Syria. He certainly wrote fulsomely to Cassius himself on these lines, as
Cassius left for home late in 51 after Bibulus had at last arrived: “I con-
gratulate you, both for the magnitude of what you achieved and for the
timeliness of your success. As you leave your province, its thanks and
plaudits speed you on your way.”8
But other versions circulated, too. Cicero was capable of claiming to
Atticus, fairly or not, that the real reason for the Parthian withdrawal
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had been his own advance into the Amanus and that the senate had been
suspicious of Cassius’ dispatches announcing his victory. In fact, the
whole story of a Parthian incursion into Syria became controversial, as
some rumors held that the invaders were not Parthians at all but Arabs
“in Parthian kit.” Caelius at one stage reports the idea (later to prove
unfounded) that Cassius had made it all up: “People were suspecting
Cassius of having invented the war so that his own depredations should
appear to be the result of enemy devastation—and of letting Arabs into
his province and reporting them to the senate as Parthians.”9
TRIUMPHAL AMBITIONS
In this climate of misinformation, it would have been hard to judge
whether any victory was worthy of a triumph. But this did not stop all
three of the provincial governors in the region from planning to claim
one—and perhaps it even encouraged them. We know almost nothing
of Appius Claudius’ military activity in Cilicia, but he returned to Rome
making no secret of his hopes. Despite Cicero’s awkward relations with
his predecessor and his low opinion of Appius’ government of the prov-
ince (“It is completely and permanently ruined”), he managed some po-
lite words to Appius himself on the prospect of his “certain and well-
deserved” triumphal celebration: “Although it is no more than my own
judgment of you . . . nevertheless I was extremely pleased with what
your letter had to say about your confident—indeed, assured—expecta-
tion of a triumph.” Only a casual aside about such a grant enhancing
Cicero’s own prospects of the honor is noticeably double-edged. In the
event, Appius was faced with a legal prosecution and gave up his ambi-
tion for a triumph in order to enter the city and fight the case.10
Bibulus too, once he had arrived in Syria, was rumored to be on the
hunt for triumphal honors and went with his army to the Amanus range
looking for an easy victory—or, as Cicero put it, “looking for a sprig of
laurel in a wedding cake” (laurel was one of the ingredients in Roman
wedding cake and, in that context, was presumably hard to miss). He
ended up, as Cicero gloats no less than he regrets, losing a large number
Playing by the Rules
191
of men. More fighting apparently followed in Syria, and it may be from
this conflict that Bibulus’ hopes of triumphal glory sprang. These hopes
were never realized, overtaken—it seems likely—by the outbreak of civil
war between Caesar and Pompey in 49 bce. But not before Cicero had
expressed his irritation with Bibulus’ ambitions and their (in his view)
ludicrous mismatch with the achievements on the ground: “So long as
there was a single Parthian in Syria he didn’t take a step outside the city
gates.” And not before their rivalry had spurred Cicero’s own triumphal
ambitions: “As for me, if it wasn’t for the fact that Bibulus was pressing
for a triumph . . . I would be quite easy about it.”11
Cicero’s pursuit of a triumph falls into two halves: first the campaign
for a supplicatio, a ceremony of thanksgiving to the gods voted by the
senate, which regularly preceded a triumph; then, once that vote was
achieved, the second round of campaigning, ultimately unsuccessful, for
another senatorial vote to award a triumph proper.12 His correspondence
documents the intense behind-the-scenes machinations; and in some
cases the surviving letters are the frontline weapons in Cicero’s bid for
triumphal glory, the very medium through which those machinations
were carried out. Given that, some favorite themes in modern discus-
sions of the ceremony are striking by their absence. There is no mention
at all of any formal rules or qualifications that governed the award of a
triumph, except the requirement to remain outside the city before the
ceremony. Instead, the letters immerse us in a world of delicate negotia-
tions that center round personal ambition and amour propre, bad faith,
pay-backs, and rivalry—or alternatively, depending on the correspon-
dent, deny (whether with philosophical hauteur or down-to-earth real-
ism) all but a passing interest in such a superficial honor as a triumph.
Cicero claims that he wrote to every member of the senate except for
two—one an inveterate enemy, the other the ex-husband of his daugh-
ter—to persuade them to vote for his supplicatio. 13 That would have
meant a total of around six hundred letters, which (even if many fol-
lowed a standard formula) must have amounted to several days’ work for
Cicero and his secretaries. Three of these letters survive. Two, probably
written within a few weeks of the fall of Pindenissum, were addressed to
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the consuls of 50, Gaius Claudius Marcellus and Lucius Aemilius
Paullus: “So I earnestly beg that you make sure that a decree is passed in
the most honorific terms possible concerning my achievements, and as
soon as possible too.”14 In neither of these did he restate what those
achievements were but referred back to the dispatch he had sent to the
senate. By contrast, his long begging letter to Marcus Porcius Cato
opens with pages of detail on the military operations.
Cato, whose probity in such matters often verged on curmudgeon,
was obviously thought to be a less easy target and, as Bibulus was his
son-in-law, he was likely to have received an alternative and no doubt
more dismissive account of Cicero’s victories. What Cicero offers here is
broadly compatible with the narrative he gives in other letters, but it is
expertly tailored to impress. He makes no jokes about Alexander the
Great (only a pointed reference to his camp being near a place known as
“Alexander’s Altars”), but he does insinuate that behind his none too in-
famous opponents lay the much more serious military threat of Parthia:
“They were harboring runaways and eagerly awaiting the arrival of the
Parthians.”
The rest of the letter uses various lines of persuasion to secure Cato’s
vote for a supplicatio. After trading on the history of their mutual admi-
ration (“I have not merely shown tacit admiration for your outstanding
qualities [for who doesn’t?]; I have extolled you publicly beyond any
man we have ever seen or even heard of.”), Cicero makes a parade of his
own vulnerability and his need for marks of esteem. In his early career,
he explains, he could afford to disdain such baubles, but since his period
in exile he has been understandably anxious for public honor, “to heal
the wound of the injustice against me.” He ends by meeting Cato’s
philosophical pretensions half-way, stressing how his military achieve-
ments were backed up by the highest principles in provincial govern-
ment. It was the case, after all, “that throughout history fewer men were
found who could conquer their own desires than could conquer the