For more than a week he relived his life, and at the end he had recovered something of his old self. ‘What an adventure it has been,’ he mused, stretching out on the couch. ‘It has all come back to me, the good and the bad, the noble and the base. I truly believe I can say, without being immodest, that these letters add up to the most complete record of an historical era ever assembled by a leading statesman. And what an era! No one else saw so much, and wrote about it while it was still fresh. This is history composed without any benefit of hindsight. Can you think of anything to compare with it?’
‘It will be of immense interest a thousand years from now,’ I said, trying to encourage his new good mood.
‘Oh, it’s more than merely of interest! It’s the case for my defence. I may have lost the past and lost the present, but I wonder if with this I might not yet win the future.’
Some of the letters showed him in a bad light – vain, duplicitous, greedy, wrong-headed – and I expected him to weed out the most egregious examples and order me to destroy them. But when I asked him which letters he wished me to discard, he replied, ‘We must keep them all. I can’t present myself to posterity as some improbable paragon – no one will believe it. If this archive is to have the necessary authenticity, I must stand before the muse of history as naked as a Greek statue. Let future generations mock me for my follies and pretensions however much they like – the important thing is that they will have to read me, and in that will lie my victory.’
Of all the sayings associated with Cicero, the most famous and characteristic is: ‘While there is life there is hope.’ He still had life – or the semblance of it, at least; and now he had the faintest gleam of hope.
Beginning that day, he concentrated what remained of his strength on the task of ensuring his papers survived. Atticus eventually agreed to help, on condition he was allowed to retrieve every letter he had ever written to Cicero. Cicero rather despised him for his caution but in the end agreed: ‘If he wants to be a mere shadow in history, that’s his lookout.’ With some reluctance I returned the correspondence I had carefully assembled over so many years and watched as Atticus lit a brazier and – not trusting the task to a servant – burnt with his own hand all the rolls on which his letters had been preserved. Then he put his scribes to work. Three complete sets of the collected letters were produced. Cicero kept one, Atticus another and I the third. I sent mine down to my farm along with locked boxes containing all my shorthand notes recording thousands of meetings, speeches, conversations, witticisms and barbed remarks, as well as the dictated drafts of his books. I told the overseer that it all should be hidden in one of the barns and that if anything happened to me he should give it to Agathe Licinia, the freedwoman who owned the baths of Venus Libertina at Baiae. Quite what she would do with it, I was not sure, but I sensed that I could trust her above all people in the world.
At the end of November, Cicero asked me if I would go back to Rome to make sure the last of his papers had been removed from his study, and to carry out a final general inspection. The house was being sold on his behalf by Atticus, and much of the furniture had already gone. It was the start of winter. The morning was chilly, the light gloomy. I wandered between the empty rooms as if I were an invisible spirit, and in my imagination I re-peopled them. I saw the tablinum once again filled with statesmen discussing the future of the republic, heard Tullia’s laughter in the dining room, saw Cicero bent over his books of philosophy in the library attempting to explain why fear of death was illogical … My eyes were blurred with tears; my heart ached.
Suddenly a dog began to howl – so loudly and frantically that my bittersweet fantasies vanished in an instant. I stopped to listen. Our old dog had gone. This had to be a neighbour’s. It was a most piteous wailing and it set off others. I went out on to the terrace. The sky was dark with swirls of starlings, and all across Rome dogs were howling like wolves. Indeed it was later said that at this very moment a wolf was seen darting across the Forum; that statues sweated blood and a newly born baby spoke. I heard the sound of running feet and looking down saw a group of men whooping with delight, racing towards the rostra and tossing to one another what I thought at first was a football but then realised was a human head. A woman started screaming in the street. Without thinking what I was doing I went out to see who it was and found the wife of our elderly neighbour, Caesetius Rufus, crawling on her knees in the gutter, while behind her the trunk of a corpse gushed blood from its neck across the threshold. Her steward, who I knew quite well, was running hopelessly to and fro. Panicking, I grabbed his arm and shook him until he told me what had happened – Octavian, Antony and Lepidus had joined forces and had published a list of hundreds of senators and equestrians who were to be killed and their fortunes seized. There was a bounty of a hundred thousand sesterces for each head that was brought to them. Both of the Cicero brothers were named on the list, and Atticus.
‘That cannot be true,’ I assured him. ‘We have a solemn promise.’
‘It’s true,’ he cried. ‘I’ve seen it.’
I ran back to the house, where the few remaining slaves were gathered, frightened, in the atrium. ‘Everyone must scatter,’ I told them. ‘If they catch us they will torture us to try to make us reveal the whereabouts of the master. If it comes to it, say he is in Puteoli.’ I scribbled out a message to Cicero: You and Quintus and Atticus are proscribed – Octavian has betrayed you – the death squads are looking for you – make at once for your house on the island – I will find you a boat. I gave it to the ostler and told him to take it by his fastest horse to Cicero in Tusculum. Then I went to the stables and found my carriage and driver and ordered him to set off for Astura.
Even as we clattered down the hill, gangs of men armed with knives and staves were running up on to the Palatine, where the richest human pickings would be found, and I banged my head against the side of the carriage in my anguish that Cicero hadn’t made good his escape from Italy while he had the chance.
I made that unfortunate driver whip his poor pair of horses until their flanks bled so that we could arrive in Astura before nightfall. We found the boatman in his hut, and even though the sea was beginning to get up and the light was dim, he rowed us the hundred yards over to the little island where Cicero’s villa stood secluded in the trees. It had not been visited by him for months, and the slaves were amazed to see me, and not a little resentful at having to light fires and heat the rooms. I lay down on my damp mattress and listened to the wind buffeting around the roof and rustling the trees. As the waves crashed against the rocky shore and the house creaked, I was full of terror, imagining that every sound might be the arrival of Cicero’s murderers. If I had brought that jar of hemlock, I almost think I might have taken it.
The next morning the weather was calmer, although when I walked through the trees and contemplated the huge expanse of grey sea with the lines of white waves running in to the shore, I felt utterly desolate. I wondered if this was a foolish plan and that we would do better to make directly for Brundisium, which at least was on the right side of Italy for a voyage east. But of course news of the proscriptions and the vast bounty for a severed head would race ahead of us, and nowhere would be safe. Cicero would never reach the harbour alive.
I sent my driver off in the direction of Tusculum with a second letter for Cicero, saying that I had arrived ‘on the island’ – I kept it vague in case the message fell into the wrong hands – and urging him to make all speed. Then I asked the boatman to go to Antium to see if he could charter a vessel to carry us down the coast. He looked at me as if I were mad to make such a request in winter, when the weather was so treacherous, but after some grumbling he went away, and came back the following day to say that he had procured a ten-oared boat with a sail that would be with us as soon as they could row the seven miles from Antium. After that there was really nothing I could do except wait.