'Well then, let there be trouble. I am not afraid.' But clearly he was afraid, and suddenly here it was again, that quality I admired the most about him – his reluctant, nervous resolution in the end to do the right thing. Because he must have known that from this time on his position in Rome would start to become untenable. After another long period of reflection, he said: 'All the time that Spanish pimp was talking, I kept thinking of what Calliope says to me in my poetic autobiography. Do you recall her lines?' He closed his eyes and recited: 'Meantime the paths which you from earliest days did seek – Yes, and when consul too, as mood and virtue called – These hold, and foster still your fame and good men's praise.
'I have my faults, Tiro – you know them better than any man: no need to point them out – but I am not like Pompey, or Caesar or Crassus. Whatever I've done, whatever mistakes I've made, I've done for my country; and whatever they do, they do for themselves, even if it means helping a traitor like Catilina.' He gave a long sigh. He seemed almost surprised at his own principled stand. 'Well, there it all goes, I suppose – a peaceful old age, reconciliation with my enemies, power, money, popularity with the mob…' He folded his arms and contemplated his feet.
'It's a lot to throw away,' I said.
'It is a lot. Perhaps you should run after Balbus and tell him I've changed my mind.'
'Shall I?' My tone was eager – I was desperate for a quiet life – but Cicero did not seem to hear me. He continued to brood on history and heroism, and after a while I went back to arranging his correspondence.
I had thought that 'The Beast with Three Heads', as the triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus came to be known, might renew its offer, but Cicero heard no more. The following week Caesar became consul and quickly laid his land bill before the senate. I was watching from the door with a large crowd of jostling spectators when he started asking the senior members for their opinions on the proposed law. He began with Pompey. Naturally the great man approved at once, and so did Crassus. Cicero was called on next, and with Caesar watching him keenly, and with many reservations, added his assent. Hortensius rejected it. Lucullus rejected it. Celer rejected it. And when eventually Caesar worked his way down the list of the great and the good and came to Cato, he too stated his disapproval. But instead of simply giving his view like the others and then sitting down, Cato continued with his denunciation, reaching far back into antiquity for precedents to argue that common land was held in trust for all the nation and was not to be parcelled out by unscrupulous 'here today and gone tomorrow' politicians for their own gain. After an hour it became clear he had no intention of resuming his place and was resorting to his old trick of talking out the day's business.
Caesar grew more and more irritated, tapping his foot impatiently. At last he stood. 'We have heard enough from you,' he said, interrupting Cato in mid-sentence. 'Sit down, you damned sanctimonious windbag, and let someone else speak.'
'Any senator has the right to talk for as long as he wishes,' retorted Cato. 'You should look up the laws of this house if you want to preside over it,' and so saying, he carried on talking.
'Sit down!' bellowed Caesar.
'I shall not be intimidated by you,' replied Cato, and he refused to yield the floor.
Have you ever seen a bird of prey tilt its head from one side to the other, as it detects a potential kill? Well, that was very much how Caesar looked at that instant. His avian profile bent first to the left and then to the right, and then he extended a long finger and beckoned to his chief lictor. He pointed to Cato. 'Remove him,' he rasped. The proximate lictor looked unwilling. 'I said,' repeated Caesar in a terrible voice, ' remove him!'
The terrified fellow did not need telling twice. Gathering half a dozen of his colleagues, he set off down the aisle towards Cato, who continued to speak even as the lictors clambered over the benches to seize him. Two men took hold of each of his arms and dragged him towards the door, and another picked up all his treasury accounts, while the senate watched in horror.
'What shall we do with him?' called the proximate lictor.
'Throw him in the Carcer,' commanded Caesar, 'and let him address his wisdom to the rats for a night or two.'
As Cato was bundled from the chamber, some senators began objecting to his treatment. The great stoic was carried directly past me, unresisting but continuing to shout out some obscure point about the Scantian forests. Celer rose from the front bench and hurried out after him, closely trailed by Lucullus, and then by Caesar's own consular colleague, Marcus Bibulus. I should think thirty or forty senators must have joined this demonstration. Caesar came down off his dais and tried to intercept a few of those departing. I remember him catching hold of the arm of old Petreius, the commander who had defeated Catilina's army at Pisae. 'Petreius!' he said. 'You are a soldier like me. Why are you leaving?'
'Because,' said Petreius, pulling himself free, 'I would rather be in prison with Cato than here with you!'
'Go then!' Caesar shouted after him. 'Go, all of you! But remember this: as long as I am consul, the will of the people will not be frustrated by procedural tricks and ancient customs! This bill will be placed before the people, whether you gentlemen like it or not, and it will be voted on by the end of the month.' He strode back up the aisle to his chair and glared around the chamber, defying anyone else to challenge his authority.
Cicero stayed uncomfortably in his place as the roll call resumed, and after the session was over he was intercepted outside the senate house by Hortensius, who demanded to know in a reproachful voice why he had not walked out with the others. 'Don't blame me for the mess you have landed us in,' replied Cicero. 'I warned you what would happen if you continued to treat Pompey with contempt.' Nevertheless, I could tell he was embarrassed, and as soon as he could he escaped to his home. 'I have contrived the worst of all worlds for myself,' he complained to me as we climbed the hill. 'I gain no benefit from supporting Caesar, yet I am denounced by his enemies as a turncoat. What a political genius I have turned out to be!'
In any normal year, Caesar would have either failed with his bill, or at the very least been obliged to compromise. His measure was opposed, first and foremost, by his fellow consul, M. Bibulus, a proud and irascible patrician whose misfortune throughout his career had been to hold office at the same time as Caesar, and who in consequence had been so entirely overshadowed that people usually forgot his name. 'I am tired of playing Pollux to his Castor,' he declared angrily, and he vowed that now he was consul it would be different. Also ranged against Caesar were no fewer than three tribunes: Ancharius, Calvinus and Fannius, each of whom wielded a veto. But Caesar was determined to get his way, whatever the price, and now began his deliberate destruction of the Roman constitution – an act for which I trust he will be cursed by humanity until the end of time.
First, he inserted into the bill a clause requiring every senator to swear an oath – on pain of death – that they would never try to repeal the law once it was on the statute book. Then he called a public assembly at which both Crassus and Pompey appeared. Cicero stood with the other senators and watched as Pompey, for the first time in his long career, was prevailed upon to issue a direct threat. 'This bill is just,' he declared. 'My men have shed their blood for Roman soil, and it is only right that when they return they should be given a share of that soil as their reward.'
'And what,' Caesar asked him disingenuously, 'if those who oppose this bill resort to violence?'
'If anyone comes with the sword, I shall bring my shield,' responded Pompey, before adding with menacing emphasis, 'and I shall also bring a sword of my own.'
The crowd roared in delight. Cicero could not bear to watch any more. He turned and pushed his way past his fellow senators and out of the public assembly.
Pompey's words were effectively a call to arms. Within days Rome began to fill with his veterans. He paid for them to come from all over Italy, and he put them up in tents outside the city, or in cheap lodgings around the town. They smuggled in illegal weapons, which they kept concealed, in anticipation of the last day in January, when the law was to be voted upon by the people. Senators who were known to oppose the legislation were jeered at in the street and their houses stoned.
The man who organised this intimidation on behalf of the Beast with Three Heads was the tribune P. Vatinius, who was known as the ugliest man in Rome. He had contracted scrofula as a boy, and his face and neck were covered in pendulous purplish-blue lumps. His hair was sparse and his legs were rickety, so that he walked with his knees wide apart, as if he had just dismounted after a long ride, or had soiled himself. Curiously, he also had great charm, and did not care at all what anyone said about him: he would always cap an enemy's joke about his appearance with a funnier one of his own. Pompey's men were devoted to him, and so were the plebs. He called many public meetings in support of Caesar's law, and on one occasion summoned the consul Bibulus to be cross- examined on the tribunes' platform. Bibulus was bad-tempered at the best of times, and Vatinius, knowing this, got his followers to lash together some wooden benches and run a bridge from the tribunes' platform straight up to the
