used to debate these matters with Brutus, answered him this way: "It is the opinion of our school, Brutus, that not everything we feel or see is real. The senses are slippery and deceitful things, and the mind is quicker and subtler still — it sets the senses in motion and stamps every kind of change upon them with no real cause behind it at all, the way an impression is pressed into wax. And the soul of man, which contains in itself both the stamp and the wax, can most easily, by its own workings, produce and take on every shape and figure. You can see this in the sudden changes of our dreams, where the imagination, once set off by the least thing, runs through a whole parade of emotions and appearances. It is the imagination's nature to be always in motion, and its motion is fantasy — mere conception. In your case, add this: your body, worn down and strained by constant toil, naturally works upon your mind and keeps it in an excited, unnatural state. As for supernatural beings — that they exist at all, or, if they did, that they would have human shape or voice or any power that could reach us — there is no reason to believe it. Though I confess I could wish there were such beings, so that in this most sacred and honorable enterprise of ours we might not have to rely only on our arms and horses and ships, numerous and powerful as they are, but could count on the help of the gods as well." With talk like this, Cassius soothed Brutus's mind. But as the troops were boarding the ships, two eagles flew down and perched on the two foremost standards. They crossed the water with the army, followed the soldiers all the way, and were fed by them — until they came to Philippi, where, just one day before the battle, both eagles flew away.
Brutus had already brought most of the places and peoples of that region under control, but now the army marched on to the coast opposite the island of Thasos, subduing any town or strongman that still held out. There they found Norbanus encamped in a position called the Straits, near Symbolum. They surrounded him so completely that they forced him to abandon the place, and Norbanus came within a hair of losing his entire army — Octavian was lagging far behind because of sickness, and only Antony's relief saved him, arriving with such astonishing speed that Brutus and his officers refused to believe the report that he had come. Octavian arrived ten days later and camped opposite Brutus, with Antony opposite Cassius.
The stretch of ground between the two armies is what the Romans call the Campi Philippi — the plains of Philippi. Never before had two Roman armies of such size come together to fight each other. Brutus's army was somewhat smaller in numbers than Octavian's, but in the splendor of its weapons and the richness of its equipment it was far the more magnificent, for most of the men's arms were of gold and silver, which Brutus had lavished on them. In everything else he had trained his commanders to frugality and self-restraint, but he believed that the wealth a soldier carried in his hands and wore on his body would put spirit into the man who craved glory — and would make the man who loved money fight all the harder to keep the armor that was his whole estate.
Octavian held his review and ritual purification of the army inside his own trenches, and handed out only a little grain and a bare five drachmas per soldier for the sacrifice they were to offer. Brutus — whether out of pity for that poverty or contempt for that meanness of spirit — first mustered and purified his army in the open field, as custom required, and then distributed great numbers of sacrificial animals to every regiment and fifty drachmas to every soldier. In the love of his men and their readiness to fight for him, Brutus held every advantage. But at the ceremony, they say, an unlucky omen befell Cassius: his lictor, his official attendant, presented him with the garland he was to wear at the sacrifice — upside down. It was said, too, that some time before, at a solemn procession, a golden image of Victory being carried before Cassius had crashed to the ground when its bearer slipped. On top of that, birds of prey circled the camp daily, and swarms of bees were found clustering at a spot inside the trenches — a spot the soothsayers ordered walled off from the camp, to quiet the superstition that was quietly beginning to infect even Cassius himself, and to shake his Epicurean philosophy, and that had already wholly seized and conquered the soldiers. Because of all this Cassius was reluctant to stake everything on an immediate battle. He argued for stretching the war out, since they were the stronger in money and supplies but the weaker in men and arms. Brutus, on the contrary, was as eager as ever to come to a swift decision — either to restore his country's liberty or to release all those multitudes of people from the misery of the levies and services and extortions the war laid on them. And when he saw his light cavalry getting the better of skirmish after skirmish, his confidence hardened into resolve. Then some of the soldiers deserted to the enemy, and others began accusing and suspecting one another, and many of Cassius's friends in the council came over to Brutus's opinion. But one man of Brutus's own party, named Atellius, opposed him, advising that they wait out the winter. When Brutus asked him how he expected to be better off a year from now, Atellius answered, "If I gain nothing else, at least I will have lived that much longer." The answer displeased Cassius intensely, and Atellius fell into general contempt for it. And so it was resolved to give battle the next day.
That night at supper Brutus was cheerful and full of hope, and talked philosophy with his friends before going to his rest. But Messala says that Cassius supped privately with a few of his closest companions and seemed thoughtful and silent, against his nature and his habit; that after supper he took Messala warmly by the hand and said to him — speaking in Greek, as he always did when he wished to show affection — "Bear witness for me, Messala, that I am brought to the same necessity as Pompey the Great before me: to hazard the liberty of my country on a single battle. Yet let us be of good courage, and trust our fortune — it would be wrong to distrust her, even if our counsels are bad." These, Messala says, were the last words Cassius spoke to him before saying goodnight; and he was invited to supper with Cassius the following evening, which was his birthday.
At first light the signal for battle — the scarlet coat — was hung out in both Brutus's camp and Cassius's, and the two generals met in the open ground between their armies. There Cassius said: "May it be as we hope, Brutus — may we win today and live all the rest of our lives happily together. But the greatest of human affairs are the most uncertain, and if the battle goes against us, we may find it hard ever to see each other again. So tell me now: what have you resolved about flight, and about death?" Brutus answered, "When I was young, Cassius, and knew nothing of the world, I let myself utter a bold philosophical opinion — I know not how. I blamed Cato for killing himself. I called it an irreligious act, and an unmanly one, to try to slip out from under the divine order of things — to refuse to accept bravely whatever evil comes, and to run from it instead. But now, in my own fortunes, I am of another mind. If Providence does not settle this undertaking as we wish, I will put no further hopes and no further preparations for war to the test. I will die content with my fortune. I gave my life to my country on the Ides of March, and I have lived a second life since then for her sake, in liberty and honor." Cassius smiled at these words, and embraced him, and said, "With these resolutions, let us go against the enemy. For either we shall conquer — or we shall have no cause to fear the men who do." After this they discussed the ordering of the battle with their friends. Brutus asked Cassius for command of the right wing, though it was generally thought that post belonged to Cassius, as the older and more experienced man. Even in this Cassius gave way to Brutus, and he placed Messala with the bravest of all his legions in the same wing. Brutus at once led out his cavalry, splendidly equipped, and brought his infantry up close behind.
Antony's soldiers were digging trenches from the marsh where they were camped out across the plain, to cut Cassius off from the sea, while Octavian's troops were to stand by in support — though Octavian himself could not be present because of his sickness. His soldiers were not expecting the enemy to offer a pitched battle at all — a few sallies, they thought, some darts and light weapons thrown to harass the men working in the trenches — and they took no notice of the army drawn up facing them, ready to fight. So they were stunned by the huge, confused roar that came rolling from the trenches. Meanwhile Brutus had sent out tickets to his officers with the password for battle written on them, and rode along the ranks himself, encouraging the men. But few of them ever heard the password before the fighting began; most of them did not wait for it to be passed down, but with one surge and one shout ran straight at the enemy. The charge threw the line out of order and the legions were pulled apart from one another. Messala's legion first, then the next beside it, swept clean past Octavian's left wing, barely grazing its edge and killing only a handful, and wheeling around behind it fell directly on Octavian's camp. Octavian himself, as his own memoirs tell it, had been carried out of the camp only moments before — one of his friends, Marcus Artorius, had dreamed a dream commanding that Octavian be carried out. He was believed dead, for the soldiers had riddled his empty litter with darts and pikes. There was great slaughter in the captured camp, and two thousand Spartans, newly arrived to reinforce Octavian, were cut down with the rest.
The rest of Brutus's line, which had not swung around the wing but engaged the enemy head-on, found them in complete disorder, overwhelmed them easily, and cut down three legions where they stood; then, swept along by the momentum of victory, they poured into the enemy camp on the heels of the fugitives, Brutus himself among them. But the defeated men saw, in their extremity, what the victors had failed to see. The right wing, hurrying off in pursuit, had torn away from the main body and left its flank exposed — and the enemy fell on that gap. They could not break the center, which met them with fierce, stubborn resistance; but the left wing, where Cassius commanded, in disorder and knowing nothing of what had happened on the other side of the field, they put to flight. They chased the fugitives all the way into Cassius's camp and sacked and wrecked it — with neither of their own generals present, for Antony, they say, had ducked away from the fury of that first charge and withdrawn into the nearby marsh, and Octavian was nowhere to be found after being carried from his tents — though some soldiers showed Brutus their bloody swords and swore they had killed him, describing his face and his youth. By now the center of Brutus's line had driven back its opponents with great slaughter. Brutus was plainly victorious everywhere on his side of the field, and Cassius was everywhere beaten. And this one mistake ruined everything: Brutus did not go to Cassius's relief, because he believed Cassius had won as he had; Cassius did not wait for Brutus's relief, because he believed Brutus had lost as he had. As proof that the victory was Brutus's, Messala points out that he took three eagles and many standards from the enemy without losing one of his own. But now, riding back from the pursuit and the plunder of Octavian's camp, Brutus was puzzled that he could not see Cassius's tent standing tall above the rest, where it had always stood — nor anything else looking as it should, for the enemy had torn it all down and looted it the moment they burst into the camp. Some of his men, sharper-eyed and longer-sighted than the rest, told Brutus they could see a great deal of gleaming armor and silver shields moving back and forth in Cassius's camp — and that neither the number nor the style of the armor looked like the guard that had been left there; yet there did not seem to be nearly as many dead bodies lying about as there should have been after the defeat of so many legions. That was what first made Brutus suspect Cassius's misfortune. Leaving a guard in the enemy camp, he called his men back from the pursuit and rallied them to march to Cassius's relief. And this is what had become of Cassius.
He had been angry from the very first, when Brutus's soldiers charged without the password and without the order to attack. Then, when they had won, he was just as displeased to watch them rush off after loot and plunder instead of wheeling to encircle what was left of the enemy. And then — acting by delay and hesitation rather than commanding boldly and with a clear purpose — he let himself be hemmed in by the enemy's right wing. His cavalry broke and bolted for the sea, and when he saw the infantry beginning to give way as well, he did everything a man could do to stop the rout and turn them back, snatching a standard from the hands of one fleeing soldier and planting it at his own feet — though by then he could barely hold even his personal guard together. In the end he was forced to withdraw with a handful of men to a small hill overlooking the plain. He himself, being weak-sighted, could make out almost nothing — only, and only with difficulty, the destruction of his camp. But the men with him saw a large body of horsemen riding toward the hill — the very riders Brutus had sent. Cassius took them for enemies coming to hunt him down; even so, he sent out Titinius, one of his companions, to find out who they were. When Brutus's horsemen saw Titinius coming and recognized a friend, a faithful servant of Cassius, those who knew him well shouted for joy, leapt down from their horses, and embraced him and shook his hands, while the rest rode circles around him, singing and cheering in their delight. And that was the cause of the worst mischief of all. For Cassius honestly believed that Titinius had been taken by the enemy, and he cried out, "Through too much love of life, I have lived to watch a friend captured by the enemy before my face." Then he withdrew into an empty tent, taking with him only Pindarus, one of his freedmen — a man he had kept ready for exactly such a moment ever since the disaster of the Parthian expedition, when Crassus was destroyed. From the Parthians Cassius had escaped with his life. Now he pulled his cloak up over his head, bared his neck, and held it out to Pindarus, commanding him to strike — with, men said, the same dagger he had used against Caesar. The head, at any rate, was found severed from the body. But no man ever saw Pindarus again, which led some to suspect that he had killed his master unbidden. Soon enough they discovered who the horsemen really were, and here came Titinius, crowned with garlands, hurrying toward Cassius. But when the cries and wailing of his grief-stricken friends told him of his general's tragic error and death, he drew his sword, bitterly cursed his own slowness for causing it, and killed himself.
As soon as Brutus was sure that Cassius's wing had been beaten, he hurried toward him — but he heard nothing of his death until he had nearly reached the camp. There he mourned over the body, calling Cassius "the last of the Romans," for the city, he said, could never again produce another man of so great a spirit. Then he sent the body away to be buried on the island of Thasos, so that a funeral inside the camp would not stir up disorder. He gathered the soldiers and steadied them; and seeing that they had lost everything they owned, he promised every man two thousand drachmas to make up for it. The words put heart back into them, and the size of the gift astonished them. They saw him off with shouts and praise, calling him the only general of all four who had not been beaten in the battle. And the facts bore out his confidence that he would win: with only a few legions he had overthrown everything that stood against him. If all his soldiers had actually fought — instead of most of them streaming past the enemy to get at the plunder — he would very likely have swept every part of the field.
Eight thousand men fell on his side, counting the army's servants, whom Brutus calls Briges. On the other side, Messala gives it as his opinion that the dead came to more than twice that number. So it was Octavian and Antony's men who were the more disheartened — until a servant of Cassius named Demetrius came to Antony that evening, carrying the robe he had stripped from the dead body, and the sword. At the sight of these the enemy took such heart that at first light they drew out their whole force and stood in battle order. Brutus, meanwhile, found both his camps wavering and in disorder. His own was full of prisoners and needed a heavier guard than usual; and Cassius's men were unsettled by the change of general — besides which, the beaten troops nursed a certain envy and resentment toward the part of the army that had done the conquering. He decided, therefore, to put his forces in battle order but to keep out of a fight. The captured slaves — a great number of them had been found mixed in among the soldiers, not without suspicion — he ordered killed. But most of the free men and citizens he released, saying that they were more truly prisoners with the enemy than with him: over there they were captives and slaves, but with him they were free men and citizens of Rome. Even so, he had to hide them and help them slip away secretly, because he could see that his friends and officers were bent on revenge against them. Among the captives were an actor named Volumnius and a clown named Sacculio. Brutus paid them no attention at all, but his friends dragged them before him and charged that even now, in this condition, the pair would not give up their jokes and their insolent talk. Brutus, his mind full of other things, said nothing to the accusation; but Messala Corvinus gave as his judgment that they should be publicly whipped on a stage and sent naked to the enemy's commanders, to show them what sort of drinking companions they liked to bring along on campaign. Some of those present laughed at that. But Publius Casca — the man who had given Caesar the first wound — said, "It is not right for us to be joking and making merry at the funeral of Cassius. And you, Brutus, will show what esteem you have for that general's memory by how you deal with men who mock him and speak of him shamefully." Brutus, badly discomposed, replied, "Then why ask me about it, Casca, instead of doing what you think fitting yourselves?" That answer was taken as his consent to the deaths of the two wretched men, and they were carried off and killed.
After this he paid the soldiers the reward he had promised. He rebuked them, though only mildly, for charging the enemy in disorder, without the password or any word of command; and he promised that if they fought bravely in the next engagement, he would give them two cities to sack and plunder: Thessalonica and Lacedaemon — Sparta itself. This is the one indefensible thing in all that is found fault with in the life of Brutus — though it is true that Octavian and Antony were far more cruel in the rewards they gave their own soldiers after victory. They drove out, one might almost say, all the old inhabitants of Italy, to put their soldiers in possession of other men's lands and cities. But then conquest and empire had been their whole purpose in the war, while Brutus, because of his reputation for virtue, was not permitted by the world either to win or even to save himself except with justice and honor — especially now that Cassius was dead, Cassius who was generally blamed as the man who had steered him toward his less merciful acts. As sailors, when a storm has smashed the rudder, fit and nail on some other piece of timber in its place — meeting the danger not well, but as well as necessity allows — so Brutus, at the head of so great an army in such uncertain times, with no commander equal to his need, was forced to use the ones he had, and to do and say much of what they advised. And what they advised was, in effect, whatever might bring Cassius's soldiers into better order. For those troops were headstrong and hard to manage — bold and insolent in camp for want of their general, but cowardly and fearful in the field, because they remembered being beaten.
Things stood no better with Octavian and Antony. Their provisions were running short, and their camp lay on low ground, so they expected a very hard winter. They were pressed close against the marshes, and the heavy autumn rains that fell after the battle filled their tents with mud and water, which froze at once in the cold. And while they were in this misery, news reached them of their disaster at sea. Brutus's fleet had fallen upon their ships as they carried a great reinforcement of soldiers over from Italy, and had destroyed them so completely that only a handful of men escaped the slaughter — and those few, starving, were driven to eat the sails and the rigging. The moment they heard this, Octavian and Antony were in a hurry to force a deciding battle before Brutus could learn of his good fortune. For it so happened that the fighting at sea and on land had fallen on the very same day; and yet by some mischance — not through any fault of his commanders — Brutus did not learn of his victory until twenty days after. Had he known, he would never have been drawn into a second battle. He had provisions enough for his army for a long time to come; his camp was well placed, sheltered from the winter weather and nearly unreachable by the enemy; and being absolute master of the sea, and victorious on land on the wing where he himself had fought, he would have been full of hope and confidence. But it seems the Roman state could no longer endure to be governed by many men; it required a monarchy; and so the divine power, wishing to remove from the scene the one man who could still resist the man destined to control the empire, cut off that good news from Brutus's ears. And it missed him by only a little. The very evening before the battle, a deserter named Clodius came over from the enemy and announced that Octavian had learned of the loss of his fleet, and that this was the reason for his haste to fight. But the story found no credit. The man was never even brought before Brutus; they simply set him down as someone with bad information, or a liar inventing tales to buy himself favor.
That same night, they say, the phantom came to Brutus again, in the same shape as before — but this time it vanished without speaking. Publius Volumnius, though, a philosopher who had carried arms with Brutus from the beginning of the campaign, makes no mention of the apparition. He records other omens: that the first eagle-standard was covered with a swarm of bees; that one of the officers had an arm that sweated oil of roses of its own accord, and though they dried and wiped it again and again, it would not stop; and that just before the battle two eagles met and fought in the open space between the two armies, while the whole field kept an unbelievable silence and every man watched the spectacle — until at last the eagle on Brutus's side gave way and fled. And the story of the Ethiopian is famous: meeting the standard-bearer just as the camp gate was opened, he was cut to pieces by the soldiers, who took him for an evil omen.
Brutus led his army into the field and drew it up facing the enemy, and then paused a long while before he would fight. As he was reviewing the troops, suspicions were stirred and accusations laid against some of them. Besides, he could see that his cavalry had no great appetite for beginning the action and were waiting to see what the infantry would do. And then, suddenly, Camulatus — an excellent soldier, one Brutus prized highly for his courage — rode close past Brutus himself and went over to the enemy. The sight grieved Brutus to the heart. Partly out of anger, partly out of fear of some greater treason and desertion, he immediately threw his forces against the enemy, at about three in the afternoon, with the sun already going down. On his own wing Brutus had the better of it. He pressed hard on the enemy's left, which gave way and retreated, and his cavalry charged in alongside the infantry when they saw the enemy in confusion. But the other wing was a different story. To avoid being surrounded — for the numbers were against them — the officers kept stretching the line, until it was drawn so thin at the center that it could not withstand a charge; at the first onset it broke and fled. After cutting through it, the enemy at once swung round and took Brutus in the rear. Brutus himself, in that peril, did everything an expert general and a brave soldier could do — by judgment and by his own hand, everything that might yet recover the victory. But the very thing that had been his advantage in the first battle told against him in the second. In the first, the beaten part of the enemy had been killed on the spot; but of Cassius's men who fled, few had been slain, and the survivors, cowed by their old defeat, infected the greater part of the army with their own dread and disorder. It was here that Marcus, the son of Cato, was killed, fighting among the noblest and bravest of the young men. He scorned to run and would not give the least ground, but kept fighting, declaring who he was and naming his father's name, until he fell at last, leaving his enemies in awe of his courage, upon a heap of the enemy's dead. And of the rest, the bravest died defending Brutus.
There was in the field a man named Lucilius, a good man and a friend of Brutus. He saw a party of barbarian horsemen ignoring everyone else in the pursuit and galloping at full stretch after Brutus alone, and he resolved to stop them, though it should cost him his life. Letting himself fall a little behind, he told them that he was Brutus. They believed him all the more because he begged to be taken to Antony — as if he feared Octavian but could trust Antony. Overjoyed with their prize, and thinking themselves wonderfully lucky, they carried him along through the night, first sending messengers ahead to tell Antony they were coming. Antony was delighted and came out to meet them; and everyone else who heard that Brutus had been taken alive came flocking to see him — some pitying his fortune, others sneering that out of too much love of life he had let himself become the prey of barbarians, a meanness unworthy of his former glory. When they came near, Antony stood still, considering how he ought to receive Brutus. But Lucilius, brought up before him, said with perfect confidence: "Be assured, Antony, that no enemy has taken Marcus Brutus alive, and no enemy ever shall — heaven forbid that fortune should ever win such a victory over virtue. He will be found, living or dead, in a manner worthy of himself. As for me, I am here by a trick I played on your soldiers, and I am ready to suffer any severity you choose to inflict for it." Everyone stood amazed at these words. But Antony turned to the men who had brought him and said: "I see, my fellow soldiers, that you are annoyed at being deceived, and feel yourselves insulted and injured by it. But you should know that you have taken a better prize than the one you were hunting. You were searching for an enemy, and you have brought me a friend. For to tell you the truth, I do not know how I would have treated Brutus if you had brought him in alive. But of this I am sure: it is better to have men like Lucilius as our friends than as our enemies." With that he embraced Lucilius, and for the moment put him in the care of one of his friends; and ever afterward he found him a steady and faithful friend.
By now Brutus had crossed a little brook that ran among trees under steep overhanging rocks, and since it was night, he would go no farther. He sat down in a hollow with a great rock jutting out in front of it, a few of his officers and friends around him. First, looking up at the sky, which was full of stars, he recited two lines of verse. One of them, Volumnius records, was this:
Punish, great Zeus, the author of these ills.
The other, he says, he had forgotten. A little later, naming one by one all the friends who had been killed before his eyes in the battle, he groaned aloud — above all at the names of Flavius, the chief of his engineers, and Labeo, his lieutenant. Meanwhile one of the company, who was thirsty and saw that Brutus was thirsty too, took his helmet and ran down to the brook for water. Then a noise was heard from the far side of the river, and Volumnius, taking Brutus's armor-bearer Dardanus with him, went out to see what it was. When they came back a short while later, they asked what had become of the water. Brutus smiled — a smile that carried a great deal of meaning — and said to Volumnius, "It is all drunk; but more shall be fetched for you." So the man who had brought the first helmetful was sent again; he came close to being captured by the enemy, took a wound, and escaped only with difficulty.
Brutus reckoned that not many of his men had been killed in the fighting, and Statyllius undertook to find out for certain. He would dash through the enemy — there was no other way — and see what had become of their camp; if he found everything safe there, he would hold up a torch as a signal, and then return. He got through, and the torch was raised: Statyllius had reached the camp safely. But when a long time had passed and he did not come back, Brutus said, "If Statyllius is alive, he will come back." On the return, he fell into the enemy's hands, and was killed.
The night was now far gone. Brutus, still sitting, leaned his head toward his servant Clitus and spoke to him. Clitus gave no answer, only burst into tears. Then Brutus drew aside his armor-bearer Dardanus and had some words with him in private. Last of all he spoke to Volumnius in Greek, reminding him of their studies together and the discipline they had shared, and begged him to take hold of the sword with him and help him drive it home. Volumnius refused the request, and so did the others; and when someone said there could be no staying here — they must fly — Brutus rose and said, "Yes, indeed, we must fly; but not with our feet — with our hands." Then he gave each of them his right hand, and with a face full of pleasure he told them that it was an infinite satisfaction to him that not one of his friends had proved false. As for Fortune, he was angry with her only for his country's sake. As for himself, he counted himself far happier than the men who had conquered — not only as he had been a little while ago, but even now, in his present condition. For he was leaving behind him a reputation for virtue that no force can take away — a possession that none of the conquerors, with all their arms and all their riches, would ever be able to acquire; nor could they ever prevent posterity from believing, and saying, that being unjust and wicked men, they had destroyed the just and the good, and seized a power to which they had no right. Then he urged and entreated them all to look to their own safety, and withdrew with only two or three of his closest friends. One of these was Strato, whose acquaintance he had made when they studied rhetoric together. Him he placed nearest to himself; and then, taking hold of the hilt of his sword and directing it with both hands, he fell upon it and killed himself. But others say that it was not Brutus who held the sword but Strato, who — at Brutus's earnest entreaty, and turning his face away — held it steady while Brutus threw himself upon it with such force that it passed through his breast, and he died at once.
Messala, that friend of Brutus who was afterward reconciled to Octavian, once brought this same Strato to him at a leisure moment and said, with tears in his eyes, "This, Caesar, is the man who did the last friendly service for my beloved Brutus." Octavian received him kindly, and had good use of him afterward in his labors and his battles — at Actium Strato was one of the Greeks who proved their courage in his service. And of Messala himself the story is told that when Octavian once paid him this compliment — that although at Philippi he had been his fiercest enemy for Brutus's sake, at Actium he had shown himself his most devoted friend — Messala answered, "You have always found me, Caesar, on the best and justest side."
Brutus's body was found by Antony, who ordered the richest purple mantle he owned to be thrown over it; and when the mantle was afterward stolen, he found out the thief and had him put to death. The ashes of Brutus he sent home to his mother, Servilia. As for his wife Portia, the philosopher Nicolaus and Valerius Maximus write that she was determined to die, but was prevented by her friends, who watched her constantly; and that at last she snatched burning coals from the fire, shut them close in her mouth, and stifled herself — and so ended her life in a manner worthy of her birth and her virtue. Yet there is also a letter of Brutus in circulation, addressed to his friends, in which he grieves for Portia's death and reproaches them for neglecting her, so that in her illness she preferred to die rather than linger. It seems, then, that Nicolaus was simply mistaken about the time; for the letter — if it is indeed genuine, and truly Brutus's own — lets us understand Portia's sickness, and her love, and the manner in which her death came.
Antony's grandfather was the famous orator Antonius, whom Marius put to death for siding with Sulla. His father was another Antony, surnamed the Cretan — never famous or distinguished in public life, but a decent, kind man, and remarkable above all for his generosity. One story shows the whole character. He was not rich, and for exactly that reason his wife kept a tight rein on his good nature. One day a friend in need came to borrow money. Money he had none. So he told a servant to bring him water in a silver basin, and when it came he wetted his face as if he meant to shave, sent the servant off on some other errand — and handed his friend the basin, telling him to turn it into whatever he needed. Later, when a great hunt for the missing basin went up through the house, and his wife, in a very bad temper, was about to put the servants to the question one by one, he confessed what he had done and begged her pardon.
His wife was Julia, of the family of the Caesars, and in good sense and honorable conduct she was the equal of any woman of her time. It was under her that Antony was raised; after his father's death she remarried, to Cornelius Lentulus — the man Cicero put to death for his part in Catiline's conspiracy. Here, probably, is the first seed of the deadly grudge Antony bore Cicero. Antony even claimed that Lentulus' body was refused burial until Julia went and begged it from Cicero's wife. But that is plainly a mistake, for none of the men executed in Cicero's consulship was denied burial. Antony grew up a strikingly handsome young man, and then — the worst luck of his life — he fell in with Curio, a man wholly given over to his pleasures. To make Antony depend on him all the more, Curio plunged him into drinking and dissipation, and led him through spending so extravagant that at that early age he was already two hundred and fifty talents in debt. Curio stood surety for the whole sum; and when his father, the elder Curio, heard of it, he threw Antony out of his house. For a short while after that, Antony attached himself to Clodius, the most insolent and violent demagogue of the day, and ran with him through his career of riot and disorder. But he soon wearied of Clodius' madness, and grew nervous of the powerful enemies gathering against him, so he left Italy for Greece, where he spent his time in military training and the study of public speaking. He took most naturally to the so-called Asiatic style of oratory, then at the height of its fashion — a style that suited his boastful, swaggering temper very well, all empty flourishes and restless grabbing after glory.
After some time in Greece, Gabinius, a former consul, invited him to join a campaign in Syria. At first Antony refused — he had no wish to serve as a man in the ranks — but when he was offered a commission as commander of cavalry, he went along. His first action was against Aristobulus, who had persuaded the Jews to rebel. There Antony was himself the first man up the wall of the largest fortress, and drove Aristobulus out of every stronghold he held; then he beat him in a pitched battle against an army many times the size of his own, killed nearly all of them, and took Aristobulus and his son prisoner. When that war was over, Ptolemy came asking Gabinius to restore him to his kingdom of Egypt, with a promise of ten thousand talents as the reward. Most of the officers were against the venture, and Gabinius himself did not much like it, though the ten thousand talents tempted him sorely. But Antony, hungry for bold action and eager to oblige Ptolemy, helped talk Gabinius into going. Everyone agreed that the most dangerous stretch was the march to Pelusium — deep sand, no hope of fresh water, the road running past the Ecregma and the Serbonian marsh, which the Egyptians call the breathing-hole of Typhon, and which is probably water left behind by the Red Sea, or seeping through from it, since only a narrow neck of land divides the Red Sea from the Mediterranean there. Antony was sent ahead with the cavalry, and he did more than seize the passes: he captured Pelusium itself, a great city, took its garrison prisoner, and so made the march safe for the army and the road to victory easy for its general. Even the enemy got some benefit from his hunger for honor. When Ptolemy entered Pelusium, boiling with rage and spite against the Egyptians, he meant to put them all to the sword — and Antony stood in his way and stopped the slaughter. In all the many skirmishes and battles that followed, he gave proof after proof of his personal courage and his skill in command; once in particular, by swinging around and striking the enemy's rear, he handed the victory to the attackers in front, and won signal honors for it. And his decency toward the dead Archelaus was noticed just as widely. The man had once been his host and his friend; now, of necessity, Antony fought him bravely while he lived — but when he fell, Antony sought out his body and buried it with royal honors. The result was that he left a great name behind him among the Alexandrians, and every man serving in the Roman army counted him a most gallant soldier.
He had, besides, a noble and striking presence. A full, well-grown beard, a broad forehead, an aquiline nose — altogether a bold, masculine look that reminded people of Hercules as he appears in paintings and statues. Indeed there was an old tradition that the Antonys descended from Hercules through a son of his named Anton, and Antony liked to lend the story credit — by that resemblance, and by the way he dressed. Whenever he was to appear before a crowd, he wore his tunic belted low on the hips, a broadsword at his side, and a heavy, coarse cloak over everything. Even the things that others found insufferable in him — the bragging, the constant joking, the drinking in public, the way he would sit down beside the men at their meals or stand eating off the common soldiers' tables — made him the darling of the army. In matters of love he had the same easy charm: he won plenty of friends by helping them along in their affairs, and took their jokes about his own in perfect good humor. And his generous ways — the open, lavish hand with gifts and favors to friends and fellow soldiers — did a great deal to launch his rise to power, and once he was great, kept his fortunes standing long after a thousand follies had begun pulling them down. One example of that open hand is worth telling. He had ordered a payment of two hundred and fifty thousand to one of his friends — a decies, as the Romans call the sum. His steward, staggered by the extravagance, piled all the silver up in a heap where Antony would pass. Antony saw the heap and asked what it meant. "The money you ordered paid to your friend," said the steward. Antony saw the man's spite at once. "I thought a decies came to more than that," he said. "This is too little. Double it." But that belongs to a later time.
When the Roman state finally split into two hostile camps — the aristocratic party lining up behind Pompey, who was in the city, and the people's party looking to Caesar, who was off at the head of an army in Gaul — Curio, Antony's old friend, changed sides, devoted himself to Caesar, and brought Antony over with him. With the influence his eloquence won him among the people, and with a free flow of Caesar's money, Curio got Antony elected first tribune of the people, then augur. And the moment Antony took office he was worth a great deal to Caesar. First he blocked the consul Marcellus, who wanted to put the troops already assembled under Pompey's command and give him power to raise fresh levies; Antony countered with an order that the assembled troops be sent to Syria to reinforce Bibulus in his war with the Parthians, and that no one should enlist under Pompey. Next, when the senators refused to allow Caesar's letters to be received or read in the senate, Antony, by the authority of his office, read them out publicly — and to such effect that many changed their minds, since Caesar's demands, as he set them down in writing, looked nothing but fair and reasonable. At last two questions were put to the senate: should Pompey dismiss his army, and should Caesar dismiss his. A few voted for the first; for the second, all but a handful. Then Antony rose and put a question of his own: would it please them that both men give up their commands together? This proposal they seized on with real enthusiasm — they cheered him loudly and demanded a vote. But the consuls would not allow it. Caesar's friends then made some fresh offers, fair and equitable ones, but Cato opposed them fiercely, and the consul Lentulus ordered Antony out of the senate. So Antony was driven out with insults. He left cursing them, and, with Quintus Cassius, dressed as slaves, they fled in a hired carriage straight to Caesar. The moment they reached the camp they declared openly that there was no longer any order or justice in Rome — that tribunes were denied the right to speak, and that any man who stood up for common fairness was thrown out and lucky to escape with his life.
At that, Caesar put his army in motion and marched into Italy. That is why Cicero writes in his Philippics that Antony caused the civil war as surely as Helen caused the Trojan one. But this is slander. Caesar was not so soft or so easily swept away that the sight of Antony and Cassius, shabbily dressed and fleeing in a hired carriage, could carry him off into civil war against his country in a fit of momentary indignation — as if he had never thought of it or resolved on it long before. For a man who wanted a pretext for war, this made a fair and plausible occasion; but the true motive that drove him was the same that had once driven Alexander, and Cyrus before him, against all mankind: the unquenchable thirst for empire, the consuming ambition to be the greatest man in the world — which was impossible until Pompey had been pulled down. So as soon as he had advanced, occupied Rome, and driven Pompey out of Italy, Caesar decided to deal first with the legions Pompey had in Spain, then cross the sea and hunt Pompey himself with the fleet being built in the meantime. He left the government of Rome to Lepidus, as praetor, and the command of the troops and of Italy to Antony, as tribune of the people. Antony had the soldiers' hearts almost at once — he drilled with them, lived among them for the most part, and gave them everything his means allowed. But with nearly everyone else he was unpopular. He was too lazy to hear out the complaints of people who had been wronged; he listened impatiently to petitioners; and he had a bad name for meddling with other men's wives. In short, Caesar's government — which, as far as Caesar himself was concerned, looked like anything but a tyranny — got its bad reputation through Caesar's friends. And of those friends, Antony, who held the largest trust and committed the largest errors, was thought the most deeply at fault.
For all that, when Caesar came back from Spain he overlooked the charges against him — and in the war that followed, in every task he gave Antony, he never once had cause to complain of any lack of courage, energy, or soldierly skill. Caesar himself embarked at Brundisium, crossed the Ionian Sea with a small force, and sent the ships back with orders for Antony and Gabinius to embark the army and come over to Macedonia with all speed. Gabinius had no stomach for the sea in the rough, dangerous weather of midwinter, and wanted to march the army around by the long land route. But Antony was more afraid of what might happen to Caesar, hard pressed as he was by the numbers against him. He beat back Libo, who was blockading the mouth of the harbor of Brundisium, by swarming his galleys with a fleet of small boats, and with that opening he loaded twenty thousand infantry and eight hundred horsemen aboard and put to sea. The enemy spotted him and gave chase — and from that danger a strong south wind saved him, springing up and raising a sea so heavy that the enemy galleys could barely make way. But his own ships were being driven straight onto a lee shore of cliffs and rock walls dropping sheer to the water, with no hope of escape — when all at once the wind swung round to the southwest and blew from the land out to open sea. Antony, sailing now in safety, saw the whole coast covered with the wreckage of the enemy's fleet: the pursuing galleys had been driven onto it by the gale, and not a few had been smashed to pieces. Many men and much property fell into Antony's hands; he took the town of Lissus as well; and by arriving when he did, with a force that size, he gave Caesar great encouragement.
In the many engagements that now came one after another, there was not one in which Antony did not distinguish himself. Twice, when the army was in full flight, he stopped it, turned the men around, led them back into the charge, and won. Not without reason, then, his reputation in the camp stood next to Caesar's. And what Caesar himself thought of him showed plainly when the final battle came at Pharsalia — the battle that would decide everything. Caesar chose to lead the right wing himself, and gave the left to Antony, as the best officer he had. After the victory, Caesar, now named dictator, went off in pursuit of Pompey, and sent Antony to Rome as Master of the Horse — an office second in power to the dictator when the dictator is present, and, in his absence, first and very nearly alone. For once a dictator is appointed, every other magistrate except the tribunes ceases to hold any authority in Rome.
Dolabella, however, who was tribune then — a young man and hungry for upheaval — was pushing a sweeping measure to cancel all debts, and he wanted Antony, his friend and always ready to champion a crowd-pleasing project, to join him in it. Asinius and Trebellius argued the other side; and just at that moment Antony was seized by a terrible suspicion that Dolabella was carrying on with his wife. In his distress he put her away — she was his cousin, a daughter of Gaius Antonius, Cicero's colleague in the consulship — sided with Asinius, and went to open war with Dolabella, who had seized the forum, intending to force his law through. The senate voted that Dolabella should be put down by armed force, and Antony went down and attacked him, killing some of Dolabella's men and losing some of his own. The action cost him the affection of the common people; and with the better sort, and with all decent citizens, his whole way of living made him — as Cicero says — absolutely odious. They were disgusted by his drinking bouts at all hours, his wild spending, his gross affairs with women, his days spent asleep or walking off his debauches, his nights at banquets and theaters and at the weddings of comedians and clowns. The story goes that after drinking all night at the wedding of Hippias the comedian, he had to address the people in the morning; he came forward, still loaded from the night before, and vomited in front of them all, while one of his friends held out his toga for him. Sergius the actor was one of the friends with the most influence over him; so was Cytheris, an actress from the same stage, whom he doted on — when he made his official tours she rode with him in a litter, attended by an entourage in nothing inferior to his own mother's. And people were scandalized on every side: at the golden cups he carried with him on the road, fitter for a religious procession than a journey; at the pavilions pitched, and the lavish outdoor breakfasts spread by riversides and in groves; at chariots drawn by lions; at prostitutes and singing-girls quartered in the houses of sober fathers and mothers of families. And it seemed outrageous that while Caesar, out of Italy, slept in the open field and was toiling through the dangerous remnant of a hazardous war, others should use his authority to insult the citizens with their shameless luxury.
All this seems to have inflamed the party quarrels in Rome and encouraged the soldiers in outrages and plunder. Accordingly, when Caesar came home, he acquitted Dolabella; and being elected consul for the third time, he took as his colleague not Antony but Lepidus. When Pompey's house was put up for sale, Antony bought it — and then complained loudly when the price was demanded of him. He tells us himself that this, and his feeling that his services had never been properly rewarded, was why he did not follow Caesar and the army to Libya. And yet Caesar, by dealing gently with his failings, seems to have cured him of a good deal of his folly and extravagance. Antony gave up his old habits and took a wife: Fulvia, the widow of Clodius the demagogue — a woman not born for spinning or housekeeping, and not one to be content ruling a private husband. Her ambition was to govern a governor and command a commander-in-chief. Cleopatra, in fact, owed Fulvia a real debt for training Antony to obey a woman — he came to her hands tame, broken in already to taking orders from a mistress. He used all sorts of playful, boyish tricks to keep Fulvia amused. For example: when Caesar was on his way back after his victory in Spain, Antony went out with the rest to meet him. Then a rumor swept Italy that Caesar was dead and the enemy marching on Rome, and Antony turned back to the city. Disguising himself, he came to Fulvia by night, muffled up as a servant carrying letters from Antony. She, frantic, asked before she would even take the letter, "Is Antony alive?" He handed it to her without a word — and as she was opening it, caught her around the neck and kissed her. This one little story, out of many like it, I give as a sample.
When Caesar returned from Spain, everybody of any rank in Rome traveled days out to meet him, but no one was received like Antony: Caesar took him into his own carriage and rode with him the whole way, while behind them came Brutus Albinus, and Octavian, Caesar's niece's son — the boy who would afterwards take his name and rule the Romans so long. When Caesar was elected consul for the fifth time, he chose Antony as his colleague at once; but he intended to resign his own consulship in favor of Dolabella, and told the senate so. Antony fought it with everything he had, heaping abuse on Dolabella and getting as good back, until Caesar, unable to stomach the indecency of it, put the matter off. When Caesar later came before the people to proclaim Dolabella consul, Antony shouted out that the auspices were against it — and at last Caesar gave in and dropped the plan, much to Dolabella's fury. The truth is, Caesar seems to have been about equally disgusted with the pair of them. When someone was accusing them both to him, he said, "It's not these fat, long-haired men I fear, but the pale, lean ones" — meaning Brutus and Cassius, whose conspiracy would soon bring him down.
And it was Antony himself who, without meaning to, handed that conspiracy its fairest pretext. The Romans were celebrating the festival called the Lupercalia, and Caesar, in his triumphal robes, sat above the Rostra in the marketplace watching the sport. The custom is that many young men of the nobility and the magistracy, oiled for the running, race through the city with leather straps in their hands, striking in fun at everyone they meet. Antony was one of the runners. But he set the old ceremony aside: he had wreathed a diadem with laurel, and he ran up to the Rostra, was hoisted up by his companions, and moved to set it on Caesar's head — as though by that ceremony Caesar were declared king. Caesar made a show of refusing and leaned away from it, and the people applauded with a great shout. Antony pressed it on him again; again Caesar declined it. So the contest between them went on for some time — Antony's offers cheered by a handful of his friends, Caesar's refusals by the whole people at once. Which is a curious thing: men who submitted patiently to the fact of a king's power could not bear the name of it, as though the name alone were the death of their liberty. Caesar, thoroughly rattled by the whole scene, rose from his seat, pulled his robe back from his neck, and cried out that anyone who wanted could strike the blow there and then. The diadem ended up placed on one of his statues — and the tribunes Flavius and Marullus tore it down, and were escorted home by the people with shouts of applause. But Caesar resented it, and stripped them of their office.
All this put fresh heart into Brutus and Cassius. When they were choosing trustworthy friends for the enterprise, they debated whether to bring in Antony. The rest were for it, except Trebonius, who told them that on the journey out to meet Caesar he and Antony had shared lodgings and traveled together, and that he had dropped several careful hints, feeling him out. Antony had understood him perfectly, he said, and had not encouraged it — but neither had he said a word of it to Caesar. He had kept the secret faithfully. The conspirators then proposed that Antony should die along with Caesar. Brutus would not allow it: an act undertaken in defense of right and the laws, he insisted, must be kept unstained, pure of any injustice. But Antony's physical strength and his high office made him dangerous — so it was settled that when Caesar entered the senate house, and the deed was to be done, some of the party would keep Antony occupied outside with a conversation about some invented piece of business.
So the plan was carried through, and Caesar fell in the senate-house. In the first moments Antony pulled on a servant's clothes and hid. But when he learned that the conspirators had gathered on the Capitol and had no designs on anyone else, he persuaded them to come down, sending his own son up as a hostage. That evening Cassius dined at Antony's house, and Brutus dined with Lepidus. Antony then called the senate together and spoke in favor of an amnesty — a formal act of forgetting — and of granting Brutus and Cassius provinces to govern. The senate passed both measures, and voted besides that everything Caesar had enacted should remain in force. Antony walked out of that session with the highest reputation of his life. He had, it seemed, headed off a civil war, and he had settled questions of enormous difficulty and danger in the wisest and most statesmanlike way imaginable.
But those sober counsels did not last. The tide of popular applause swept them away, and with them came a thought that would not leave him: if Brutus were overthrown, Antony would beyond any doubt be the first man in Rome. As Caesar's body was being carried out for burial, Antony delivered the funeral oration in the forum, as custom required. He could see that his praise was working powerfully on the crowd, and so he began to weave in notes of pity, and of horror at what had been done. As he came to the end of the speech he lifted up the dead man's garments, soaked in blood and stabbed through in every part, and held them out for all to see, calling the men who had done this villains and bloody murderers. The effect was volcanic. The people would not hear of delaying the funeral. They heaped up a pyre of benches and tables right there in the market-place and set the body burning — and then, each man snatching a flaming brand from the fire, they ran to attack the houses of the conspirators.
At that, Brutus and his whole party abandoned the city, and Caesar's friends closed ranks behind Antony. Calpurnia, Caesar's widow, entrusted him with the best part of the estate, worth some four thousand talents; and he also got his hands on Caesar's papers — journals of everything he had done, drafts of everything he intended to do. Antony made excellent use of these. On their authority he appointed whatever magistrates he pleased, brought whomever he liked into the senate, recalled men from exile, freed others from prison — all of it, supposedly, "as Caesar had ordered." The Romans mocked the beneficiaries with the nickname "Charonites," men of Charon's ferry, since any of them asked to prove his title would have to appeal to the papers of the dead. In short, Antony's rule in Rome was absolute. He himself was consul, and his two brothers held high office beside him: Gaius as praetor, Lucius as tribune of the people.
While things stood so in Rome, the young Octavian — Caesar's great-nephew, his niece's son, and by his will his adopted heir — arrived from Apollonia, where he had been staying when his uncle was killed. The first thing he did was call on Antony, as his father's friend. He raised the matter of the money in Antony's keeping, and reminded him that Caesar's will had left seventy-five drachmas to every single Roman citizen. At first Antony simply laughed at such talk from so young a man. He told him he must be out of his mind — that what he needed was good sense and good friends, because the burden of being Caesar's executor would crush shoulders as young as his. That answer settled nothing. Octavian went on demanding the property, and Antony went on treating him insultingly in word and deed. He blocked him when he stood for the tribune's office; and when Octavian took steps to dedicate his father's golden chair, as the senate had decreed, Antony threatened to have him thrown in prison if he did not stop courting the people. At that the young man turned to Cicero, and to everyone else who hated Antony. Through them he was recommended to the senate, while he himself wooed the common people and gathered in Caesar's old soldiers from their settlements — until Antony took alarm, met him on the Capitol, and, after some words, the two patched up an agreement.
That night Antony had an ugly dream: he fancied his right hand had been struck by lightning. And a few days later came a report that Octavian was plotting against his life. Octavian tried to explain and was not believed, and the breach was as wide as it had ever been. Each man now raced through Italy, bidding high to enlist the old soldiers scattered in their settlements, and hurrying to be first to secure the troops still under arms.
Cicero at this point was the most influential man in Rome. He used every art he possessed to inflame the public against Antony, and at last persuaded the senate to declare him a public enemy, to send Octavian the rods and axes and the other marks of honor usually given to praetors, and to order Hirtius and Pansa, the consuls of the year, to drive Antony out of Italy. The armies met near Mutina, and Octavian was present and fought in the battle. Antony was defeated — but both consuls were killed.
Antony's flight was misery of every kind, and the worst of it was famine. But it was his character, in calamity, to be better than at any other time. Antony in misfortune came closest to being a virtuous man. It is common enough for people who have fallen into great disasters to see what is right and what they ought to do; what is rare is the strength, in such extremity, to obey that judgment — to do what it approves and avoid what it condemns. Plenty of people are so weak that they collapse into their old habits all the more, and let their minds go entirely. Antony, on this occasion, was an astonishing example to his own soldiers. Fresh from all that luxury and splendid living, he made no difficulty now about drinking foul water and living on wild fruit and roots. As they crossed the Alps, the story goes, his men ate the very bark of trees, and fed on creatures that no one before had ever been willing to touch.
The plan was to join the army on the far side of the Alps commanded by Lepidus, whom Antony counted on as a friend — he had done Lepidus many good turns with Caesar. He came up and camped close by; and when no encouragement of any kind was offered him, he resolved to push his luck and risk everything. His hair was long and wild, his beard unshaved since the defeat; and in that state, with a dark cloak thrown around him, he walked up to the trenches of Lepidus's camp and began to address the army. Some of the men were moved by the sight of him, others by his words — enough of them that Lepidus, not liking where this was heading, ordered the trumpets sounded so that Antony could not be heard. That only deepened the soldiers' pity. They resolved to confer with him in secret, dressed Laelius and Clodius in women's clothes, and sent the pair to him. Attack Lepidus's trenches now, they urged; a strong party inside would welcome him, and would kill Lepidus too if he wished it. Antony wanted no such thing. Instead, the next morning, he marched his army straight into the river that divided the two camps. He was the first man into the water; and as he waded toward the far bank he could see Lepidus's soldiers in great numbers stretching out their hands to help him and tearing down their own defenses to make way for him. Once inside the camp he was its absolute master — and yet he treated Lepidus with perfect courtesy, addressed him as "Father" when he spoke to him, and, though everything was now his to command, left him the honor of being called the general. That handsome treatment brought over Munatius Plancus, who lay not far off with a considerable force. So Antony recrossed the Alps in great strength, leading seventeen legions and ten thousand horse into Italy, besides six legions left in garrison under Varius, one of his familiar friends and drinking companions, whom everyone called by his nickname: Cotylon — "the Jug."
Octavian, meanwhile, had perceived that Cicero's heart was set on liberty, and stopped paying him any further attention; he was already using his friends to work out an understanding with Antony. The three of them — Antony, Octavian, Lepidus — met on a small island, and the conference lasted three days. The empire itself was settled easily enough: they divided it among themselves like a piece of family property. What gave them real trouble was agreeing on who should die. Each of them wanted to destroy his enemies and save his friends; and in the end, hatred of enemies beat respect for kin and love of friends. Octavian yielded, and gave Cicero up to Antony; Antony gave up his own uncle, Lucius Caesar; and Lepidus was given leave to murder his brother Paulus — or, as others tell it, surrendered his brother to the other two. I do not believe anything more truly savage or barbarous was ever transacted. In this exchange of blood for blood they were equally guilty of the lives they surrendered and of the lives they took — more guilty, in fact, where their friends were concerned, since those they killed without even the excuse of hatred. To complete the reconciliation, the soldiers crowding around them demanded that the pact be sealed with a marriage: Octavian was to marry Clodia, the daughter of Antony's wife Fulvia. That too was agreed. And then three hundred men were put to death by proscription.
Antony's orders to the men sent to kill Cicero were to cut off his head, and the right hand that had written the Philippics against him. When they were brought to him he gazed at them with delight, bursting out more than once into laughter for sheer joy; and when he had looked his fill, he had them fastened up above the speakers' platform in the forum. He thought he was insulting the dead. In fact he was only putting his own wanton arrogance on display, and his unworthiness to hold the power that fortune had given him. His uncle Lucius Caesar, closely hunted, fled to his sister. When the murderers broke into her house and were pressing toward his room, she stood in the doorway, spread out her arms, and cried again and again, "You will not kill Lucius Caesar until you have first killed me — me, the mother of your general!" And by making that stand she got her brother away and saved his life.
The triumvirate was hateful to the Romans, and Antony bore most of the blame — he was older than Octavian, he carried more authority than Lepidus, and the moment his affairs were settled he rolled straight back into his old luxurious, dissolute way of living. To the general scandal of his behavior one detail added special damage: he lived in the house of Pompey the Great, a man who had been admired as much for his temperance and his sober, citizen-like habits as for his three triumphs. People could not watch without anger as the doors of that house were shut against magistrates, officers, and envoys — shamefully refused admittance — while inside it was packed with actors, jugglers, and drunken flatterers, on whom Antony poured out most of the wealth that violence and cruelty were raking in. For the triumvirs did not stop at confiscating the estates of the proscribed, cheating the widows and families as they went, nor were they satisfied with laying on every imaginable kind of tax and levy. Hearing that sums of money, deposited by foreigners and Roman citizens alike, lay in the keeping of the vestal virgins, they went and took the money by force. When it became plain that nothing would ever be enough for Antony, Octavian finally demanded a division of the property. They divided the army as well, and marched for Macedonia to make war on Brutus and Cassius, leaving Lepidus in command of the city.
Once they had crossed the sea, opened the campaign, and camped facing the enemy at Philippi — Antony opposite Cassius, Octavian opposite Brutus — Octavian did nothing worth recording; all the success and all the victory were Antony's. In the first battle Octavian was completely routed by Brutus, his camp was captured, and he himself very narrowly escaped — though by his own account in his Memoirs, he had withdrawn before the battle even began, because of a dream one of his friends had. Antony, for his part, defeated Cassius — though some have written that he was not actually present in the engagement and only joined afterward in the pursuit. Cassius, not knowing that Brutus had won, was killed at his own entreaty and order by Pindarus, one of his most trusted freedmen. A few days later they fought a second battle; Brutus lost it, and killed himself. Octavian being sick, nearly all the honor of the victory fell to Antony. Standing over Brutus's dead body, he allowed himself a few words of reproach for the death of his brother Gaius, whom Brutus had executed in Macedonia to avenge Cicero. But then, saying that Hortensius was more to blame for it than Brutus, he ordered Hortensius slain on his brother's tomb — and he threw his own scarlet cloak, a garment of great value, over Brutus's body, and charged one of his freedmen with seeing to the funeral. When Antony later learned that this man had not burned the cloak with the corpse, and had pocketed a good part of the funeral money besides, he had him put to death.
Octavian was carried back to Rome so ill that no one expected him to live long. Antony set out for the eastern provinces to lay them under tribute, and entered Greece with a large force. Every common soldier had been promised five thousand drachmas in pay, so the taxing and levying were bound to be severe. To the Greeks, however, he showed at first a fair amount of reason and moderation. He indulged his love of amusement in civilized ways — listening to the scholars dispute, watching the games, undergoing initiation into the mysteries. In matters of law he was even-handed, and he took pleasure in being called a lover of Greece — above all in being called a lover of Athens, a city to which he gave very considerable presents. The people of Megara, wishing him to know that they too had something worth seeing, invited him to come and view their senate-house. He went, looked it over, and when they asked how he liked it, told them: "Not very large — but extremely ruinous." At the same time he had a survey made of the temple of Pythian Apollo, as though he meant to restore it; indeed he had declared to the senate that he intended to.
Leaving Lucius Censorinus in Greece, Antony crossed into Asia, and there laid his hands on the stored-up wealth of the East, while kings waited at his door and queens competed with one another over who could send him the greatest presents or look most enchanting in his eyes. So while Octavian in Rome was wearing out his strength amid sedition and war, Antony, with nothing to do amid the enjoyments of peace, let his passions carry him easily back down the old familiar road. A troupe of harpers and pipers — Anaxenor and Xuthus — the dancer Metrodorus, and a whole Bacchic carnival of Asiatic performers, far outdoing in license and buffoonery even the pests that had followed him out of Italy, came flooding in and took possession of his court. It was past all patience: wealth of every kind was being squandered on people like these. The whole of Asia was like the city in Sophocles, loaded at one and the same time
with incense in the air, with songs of joy — and cries of despair.
When he made his entry into Ephesus, women dressed as Bacchantes went to meet him, with men and boys costumed as satyrs and fauns; through the whole town nothing was to be seen but spears wreathed with ivy, harps, flutes, and pipes, while the songs hailed Antony as Bacchus — the Giver of Joy, the Gentle. And so he was, to some. To far more he was the Devourer and the Savage; for he stripped people of worth and standing of their fortunes to gratify scoundrels and flatterers — men who would sometimes beg the estate of someone still living, pretending he was dead, get the grant, and take possession. He gave his cook the house of a citizen of Magnesia as the reward for a single highly successful supper. And at last, when he was moving to lay a second year's tribute on Asia, Hybreas, speaking on behalf of the cities, found the courage to tell him — bluntly, but in a style suited to Antony's taste — "If you can take tribute twice a year, no doubt you can give us two summers and two harvests a year." Then he put the rest in the plainest, boldest terms: Asia had already raised two hundred thousand talents for Antony's service. "If this has not been paid to you, ask your collectors what became of it. If it has been paid, and it is all gone — then we are ruined men."
The words cut Antony to the quick, for he was simply ignorant of most of what was done in his name — not that he was lazy, but that he trusted, frankly and completely, everyone around him. There was a great deal of simplicity in his character. He was slow to see his faults; but when he did see them, his repentance was intense, and he was ready to ask pardon of the very people he had wronged. When he made amends he was lavish, and when he punished he was severe — though his generosity always ran further than his severity. His mockery was sharp and insulting, but it carried its own antidote: he was perfectly willing to take as good as he gave, and enjoyed being laughed at almost as much as he enjoyed laughing at others. And this freedom of speech was, in truth, the cause of many of his disasters. He could not imagine that men who joked with him so boldly would ever flatter or deceive him in serious business. He did not understand how deliberately a parasite mixes boldness into his flattery, the way a confectioner cuts sweetness with something sharp so that it never cloys. The impudence at the dinner table was engineered precisely so that the yes-saying in council would look like conviction instead of servility.
With a temper like his, the last and crowning ruin came in the form of the love of Cleopatra — a love that woke and whipped to fury passions that had lain quiet and dormant in his nature, and stifled, and finally corrupted, whatever goodness and sound judgment still held out in him. He fell into the snare in this way. As he was preparing for the Parthian war, he sent orders commanding her to appear before him in Cilicia, to answer a charge that she had given great assistance to Cassius in the late war. But Dellius, who carried the message, had no sooner seen her face and registered the adroitness and subtlety of her talk than he understood that Antony would never dream of harming such a woman — on the contrary, she would soon stand first in his favor. So he set about paying court to the Egyptian queen at once, and gave her his advice: to go to Cilicia "in her best attire," as Homer would put it, and to fear nothing from Antony, the gentlest and kindest of soldiers. She put some faith in Dellius's words, but far more in her own powers of attraction. They had already won her Julius Caesar, and Gnaeus, the great Pompey's son — and those conquests she had made as a girl who knew nothing yet of the world. She would meet Antony at the age when a woman's beauty is at its most splendid and her mind at its full maturity. So she gathered a great store of money, gifts, and ornaments of value — everything so wealthy a kingdom could supply — but her surest hopes she carried in herself: in her own magic, her own spells.
She received letter after letter of summons, from Antony and from his friends alike, and took no notice of any of them. At last, as if in mockery of the whole proceeding, she came sailing up the river Cydnus in a barge with a gilded stern and outspread sails of purple, while oars of silver beat time to the music of flutes and fifes and harps. She herself lay stretched at ease beneath a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed as Venus is dressed in a painting, while beautiful boys, got up like painted Cupids, stood on either side to fan her. Her maids, costumed as sea nymphs and graces, steered at the rudder and worked at the ropes. Perfume drifted from the vessel to the shore, which was covered with multitudes — part following the galley up the river along either bank, part streaming out of the city for the sight. The market-place emptied until Antony was left sitting on the tribunal alone, while the word ran through the whole crowd that Venus had come to feast with Bacchus, for the common good of Asia. On her arrival, Antony sent an invitation to supper. She thought it more fitting that he should come to her; and Antony, wanting to show his good humor and courtesy, complied, and went. He found preparations magnificent beyond expression, but nothing so admirable as the lights: all at once, so great a number of branching lights were let down, arranged with such ingenuity — some in squares, some in circles — that the whole scene was a spectacle few things have ever equaled for beauty.
The next day Antony invited her in turn, ambitious to outdo her in magnificence and in cleverness alike. He was beaten in both, and so thoroughly convinced of it that he was the first to jest at his own poverty of wit and his rough soldier's manners. She saw at once that his humor was broad and coarse — more of the barracks than the court — and she met him in exactly the same key, instantly, without the least reluctance or reserve. For her actual beauty, it is said, was not in itself so remarkable that no one could be compared with her, nor the kind that struck everyone who saw her at first sight. But the contact of her presence, if you lived with her, was irresistible. The attraction of her person, joined with the charm of her conversation and a character that colored everything she said and did, was something bewitching. There was pleasure in the mere sound of her voice; and her tongue was like an instrument of many strings, passing from one language to another as she pleased, so that there were few barbarian nations she needed an interpreter to answer. To most of them she spoke herself — Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes, Parthians, and many others whose languages she had learned — which was all the more astonishing because most of the kings before her had scarcely troubled to learn even the Egyptian tongue, and several of them had let their Macedonian Greek go as well.
Antony was so captivated by her that he simply stopped functioning as a Roman commander. Consider what was happening in the world at that moment. His wife Fulvia was in Rome, waging his quarrels against Octavian with actual armies. Parthian troops under Labienus — the king's generals had made this renegade Roman their commander-in-chief — were massed in Mesopotamia, poised to pour into Syria. And Antony let himself be carried off to Alexandria to keep holiday like a schoolboy, playing and amusing himself, squandering the one commodity that, as the orator Antiphon says, is the costliest of all valuables: time. He and Cleopatra formed a sort of club with its own special name — they called it the Order of Inimitable Livers. The members entertained one another daily, each taking a turn, with spending so extravagant it defied measure or belief. Philotas, a physician from Amphissa who was then a medical student in Alexandria, used to tell my grandfather Lamprias about it. Philotas had gotten to know one of the royal cooks, and the cook, since Philotas was a young man, invited him to come see the sumptuous preparations for a supper. He was taken into the kitchen, where he marveled at the prodigious spread of everything — but what stopped him cold was the sight of eight wild boars roasting whole. "You must have an enormous number of guests," he said. The cook laughed at his innocence and told him there would be no more than twelve at supper — but every dish had to be served roasted to the exact turn, and if anything was mistimed by so much as a minute, it was ruined. "And Antony," said the cook, "may sit down to supper right now, or maybe not for an hour; maybe he'll call for wine first, or fall into conversation and put it off. So it isn't one supper we have to keep ready — it's many suppers, because there's no guessing his hour." That was Philotas's story, and he had more. He later became one of the medical attendants of Antony's eldest son by Fulvia, and was invited fairly often to the young man's table, along with his other companions, whenever the boy was not dining with his father. One day another physician at the table was talking loudly and making a nuisance of himself to the whole company, until Philotas shut his mouth with this piece of trick logic: "In some states of fever the patient should take cold water; everyone who has a fever is in some state of fever; therefore in a fever cold water should always be taken." The man was struck completely dumb, and Antony's son, delighted, laughed out loud and said, "Philotas, I make you a present of all of that" — pointing to a sideboard loaded with plate. Philotas thanked him warmly, but never for a moment imagined that a boy of that age could give away things of such value. Soon afterward, however, the whole service was brought to his rooms, and he was asked to put his seal on it. When he pushed it away, afraid to accept such a gift, the man who had brought it said, "What's the matter with you? Don't you know the giver is Antony's son, who is free to give it away if it were all solid gold? Still, if you'll take my advice, let us pay you its value in money instead — there may be some antique piece in the set, some famous bit of craftsmanship, that Antony would be sorry to lose." These are the stories my grandfather told us Philotas loved to repeat.
But to return to Cleopatra. Plato admits four kinds of flattery; she had a thousand. Whether Antony was in a serious mood or a merry one, she had at any moment some fresh delight or charm ready to meet it. She was at his side at every turn and never let him out of her grasp by day or by night. She diced with him, drank with him, hunted with him; when he drilled at arms, she was there to watch. At night she would go rambling with him through the city to knock at people's doors and windows and torment them, dressed as a servant-woman — for Antony went out disguised as a servant too. He often came home from these expeditions thoroughly insulted, and sometimes soundly beaten, though most people had a good guess who he was. The Alexandrians, for their part, rather liked it all. They joined in his fun good-humoredly and kindly, and said they were much obliged to Antony for playing his tragic roles for the Romans and saving his comedy for them. To catalogue all his follies would be trifling without end, but his fishing must not be forgotten. He went out angling one day with Cleopatra and had the bad luck to catch nothing while his mistress looked on. So he secretly ordered the fishermen to dive under the water and fasten onto his hooks fish that had already been caught — and he hauled these in so fast that the Egyptian saw through it. Pretending to be lost in admiration, she told everyone how marvelously skilled Antony was, and invited them to come out the next day and watch him again. So a crowd of them boarded the fishing boats, and the moment Antony let down his line, one of her servants beat his divers to the hook and fixed on it a salted fish from Pontus. Antony felt the line pull, drew up his prize, and — as you can imagine — the laughter was tremendous. "Leave the fishing-rod, general, to us poor sovereigns of Pharos and Canopus," said Cleopatra. "Your game is cities, provinces, and kingdoms."
While he was amusing himself with this boys' play, two dispatches arrived. One came from Rome: his brother Lucius and his wife Fulvia, after many quarrels between themselves, had joined together in war against Octavian, lost everything, and fled from Italy. The other brought news hardly better: Labienus, at the head of the Parthians, was overrunning Asia from the Euphrates and Syria all the way to Lydia and Ionia. So at last — barely — rousing himself from his long sleep and shaking off the fumes of the wine, Antony set out to attack the Parthians and got as far as Phoenicia. But then came heartbroken letters from Fulvia, and he turned back toward Italy with two hundred ships. On the voyage he took aboard friends of his who were fleeing Italy, and from them he learned that Fulvia had been the real cause of the whole war — a woman of restless spirit and plenty of daring, who had hoped that stirring up trouble in Italy would pry Antony away from Cleopatra. But it happened that Fulvia, sailing to meet her husband, fell sick on the way and died at Sicyon, which made a settlement all the easier. For when Antony reached Italy, Octavian showed no intention of pressing any charge against him, and Antony for his part shifted the blame for everything onto Fulvia. Their friends would not allow the moment to be wasted in picking that excuse apart; they made the reconciliation first, and then divided the empire between the two men, taking the Ionian Sea as the boundary — the eastern provinces falling to Antony, the western to Octavian, with Africa left to Lepidus. And they agreed that, whenever they did not choose to hold the consulship themselves, each in turn should hand the office to friends of his own choosing.
These terms satisfied everyone, but it was felt that some closer tie would be desirable, and for that, fortune supplied the occasion. Octavian had an elder half-sister — not of the whole blood, for his mother was Attia, and hers was Ancharia. He was deeply attached to this sister, Octavia, and she was, by every account, a wonder of a woman. Her husband, Gaius Marcellus, had died not long before, and Antony was now a widower by Fulvia's death — for though he did not deny his passion for Cleopatra, he disowned any talk of marriage; on that one point, reason was still fighting its case against the charms of the Egyptian. Everyone pushed to promote this new alliance, in the full expectation that once Octavia's beauty, honor, and good sense had won his affections — and it seemed certain they would — the whole arrangement would be held safely in the happy course of friendship. So, with both parties agreed, they went up to Rome to celebrate the wedding, the senate granting a dispensation from the law that forbade a widow to remarry within ten months of her husband's death.
Sextus Pompey, the son of Pompey the Great, held Sicily at this time, and with his ships — commanded by Menas the pirate and by Menecrates — he so infested the Italian coast that no vessel dared venture into those waters. Sextus had treated Antony with real humanity, having taken in his mother when she fled with Fulvia, so it was judged proper that he too should be brought into the peace. They met near the promontory of Misenum, by the mole of the harbor, Sextus with his fleet riding at anchor close by, Antony and Octavian with their troops drawn up along the shore. There it was settled that Sextus should keep the government of Sicily and Sardinia undisturbed, on condition that he sweep the seas clear of pirates and send a fixed quantity of grain to Rome every year.
With this agreed, they invited one another to supper, and the lot fell to Sextus to give the first entertainment. When Antony asked where it would be held, Sextus pointed to his flagship, a great galley of six banks of oars. "There," he said. "That is the only house Pompey inherits from his father." It was a jab at Antony, who was then living in the elder Pompey's confiscated house. Fixing the ship firmly on her anchors and laying a bridge of planks from the promontory to her deck, Sextus gave them a hearty welcome. And when the party had warmed up, and the jokes about Antony and Cleopatra were flowing freely, Menas the pirate leaned close to Sextus and whispered in his ear, "Shall I cut the cables and make you master not of Sicily and Sardinia only, but of the whole Roman empire?" Sextus considered it for a moment, then answered, "Menas, you should have done it without telling me. As it is, we must let things rest. I do not break my word." And so, after being entertained in turn by the other two, he sailed back to Sicily.
Once the treaty was completed, Antony dispatched Ventidius into Asia to check the Parthian advance, while he himself, as a courtesy to Octavian, accepted the office of priest to the deified Julius Caesar. In every affair of state and matter of consequence, the two men treated each other with consideration and friendliness. But it gnawed at Antony that in all their amusements — any contest of skill or of luck — Octavian kept winning. Antony had with him an Egyptian diviner, one of those who cast horoscopes, and this man — whether to please Cleopatra, or because his art genuinely told him so — declared openly that Antony's fortune, bright and glorious as it was, stood in the shadow of Octavian's, and advised him to keep as far away from the young man as he could. "Your Genius dreads his," he said. "Apart from him, your guardian spirit is proud and brave; in his presence it turns cowed and dejected." And events did seem to bear the Egyptian out. Whenever they drew lots for some trifle or threw dice, Antony lost; whenever they set their gamecocks or their quails against each other, Octavian's won. This nettled Antony in secret and made him trust the Egyptian's science all the more. So, leaving the management of affairs in Italy to Octavian, he left for Greece, taking with him Octavia, who had just borne him a daughter.
While he wintered in Athens, he received the first reports of Ventidius's victories over the Parthians: he had beaten them in battle and killed Labienus along with Pharnapates, the best general their king Hyrodes had. To celebrate, Antony gave a public feast throughout Greece, and at the games held in Athens he served personally as steward of the prizes. Leaving at home the insignia that are carried before a general, he appeared in public in a Greek gown and white shoes, with the steward's wands borne before him, and he did his duty in full — taking the combatants by the neck to pull them apart when they had fought long enough.
When the time came to leave for the war, he took a garland from the sacred olive tree and, obeying some oracle, filled a vessel with water from the spring of the Clepsydra to carry with him. In the meantime Pacorus, the Parthian king's son, marching into Syria with a large army, was met by Ventidius, who gave him battle in the country of Cyrrhestica, killed a great number of his men, and killed Pacorus among the first of them. This victory became one of the most celebrated feats of Roman arms, and it fully avenged the defeats under Crassus: after losing three battles in a row, the Parthians were forced to keep themselves within the bounds of Media and Mesopotamia. Ventidius chose not to push his luck further, for fear of stirring Antony's jealousy; instead he turned his forces on the peoples who had abandoned the Roman cause and brought them back to their old obedience. Among the rest, he besieged Antiochus, king of Commagene, in the city of Samosata. Antiochus offered a thousand talents for his pardon and promised submission to Antony's commands, but Ventidius told him he would have to send to Antony directly — for Antony was already on the march, and had ordered Ventidius to make no terms with Antiochus. He wanted this one exploit, at least, credited to his own name, so that people would not think every success was won by his lieutenants. But the siege dragged on and on; once the men inside saw their offers refused, they defended themselves stoutly, until at last Antony, finding he was accomplishing nothing, and ashamed and sorry that he had refused the first offer, was glad to settle with Antiochus for three hundred talents. After giving some orders for the affairs of Syria, he returned to Athens, and, paying Ventidius the honors he had richly earned, sent him home to receive his triumph. Ventidius is, to this day, the only man who has ever triumphed over the Parthians. He was of obscure birth, but Antony's friendship gave him the opportunity to show what he could do, and he made such glorious use of it that he confirmed the common observation about Antony and Octavian both: that they were more fortunate in what they did through their lieutenants than in their own persons. For Sossius, too, won great successes, and Canidius, whom Antony left in Armenia, defeated the people there along with the kings of the Albanians and Iberians, and marched victorious all the way to the Caucasus. By these means the fame of Antony's arms grew great among the barbarian nations.
Yet once again, on the strength of some unflattering stories, Antony took offense at Octavian, and set sail for Italy with three hundred ships. Refused entry at the port of Brundisium, he made for Tarentum instead. There his wife Octavia, who had sailed from Greece with him, asked leave to visit her brother. She was then heavily pregnant, having already borne Antony a second daughter. On her way she met Octavian, accompanied by his two friends Agrippa and Maecenas, and drawing those two aside, with urgent entreaties and many tears she told them that she, the most fortunate woman on earth, was in danger of becoming the most miserable. As things stood, every eye was fixed on her as the wife and the sister of the two great commanders; but if rash counsels prevailed and it came to war — "I shall be wretched," she said, "past all remedy. Whichever side wins, I lose." Octavian was overcome by her pleading and came on to Tarentum in a peaceable frame of mind, and the people there beheld a most stately spectacle: a vast army drawn up along the shore and as great a fleet in the harbor, with not one act of hostility — nothing but the greetings of friends, and every expression of joy and kindness, passing from one armament to the other. Antony entertained Octavian first, Octavian conceding even this for his sister's sake. At length they struck an agreement: Octavian would give Antony two of his legions for the Parthian war, and Antony in return would leave him a hundred armed galleys. Octavia then obtained, over and above this, twenty light ships from her husband for her brother, and a thousand foot-soldiers from her brother for her husband. So they parted good friends. Octavian went off at once to make war on Sextus Pompey for Sicily, and Antony, leaving in Octavian's care his wife and children — along with his children by Fulvia — set sail for Asia.
But the mischief that had lain quiet so long — the passion for Cleopatra, which better thoughts had seemed to lull and charm into forgetfulness — gathered strength again as he drew near Syria, and broke out in flame. In the end, like the restive, rebellious horse that Plato makes of the human soul, kicking away all good and wholesome counsel and breaking fully loose, he sent Fonteius Capito to bring Cleopatra to Syria. And when she arrived, the present he made her was no small or trifling thing: Phoenicia; Coele-Syria; Cyprus; a great part of Cilicia; the balm-producing side of Judaea; and the stretch of Arabia where the Nabathaeans reach down to the outer sea. Lavish gifts — and they deeply displeased the Romans. He had handed great governments and kingdoms to plenty of private persons before, and stripped many kings of theirs — Antigonus of Judaea he had actually beheaded, the first king ever put to death that way — yet nothing stung the Romans like the shame of these honors paid to Cleopatra. Their resentment grew sharper still when he acknowledged as his own the twin children she had borne him, naming them Alexander and Cleopatra, and adding as surnames the titles of the Sun and the Moon. But Antony, who knew how to put a fine face on the most disreputable conduct, would say that the greatness of the Roman empire lay more in the giving of kingdoms than in the taking of them, and that the way to spread noble blood through the world was to father a new line of kings in every place. His own ancestor, he said, had been born of Hercules that way — and Hercules had never confined his hopes of offspring to a single womb, never feared any law like Solon's or any audit of his procreation, but had freely let nature have her way in founding and beginning many families.
After Phraates killed his father Hyrodes and seized the kingdom, many Parthians fled the country — among them Monaeses, a man of great distinction and authority, who took refuge with Antony. Antony, seeing in his case a likeness to that of Themistocles, and comparing his own wealth and generosity of spirit to those of the old Persian kings, gave him three cities: Larissa, Arethusa, and Hierapolis, which used to be called Bambyce. But when the Parthian king soon recalled Monaeses, pledging his word and honor for his safety, Antony was quite willing to let him go — for he hoped by this to catch Phraates off guard, lulled into believing the peace would hold. All Antony asked of the king was the return of the Roman standards taken when Crassus was killed, and of whatever prisoners still remained alive. That done, he sent Cleopatra back to Egypt and marched through Arabia and Armenia. When his own forces had assembled and been joined by those of his allied kings — there were a great many of these, the most considerable being Artavasdes, king of Armenia, at the head of six thousand horse and seven thousand foot — he held a general muster. The count came to sixty thousand Roman infantry, ten thousand cavalry of Spaniards and Gauls who ranked as Romans, and thirty thousand more, horse and foot together, from the other nations. And these vast preparations — which alarmed even the Indians beyond Bactria and made all Asia shake — were rendered useless to him, we are told, because of Cleopatra. For in order to spend the winter with her, he pushed the war forward before its proper time, and everything he did, he did without clear thought — like a man with no real command of his own faculties, who, under the influence of some drug or spell, was forever glancing back toward her, his mind fixed far more on a quick return than on conquering his enemies.
Consider his mistakes. First: he ought to have taken up winter quarters in Armenia to rest his men, who were exhausted from marches totaling at least a thousand miles, and then moved at the first opening of spring to invade Media before the Parthians were out of their own winter quarters. He hadn't the patience to wait. He marched straight into the province of Atropatene, leaving Armenia on his left hand, and laid waste the whole country. Second: his haste was so great that he left behind the siege engines absolutely required for any siege — they followed the camp in three hundred wagons, and among them was a battering ram eighty feet long — none of which, once lost or damaged, could be repaired or replaced, since the provinces of upper Asia produce no trees long or hard enough for such work. Nevertheless he left them all behind as a mere drag on his speed, in the care of a detachment under Statianus, the officer of the baggage train. Antony himself laid siege to Phraata, a principal city of the king of Media, where that king's wife and children were. And when real need soon showed him the size of his blunder in leaving the siege train behind, there was nothing for it but to come up close and raise a mound against the walls — with enormous labor and a great loss of time. Meanwhile Phraates came down with a large army, and hearing that the wagons with the battering engines had been left behind, he sent out a strong force of cavalry. Statianus was caught by surprise; he himself and ten thousand of his men were killed, the engines were all broken to pieces, and many men were taken prisoner — among them King Polemon.
This great disaster at the very opening of the campaign badly discouraged Antony's army, and Artavasdes, the king of Armenia, deciding that Roman prospects were poor, withdrew with all his forces from the camp — though he had been the chief promoter of the war. The Parthians, emboldened by their success, rode up to the Romans at the siege works and taunted them freely. Antony, fearing that idleness would only deepen his soldiers' despondency and alarm, took all the cavalry, ten legions, and three praetorian cohorts of heavy infantry, and resolved to go out foraging — reckoning this the best way to draw the enemy into a battle on favorable terms. He marched a day's journey from camp, and finding the Parthians hovering around him, ready to strike while he was on the move, he had the signal for battle hung out in the encampment, but at the same time struck the tents, as if he meant not to fight but simply to lead his men home. So he marched them past the enemy, who were drawn up in a half-moon formation, with orders that the moment the legions were close enough to support them, the cavalry should charge. The Parthians, standing still as the Romans filed past, watched the army in open admiration: rank after rank passing at equal intervals, in perfect order and silence, pikes ready in hand. Then the signal was given, the horse wheeled sharply on the Parthians and charged them with loud cries, and the Parthians met them bravely, though at once they were too close for bowshot. But when the legions came on with a roar and a clashing of arms, the Parthian horses shied in terror — the men too — and they broke without holding their ground. Antony pressed them hard, in high hopes that this one victory might end the war. The infantry kept up the pursuit for six miles, the cavalry three times that distance — and yet, when they summed up the advantage, they had taken only thirty prisoners and killed a mere eighty men. Gloom and discouragement settled over them all at the thought of it: when they won, this was all their winning came to; but when they lost, as at the capture of the wagons, they lost ten thousand men.
The next day they got the baggage in order and started back toward the camp before Phraata. Almost at once they ran into scattered enemy troops on the road. Then larger parties. Then, at last, the whole Parthian army, fresh and in good order, calling them out to battle and charging them from every side, and it took hard fighting just to get back inside the camp. There Antony discovered something worse waiting for him. During a sally by the Medes, his men had panicked and abandoned the defense of the siege mound. He resolved to punish them by decimation, as it is called: the soldiers are divided into groups of ten, and out of every ten, one man — chosen by lot — is put to death. The rest he ordered to have their grain rations issued in barley instead of wheat, the food of the disgraced.
By now the war had turned grim for both sides, and the future looked grimmer still — for Antony most of all, because famine was closing in on him. He could no longer send out foraging parties without paying for every sack of grain in wounds and dead men. But Phraates had his own fears. The autumn equinox was past, the air was already sharpening toward winter, and if the Romans dug in and kept up the siege, he was afraid his own soldiers would desert him; Parthians will endure almost anything rather than winter in an open field. So he turned to a trick. He passed the word to those of his men who had struck up the most acquaintance with the Roman soldiers: when you meet them foraging, don't press them too hard — let them carry off some provisions. More than that: praise their courage. Tell them the king has good reason to call the Romans the bravest men in the world. Once this had done its work, the riders came in closer, walking their horses alongside the Romans, and began to complain about Antony's stubbornness. Phraates, they said, wanted nothing more than peace, and a chance to show how gladly he would spare the lives of so many brave soldiers — and Antony would not give him the smallest opening. Instead he sat there waiting for the two fiercest and cruelest enemies of all, winter and famine, and even with all the goodwill of the Parthians to help them, those two would be hard to escape. These reports reached Antony from many mouths, and he began to let himself hope. Still, he would not send a word to the Parthian king until he had put the question to these friendly talkers directly: were they speaking on their king's orders? They answered that they were, and urged him again to believe them. So he sent some of his friends to demand, one more time, the return of the standards and prisoners lost with Crassus — reasoning that if he asked for nothing at all, he would look pathetically grateful just to be allowed to slink away. The Parthian king's answer came back: never mind the standards and prisoners; but if Antony wished to retreat, he could do so whenever he pleased, in peace and safety. So after a few days spent collecting the baggage, he broke camp and marched. And here something telling happened. There was no man alive who could address a crowd of soldiers like Antony, no one better at carrying an army with him by sheer force of words — and out of shame and sadness he could not bring himself to speak. He handed the task to Domitius Ahenobarbus. Some of the soldiers resented it, as if he thought them not worth addressing; but most of them understood the real reason, and pitied him for it, and decided it was one more reason to give their general more respect and obedience than ever.
Antony had planned to go back the way he had come, through open, level country bare of trees. But a certain Mardian came to him — a man who knew Parthian ways inside and out, and whose loyalty to Rome had been proved at the battle where the siege engines were lost — and gave him different advice. Keep the mountains close on your right hand, he said. Do not march heavy-armed men across broad, open riding country against a huge army of mounted archers. That was exactly why Phraates had coaxed him away from the siege with soft promises: to cut him to pieces at leisure on the retreat. If Antony was willing, the Mardian would guide him himself, by a shorter route, with better supplies for the army along the way. Antony thought it over. He did not want to seem to distrust the Parthians right after making terms with them; but the shorter road through inhabited country was plainly the better one. So he asked the Mardian for some guarantee of good faith, and the man offered to be kept in chains until the army was safe in Armenia. For two days he guided the army in chains. On the third, when Antony had stopped thinking about the enemy altogether and was marching at his ease, in no particular order, the Mardian noticed that the bank of a river had been broken open and the water let out to flood the road ahead of them. He saw instantly whose handiwork this was: the Parthians had done it to slow their march. Be on your guard, he told Antony — the enemy is close. Antony had barely begun to form his ranks, posting the slingers and javelin men at intervals where they could dash out, when the Parthians came pouring in from all sides, fully expecting to surround the army and break it apart in confusion. The Roman light troops met them and were badly stung by the arrows; but the Parthians were entertained just as warmly with sling stones and javelins, took many wounds of their own, and pulled back. They rallied and came on again, until a battalion of Gallic cavalry charged and broke them, and they were seen no more that day.
The attack taught Antony what to do. He posted slingers and javelin men not only as a rear guard but along both flanks as well, and marched the army as a hollow square, with orders to the cavalry to charge and drive the enemy off — but never to chase them far when they fled. For the next four days the Parthians took at least as much damage as they gave, and their enthusiasm began to cool. Winter was getting on, they grumbled, and they pressed to go home.
But on the fifth day, Flavius Gallus, a brave and energetic officer with a substantial command, came to Antony asking for some light infantry from the rear and some cavalry from the van. With these, he said, he could strike a real blow. Antony gave them to him, and when the enemy attacked, Gallus beat them back — but instead of withdrawing as usual and retiring on the mass of the heavy infantry, he stood his ground where he was and fought on, dangerously exposed. The officers commanding the rear, seeing how far he was drifting from the army, sent messages calling him back. He ignored them. It is said that Titius the quaestor actually grabbed the standards and turned them around, shouting at Gallus that he was leading so many brave men to their destruction. Gallus shouted back, and ordered the men around him to stand firm; so Titius withdrew. Then, while Gallus pressed the enemy in front of him, a Parthian force swung in behind and closed the circle. Surrounded at last, he sent a messenger asking for help — and here the commanders of the heavy infantry, including Canidius, a particular favorite of Antony's, made what looks like a serious blunder. Instead of wheeling the whole army around, they sent small detachments; and when those were cut up, they sent more small detachments, and by this piecemeal mismanagement the rout would have spread through the entire army if Antony himself had not come up from the van at the head of the third legion, driven it straight through the mass of fleeing men, and faced down the enemy, stopping the pursuit cold.
Three thousand men died in that engagement. Five thousand more were carried back to camp wounded — among them Gallus, shot through the body with four arrows. He did not recover. Antony went from tent to tent to visit and comfort the wounded, and he could not look at his men without tears, without open grief. But they took his hand with shining faces and told him to go and look after himself and not to worry about them, calling him their imperator, their general, saying that as long as he was well, they were safe. And in truth, history cannot show a finer army behind any general of that age. In strength and youth, in patience under labor and hardship, it had no superior; and as for the obedience and affection the soldiers bore their general — the way every man of them, officer and private, great and small, valued Antony's good opinion of him above his own life — in that particular excellence, not even the Romans of old could have surpassed them. There were many reasons for this devotion, as I have said before: his noble family, his eloquence, his frank and open manner, his lavish and princely generosity, his easy way of joking with everyone. And now, above all, there was his kindness to the sick and wounded — visiting them, grieving with them, supplying whatever they needed — so that the sick and wounded were even more eager to serve him than the healthy and strong.
Yet that one victory had put such heart into the enemy that their weariness turned to contempt. They camped through the night close to the Roman lines, expecting to plunder the tents and baggage of an army about to disintegrate, and in the morning fresh forces streamed in, until their number is said to have grown to no fewer than forty thousand horsemen. The king had even sent the guards who attended his own person — a sign that he considered the victory certain. The king himself was never present at any battle. Antony prepared to address his soldiers, and called for a mourning robe, thinking to move them more deeply; his friends talked him out of it, and he came forward instead in the scarlet cloak of a general. He praised the men who had won the recent fighting and shamed the ones who had run. The victors shouted back promises of success; the others begged his forgiveness, telling him they were ready to undergo decimation or any other punishment he chose, asking only that he stop grieving over their failure. At that, Antony lifted his hands to heaven and prayed: if any judgment from the gods was coming to balance the great favors of his life, let it fall on his head alone — and let his soldiers have victory.
The next day they marched in better order, and the Parthians, riding up expecting a plundering party rather than a battle, met a storm of missiles from men who were anything but broken — fresh, resolute, and ready. It was the Parthians who began to lose their nerve. But at a place where the Romans had to descend a steep hill, they gathered and poured arrows into the column as it moved slowly down the slope. Then the shield-bearing infantry wheeled about, took the light troops inside their ranks, and the front rank knelt on one knee with shields planted before them; the rank behind held their shields over the heads of the first, and the next rank over those, layer upon layer, like the tiles of a roof or the banked seats of a theater — a sloping shell that no arrow could do more than glance off. The Parthians, watching the Romans sink to their knees, could only imagine the men were collapsing from exhaustion. So they put down their bows, took up their spears, and charged in close — at which the Romans leapt to their feet with a roar, met them hand to hand with their javelins, killed the foremost, and sent the rest flying. It went this way day after day, and the constant fighting shrank the marches to almost nothing. Then hunger set in. They could get only a little grain, and had to fight for what they got; and they lacked even the tools to grind it and bake bread, for nearly all the mills had been left behind — the pack animals were dead, or carrying the sick and wounded. In the camp, a quart of wheat sold for fifty drachmas, and barley loaves went for their weight in silver. They turned to vegetables and roots, and finding few of the familiar kinds, they were driven to try whatever they could pull from the ground — and so they came upon an herb that was death to eat. It first destroyed the memory and the mind. A man who ate it forgot everything in the world and gave himself over to a single task: moving large stones from one place to another, which he did with tremendous earnestness and industry, as if it were the most important business of his life. All through the camp you could see men stooped over the ground, digging up stones and carrying them from place to place. And then, at the end, they vomited bile and died — for wine, the one antidote, had run out. Watching them die by the score, with the Parthians still hanging on his heels, Antony was heard to cry out, again and again, "O, the Ten Thousand!" — in admiration of Xenophon's Greeks, who had an even longer road home from Babylonia, and a more powerful enemy, and made it back safe all the same.
The Parthians, unable to break the Roman army apart or crack its formations, and beaten as often as not, once more turned friendly with the foragers. They rode up with their bows unstrung and said they were going home; this was the end of their reprisals; only a few Median troops would follow along for two or three more days — not to trouble the Romans, but to protect some outlying villages. And they took their leave with salutes and embraces and a great show of friendship. The Romans filled up with confidence again, and Antony, hearing of it, leaned toward taking the road through the plains, since the mountain route was said to be waterless. But while he was preparing to do it, a man named Mithridates rode into the camp — a cousin of that Monaeses who had taken refuge with the Romans and received the gift of the three cities from Antony. He asked for someone who could speak Syriac or Parthian. Alexander of Antioch, a friend of Antony's, was brought to him. The stranger gave his name, explained that Monaeses was the man who wished to repay Antony's kindness, and then asked Alexander a question: did he see that high range of hills in the distance? He said he did. "Under those hills," said Mithridates, "the whole Parthian army is waiting for you. The great plains run right up to their feet, and they are counting on you to trust their promises, leave the mountain road, and take the level one. It is true that on the mountain route you will face thirst and the hardships you have grown used to. But if Antony goes through the plains, he should expect the fate of Crassus."
With that, he left. Antony, alarmed, called his friends to council, and sent for the Mardian guide, who said exactly the same thing. Enemy or no enemy, he told them, the plain had no reliable track, and losing the way in it was likely enough to rule it out by itself; the other route was rough and dry, but the dry stretch lasted only a day. So Antony changed his mind and marched out that night by the mountain road, ordering every man to carry his own water. Most of them had no vessels, so they made do, filling their helmets, or carrying it in skins. They were barely underway when word of the march reached the Parthians, who — against all their custom — pursued through the night, and at sunrise struck the rear guard, which was worn out with marching and lack of sleep and in no condition to put up a real fight. They had covered thirty miles in the dark, and to find the enemy on their heels at the end of such a march broke their spirit. Worse, fighting for every step of the road sharpened their thirst. The men at the front reached a river whose water ran cool and clear — and brackish, laced with minerals, so that whoever drank it was seized at once with cramps in the bowels and a thirst fiercer than before. The Mardian had warned them of this too, but they could not hold back; they shoved aside the men who tried to stop them and drank. Antony ran up and down the column, begging them for a little patience — there was a river of good water not far ahead, he said, and beyond it the country was too rough for cavalry, so the enemy could follow no further. Then he sounded the recall for the men still fighting, and ordered the tents pitched, so the soldiers could at least rest in the shade.
The tents were scarcely up, and the Parthians were withdrawing as usual for the night, when Mithridates appeared again and told Alexander to give Antony this advice: rest the army, but not a moment longer than necessary — then push hard for the next river. The Parthians would not cross it, but that far they were determined to follow. Alexander carried the message to Antony, who sent back a load of gold plate; Mithridates took as much of it as he could hide under his clothes and rode off. Acting on his warning, Antony broke camp while it was still daylight, and the whole army marched on with no interference from the Parthians at all — and yet, by their own doing, that night was the most wretched and terrifying of the entire retreat. Men began to murder and rob anyone suspected of carrying money. They ransacked the baggage train and stole whatever they found. Finally they laid hands on Antony's own equipment, smashing his fine tables and drinking cups and dividing the pieces among themselves. With such an uproar rolling through the whole army — men surging back and forth in the dark — the belief spread that the enemy had fallen on the column and cut off part of it, and Antony believed it too. He called for one of his freedmen among his bodyguard, a man named Rhamnus, and made him swear an oath: whenever Antony gave the order, Rhamnus would run his sword through him and cut off his head, so that he would neither fall into Parthian hands alive nor be recognized when dead. His friends stood around him in tears. Then the Mardian came up and gave them all their lives back. The air, he pointed out, had turned cool and moist — they could feel it in every breath — which meant the river he had promised was near; and the time it should have taken to reach it, reckoned against the hours they had marched, came out the same, for the night was nearly spent. At the same moment, others arrived to report that the whole uproar had come from nothing but the army's own violence and thieving. To quiet the tumult and pull the men out of their frenzy back into some kind of order, Antony gave the signal to halt.
Day was breaking, and calm and discipline were just returning to the column, when Parthian arrows began to drop on the rear guard. The light troops were ordered out to fight, and the infantry covered one another with their shields as before, roof-tile fashion, and held the enemy — who chose not to press any closer — while the head of the army, marching on at an easy pace, came in sight of the river. Antony drew up his cavalry along the bank, facing the enemy, and sent the sick and wounded across first. And by now even the men still skirmishing had time to drink in peace, for as soon as the Parthians saw the river, they unstrung their bows, told the Romans to cross freely, and paid them handsome compliments on their courage. They crossed unmolested, rested a while, and then pushed on — not quite trusting fair words from that quarter. Six days after that last battle they reached the river Araxes, which divides Media from Armenia — deep, violent in its current, and dangerous-looking to cross; and a rumor ran through the ranks that the enemy lay in ambush, waiting to strike the moment they were tangled up in the crossing. But when they had gotten safely to the far bank and stood in Armenia at last, they behaved like sailors sighting land after a storm at sea: they kissed the ground, they wept, they fell into one another's arms for joy. But then, marching through a country that overflowed with everything, they ate — after their long starvation — with such abandon that they came down with dropsy and dysentery.
Here Antony held a review of his army and found he had lost twenty thousand infantry and four thousand cavalry — and more than half of them had been killed not by the enemy but by disease. The march from Phraata had taken twenty-seven days, and in that time they had beaten the Parthians in eighteen battles — victories that settled nothing and won nothing lasting, because they could never pursue. And that fact points the finger plainly: it was Artavasdes who cost Antony the fruits of the whole expedition. If the sixteen thousand horsemen the Armenian had led away out of Media — armed in the Parthian style and trained to the Parthian way of fighting — had been there to run down the enemy whenever the Romans broke them, the Parthians could never have rallied so many times after so many defeats and come back fresh to attack again. The whole army, understandably, was hot to march into Armenia and take revenge. But Antony, thinking further ahead, made no mention of the desertion and kept up every courtesy as before; his army was worn out and short of everything, and this was no time for a new war. Later, however, when he entered Armenia again, he coaxed Artavasdes into a meeting with invitations and fair promises — then seized him, put him in chains, carried him down to Alexandria, and led him there in a triumph. This was one of the things that most offended the Romans back home: the proudest and most sacred ceremony of their country, handed over to the Egyptians for Cleopatra's sake.
All that, however, came later. For the moment, Antony was marching his army at desperate speed through the dead of winter, through one snowstorm after another, and the march cost him eight thousand men. With his numbers badly thinned he came down to the seacoast, to a place called the White Village, between Sidon and Berytus, and there he waited for Cleopatra to arrive. She was slow in coming, and the delay ate at him. He tried to shorten the time with wine and heavy drinking, but even so he could not sit through a meal; again and again he would jump up from the table and run down to look for her ship. At last she came into port, bringing clothing and money for the soldiers — though some say she brought only the clothes, and that Antony handed out his own money in her name.
About this time a quarrel broke out between the king of Media and Phraates of Parthia. It began, the story goes, over the division of the loot taken from the Romans, and it left the Median king in real fear of losing his throne. So he sent ambassadors to Antony offering to join him in a war against Phraates. This filled Antony with hope. The one thing he had lacked against the Parthians — the thing whose absence, he believed, had cost him the last campaign — was horsemen and archers; and here was someone begging him, as a favor, to accept exactly that. He began at once to prepare a return to Armenia, planning to meet the Medes on the river Araxes and open the war afresh.
But in Rome, Octavia wanted to see her husband, and she asked Octavian's leave to go to him. He gave it — not so much, most writers say, to please his sister, as to gain a respectable pretext for war when she was received with dishonor. She had no sooner reached Athens than letters came from Antony telling her of his new expedition and instructing her to wait for him there. She was hurt, and she was not blind to the real reason for this treatment; yet she wrote back asking only where he would like her to send the things she had brought for him. And she had brought a great deal: clothing for his soldiers, baggage animals, money, presents for his friends and officers, and two thousand picked men, splendidly armed, to serve as his personal guard. This message was carried to Antony by one of his friends, a man named Niger, who added to it the praises she so thoroughly deserved.
Cleopatra could feel her rival closing in, and she was afraid. Octavia had a noble character and the power of her brother behind her; if she were ever allowed to add the quiet charm of daily company and affectionate married life to those advantages, she would become irresistible, and hold Antony absolutely and forever. So Cleopatra pretended to be dying of love for him. She starved herself thin on a meager diet. When he entered the room, she would fix her eyes on him in rapture; when he left, she would seem to sink and half faint away. She took great care that he should catch her in tears — and then, the moment he noticed, she would hastily dry them and turn aside, as if the one thing she wished was that he should know nothing of it. All this theater was played out while he was preparing for Media, and Cleopatra's creatures worked busily to help it along. They scolded Antony for his cold, hard heart — letting a woman perish whose whole soul hung on him and him alone. Octavia was his wife, yes; but she had been married to him because it suited her brother's political business, and she had the honor of the title. Cleopatra, sovereign queen of many nations, had been content to be called his mistress; she did not shrink from the name or think it beneath her, so long as she could see him, live with him, have him. Take that away, and she would not survive the loss. In the end they so melted and unmanned him that, genuinely believing she would die if he left her, he put off the war and went back to Alexandria, postponing the Median expedition until the following summer — this although word had come that Parthia was in chaos with internal feuds. Some time later he did go into that country, and sealed an alliance with the Median king by betrothing one of his sons by Cleopatra to the king's daughter, still a very young girl. Then he returned, his mind now occupied with the coming civil war.
When Octavia came back from Athens, Octavian considered that she had been insultingly treated, and ordered her to live in a house of her own. She refused to leave her husband's house. More than that, she begged her brother — unless he had already resolved on war with Antony for other reasons — to take no notice of her injuries. It would be an unbearable thing, she said, to have it told of the two greatest commanders in the world that they had plunged the Roman people into civil war, the one out of passion for a woman, the other out of resentment about one. And her conduct proved she meant every word. She stayed in Antony's house as though he were living in it, and she took the noblest, most generous care not only of her own children by him but of his children by Fulvia as well. She received every friend of Antony's who came to Rome seeking office or on any other business, and did all she could to advance their requests with Octavian. Yet this honorable behavior did Antony damage she never intended: he was hated for wronging such a woman.
And the division of kingdoms he staged among his sons at Alexandria was hated just as much; it looked like a piece of theatrical arrogance and contempt for his own country. He assembled the people in the exercise ground and had two golden thrones set up on a platform of silver, one for himself and one for Cleopatra, with lower thrones at their feet for the children. Then he proclaimed Cleopatra queen of Egypt, Cyprus, Libya, and Coele-Syria, and joint ruler with her Caesarion, the reputed son of the first Caesar, who had left Cleopatra with child. His own sons by Cleopatra were to carry the title Kings of Kings. To Alexander he gave Armenia and Media — with Parthia thrown in, as soon as it should be conquered. To Ptolemy he gave Phoenicia, Syria, and Cilicia. Alexander was presented to the people in Median dress, with the tiara and the tall upright peak; Ptolemy in boots, mantle, and a Macedonian cap circled with the diadem — for this was the costume of the successors of Alexander the Great, as the other was of the Medes and Armenians. When the boys had saluted their parents, one was received by a bodyguard of Macedonians, the other by a guard of Armenians. Cleopatra, then and whenever she appeared in public, wore the sacred robes of the goddess Isis, and gave audience to the people under the name of the New Isis.
Octavian reported all this to the senate, and complained of it often before the people, stirring the public mind against Antony. Antony sent accusations back in kind. His principal charges were these: first, that Octavian had taken Sicily from Sextus Pompey and never given him his share of it; second, that he had kept the ships Antony lent him for that war; third, that after deposing their colleague Lepidus, he had taken for himself the army, the provinces, and the revenues that had been assigned to him; and last, that he had parceled out almost all of Italy among his own soldiers and left nothing for Antony's. Octavian's answer ran as follows: he had removed Lepidus from power because of Lepidus' own misconduct; whatever he had won in war he would divide with Antony the moment Antony gave him a share of Armenia; and as for Italy, Antony's soldiers had no claim to any of it — they had Media and Parthia, those splendid additions their brave service under their general had made to the Roman empire.
Antony was in Armenia when this answer reached him. He immediately sent Canidius toward the sea with sixteen legions, while he himself went with Cleopatra to Ephesus, where ships were streaming in from every quarter to form the navy — eight hundred vessels counting the transports, of which Cleopatra furnished two hundred, along with twenty thousand talents and provisions for the whole army for the duration of the war. Antony, on the advice of Domitius Ahenobarbus and some others, told Cleopatra to return to Egypt and await the outcome there. But she dreaded any new reconciliation that Octavia might manage, so she paid Canidius a large sum to plead her case with Antony. It was not just, Canidius argued, that a woman bearing so great a share of the war's cost should be robbed of her share of its glory; nor was it good policy to offend the Egyptians, who made up so large a part of the naval forces; nor, for that matter, could he see how Cleopatra was inferior in judgment to any one of the kings serving in the campaign — she had governed a great kingdom by herself for years, and she had lived long with Antony and learned the handling of great affairs. These arguments won — for such was the will of the fate that was steering everything into Octavian's hands. When all the forces had assembled, they sailed together to Samos and gave themselves over to festivities. Every king, prince, and governor, every nation and city between Syria, the Maeotid Lake, Armenia, and Illyria had been ordered to send or deliver munitions of war; and at the same time every stage performer was summoned to appear at Samos. So while nearly the whole world around them groaned and lamented, this one island echoed for days with piping and harping, with theaters filling and choruses competing. Every city sent an ox for the sacrifice, and the kings in Antony's train outdid one another in magnificent feasts and presents — until people began to ask themselves: what will they possibly do to celebrate the victory, if this is what they spend on the opening of the war?
When it was over, he gave the town of Priene to his performers to live in, and sailed for Athens, where fresh sports and play-acting swallowed his time. Cleopatra, jealous of the honors Octavia had received in that city — for the Athenians loved Octavia dearly — set out to win the people with every sort of attention. The Athenians voted her public honors and sent a deputation of citizens to her house to deliver them, and among the deputies went Antony himself, as a citizen of Athens; it was he who made the speech. And he sent orders to Rome to have Octavia put out of his house. She left it, we are told, with all of his children in her care except the eldest son by Fulvia, who was with his father — weeping, and grieving that she would be looked upon as one of the causes of the war. But the Romans pitied Antony more than they pitied her, and most of all those who had seen Cleopatra with their own eyes and could report that she had no advantage over Octavia in either youth or beauty.
The speed and scale of Antony's preparations alarmed Octavian, who feared he might be forced into the decisive battle that very summer. He was short of many essentials, and the taxes were bitterly resented: free citizens were being called on to pay a quarter of their income, freed slaves an eighth of their property, and there were loud outcries against him and disturbances all over Italy. This is reckoned among the greatest of Antony's blunders — that he did not press the war then. He gave Octavian time to finish his preparations, and gave the unrest time to burn itself out. For while the money was being demanded of them, people were mutinous and violent; once they had paid it, they held their peace.
Then Titius and Plancus, men of consular rank and friends of Antony, defected to Octavian. They had been badly treated by Cleopatra, having resisted harder than anyone her insistence on being present in the war; and they carried with them knowledge of the contents of Antony's will. The will had been deposited with the vestal virgins, who refused to hand it over — if Octavian wanted it, they sent word, he could come and take it himself. So he did. First he read it through alone, marking the passages that would serve his purpose best; then he summoned the senate and read those passages aloud. Many of the senators were scandalized by the whole proceeding: it seemed neither reasonable nor fair to call a living man to account for what was not to happen until after his death. Octavian bore down hardest on the clause about Antony's burial, for Antony had directed that even if he died in the city of Rome, his body, after being carried in state through the forum, should be sent to Cleopatra at Alexandria. Calvisius, one of Octavian's dependents, piled on further charges connected with Cleopatra: that Antony had given her the library of Pergamus with its two hundred thousand volumes; that at a great banquet, in front of a crowd of guests, he had stood up and rubbed her feet, to settle some wager or promise; that he had allowed the Ephesians to salute her as their queen; that many times, while seated on the tribunal giving public audience to kings and princes, he had received love notes from her written on tablets of onyx and crystal, and read them then and there; and that once, when Furnius — a man of great authority and one of the finest speakers in Rome — was pleading a case before him, Cleopatra happened to pass by in her chair, and Antony leaped up, abandoned the hearing in the middle of the cause, and walked at her side all the way home.
Calvisius, it must be said, was generally suspected of inventing most of these stories. Antony's friends went up and down the city pleading his cause, and sent one of their number, Geminius, to warn him not to sit still while he was stripped of his authority by vote and declared a public enemy of Rome. But Geminius had no sooner landed in Greece than he was marked down as one of Octavia's spies. At dinner he was made the standing butt of the jokes and seated in the least honorable places. He bore all of it well, only watching for a chance to speak with Antony. Finally, at supper, he was told to state the business he had come about. The rest of it, he answered, would keep for a soberer hour — but there was one thing he had to say, drunk or fasting: everything would go well if Cleopatra would return to Egypt. Antony flared up at that. Cleopatra cut in: "You have done well, Geminius, to tell your secret without being put to the rack." A few days later Geminius found his moment and slipped away to Rome. Cleopatra's flatterers drove off many more of Antony's friends with their insolence, among them Marcus Silanus and Dellius the historian. Dellius says he was in fear for his very life, and that Glaucus the physician tipped him off that Cleopatra was planning to have him killed. He had offended her by remarking that Antony's friends were served sour wine, while back in Rome Sarmentus — Octavian's little page boy, his delicia, as the Romans call such pets — was drinking Falernian.
As soon as Octavian's preparations were complete, he had a decree passed declaring war on Cleopatra, and stripping Antony of the authority he had surrendered to a woman to exercise in his place. Octavian added that Antony had been drugged out of his own senses, and that the generals Rome would actually be fighting were Mardion the eunuch, Pothinus, Iras — Cleopatra's hairdressing girl — and Charmion: for these, he said, were Antony's chief ministers of state.
These are the prodigies said to have announced the war. Pisaurum, a colony Antony had settled on the Adriatic, was swallowed by an earthquake. At Alba, sweat ran from one of the marble statues of Antony for days on end, and though it was wiped away again and again, it did not stop. While he was in the city of Patrae, the temple of Hercules there was struck by lightning; and at Athens, a violent wind tore the figure of Bacchus out of the sculptured Battle of the Giants and laid it flat on the theater below. Both omens struck home, for Antony claimed a connection with both gods: he professed descent from Hercules, and his imitation of Bacchus in his manner of living had earned him the name of the Young Bacchus. The same whirlwind at Athens singled out, from among many statues left standing, the colossal figures of Eumenes and Attalus — the ones inscribed with Antony's name — and brought them down. And aboard Cleopatra's flagship, which was called the Antonias, came the most ominous sign of all. Swallows had built their nest in the stern of the galley; then other swallows came, drove the first ones out, and destroyed their nests.
When the armaments gathered for the war, Antony had no fewer than five hundred warships, among them many huge galleys of eight and ten banks of oars, decked out as richly as if they were meant for a triumph. He had a hundred thousand infantry and twelve thousand horse. He had vassal kings in attendance: Bocchus of Libya, Tarcondemus of Upper Cilicia, Archelaus of Cappadocia, Philadelphus of Paphlagonia, Mithridates of Commagene, and Sadalas of Thrace — all of these with him in person. Out of Pontus, Polemon sent him substantial forces, as did Malchus from Arabia, Herod the Jew, and Amyntas, king of Lycaonia and Galatia; the Median king, too, sent troops. Octavian had two hundred and fifty war galleys, eighty thousand foot, and cavalry roughly equal to the enemy's. Antony's dominion stretched from the Euphrates and Armenia to the Ionian Sea and the Illyrians; Octavian's from Illyria to the western ocean, and from the ocean back along the Tuscan and Sicilian seas. Of Africa, Octavian held all the coast facing Italy, Gaul, and Spain as far as the Pillars of Hercules; Antony held the provinces from Cyrene to Ethiopia.
But by now he was so entirely an appendage of Cleopatra that although he was far superior on land, he wanted the victory won at sea — to please her; and this although he could not help seeing that for sheer lack of sailors, his captains were sweeping up every kind of man that miserable Greece could supply — travelers, mule drivers, harvest hands, half-grown boys — and even so the ships could not fill their crews, and most of them put to sea undermanned and wretchedly rowed. Octavian's ships were another matter: built not for size or show but for service — no towering parade galleys, but light, fast, and fully manned. He kept his headquarters at Tarentum and Brundisium, and from there he sent Antony a message: stop wasting time, and come. He would provide safe anchorages and harbors for Antony's fleet, and for his army he would pull back and leave him as much landing ground in Italy, inland from the sea, as a horse could cover in a single gallop. Antony answered in equally grand style: he challenged Octavian to single combat — though Antony was much the older man — and when that was refused, proposed that they fight it out on the fields of Pharsalia, where Caesar and Pompey had fought before. But while Antony lay with his fleet off Actium — where the city of Nicopolis now stands — Octavian saw his moment, crossed the Ionian Sea, and seized a place in Epirus called the Ladle. Antony's people were badly rattled, for their land forces were still far behind. "How terrifying," said Cleopatra, mocking them. "We may well be frightened, now that Octavian has got hold of the Ladle!"
At dawn the next day, Antony saw the enemy fleet standing in toward him, and feared his ships would be captured outright for want of soldiers to fight from their decks. So he armed the rowers and paraded them on deck as if ready for battle; the oars were shipped and poised as though waiting for the stroke, and the vessels were drawn up facing the enemy at the mouth of the channel of Actium, looking fully crewed and ready to fight. Octavian was taken in by the stratagem, and withdrew. Antony was also credited with a clever piece of work in cutting the enemy off from their drinking water by a system of trenches and forts — fresh water being scarce in that country, and bad. And his conduct toward Domitius was generous, much against Cleopatra's will. When Domitius, already burning with fever, escaped in a small boat and went over to Octavian, Antony — though the desertion stung him deeply — sent his entire baggage after him, along with his friends and his servants. And Domitius, as though he wished to give the world one testimony of his repentance now that his treachery lay exposed, died soon after. Among the kings, Amyntas and Deiotarus also went over to Octavian. And the fleet proved so unlucky in every venture, and so unready at every call, that Antony was driven back, in spite of everything, to putting his faith in the army. Even Canidius, who commanded the legions, changed his mind when he saw how things stood: he now advised that Cleopatra be sent home, and that they fall back into Thrace or Macedonia and settle the quarrel in a land battle. Dicomes, king of the Getae, was promising to join them with a great army; there would be no disgrace in yielding the sea to Octavian, whose crews had trained through the long Sicilian war — but it would be simply ridiculous for Antony, the most experienced land commander alive, to throw away the strength of his numerous, disciplined infantry by scattering the men in parcels among the ships. But Cleopatra carried the day: a sea fight would decide everything. She already had her eye on flight, and was arranging all her affairs not to help win the battle, but to get away most safely once the losing of it had begun.
Between the camp and the station of the ships ran two long walls, and Antony used to walk the passage between them without a thought of danger. A servant pointed out to Octavian how easy it would be to snatch him there, and an ambush was laid. It sprang up a moment too soon, and seized the man walking just ahead of him; Antony himself barely got away at a run.
Once the decision was taken to fight at sea, they burned all the Egyptian ships except sixty; the best and largest of these, from ten banks of oars down to three, Antony manned with twenty thousand heavy infantry and two thousand archers. It was then, the story goes, that a foot captain — a man who had fought through countless battles under Antony, his body seamed all over with wounds — cried out as Antony passed: "General! What have our wounds and our swords done to displease you, that you put your trust in rotten timbers? Let the Egyptians and Phoenicians do their fighting on the water. Give us land — where we know how to stand our ground, and die on it, or win." Antony answered him nothing. He gave the man a look and a motion of the hand, as if to say, be of good courage, and passed on. But his own hopes, it would seem, were no longer very sure; for when the ships' masters proposed leaving the sails ashore, he ordered them carried aboard. "For we must not," he said, "let one enemy escape."
That day and the three days after it, the sea ran too rough for the fleets to engage. On the fifth day it fell calm, and they fought. Antony commanded the right squadron himself, with Publicola; Coelius had the left; Marcus Octavius and Marcus Insteius held the center. On the other side, Octavian gave the left wing to Agrippa and commanded the right in person. As for the armies on land, Canidius was Antony's general and Taurus was Octavian's, and both stood drawn up in order along the shore, watching. Antony went about his fleet in a small boat, rowing from ship to ship, encouraging his soldiers — stand firm, he told them, and fight from these big ships as steadily as if you were on solid ground. The ships' masters he ordered to take the enemy's attack lying still, as though riding at anchor, and to hold the mouth of the gulf, which was a narrow and difficult passage. Of Octavian this story is told: while it was still dark, as he left his tent to go the rounds of his ships, he met a man driving a donkey and asked him his name. "My name is Fortunate," the man said, "and my donkey is called Conqueror." Afterward, when Octavian decorated the place with the bronze beaks of captured ships as a monument to his victory, a bronze statue of this man and his donkey stood among them. After inspecting the rest of his fleet, he was rowed out to the right wing, and looked with real admiration at the enemy lying perfectly motionless in the straits — to all appearances a fleet at anchor. For a considerable time he actually believed they were, and he held his own ships back, about a mile off. But around noon a breeze came up off the sea, and Antony's men — tired of waiting so long, and trusting their tall, massive vessels as if they were unbeatable — began to push the left squadron forward. Octavian was overjoyed to see them move. He ordered his own right wing to back water, meaning to draw the enemy out into open sea as far as he could; his plan was to circle, and circle again, and set his light, well-manned galleys on those enormous ships, which their bulk and their shortage of rowers made slow to move and clumsy to handle.
When the fleets engaged, there was no charging, no ramming of one ship by another. Antony's ships were too ponderous to build up the speed that gives a ram its force; and Octavian's did not dare meet them head to head, since their bows were armored with solid masses and spikes of bronze, nor even to strike their sides, which were built of great squared timbers bolted through with iron — a ram would have shattered against them. So the engagement looked like a battle on land, or, more exactly still, like the storming of a walled town. Three or four of Octavian's vessels would cluster around one of Antony's, the men pressing in with spears, javelins, boarding poles, and every device of fire they could hurl, while Antony's men shot back with catapults from wooden towers on the decks. Then Agrippa began stretching his squadron wide to outflank the enemy line, and Publicola had to answer the movement, drawing gradually away from the center, where confusion and alarm set in as Arruntius attacked. And the day still hung undecided, the battle dead even, when suddenly Cleopatra's sixty ships were seen hoisting sail and making for open water in full flight — straight through the ships that were fighting. They had been stationed behind the great vessels, and they threw them into disorder as they broke through. The enemy watched in astonishment as they caught the wind and ran for the Peloponnesus. And here Antony showed the whole world that he was no longer steered by the judgment of a commander, or of a man, or by his own judgment at all. What had once been said as a joke — that the soul of a lover lives in someone else's body — he proved to be the plain and serious truth. As if he had been born a part of her and had to move wherever she moved, the moment he saw her ship sailing away he abandoned everyone who was fighting and dying for him, got himself aboard a galley of five banks of oars, and — taking with him only Alexander of Syria and Scellias — chased after the woman who had already begun his ruin, and would soon finish it.
She, seeing him follow, raised the signal for him to come aboard, and as soon as he drew alongside he was taken onto her ship. But he did not see her, and did not let himself be seen. He walked forward alone and sat down by himself in the ship's prow, without a word, covering his face with both hands. Meanwhile some of Octavian's light Liburnian galleys appeared, in pursuit. Antony ordered the ship brought about to face them, and they all sheered off — except Eurycles the Spartan, who came on hard, brandishing a lance from his deck as if he meant to throw it at Antony himself. Antony stood up at the prow and demanded, "Who is this that pursues Antony?" "I am Eurycles, the son of Lachares," came the answer, "armed with Octavian's fortune to avenge my father's death." Lachares had been condemned on a charge of robbery and beheaded on Antony's orders. Yet Eurycles did not attack Antony's ship. He drove with his full force into the other flagship — for there were two — spun her around with the blow, and captured her, along with a second ship loaded with valuable plate and furnishings. As soon as Eurycles was gone, Antony returned to exactly the same posture as before and sat silent; and so he remained for three days — whether in anger at Cleopatra, or unwilling to reproach her — until they put in at Taenarus. There the women of their company managed first to get them talking to each other, then eating together, then sleeping together. By this time several of the transport ships and some of his friends began finding their way to him out of the rout, all bringing the same news: the fleet was utterly destroyed, but the land army, they believed, still held together. So he sent messengers to Canidius with orders to march the army at full speed through Macedonia into Asia. He himself intended to cross from Taenarus to Africa; and he gave one of the merchant ships — loaded with an immense sum of coined money and with gold and silver vessels from the royal collections — to his friends, telling them to divide it among themselves and see to their own safety. They refused, with tears running down their faces, and he comforted them with all the warmth and kindness imaginable, begging them to go, and wrote letters on their behalf to Theophilus, his steward at Corinth, instructing him to keep them safe and hidden until they could make their peace with Octavian. This Theophilus was the father of Hipparchus, who had stood higher in Antony's favor than almost anyone — and who was the first of all Antony's freedmen to go over to Octavian. He settled afterward at Corinth. So matters stood with Antony.
But at Actium his fleet fought on. It held out against Octavian for hours, and took its worst punishment from a heavy sea that set in dead against the bows; it was four in the afternoon before it finally gave up the struggle. No more than five thousand men were killed, but three hundred ships were taken, as Octavian himself has recorded. Only a few had even known that Antony had fled, and those who were told of it at first simply refused to believe it — that a general with nineteen intact legions and twelve thousand cavalry waiting on the shore could abandon everything and run; he, of all men, who had known good fortune and bad so many times, and had been schooled by a thousand wars and battles in the turns of luck. His soldiers would not give up their longing for him, or their expectation. They kept imagining he would reappear from somewhere, and they showed such generous loyalty to his cause that even when his flight was beyond all doubt, they held together as an army for seven days, ignoring every message Octavian sent them. Only at the end — when Canidius, their own commanding general, had slipped out of the camp by night, and every officer had abandoned them — did they give way and submit to the conqueror. After this Octavian sailed for Athens, where he came to a settlement with Greece and distributed what remained of the grain Antony had stockpiled for his army among the cities, which were in a miserable state — stripped of their money, their slaves, their horses and pack animals. My own great-grandfather Nicarchus used to tell how the entire population of our city was conscripted to carry grain down to the sea near Anticyra, each man with a fixed measure on his shoulders, and men standing over them with whips to keep them moving. They had made one trip of that kind, and the grain for the second was measured out and they were just hoisting it onto their backs when the news came of Antony's defeat — and that news was the saving of Chaeronea, for Antony's quartermasters and soldiers fled at once, and the citizens divided the grain among themselves.
When Antony reached Africa, he sent Cleopatra ahead from Paraetonium into Egypt, and gave himself up to as complete a solitude as he could wish, roaming and wandering about with only two friends — one a Greek, the rhetorician Aristocrates, the other a Roman, Lucilius. Of Lucilius I have told elsewhere how, at Philippi, he let himself be captured by the pursuers, pretending to be Brutus, to give Brutus time to escape. Antony spared his life, and for that reason Lucilius remained true and faithful to him to the very end.
But when the officer commanding his forces in Africa — the man to whom he had entrusted everything there — took them over to Octavian as well, Antony resolved to kill himself, and was stopped by his friends. Coming at last to Alexandria, he found Cleopatra absorbed in an astonishingly bold undertaking. Between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean off Egypt lies the narrow neck of land that may be called the boundary between Asia and Africa; at its narrowest it is not much more than thirty-five miles across. Over this isthmus Cleopatra had conceived the project of hauling her fleet and launching it again in the Arabian Gulf — and then, with her soldiers and her treasure, of finding herself a home on the far side of the world, beyond the reach of war and slavery. But the first galleys carried over were burned by the Arabs of Petra; and since Antony still believed the army at Actium was holding together, she abandoned the enterprise and gave orders to fortify every approach to Egypt. Antony, meanwhile, forsook the city and the company of his friends and built himself a dwelling in the sea near Pharos, on a little breakwater he ran out into the water; and there, shut away from all mankind, he said he wanted nothing but to live the life of Timon — for his case, he said, was the same. The ingratitude and the injuries he had suffered from those he had counted his friends had made him hate and distrust the whole human race.
This Timon was a citizen of Athens who lived around the time of the Peloponnesian War, as you can tell from the comedies of Aristophanes and Plato, where he is mocked as the hater and enemy of mankind. He shunned and rebuffed every approach from every man — yet Alcibiades, then in his reckless youth, Timon would embrace and kiss with every show of affection. When Apemantus, amazed, asked him why, he answered that he knew this young man would one day do the Athenians infinite harm. This Apemantus was the only person he ever allowed into his company, and only now and then — a man of the same sour temper, who imitated his way of life. At the festival of flagons, the Athenian wine feast, the two of them kept the holiday together, and Apemantus remarked, "What a pleasant party this is, Timon." "It would be," he answered, "if you were somewhere else." One day he climbed up onto the speaker's platform before a full assembly, and when a dead silence fell — everyone wondering at so unheard-of a sight — he said: "Men of Athens, I own a little plot of ground, and in it grows a fig tree, on which many of my fellow citizens have been pleased to hang themselves. Since I have decided to build on the spot, I wanted to give public notice, so that any of you who are so inclined may go and hang yourselves before I cut it down." He died and was buried at Halae, near the sea; and after his burial it happened that the shore at that point slipped and gave way, and the sea flowed in around his tomb and made it unreachable by any human foot. The tomb bore this inscription:
Here I lie, my miserable life at an end. Do not ask my name. I curse you, every one.
That epitaph he composed for himself while he was still alive. The one more commonly quoted is by Callimachus:
Timon the man-hater am I, who lie below. Go ahead, traveler — curse me. Only go.
So much for Timon, though there is a great deal more that could be said. Now Canidius arrived, bringing in person the news that the army at Actium was lost. Then Antony learned that Herod of Judaea had gone over to Octavian with several legions and cohorts, that the other kings and princes were deserting him in the same way, and that outside Egypt nothing remained to him. None of it seemed to disturb him. Rather, as if he were glad to put away hope, and with it to be rid of care, he quit that dwelling by the sea, which he called the Timoneum, and let Cleopatra receive him into the palace — and set the whole city on a course of feasting, drinking, and gift-giving. Caesarion, Cleopatra's son by the great Caesar, was enrolled among the young men of age; and Antyllus, Antony's own son by Fulvia, put on the plain toga without the purple border, the dress of manhood. In honor of it, Alexandria did nothing but feast and revel for days. The two of them dissolved the Order of Inimitable Livers and founded another in its place, every bit its equal in splendor, luxury, and extravagance, which they called the Order of Those Who Will Die Together. All who declared they would die with Antony and Cleopatra put down their names, and passed the time, for the present, in every kind of pleasure and an unbroken round of banquets. Cleopatra, meanwhile, was assembling a collection of every variety of deadly poison, and to find out which of them killed with the least pain, she had them tested on prisoners under sentence of death. When she found that the fast poisons always brought sharp agony, and that the gentler ones were slow, she went on to trying venomous animals, watching with her own eyes as one creature was set upon the body of another. This became her daily practice; and she satisfied herself, in the end, that nothing compared with the bite of the asp, which brought on — without convulsions, without groaning — a heavy drowsiness and lethargy, a light sweat on the face, the senses dimming and closing down by easy degrees; the victim showing no sign of pain, but only a mild annoyance at being disturbed or awakened, like someone deep in natural sleep.
At the same time they sent ambassadors to Octavian in Asia. Cleopatra asked that the kingdom of Egypt be preserved for her children; Antony asked leave to live as a private citizen in Egypt — or, if that was too much, to retire to Athens. They were so short of friends, after so many desertions, and so unsure of those who remained, that the embassy was entrusted to Euphronius, the tutor of their children. For Alexas of Laodicea — who had come to know Antony at Rome through Timagenes' introduction, who had held more power over him than any other Greek, and who of all the instruments Cleopatra used on Antony was the most forcible, the chief subverter of whatever good impulses toward Octavia still rose up in his mind from time to time — Alexas had already been sent away, to talk Herod out of deserting. Instead he betrayed his master and stayed with Herod; and then, presuming on Herod's influence, he had the audacity to appear before Octavian. Herod's influence did him no good. He was thrown into chains on the spot, shipped back to his own country, and there, on Octavian's orders, put to death. That was the wage of his treason — paid to Alexas while Antony was still alive.
To any proposal on Antony's behalf, Octavian refused to listen. To Cleopatra his answer was that there was no reasonable favor she might not expect — if she put Antony to death, or drove him out of Egypt. Along with the returning ambassadors he sent a freedman of his own, Thyrsus, a man of intelligence, and by no means ill-suited to carry a young general's messages to a proud beauty who believed in the power of her charms. The long audiences she granted him, and the marked honors she paid him, woke Antony's jealousy. He had Thyrsus seized, whipped, and sent back to Octavian with a letter: the man's busy, insolent meddling had provoked him, and in his present circumstances he could not be expected to have much patience. "But if it offends you," he added, "you have my freedman Hipparchus with you. String him up and give him a whipping, and we'll be even." After that, Cleopatra set out to clear herself and soothe his jealousy with every attention imaginable. Her own birthday she kept modestly, as suited their fallen fortunes; but his she celebrated with such reckless splendor and magnificence that many of the guests came to the table poor and went home rich. Meanwhile letter after letter came to Octavian from Agrippa, telling him his presence was urgently needed at Rome.
So the war was put off for a season. But when winter was over, Octavian marched — he himself through Syria, his commanders through Africa. Pelusium fell, and a story went around that Seleucus had handed it over, and not without Cleopatra's consent; to clear herself, she delivered Seleucus' wife and children into Antony's hands to be put to death. She had built, adjoining the temple of Isis, a set of tombs and monuments of astonishing height and remarkable workmanship, and into these she now moved her treasure — gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, ebony, ivory, cinnamon — and, along with it all, a great quantity of torchwood and tow. Octavian began to be afraid that in some fit of desperation she would set the whole fortune ablaze; so all the while he marched his army toward the city, he kept sending her fresh assurances of his good intentions. He took up his position at the Hippodrome — and Antony made a fierce sally against him, routed his cavalry, drove them back into their trenches, and came home to the palace glowing with satisfaction. Meeting Cleopatra, still in his armor, he kissed her, and presented to her favor the one of his soldiers who had fought most brilliantly. She gave the man a breastplate and helmet of gold; he took them — and that very night deserted to Octavian.
After this Antony sent Octavian a fresh challenge: single combat, man to man. Octavian answered that Antony might find several other ways to end his life. Antony, reflecting that he could not die more honorably than in battle, resolved to attack by land and sea at once. At supper, the story goes, he told his servants to pour freely and serve him with a generous hand — for tomorrow, perhaps, they would not be doing the same; tomorrow they might be waiting on a new master, while he lay on the ground, a corpse, and nothing. His friends wept to hear him talk this way, and seeing it, he told them he would not lead them into a battle from which he expected an honorable death rather than either safety or victory. That night, it is said, around the middle of it, when the whole city lay in silence and dread, waiting on the next day, there suddenly came the sound of every kind of instrument at once — voices singing in harmony, and the cries of a great crowd shouting and dancing, like a troop of revelers of Bacchus on the march. The wild procession seemed to move through the very center of the city toward the gate that faced the enemy camp; there the noise rose to its loudest, and passed out, and was gone. Those who tried to read the sign understood it this way: Bacchus — the god whom Antony had all his life studied to copy and claim — was now abandoning him.
At first light he marched his infantry out of the city and posted them on the high ground, where he stood and watched his fleet put out toward the enemy, waiting to see what it would do. And what it did was this: as the fleets closed, his crews lifted their oars and saluted Octavian's men — who returned the salute — and the whole body of ships, falling into a single fleet, rowed together straight for the city. Antony had barely taken this in when his cavalry deserted too, going over to Octavian; and when his infantry was beaten, he fell back into the city, crying out that Cleopatra had betrayed him to the very enemies he had made for her sake. She, terrified of what he might do to her in his fury and despair, fled to her monument and let down the falling doors, massive with their bars and bolts, and sent messengers to tell Antony she was dead. He believed it. "Now, Antony," he said to himself, "why delay any longer? Fate has taken away the only excuse you had left for wanting to live." He went into his chamber, and as he unfastened and opened his armor he said, "I am not troubled, Cleopatra, to be parted from you — I shall be with you soon. What stings me is that so great a general should be proved slower in courage than a woman." He had a faithful servant named Eros, whom he had long ago bound by a promise to kill him whenever he judged it necessary; and now he called in the promise. Eros drew his sword and raised it as if to strike — then turned suddenly away and ran himself through instead. As the man fell dead at his feet, Antony said, "Well done, Eros. You show your master how to do what you did not have the heart to do yourself." And he drove the sword into his own belly, and laid himself down on the couch. But the wound did not kill him at once. The bleeding slowed when he lay down, and presently he came to himself and begged the men around him to put him out of his pain. Instead they fled the chamber, every one, and left him crying out and writhing there, until Diomede, Cleopatra's secretary, came to him with her orders: he was to be carried to her, into the monument.
The moment he understood that she was alive, Antony eagerly ordered his servants to lift him up, and they carried him in their arms to the door of the monument. Cleopatra would not open it. Instead she appeared at a sort of window above and let down ropes and cords. Antony was made fast to them, and she and her two women — the only people she had allowed inside with her — hauled him up. Those who saw it said nothing was ever more heartbreaking than that sight: Antony, covered in blood and dying, drawn slowly up the wall, still stretching out his hands to her, still lifting himself with what little strength he had left. It was no easy work for the women. Cleopatra, clinging to the rope with both hands, her whole weight against it, her face straining toward the ground, dragged him up with the greatest difficulty, while the people below shouted encouragement and lived every inch of it with her.
When she had him inside, she laid him on the bed. She tore off her own clothes and spread them over him. She beat her breasts with her hands, tore at herself, smeared her face with the blood from his wounds, calling him her lord, her husband, her commander — so lost in his misfortunes that she seemed to have nearly forgotten her own. Antony calmed her cries as best he could and asked for wine — either because he was thirsty, or because he hoped it might carry him out of his pain the sooner. When he had drunk it, he gave her his last advice. She should look to her own safety, so far as it could be done with honor; among all of Octavian's friends, the one to trust was Proculeius. And she should not pity him for this final turn of fortune, but rather be glad for him, remembering the happiness he had known — he who had been the most illustrious and the most powerful of men, and who at the end had fallen not without honor, a Roman by a Roman overcome.
Just as he breathed his last, Proculeius arrived from Octavian. For when Antony had given himself his wound and been carried in to Cleopatra, one of his guards, Dercetaeus, had picked up Antony's sword and hidden it; and when he saw his chance, he slipped away to Octavian and brought him the first news of Antony's death, showing him the bloody sword as proof. At this, Octavian withdrew into the inner part of his tent and wept — genuine tears, for a man who had been his brother-in-law, his colleague in power, his companion in so many wars and dangers. Then he came out to his friends carrying a bundle of letters, and read them aloud to show how reasonably and moderately he had always written to Antony, and what overbearing, arrogant answers he had gotten back. After that he sent Proculeius with orders to do everything possible to take Cleopatra alive. He was afraid of losing a great treasure — and besides, she would be no small ornament to his triumph.
Cleopatra, however, was careful not to put herself in Proculeius's hands. He stood outside a door at ground level, strongly barred but built so that voices carried through it, and there they held their conference: she demanding that her kingdom be given to her children, he telling her to take heart and trust Octavian in everything. Having studied the place carefully, Proculeius went back to Octavian, and Gallus was sent to talk with her a second time. Gallus came to the door and deliberately dragged out the conversation — while Proculeius set his ladders against the window through which the women had pulled up Antony. He climbed in with two men behind him and went straight down to the door where Cleopatra stood talking with Gallus. One of the two women shut up in the monument with her cried out, "Poor Cleopatra — you are taken prisoner!" She spun around, saw Proculeius, and drew the dagger she carried to kill herself. But Proculeius was on her in an instant, pinning her with both hands. "For shame, Cleopatra," he said. "You wrong yourself, and you wrong Octavian — you would rob him of this perfect chance to show his mercy, and make the world believe the gentlest of commanders is a faithless, unforgiving enemy." He took the dagger out of her hand and shook out her dress to see whether any poison was hidden in it. Afterward Octavian sent one of his freedmen, Epaphroditus, with orders to treat her with every possible gentleness and courtesy — and to take the strictest precautions to keep her alive.
Meanwhile Octavian made his entry into Alexandria with the philosopher Areius at his side, holding him by the hand and talking with him as they went — he wanted the whole city to see, from the very first moment, what honor was paid to this man, and to measure him accordingly. Then, entering the exercise-ground, he mounted a platform built for the occasion, and from it he commanded the citizens — who in their terror had thrown themselves flat at his feet — to stand up. He told them he freely acquitted the people of all blame: first for the sake of Alexander, who had founded their city; second for the sake of the city itself, so large and so beautiful; and third, to gratify his friend Areius.
That was the honor Areius received from Octavian, and by his intercession many lives were saved. Among them was Philostratus, of all professional debaters that ever lived the readiest at speaking off the cuff, but with no honest claim at all to call himself a philosopher of the Academy. Octavian, disgusted by the man's character, would not listen to his pleas. So Philostratus grew a long white beard, dressed himself in black, and trailed behind Areius everywhere, shouting the verse,
The wise, if they are truly wise, will save the wise.
When Octavian heard of it, he pardoned him — less to spare Philostratus any harm than to spare Areius the ill will.
As for Antony's children: Antyllus, his son by Fulvia, was betrayed by his tutor Theodorus and put to death. While the soldiers were cutting off the boy's head, the tutor managed to steal the precious jewel he wore around his neck and slip it into his own pocket. He denied it afterward, but he was convicted and crucified. Cleopatra's children and their attendants were kept under guard, but treated very honorably. Caesarion, who was widely held to be the son of Caesar the dictator, had been sent off by his mother with a great sum of money, to travel through Ethiopia and cross over into India. But his tutor, a man named Rhodon — about as honest as Theodorus — persuaded him to turn back, telling him Octavian meant to make him king. While Octavian was weighing what to do with him, Areius, we are told, remarked,
Too many Caesars is no good thing.
And so, after Cleopatra was dead, the boy was killed.
Many kings and great commanders petitioned Octavian for Antony's body, to give him his funeral rites; but he would not take the corpse away from Cleopatra, and she buried him with her own hands, with royal splendor and magnificence, being granted whatever she wished to spend on the funeral. In that extremity of grief — her breasts inflamed and ulcerated from the beating she had given them — she fell into a high fever, and she welcomed it, hoping to use the illness as an excuse to refuse food and so die quietly, without interference. She had her own physician, Olympus, and to him she told the truth, asking his advice and his help in ending her life — as Olympus himself tells us in the account he wrote of these events. But Octavian suspected what she intended and began making menacing remarks about her children, working on her fears for them; and against those siege-engines her resolve shook and gave way, and she let her attendants feed and treat her as they pleased.
A few days later, Octavian himself came to visit and console her. She was lying on a simple pallet, plainly dressed, and as he entered she sprang up from the bed with nothing on but the single garment next to her body and threw herself at his feet — her hair and face wild and disfigured, her voice trembling, her eyes sunken in her head. The marks of the blows she had given herself were visible on her bosom; her whole body, in a word, seemed no less wounded than her soul. And yet for all that, her old charm — the confidence of her youthful beauty — had not wholly left her. In spite of everything, it still sparkled from within and showed itself in every movement of her face. Octavian asked her to lie down again and sat beside her, and she seized the opportunity to justify what she had done, blaming it on necessity and on her fear of Antony. When Octavian answered her point by point and she found herself refuted, she shifted at once to pleading and appeals for pity, like a woman who wanted nothing in the world so much as to go on living. Finally she handed him a list she kept of her treasure; and when Seleucus, one of her stewards, who was standing by, pointed out that various items were missing from it and accused her of hiding them, she flew at him, caught him by the hair, and struck him blow after blow across the face. Octavian, smiling, restrained her. "Isn't it hard, Caesar," she said, "that when you do me the honor of visiting me in this condition, I should be accused by my own servant of setting aside a few women's trinkets — not to adorn my own unhappy self, believe me, but so that I might have some small presents for your Octavia and your Livia, and hope, through their intercession, to find you in some measure inclined to mercy?" Octavian was delighted to hear her talk this way, now feeling certain that she wanted to live. He told her that she might dispose of the things she had set aside exactly as she pleased, and that his treatment of her would be generous beyond her expectation; and he went away well satisfied that he had outwitted her — when in fact it was he who had been deceived.
Among Octavian's companions was a distinguished young man named Cornelius Dolabella, who was not without a certain tenderness for Cleopatra. At her request he sent her word privately that Octavian was about to march back through Syria, and that she and her children were to be sent ahead within three days. When she learned this, she asked Octavian's permission to pour funeral offerings for the departed Antony. It was granted, and she had herself carried to the place where he was buried. There, with her women around her, she embraced his tomb, tears in her eyes, and spoke: "O dearest Antony, it is not long since I buried you with these hands. They were free then; now I am a captive, and I pay you these last duties with a guard set over me, for fear my just grief and sorrow should wear down this slave's body of mine and make it less fit to appear in their triumph over you. Expect no further offerings or libations from me. These are the last honors Cleopatra can pay your memory, for now they are hurrying her far away from you. Nothing could part us while we lived — but in death, it seems, we may have to trade places: you, the Roman, lie buried in Egypt, while I, the Egyptian, am to seek my grave in your country, and that is the only favor I will ask of it. But if the gods below, with whom you now dwell, can do anything or will do anything — since the gods above have betrayed us — do not abandon your living wife. Do not let me be led in triumph to your shame. Hide me, bury me here with you; for of all my countless bitter misfortunes, none has been so heavy as this short time I have lived without you."
When she had finished these lamentations, she crowned the tomb with garlands and kissed it. Then she ordered a bath prepared for herself, and after bathing she lay down to a sumptuous meal. Presently a fellow arrived from the country carrying a little basket. The guards stopped him and asked what was in it, so he pulled aside the leaves on top and showed them it was full of figs. They marveled at how large and beautiful the figs were, and he laughed and invited them to take some; they declined, and, suspecting nothing, told him to carry them in. After her meal, Cleopatra sent Octavian a letter she had written and sealed; then, putting everyone out of the monument except her two women, she shut the doors. Octavian opened the letter, and when he found in it pathetic prayers and entreaties to be buried in the same tomb with Antony, he guessed at once what was happening. His first thought was to rush there himself; then he changed his mind and sent others at full speed to see. But the thing had been quickly done. The messengers arrived at a run and found the guards suspecting nothing; when they opened the doors, they found her stone-dead, lying on a bed of gold, arrayed in all her royal ornaments. Iras, one of her women, lay dying at her feet. Charmion, already swaying, scarcely able to hold up her head, was adjusting the diadem on her mistress's brow. Someone burst out angrily, "A fine deed this, Charmion!" "It is extremely well done," she answered, "and worthy of a queen descended from so many kings." And as she said it, she fell dead beside the bed.
Some say an asp was carried in among those figs, hidden under the leaves — that Cleopatra had arranged for it to strike her before she even knew it was there, but that when she lifted away some of the figs and saw it, she said, "So here it is," and held out her bare arm for the bite. Others say the asp was kept shut in a vase, and that she teased and provoked it with a golden spindle until it seized her arm. But what really happened, no one knows. It was even said that she carried poison in a hollow hairpin that she kept hidden in her hair; yet no spot, no symptom of poison, was found on her body. Nor was the asp ever seen inside the monument — though some claimed to have noticed something like its trail in the sand by the sea, on the side the building faced, below the windows. Some also report that two faint puncture-marks were found on Cleopatra's arm, and Octavian seems to have believed this account, for in his triumph he had carried a figure of Cleopatra with an asp clinging to her. Such are the different stories. But Octavian, though bitterly disappointed by her death, could not help admiring the greatness of her spirit, and he gave orders that her body be buried beside Antony's with royal splendor and magnificence. Her women, too, received honorable burial by his direction. Cleopatra had lived thirty-nine years. For twenty-two of them she had reigned as queen, and for fourteen she had been Antony's partner in his power. Antony was fifty-three by some accounts, fifty-six by others. His statues were all pulled down; Cleopatra's were left standing untouched, because Archibius, one of her friends, gave Octavian two thousand talents to save them from the fate of Antony's.
Antony left seven children by his three wives, and of them only Antyllus, the eldest, was put to death by Octavian. Octavia took in all the rest and raised them with her own. Cleopatra, his daughter by Cleopatra, was given in marriage to Juba, the most accomplished of kings; and Antony, his son by Fulvia, rose so high in favor that — while Agrippa was reckoned to hold first place with Octavian, and the sons of Livia the second — the third place, beyond dispute, belonged to Antony. Octavia had two daughters by her first husband, Marcellus, and one son, also named Marcellus; this son Octavian adopted and made his son-in-law, giving him his daughter in marriage, while Octavia gave one of the daughters to Agrippa. But when Marcellus died almost immediately after the wedding, and Octavia saw that her brother was at a loss to find another son-in-law he could truly trust, it was she who proposed that Agrippa should put away her own daughter and marry Julia. Octavian agreed first, then Agrippa; so Agrippa married Julia, and Octavia, taking her daughter back, married her to the young Antony. Of the two daughters Octavia had borne to Antony, one married Domitius Ahenobarbus; the other, Antonia, famous for her beauty and her good sense, married Drusus, the son of Livia and stepson of Octavian. From these parents came Germanicus and Claudius. Claudius later reigned as emperor; and of the children of Germanicus, Gaius reigned with distinction for a time before he was killed, along with his wife and child. Agrippina, who bore a son, Lucius Domitius, to Ahenobarbus, was later married to Claudius the emperor, who adopted the boy and gave him the name Nero Germanicus. This was the Nero who was emperor in our own time — who put his own mother to death, and whose madness and folly came close to ruining the Roman empire. He was Antony's descendant in the fifth generation.