fic: 'Simulacra', Rome, R
Title: Simulacra (2/10)
Fandom: Rome (HBO/BBC)
Rating: R
Pairing: Brutus/Cicero, Brutus/Cassius
Words: 5,500 / c. 50, 000
Disclaimer: Rome property Bruno Heller / BBC / HBO, etc.
A/N: HERE.
Prologue // 1: Good Omens // 2: On a Knife’s Edge // 3: The Die Is Cast // 4: Liberators // 5: Born Again // 6: Power and Freedom // 6a: Two Letters on the Subject of Antony // 7: The Bravery of a Nervous Man // 8: A Debt of Nature
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Additional notes for this chapter:
Buthrotum = Butrint, Albania
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Chapter 1
Boni Auspici
Medio de fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid, quod in ipsis floribus angat. - Full from the fount of joy’s delicious springs / Some bitter o’er the flowers the bubbling venom springs.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, IV 1129 ; Byron, Childe Harold, canto I, st. 82
a.d. ii Non. Iun. 47
Dawn had painted the sky with broad brushstrokes of oranges, pinks and purples, and the previous night’s moon was rapidly fading to a ghostly crescent behind a dissipating veil of summer mist. Thin sunlight began to dance across the peristyle roof of Titus Pomponius Atticus’ well appointed house and fell weakly onto the garden wall, scattered into droplets and prisms through the wide leaves of a fig tree, illuminating dappled sections of a mosaic of Heracles’ son Hylas cavorting with a blushing nymph. Beneath the tree sat Marcus Tullius Cicero, the chill of the early morning aggravating his rheumatism. He did not mind waiting; indeed, in his encroaching old age he had discovered much of the lassitude which had eluded him as a young man.
He picked a small, unripe fruit from the fig tree, peeled the skin from the pith and the pith from the flesh with little enthusiasm, and finally discarded the whole fruit uneaten in a nearby border of flowering hibiscus. Atticus and most of his household staff were still asleep, and Cicero had been attended on waking by a young slave, a boy of no more than twelve, whom he had dispatched over the crest of the Quirinal with a hastily scribbled letter to Brutus.
The letter gave him cause for concern. It was the ill-composition of the thing which bothered him above all else. It had been too early to wake Tiro, for in all conscience he knew he had been working his secretary too hard of late, and his health was not what it had been, but his own hand had trembled intolerably due to the early hour. He’d been unable to summon any of his usual stylistic tricks, had felt unmanned by his inability to command anaphora and ascending tricolon into cutting condemnation for Brutus’ indiscretions.
“No reply yet, I imagine?” he asked when the slave returned, and received the expected shaken head in response.
*
Across the wide expanse of the city, removed from the urban sprawl by a complex of tidy streets and high, stuccoed walls, Marcus Junius Brutus stood at an open window, warmed despite the lingering morning chill by tendrils of weak sunlight creeping over the windowsill. There was saffron in the air, bitter and deep and reminiscent of the scent and taste of a woman’s body. Brutus leaned his head against the window frame and breathed deeply. Behind him, long, pale limbs arched and stretched against the bed linen. He simply frowned, one hand curled around the letter from Cicero; it was this which commanded his attention as he watched day dawn over the brow of the Quirinal hill.
“Must I summon one of your slaves to have you brought back to bed,” came a drowsy, arch enquiry from the depths of the pillows, “or will you come voluntarily?”
He turned sharply and spared the barest of smiles for his erstwhile companion. She sprawled and stretched before him, a picture of artful debauchery, pigmented hair tumbling over the pillows, her skin milky and unblemished by the previous night’s exertions. Had he lain with his wife in such a manner, he should have felt obliged to find excuses for his roughness, but this woman expected no apologies. She was, as Cicero had in his unusually brusque letter been at pains to point out, a veteran in the art of rough fucking.
“I’m afraid not, Volumnia.” He tucked the scroll into the folds of his tunic and bent to retrieve his senatorial ring from the floor, where it has been discarded carelessly the previous night. “I have business to attend to.”
She smiled coyly and lay back against the pillows. “Important men like you always do.”
Brutus had no need of so artless a reminder where her affections had previously lain, certainly not now that he had had time to carefully explore and reject his own fleeting desires. It had not escaped his notice that this woman viewed her dalliance with him as a way to clamber back onto the dining couch of high society from which she had so very nearly been cast. He felt contempt for her, and for himself, that he should have allowed drink and unaccustomed lust to overwhelm his better judgement yet again, that he should have permitted petty arguments with female relations - there was a plague of them, these days, and counter-balancing their individual agendas was a rough task at the best of times - to goad him into courting and bedding a woman such as this.
There was nevertheless some criticism he would accept only from a select few trusted friends; the fact that Cicero’s letter was nestled inside the folds of his toga and not in pieces upon the floor was testament to that.
On his way out of the room he instructed the slaves to help Volumnia dress. He paused in the doorway and offered her a cool, detached smile.
“I doubt I will find time to entertain you here again.”
To her credit she made no protest that their month-long dalliance should be cut short and would be gone by the time he returned.
*
Brutus strode into Atticus’ garden a little later trailed by his newly-woken host and a bevy of attendant slaves. Cicero got immediately to his feet, betraying his anxiety and reassuring Brutus that there was not, after all, to be any need for a great and unbearable argument. He nodded in greeting and took the seat offered to him by Atticus’ anxious wife.
“Cicero,” he said, cordially enough, his hand coming to rest on the cast-iron table beside his chair. “I received your letter.”
Cicero executed one of the smiles he wore when unsure of the auspices. He was a consummate actor, but Brutus had seen him wear that expression a thousand times and was steadfastly unfooled. “You flatter me to call it that; I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Actually, you didn’t.”
Brutus relaxed, smiling not without fondness or affection because, now that he was there, he almost found it impossible to remember the cause of their disagreement.
Cicero was visibly pleased, reassured by the habitual ease of their conversation. He sat, brushing imaginary dust from his toga, and turned to address their host, whose wife was still hovering at Brutus’ elbow. “Atticus, may I trouble you for refreshments? This matter is a little sensitive, and would best be dealt with over wine.”
Atticus nodded graciously and gestured to the slave. “Wine,” he instructed, “and bring bread and oil.”
“Thank you.” Cicero resumed his seat. “I trust you don’t mind giving us the use of your garden?”
“Of course not,” Atticus assured him, smiling broadly, the very picture of the attentive host. He gestured for the slaves to return to the house. “Call for Hypaxos, should you require anything else. Good to see you, Brutus,” he added, inclining his head and retreating beyond the portico and into the atrium.
Cicero waited until they were alone to turn to Brutus directly, as did Brutus to remove the folded letter from the inside of his toga. A slave hurried forth from the house and placed bread and oil in terracotta dishes on the table, impeding the conversation before it had had a chance to begin. Cicero made a quiet sound of impatience as the slave fussed, mixing wine and water.
“Wine, domine?”
Brutus nodded and allowed the slave to fill his cup almost entirely before holding up his hand.
“It’s a little early,” Cicero said, declining the second cup with a shake of his head. “I’ll take some honeyed water.”
Brutus took a swift, impetuous swig from his own cup and then set it down heavily on the table. Cicero raised an eyebrow at the empty gesture and wondered whether Brutus was truly so tired of being hounded by his mother that he would seize the smallest opportunity to assert his authority, even over the consumption of his wine.
Eventually the slave retreated into the house, leaving the wine jug on the table, and Cicero rose from his seat beneath the fig tree to join Brutus in the small patch of sunlight creeping across the courtyard’s tiled floor.
“I must apologise,” he said immediately, “for the ugly composition of my note. The language was almost as vulgar as the subject matter; forgive me.”
“A less well-dispositioned man might have taken offence,” Brutus replied with a smile. The sun on his face had warmed away any prospect of cold resentment and he felt content to weather any great speech Cicero might have composed for his benefit. “Fortunately, when I woke up this morning I was feeling quite cheerful.”
“Fortuitous,” Cicero agreed, “though I’d prefer not to consider why.”
“Now, now, Cicero. That wasn’t the reason.”
“Well, thank heavens,” Cicero replied acidly, with an arch of his eyebrow, “that today is not the day a mere dancing girl turns the head of noble Brutus.”
Brutus set down his cup, smile fading a little. “Steady on, Cicero, there’s no need for sarcasm.”
“‘Steady on’, you say, as though I were questioning the virtue of a Vestal virgin.” Cicero got to his feet in agitation. “I returned from the country to reports of your having taken up with that woman, that pantomime actress, who has taken every opportunity to transgress the bounds of decency, and flaunts her decrepitude in public at every turn entirely without conscience, and you ask me to ‘steady on’...” He clicked his tongue behind his teeth in irritation, reminding Brutus incongruously of his mother’s slave scolding the kitchen girls. “She’s been no friend to either of us, in the past. Nor has she been a friend, it ought to be said, to either of our wives.”
“I wasn’t aware my private affairs had become significant enough to garner such esteemed interest,” Brutus commented mildly, though Cicero could detect an edge of determination to his voice; that quiet indignation which may be recognised as the mark of a principled man forced to face the evidence of his less-than-principled behaviour.
“Were they of no consequence, then I’m sure they would have remained private. But the fact that that woman was Antony’s concubine and, until a small number of months ago, touting herself about the city as though she were the very queen of Sheba - that makes the affair extremely consequential indeed.”
Brutus made a determined study of his cup, chastened as Cicero had known he would be. “Forgive me, Cicero, but the affair is now over, I fail to see how it can be of any further consequence - ”
“And forgive me, Brutus, but need I remind you yet again on exactly whose leavings it was you slipped in?” Cicero demanded, echoing the vulgar sentiments of his letter, which lay on the table by the curled fingers of Brutus’ left hand. He softened his voice and attempted a tone of concerned sincerity. “Would you have us beset by a second Sempronia, and make Antony your Catilina?”
“Antony, another Catilina!” Brutus laughed in incredulity. “The man hasn’t the intelligence for that, and certainly not the subtlety.”
Cicero frowned at Brutus’ making light of the suggestion, apparently entirely serious. "You forget, I think, that if the siege in Egypt should continue indefinitely, we are in the unenviable position of having to abide by Antony's every whim."
"I thought your disapprobation was for my affair with Antony's mistress, not Caesar's campaign in Egypt."
"I think you'll find the issues are not entirely unconnected. Admittedly, my concern for your recent indiscretions has been that of one friend for another and motivated by my distaste for - forgive me - shabby behaviour of any kind. Meanwhile, Caesar...” Cicero sighed and felt, not for the first time, the full weight and consequence of their capitulation all those years ago in Greece. “Antony is ambitious. He'll not wait too long before seeking greater power."
"I think you misjudge him, you know,” Brutus said, frowning thoughtfully. “Antony may be a brute and a rabble-rouser, but he’ll remain loyal to his chosen master till the end.” He raised an eyebrow at Cicero over the rim of his cup. “Which is more than can be said for either of us."
Cicero ignored the last comment on their past inconstancies and looked faintly surprised, as though Brutus had alighted on something which had not previously occurred to him. He did not often like to be outdone in these things. "You think Antony will settle for constitutional power, for such a man as Caesar?"
“For Caesar?” Brutus considered it carefully for a moment. "For Caesar, yes, I think he will."
Cicero nodded and, if he had further reservations, he kept them to himself. The subject had been breached, discussed and dealt with, and he saw no reason to provoke a more heated argument. As always, he felt faintly pleased by Brutus’ willingness to accept perceived criticism, and gratified to be in a position of such trust that he was able to offer advice and have it evenly heard.
The conversation turned to the matter of Cicero’s ill-favoured son-in-law’s attempts to seek cancelation of his debts, and the sun had nearly completed its journey to the summit of the fig tree before Cicero remembered his unfulfilled desire for a cup of honeyed water and called impatiently for the slave.
***
a.d. ii. Id. Mai. 46: One Year Later
Titus Pomponius Atticus was Cicero’s oldest friend, his constant correspondent since they were schooled together in Greece. In spite of his prodigious wealth, and his occasional forays into literature - a history of Cicero’s consulship, and what he liked to call ‘a smattering of poetry’ - Atticus’ life remained mainly one of absolute leisure. He refrained from politics, in as much as any Roman could, and did not take up the place that might have been found for him in the senate. He had married late in life to a distant cousin named Caecilia Pilea and subsequently had a son and a daughter, on whom he doted in a manner even Cicero found quite excessive. In Atticus’ household only two tenets governed daily life: ‘respect your mother, for she always knows best’, and ‘seek pleasure through delighting in the company of friends’. To this end, Atticus sought often to throw parties for his friends and their associates, in pursuit of the pleasure of good food and conversation.
Atticus’ dinner parties were nevertheless few and far between these days; time spent overseas, in Athens or at his villa in Buthrotum, meant he was only ever in Rome for a small part of the season at a time. He liked to hold symposia during the spring, after the worst of the rains had passed, but before the cloying evening humidity of the summer had had a chance to settle across the city’s better neighbourhoods. An early May evening, in his opinion, was the optimal setting for just such an occasion, and so prior to the festival of Vinalia the cubiculum had undergone its annual refurbishment and redecoration. Then, a week before the day of the dinner, his greatest friends had been sent for by formal invitation and had, one by one, arrived early on the appointed evening jocular and buoyed to a man by the promise of another of Atticus’ splendid dinner parties.
The young Gallus, a promising poet and orator by day, but a puerile twenty five year-old gossip under cover of darkness and the encouragement of wine, was currently holding forth loudly on the subject of Caesar’s continuing sojourn in Egypt. Leaning precariously over the precipice of his couch, he was in the act of raising a knowing finger in the relation of another anecdote.
"They say Cleopatra is carrying Caesar's child, and that if it is a boy he will be crowned Prince of Egypt,” he said clumsily, his elbow slipping off the couch with a jolt which very nearly slopped wine down the front of his toga.
"And much good it will do him,” Cicero opined dryly, from the place of honour - the summus in medio - on the left side of the central lectus, “if his kingdom is to extend from one wall of Alexandria to the other.”
Brutus meanwhile, reclining to the right of their host, found himself wishing that Atticus would water his wine a little better before these soirees, and was reflecting that his mother would be absolutely, satisfyingly horrified to bear witness to the sort of company he was keeping.
"I find it surprising that Caesar ought to have mated with Cleopatra in the first place,” Gallus mused thoughtfully, throwing a swift glance in Brutus’ direction. “He always seems to have preferred women of a distinctly patrician hue.”
“I have to say I'd have thought she’d be more to Antony's taste," Atticus agreed, cup suspended lazily in the Greek fashion between the fingers of one hand. “But then if the old stories about his dalliances with Nicomedes are to be believed, it should come as no surprise that Caesar has a taste for the exotic.”
“Oh, come, Atticus,” Cicero interrupted, “let us not pretend that Caesar’s sudden desire for the queen of Egypt is motivated by anything more than his lust for a throne. He realises he cannot get his hands on one in Rome, so he has found a tempting substitute in Alexandria.”
Gallus snorted into his wine. “He’s a cold fish, that’s for sure; it won’t be passion that’s set him onto her. He’d better not let her alone with Antony, or he’ll have her on her back before the introductions have been made.”
"You know,” chipped the recumbent Metellus, rousing himself from well-fed torpor with difficulty and red in the face from his efforts with the roasted capons, “It strikes me that Brutus hasn’t said much at all on the subject, yet he seems to understand Antony’s tastes far better than most these days."
An uncomfortable silence fell as Brutus looked up from his wine and absorbed the somewhat clumsy effort at jovial banter. His dalliance with Volumnia had not, despite Cicero’s dire warnings, been the making of another Sempronia, but it had become an embarrassing millstone around his neck, one which he had begun to hope had been put to bed and forgotten altogether. Metellus looked rather surprised by his own ill manners, but there was nothing Brutus would have liked less than an even clumsier apology, and tension hung in the air for some moments, like an unwelcome guest, suddenly arrived.
Cicero adroitly disrupted the uneasy silence, and directed a withering look in the unfortunate Metellus’ direction. "When you have broadened your own tastes beyond strapping Gallic adolescents, Metellus, then perhaps we will seek your opinion."
The comment was greeted by hearty laughter, not least from red-faced Metellus, and Brutus was grateful to Cicero for the intercession, pleased for at least the second time that night that Cicero had been awarded the summus in medio, and authority over the direction of the conversation.
Atticus was also quick, as their host, to raise his cup to Brutus in apology. “Let us turn to other matters,” he directed with typical Athenian delicacy.
“The elections?” suggested Gallus, hopefully.
“Oh, for the days when a dinner party could simply be allowed to be a dinner party,” Cicero commented, provoking more laughter.
Brutus smiled and looked into the depths of his wine cup, wondering where the slave bearing Atticus’ fine Etruscan krater might have got to. “Must every aspect of life these days still be dictated by politics?” he echoed privately, a murmured aside to his host.
“But, these days, what else is there?” Atticus countered quietly with a wry smile, and Brutus was forced to concede defeat.
He would reflect later on the accuracy of Atticus’ observation. He would also think how unfair it was that, even in being proved right about Antony’s enduring loyalty to Caesar, he should have to suffer bearing witness to the evidence of his veracity concerning the other traits of Antony’s character.
He was unable to do anything to prevent it, when he and Cicero were cornered guiltily on the steps of the senate chamber some weeks later, in part due to the necessity of maintaining the façade of wary cordiality towards a man they both found to be utterly repellent. Nevertheless, he felt the prick of his conscience at not resisting Antony’s attempts to assert his supremacy via gratuitous cruelty, when the latter took Cicero’s hands between his own and sought to crush the very bones of him as a warning against future transgressions. As soon as Antony had exited the chamber, Brutus helped Cicero to his feet, offering a firm hand on his shoulder as a gesture of solidarity, and making no reference at all to the visible tremor in Cicero’s injured fingers.
*
Young Gallus was absent from all the rest of Atticus’ parties for that season on account of an all-consuming passion, the object of which he liked to think remained a secret when in fact every senator in the city knew he had been writing florid odes to the dubious glories of Volumnia Eutrapela.
“You haven’t thought to sanction Gallus for his hideous indiscretion,” Brutus pointed out a little too loudly, not long into a dinner during which he was seated next to Cicero, on the same couch as their host.
“So much the better if the delectable Volumnia keeps herself busy with a man of Gallus’ low standing, eh, Cicero?”
Cicero flashed Metellus a look of mild irritation, “Just as you so succinctly put it.”
“Poor Gallus, with his poet’s soul,” said Atticus, laughing. “He thought himself terribly clever, calling her his Lycoris - as though nobody would work it out! He trails round the city after her like a pup, wagging his tail if she deigns to mete out the slightest bit of affection.”
He and Metellus sank into a ribald discussion of Gallus’ poetry, culminating in a mock dramatic reading from his latest set of florid verses.
Cicero, already weary of the conversation and the company, glanced at Brutus beside him, who was leaning on one arm with his head drooping nearly onto Cicero’s shoulder and dangling his wine cup at a dangerous angle off the side of the lectus. He had seemed distracted since the beginning of the evening and had been drinking Atticus’ wine as though it were water. Cicero had watched him with quiet concern and wondered, given Brutus’ father’s temperate character, who it was had given him his wilful, immoderate streak.
“Do try not to fall asleep,” he murmured as Brutus’ elbow slipped and he nearly sent wine cascading onto Atticus’ floor.
“Sorry, Cicero,” he mumbled, righting himself with difficulty. “I’d nearly dozed off, there.”
Come the end of the evening, Metellus had done just that and was snoring gently with his head cushioned on his fleshy arm. The rest of the party was deep in earnest conversation, and when Cicero peered into his cup to realise it was empty he took it as his cue to leave.
“Atticus, my friend,” he said, “I fear it’s time for me to make my weary way home.”
Atticus looked regretful as Cicero got to his feet, but knew better than to try to dissuade him. “Oh, well then, I suppose I shall have to let you go.”
Cicero gratefully said his farewells to the other guests and Atticus accompanied him to the atrium, summoning the lictors and making Cicero promise to pass on his best wishes to Tiro.
Brutus chose that moment to rouse himself from morose introspection and join them.
“I think I ought to be leaving too, Atticus,” he announced in the general direction of the front door. He was swaying and Cicero winced in sympathy, thinking of the sore head he’d be suffering come the morning and his mother’s inevitable disapproval.
“Of course.” Atticus shot Cicero a look communicating shared concerns. “Perhaps you’d be so good as to accompany Cicero as far as the Palatine?”
Cicero had been intending to retire to the house on the Argiletum that evening, given that Terentia would be at home on the Palatine and he was in no mood for an argument, nor for taking breakfast in frosty silence while his wife sniffed and huffed and glared at him for every breath he breathed. Nevertheless, he took a pitying look at Brutus, who looked fit to fall where he stood, and nodded his agreement.
When they had said their farewells to Atticus and emerged into the street, Cicero paused to adjust his attire, pulling his cloak tighter about himself. Around them, along the façade of Atticus’ house, torches burned in braces on the wall and two potted bay trees framed the doorway, clipped into the shape of perfect globes - to remind his Roman visitors that they did not have command of the entire world, at least just yet, Atticus frequently joked. Beside the trees stood a pair of low benches to allow the mounting of horses.
“At least I refrained from writing poetry,” Brutus murmured suddenly, apropos of nothing, and it took Cicero a leap of logic to conclude that he was referring to Gallus’ dalliance with Volumnia.
“For that we can both be very grateful,” he agreed, thinking what a disaster it would have been if Brutus had ever thought himself in love with the dreadful woman.
Brutus seemed unsteady on his feet; certainly he was standing a good deal nearer than propriety would demand. He put out a hand to steady himself and Cicero grasped his arm, alarmed, only to find that Brutus sagged against him, muttering apologies and self-recriminations.
“I’m sorry Cicero, Atticus never properly waters his wine - ”
“And yet most of us will manage to find our way home unaided,” Cicero chided tartly. He gestured to the door slave, who hurried inside to send word to fetch Atticus’ litter-bearers. “Here, Brutus, sit.”
Brutus sank heavily onto the bench. “Forgive me, Cicero, forgive me.”
Cicero thought to make a clever remark regarding the nature of forgiveness, but settled for resting a hand on Brutus’ shoulder and assuring him that he needn’t ask as it was already given.
***
a.d. iii Id. Nov. 46
“How are your hands?” Brutus remembered to ask when he met Cicero outside the Curia months later. He knew that both of them, through private audience with Caesar, had separately been made aware of what would be expected of them today, when Antony would propose to elect Caesar sole consul for another unprecedented term. He hoped that Cicero might reply lightly and with humour, to dispel the deadening sense of absolute political impotence.
"Apart from a week's inability to hold a quill, and worsened rheumatism come the next spell of wet weather, Antony has left me surprisingly unafflicted, considering how soft and pink we politicians' hands are,” Cicero replied with a wry grimace. Brutus felt vaguely disappointed, but nodded and began to adjust the folds of his toga to calm his failing nerves.
Cicero, for his part, thought for a moment that Brutus intended to take the injured hands between his own, and shifted foolishly, nonplussed by the unaccustomed gesture of intimacy and dismayed by the quickening excitement he had felt in anticipation of it. It was troubling to suffer such adolescent lapses of judgement where Brutus was concerned, nothing but a recipe for ridicule and humiliation in the long run. Clearing his throat as he realised his mistake, he turned his attention to the open doors of the senate chamber.
"Are you ready to get on with this sordid business?" he asked. Brutus nodded and they processed beneath the portico, prepared to support the motion that would, Cicero felt sure, seal the fate of the republic once and for all.
*
Later that afternoon, Cicero cradled his injured hand against his chest and tried to ease
he incipient rheumatism in his knuckles - a habit, as it had become, in moments of tension. The fragments of an expensive Greek lamp lay at his feet, and his wife stood staring at him wide-eyed on the opposite side of the room, trembling and sagging in the wake of a bout of familiar incandescent rage.
He raised his eyes from the mess of oil and broken pottery and lifted a hand to wipe imaginary creases from his tunic. Was it not enough, he wondered, that his wife regarded him with disdain each time they suffered to be in one another’s company, without the added ignominy of her very public displays of hostility towards Caesar and his associates? He may not be master of his own destiny, but by the gods, he had tried to be master in his own home. Turning on his heel, he made to leave the tablinium the way he had come some fraught minutes earlier.
“How dare you turn your back on me!” Terentia cried, scrabbling, no doubt, for more crockery to throw.
Cicero sighed deeply and turned back to her with his hands spread in a gesture of weary surrender. “Terentia, I have listened to your complaints and withstood your interminable dissatisfaction at our lot in life for longer than any reasonable man might be expected to bear. I have no desire to become violent, but I fear I might not be able to contain myself, if I am subjected to your incessant shrewishness any longer.”
“If I am a shrew, it is because you drive me to it!”
Cicero threw up his hands in exasperation. “How could I possibly drive you to anything, you ridiculous woman? I have given you your own house in the country to allow you your freedom, you are never here for me to - ”
“You have given me nothing which was not bought with my own money!”
As soon as the words had tumbled from her mouth, Terentia clapped her hands to her face in horror, and Cicero’s expression began to turn cold as her words hung in the air between them, heavy with the weight of years of unspoken resentment. He had known of Terentia’s latent distaste for his borrowing her family’s money in the early days of their marriage, and her hatred of having in recent years to sell jewellery to settle household debts, but had never thought she would dare to fling it at him like a weapon, even in one of her frequent fits of passion. Terentia, meanwhile, had begun once more to tremble, and cowered away from the heavy disdain in the words which Cicero next spoke.
“The day has long since passed when I relied on your money to finance my advancement, Terentia, and your personality, such as it has become these days, offers little else in the way of encouragement to maintain a marriage.”
Terentia laughed nervously. “You think threats of divorce will chasten me? I have ten times the pride and one hundred times the dignity!”
“Then let your pride and your dignity keep you happy,” Cicero sighed, too tired to struggle any longer against the tide of her disappointment, “as I am clearly no longer able.”
It was an unimpressive end to what had once been the most efficient and useful of marriages. As Cicero walked away he allowed Tiro to place a thick cloak around his shoulders, and they swept out into the damp early evening. They returned to the old house on the Argiletum and Cicero quietly instructed Tiro to begin to draft a divorce contract, allowing Terentia all the money she had leant to his political career in its infancy, along with significant interest.
The following Spring, when a letter arrived from the secretary of his daughter’s former husband, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, informing him of his beloved Tullia’s death following the birth of her second son, Terentia had long since departed for the Bay of Neapolis and set up her household at a villa in Misenum. With Atticus at his Illyrian villa, it seemed there was no one left in Rome but Tiro to comfort Cicero in his grief.
*
M. Junius Brutus, M. Tullius Cicero S.D.
Cicero, allow me to express my deepest sadness at the news of the death of your daughter. You spoke to me of Tullia many years ago in Greece, after which I had the privilege of meeting her a number of times, on each of which occasion I was struck by the intelligence of her conversation and the uncanny perspicacity of her political insight. She seemed, as the common saying goes, a fig fallen not far from the tree. I am unable to comprehend the depth of your loss, and wish there were some small comfort my words could bring you in your distress. I beg you to remember me your friend, as always.
Roma. a.d. vi Id. Mar. 45
*
Continued: Chapter 2
***
Fandom: Rome (HBO/BBC)
Rating: R
Pairing: Brutus/Cicero, Brutus/Cassius
Words: 5,500 / c. 50, 000
Disclaimer: Rome property Bruno Heller / BBC / HBO, etc.
A/N: HERE.
Prologue // 1: Good Omens // 2: On a Knife’s Edge // 3: The Die Is Cast // 4: Liberators // 5: Born Again // 6: Power and Freedom // 6a: Two Letters on the Subject of Antony // 7: The Bravery of a Nervous Man // 8: A Debt of Nature
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Additional notes for this chapter:
Buthrotum = Butrint, Albania
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Chapter 1
Boni Auspici
Medio de fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid, quod in ipsis floribus angat. - Full from the fount of joy’s delicious springs / Some bitter o’er the flowers the bubbling venom springs.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, IV 1129 ; Byron, Childe Harold, canto I, st. 82
a.d. ii Non. Iun. 47
Dawn had painted the sky with broad brushstrokes of oranges, pinks and purples, and the previous night’s moon was rapidly fading to a ghostly crescent behind a dissipating veil of summer mist. Thin sunlight began to dance across the peristyle roof of Titus Pomponius Atticus’ well appointed house and fell weakly onto the garden wall, scattered into droplets and prisms through the wide leaves of a fig tree, illuminating dappled sections of a mosaic of Heracles’ son Hylas cavorting with a blushing nymph. Beneath the tree sat Marcus Tullius Cicero, the chill of the early morning aggravating his rheumatism. He did not mind waiting; indeed, in his encroaching old age he had discovered much of the lassitude which had eluded him as a young man.
He picked a small, unripe fruit from the fig tree, peeled the skin from the pith and the pith from the flesh with little enthusiasm, and finally discarded the whole fruit uneaten in a nearby border of flowering hibiscus. Atticus and most of his household staff were still asleep, and Cicero had been attended on waking by a young slave, a boy of no more than twelve, whom he had dispatched over the crest of the Quirinal with a hastily scribbled letter to Brutus.
The letter gave him cause for concern. It was the ill-composition of the thing which bothered him above all else. It had been too early to wake Tiro, for in all conscience he knew he had been working his secretary too hard of late, and his health was not what it had been, but his own hand had trembled intolerably due to the early hour. He’d been unable to summon any of his usual stylistic tricks, had felt unmanned by his inability to command anaphora and ascending tricolon into cutting condemnation for Brutus’ indiscretions.
“No reply yet, I imagine?” he asked when the slave returned, and received the expected shaken head in response.
*
Across the wide expanse of the city, removed from the urban sprawl by a complex of tidy streets and high, stuccoed walls, Marcus Junius Brutus stood at an open window, warmed despite the lingering morning chill by tendrils of weak sunlight creeping over the windowsill. There was saffron in the air, bitter and deep and reminiscent of the scent and taste of a woman’s body. Brutus leaned his head against the window frame and breathed deeply. Behind him, long, pale limbs arched and stretched against the bed linen. He simply frowned, one hand curled around the letter from Cicero; it was this which commanded his attention as he watched day dawn over the brow of the Quirinal hill.
“Must I summon one of your slaves to have you brought back to bed,” came a drowsy, arch enquiry from the depths of the pillows, “or will you come voluntarily?”
He turned sharply and spared the barest of smiles for his erstwhile companion. She sprawled and stretched before him, a picture of artful debauchery, pigmented hair tumbling over the pillows, her skin milky and unblemished by the previous night’s exertions. Had he lain with his wife in such a manner, he should have felt obliged to find excuses for his roughness, but this woman expected no apologies. She was, as Cicero had in his unusually brusque letter been at pains to point out, a veteran in the art of rough fucking.
“I’m afraid not, Volumnia.” He tucked the scroll into the folds of his tunic and bent to retrieve his senatorial ring from the floor, where it has been discarded carelessly the previous night. “I have business to attend to.”
She smiled coyly and lay back against the pillows. “Important men like you always do.”
Brutus had no need of so artless a reminder where her affections had previously lain, certainly not now that he had had time to carefully explore and reject his own fleeting desires. It had not escaped his notice that this woman viewed her dalliance with him as a way to clamber back onto the dining couch of high society from which she had so very nearly been cast. He felt contempt for her, and for himself, that he should have allowed drink and unaccustomed lust to overwhelm his better judgement yet again, that he should have permitted petty arguments with female relations - there was a plague of them, these days, and counter-balancing their individual agendas was a rough task at the best of times - to goad him into courting and bedding a woman such as this.
There was nevertheless some criticism he would accept only from a select few trusted friends; the fact that Cicero’s letter was nestled inside the folds of his toga and not in pieces upon the floor was testament to that.
On his way out of the room he instructed the slaves to help Volumnia dress. He paused in the doorway and offered her a cool, detached smile.
“I doubt I will find time to entertain you here again.”
To her credit she made no protest that their month-long dalliance should be cut short and would be gone by the time he returned.
*
Brutus strode into Atticus’ garden a little later trailed by his newly-woken host and a bevy of attendant slaves. Cicero got immediately to his feet, betraying his anxiety and reassuring Brutus that there was not, after all, to be any need for a great and unbearable argument. He nodded in greeting and took the seat offered to him by Atticus’ anxious wife.
“Cicero,” he said, cordially enough, his hand coming to rest on the cast-iron table beside his chair. “I received your letter.”
Cicero executed one of the smiles he wore when unsure of the auspices. He was a consummate actor, but Brutus had seen him wear that expression a thousand times and was steadfastly unfooled. “You flatter me to call it that; I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Actually, you didn’t.”
Brutus relaxed, smiling not without fondness or affection because, now that he was there, he almost found it impossible to remember the cause of their disagreement.
Cicero was visibly pleased, reassured by the habitual ease of their conversation. He sat, brushing imaginary dust from his toga, and turned to address their host, whose wife was still hovering at Brutus’ elbow. “Atticus, may I trouble you for refreshments? This matter is a little sensitive, and would best be dealt with over wine.”
Atticus nodded graciously and gestured to the slave. “Wine,” he instructed, “and bring bread and oil.”
“Thank you.” Cicero resumed his seat. “I trust you don’t mind giving us the use of your garden?”
“Of course not,” Atticus assured him, smiling broadly, the very picture of the attentive host. He gestured for the slaves to return to the house. “Call for Hypaxos, should you require anything else. Good to see you, Brutus,” he added, inclining his head and retreating beyond the portico and into the atrium.
Cicero waited until they were alone to turn to Brutus directly, as did Brutus to remove the folded letter from the inside of his toga. A slave hurried forth from the house and placed bread and oil in terracotta dishes on the table, impeding the conversation before it had had a chance to begin. Cicero made a quiet sound of impatience as the slave fussed, mixing wine and water.
“Wine, domine?”
Brutus nodded and allowed the slave to fill his cup almost entirely before holding up his hand.
“It’s a little early,” Cicero said, declining the second cup with a shake of his head. “I’ll take some honeyed water.”
Brutus took a swift, impetuous swig from his own cup and then set it down heavily on the table. Cicero raised an eyebrow at the empty gesture and wondered whether Brutus was truly so tired of being hounded by his mother that he would seize the smallest opportunity to assert his authority, even over the consumption of his wine.
Eventually the slave retreated into the house, leaving the wine jug on the table, and Cicero rose from his seat beneath the fig tree to join Brutus in the small patch of sunlight creeping across the courtyard’s tiled floor.
“I must apologise,” he said immediately, “for the ugly composition of my note. The language was almost as vulgar as the subject matter; forgive me.”
“A less well-dispositioned man might have taken offence,” Brutus replied with a smile. The sun on his face had warmed away any prospect of cold resentment and he felt content to weather any great speech Cicero might have composed for his benefit. “Fortunately, when I woke up this morning I was feeling quite cheerful.”
“Fortuitous,” Cicero agreed, “though I’d prefer not to consider why.”
“Now, now, Cicero. That wasn’t the reason.”
“Well, thank heavens,” Cicero replied acidly, with an arch of his eyebrow, “that today is not the day a mere dancing girl turns the head of noble Brutus.”
Brutus set down his cup, smile fading a little. “Steady on, Cicero, there’s no need for sarcasm.”
“‘Steady on’, you say, as though I were questioning the virtue of a Vestal virgin.” Cicero got to his feet in agitation. “I returned from the country to reports of your having taken up with that woman, that pantomime actress, who has taken every opportunity to transgress the bounds of decency, and flaunts her decrepitude in public at every turn entirely without conscience, and you ask me to ‘steady on’...” He clicked his tongue behind his teeth in irritation, reminding Brutus incongruously of his mother’s slave scolding the kitchen girls. “She’s been no friend to either of us, in the past. Nor has she been a friend, it ought to be said, to either of our wives.”
“I wasn’t aware my private affairs had become significant enough to garner such esteemed interest,” Brutus commented mildly, though Cicero could detect an edge of determination to his voice; that quiet indignation which may be recognised as the mark of a principled man forced to face the evidence of his less-than-principled behaviour.
“Were they of no consequence, then I’m sure they would have remained private. But the fact that that woman was Antony’s concubine and, until a small number of months ago, touting herself about the city as though she were the very queen of Sheba - that makes the affair extremely consequential indeed.”
Brutus made a determined study of his cup, chastened as Cicero had known he would be. “Forgive me, Cicero, but the affair is now over, I fail to see how it can be of any further consequence - ”
“And forgive me, Brutus, but need I remind you yet again on exactly whose leavings it was you slipped in?” Cicero demanded, echoing the vulgar sentiments of his letter, which lay on the table by the curled fingers of Brutus’ left hand. He softened his voice and attempted a tone of concerned sincerity. “Would you have us beset by a second Sempronia, and make Antony your Catilina?”
“Antony, another Catilina!” Brutus laughed in incredulity. “The man hasn’t the intelligence for that, and certainly not the subtlety.”
Cicero frowned at Brutus’ making light of the suggestion, apparently entirely serious. "You forget, I think, that if the siege in Egypt should continue indefinitely, we are in the unenviable position of having to abide by Antony's every whim."
"I thought your disapprobation was for my affair with Antony's mistress, not Caesar's campaign in Egypt."
"I think you'll find the issues are not entirely unconnected. Admittedly, my concern for your recent indiscretions has been that of one friend for another and motivated by my distaste for - forgive me - shabby behaviour of any kind. Meanwhile, Caesar...” Cicero sighed and felt, not for the first time, the full weight and consequence of their capitulation all those years ago in Greece. “Antony is ambitious. He'll not wait too long before seeking greater power."
"I think you misjudge him, you know,” Brutus said, frowning thoughtfully. “Antony may be a brute and a rabble-rouser, but he’ll remain loyal to his chosen master till the end.” He raised an eyebrow at Cicero over the rim of his cup. “Which is more than can be said for either of us."
Cicero ignored the last comment on their past inconstancies and looked faintly surprised, as though Brutus had alighted on something which had not previously occurred to him. He did not often like to be outdone in these things. "You think Antony will settle for constitutional power, for such a man as Caesar?"
“For Caesar?” Brutus considered it carefully for a moment. "For Caesar, yes, I think he will."
Cicero nodded and, if he had further reservations, he kept them to himself. The subject had been breached, discussed and dealt with, and he saw no reason to provoke a more heated argument. As always, he felt faintly pleased by Brutus’ willingness to accept perceived criticism, and gratified to be in a position of such trust that he was able to offer advice and have it evenly heard.
The conversation turned to the matter of Cicero’s ill-favoured son-in-law’s attempts to seek cancelation of his debts, and the sun had nearly completed its journey to the summit of the fig tree before Cicero remembered his unfulfilled desire for a cup of honeyed water and called impatiently for the slave.
***
a.d. ii. Id. Mai. 46: One Year Later
Titus Pomponius Atticus was Cicero’s oldest friend, his constant correspondent since they were schooled together in Greece. In spite of his prodigious wealth, and his occasional forays into literature - a history of Cicero’s consulship, and what he liked to call ‘a smattering of poetry’ - Atticus’ life remained mainly one of absolute leisure. He refrained from politics, in as much as any Roman could, and did not take up the place that might have been found for him in the senate. He had married late in life to a distant cousin named Caecilia Pilea and subsequently had a son and a daughter, on whom he doted in a manner even Cicero found quite excessive. In Atticus’ household only two tenets governed daily life: ‘respect your mother, for she always knows best’, and ‘seek pleasure through delighting in the company of friends’. To this end, Atticus sought often to throw parties for his friends and their associates, in pursuit of the pleasure of good food and conversation.
Atticus’ dinner parties were nevertheless few and far between these days; time spent overseas, in Athens or at his villa in Buthrotum, meant he was only ever in Rome for a small part of the season at a time. He liked to hold symposia during the spring, after the worst of the rains had passed, but before the cloying evening humidity of the summer had had a chance to settle across the city’s better neighbourhoods. An early May evening, in his opinion, was the optimal setting for just such an occasion, and so prior to the festival of Vinalia the cubiculum had undergone its annual refurbishment and redecoration. Then, a week before the day of the dinner, his greatest friends had been sent for by formal invitation and had, one by one, arrived early on the appointed evening jocular and buoyed to a man by the promise of another of Atticus’ splendid dinner parties.
The young Gallus, a promising poet and orator by day, but a puerile twenty five year-old gossip under cover of darkness and the encouragement of wine, was currently holding forth loudly on the subject of Caesar’s continuing sojourn in Egypt. Leaning precariously over the precipice of his couch, he was in the act of raising a knowing finger in the relation of another anecdote.
"They say Cleopatra is carrying Caesar's child, and that if it is a boy he will be crowned Prince of Egypt,” he said clumsily, his elbow slipping off the couch with a jolt which very nearly slopped wine down the front of his toga.
"And much good it will do him,” Cicero opined dryly, from the place of honour - the summus in medio - on the left side of the central lectus, “if his kingdom is to extend from one wall of Alexandria to the other.”
Brutus meanwhile, reclining to the right of their host, found himself wishing that Atticus would water his wine a little better before these soirees, and was reflecting that his mother would be absolutely, satisfyingly horrified to bear witness to the sort of company he was keeping.
"I find it surprising that Caesar ought to have mated with Cleopatra in the first place,” Gallus mused thoughtfully, throwing a swift glance in Brutus’ direction. “He always seems to have preferred women of a distinctly patrician hue.”
“I have to say I'd have thought she’d be more to Antony's taste," Atticus agreed, cup suspended lazily in the Greek fashion between the fingers of one hand. “But then if the old stories about his dalliances with Nicomedes are to be believed, it should come as no surprise that Caesar has a taste for the exotic.”
“Oh, come, Atticus,” Cicero interrupted, “let us not pretend that Caesar’s sudden desire for the queen of Egypt is motivated by anything more than his lust for a throne. He realises he cannot get his hands on one in Rome, so he has found a tempting substitute in Alexandria.”
Gallus snorted into his wine. “He’s a cold fish, that’s for sure; it won’t be passion that’s set him onto her. He’d better not let her alone with Antony, or he’ll have her on her back before the introductions have been made.”
"You know,” chipped the recumbent Metellus, rousing himself from well-fed torpor with difficulty and red in the face from his efforts with the roasted capons, “It strikes me that Brutus hasn’t said much at all on the subject, yet he seems to understand Antony’s tastes far better than most these days."
An uncomfortable silence fell as Brutus looked up from his wine and absorbed the somewhat clumsy effort at jovial banter. His dalliance with Volumnia had not, despite Cicero’s dire warnings, been the making of another Sempronia, but it had become an embarrassing millstone around his neck, one which he had begun to hope had been put to bed and forgotten altogether. Metellus looked rather surprised by his own ill manners, but there was nothing Brutus would have liked less than an even clumsier apology, and tension hung in the air for some moments, like an unwelcome guest, suddenly arrived.
Cicero adroitly disrupted the uneasy silence, and directed a withering look in the unfortunate Metellus’ direction. "When you have broadened your own tastes beyond strapping Gallic adolescents, Metellus, then perhaps we will seek your opinion."
The comment was greeted by hearty laughter, not least from red-faced Metellus, and Brutus was grateful to Cicero for the intercession, pleased for at least the second time that night that Cicero had been awarded the summus in medio, and authority over the direction of the conversation.
Atticus was also quick, as their host, to raise his cup to Brutus in apology. “Let us turn to other matters,” he directed with typical Athenian delicacy.
“The elections?” suggested Gallus, hopefully.
“Oh, for the days when a dinner party could simply be allowed to be a dinner party,” Cicero commented, provoking more laughter.
Brutus smiled and looked into the depths of his wine cup, wondering where the slave bearing Atticus’ fine Etruscan krater might have got to. “Must every aspect of life these days still be dictated by politics?” he echoed privately, a murmured aside to his host.
“But, these days, what else is there?” Atticus countered quietly with a wry smile, and Brutus was forced to concede defeat.
He would reflect later on the accuracy of Atticus’ observation. He would also think how unfair it was that, even in being proved right about Antony’s enduring loyalty to Caesar, he should have to suffer bearing witness to the evidence of his veracity concerning the other traits of Antony’s character.
He was unable to do anything to prevent it, when he and Cicero were cornered guiltily on the steps of the senate chamber some weeks later, in part due to the necessity of maintaining the façade of wary cordiality towards a man they both found to be utterly repellent. Nevertheless, he felt the prick of his conscience at not resisting Antony’s attempts to assert his supremacy via gratuitous cruelty, when the latter took Cicero’s hands between his own and sought to crush the very bones of him as a warning against future transgressions. As soon as Antony had exited the chamber, Brutus helped Cicero to his feet, offering a firm hand on his shoulder as a gesture of solidarity, and making no reference at all to the visible tremor in Cicero’s injured fingers.
*
Young Gallus was absent from all the rest of Atticus’ parties for that season on account of an all-consuming passion, the object of which he liked to think remained a secret when in fact every senator in the city knew he had been writing florid odes to the dubious glories of Volumnia Eutrapela.
“You haven’t thought to sanction Gallus for his hideous indiscretion,” Brutus pointed out a little too loudly, not long into a dinner during which he was seated next to Cicero, on the same couch as their host.
“So much the better if the delectable Volumnia keeps herself busy with a man of Gallus’ low standing, eh, Cicero?”
Cicero flashed Metellus a look of mild irritation, “Just as you so succinctly put it.”
“Poor Gallus, with his poet’s soul,” said Atticus, laughing. “He thought himself terribly clever, calling her his Lycoris - as though nobody would work it out! He trails round the city after her like a pup, wagging his tail if she deigns to mete out the slightest bit of affection.”
He and Metellus sank into a ribald discussion of Gallus’ poetry, culminating in a mock dramatic reading from his latest set of florid verses.
Cicero, already weary of the conversation and the company, glanced at Brutus beside him, who was leaning on one arm with his head drooping nearly onto Cicero’s shoulder and dangling his wine cup at a dangerous angle off the side of the lectus. He had seemed distracted since the beginning of the evening and had been drinking Atticus’ wine as though it were water. Cicero had watched him with quiet concern and wondered, given Brutus’ father’s temperate character, who it was had given him his wilful, immoderate streak.
“Do try not to fall asleep,” he murmured as Brutus’ elbow slipped and he nearly sent wine cascading onto Atticus’ floor.
“Sorry, Cicero,” he mumbled, righting himself with difficulty. “I’d nearly dozed off, there.”
Come the end of the evening, Metellus had done just that and was snoring gently with his head cushioned on his fleshy arm. The rest of the party was deep in earnest conversation, and when Cicero peered into his cup to realise it was empty he took it as his cue to leave.
“Atticus, my friend,” he said, “I fear it’s time for me to make my weary way home.”
Atticus looked regretful as Cicero got to his feet, but knew better than to try to dissuade him. “Oh, well then, I suppose I shall have to let you go.”
Cicero gratefully said his farewells to the other guests and Atticus accompanied him to the atrium, summoning the lictors and making Cicero promise to pass on his best wishes to Tiro.
Brutus chose that moment to rouse himself from morose introspection and join them.
“I think I ought to be leaving too, Atticus,” he announced in the general direction of the front door. He was swaying and Cicero winced in sympathy, thinking of the sore head he’d be suffering come the morning and his mother’s inevitable disapproval.
“Of course.” Atticus shot Cicero a look communicating shared concerns. “Perhaps you’d be so good as to accompany Cicero as far as the Palatine?”
Cicero had been intending to retire to the house on the Argiletum that evening, given that Terentia would be at home on the Palatine and he was in no mood for an argument, nor for taking breakfast in frosty silence while his wife sniffed and huffed and glared at him for every breath he breathed. Nevertheless, he took a pitying look at Brutus, who looked fit to fall where he stood, and nodded his agreement.
When they had said their farewells to Atticus and emerged into the street, Cicero paused to adjust his attire, pulling his cloak tighter about himself. Around them, along the façade of Atticus’ house, torches burned in braces on the wall and two potted bay trees framed the doorway, clipped into the shape of perfect globes - to remind his Roman visitors that they did not have command of the entire world, at least just yet, Atticus frequently joked. Beside the trees stood a pair of low benches to allow the mounting of horses.
“At least I refrained from writing poetry,” Brutus murmured suddenly, apropos of nothing, and it took Cicero a leap of logic to conclude that he was referring to Gallus’ dalliance with Volumnia.
“For that we can both be very grateful,” he agreed, thinking what a disaster it would have been if Brutus had ever thought himself in love with the dreadful woman.
Brutus seemed unsteady on his feet; certainly he was standing a good deal nearer than propriety would demand. He put out a hand to steady himself and Cicero grasped his arm, alarmed, only to find that Brutus sagged against him, muttering apologies and self-recriminations.
“I’m sorry Cicero, Atticus never properly waters his wine - ”
“And yet most of us will manage to find our way home unaided,” Cicero chided tartly. He gestured to the door slave, who hurried inside to send word to fetch Atticus’ litter-bearers. “Here, Brutus, sit.”
Brutus sank heavily onto the bench. “Forgive me, Cicero, forgive me.”
Cicero thought to make a clever remark regarding the nature of forgiveness, but settled for resting a hand on Brutus’ shoulder and assuring him that he needn’t ask as it was already given.
***
a.d. iii Id. Nov. 46
“How are your hands?” Brutus remembered to ask when he met Cicero outside the Curia months later. He knew that both of them, through private audience with Caesar, had separately been made aware of what would be expected of them today, when Antony would propose to elect Caesar sole consul for another unprecedented term. He hoped that Cicero might reply lightly and with humour, to dispel the deadening sense of absolute political impotence.
"Apart from a week's inability to hold a quill, and worsened rheumatism come the next spell of wet weather, Antony has left me surprisingly unafflicted, considering how soft and pink we politicians' hands are,” Cicero replied with a wry grimace. Brutus felt vaguely disappointed, but nodded and began to adjust the folds of his toga to calm his failing nerves.
Cicero, for his part, thought for a moment that Brutus intended to take the injured hands between his own, and shifted foolishly, nonplussed by the unaccustomed gesture of intimacy and dismayed by the quickening excitement he had felt in anticipation of it. It was troubling to suffer such adolescent lapses of judgement where Brutus was concerned, nothing but a recipe for ridicule and humiliation in the long run. Clearing his throat as he realised his mistake, he turned his attention to the open doors of the senate chamber.
"Are you ready to get on with this sordid business?" he asked. Brutus nodded and they processed beneath the portico, prepared to support the motion that would, Cicero felt sure, seal the fate of the republic once and for all.
*
Later that afternoon, Cicero cradled his injured hand against his chest and tried to ease
he incipient rheumatism in his knuckles - a habit, as it had become, in moments of tension. The fragments of an expensive Greek lamp lay at his feet, and his wife stood staring at him wide-eyed on the opposite side of the room, trembling and sagging in the wake of a bout of familiar incandescent rage.
He raised his eyes from the mess of oil and broken pottery and lifted a hand to wipe imaginary creases from his tunic. Was it not enough, he wondered, that his wife regarded him with disdain each time they suffered to be in one another’s company, without the added ignominy of her very public displays of hostility towards Caesar and his associates? He may not be master of his own destiny, but by the gods, he had tried to be master in his own home. Turning on his heel, he made to leave the tablinium the way he had come some fraught minutes earlier.
“How dare you turn your back on me!” Terentia cried, scrabbling, no doubt, for more crockery to throw.
Cicero sighed deeply and turned back to her with his hands spread in a gesture of weary surrender. “Terentia, I have listened to your complaints and withstood your interminable dissatisfaction at our lot in life for longer than any reasonable man might be expected to bear. I have no desire to become violent, but I fear I might not be able to contain myself, if I am subjected to your incessant shrewishness any longer.”
“If I am a shrew, it is because you drive me to it!”
Cicero threw up his hands in exasperation. “How could I possibly drive you to anything, you ridiculous woman? I have given you your own house in the country to allow you your freedom, you are never here for me to - ”
“You have given me nothing which was not bought with my own money!”
As soon as the words had tumbled from her mouth, Terentia clapped her hands to her face in horror, and Cicero’s expression began to turn cold as her words hung in the air between them, heavy with the weight of years of unspoken resentment. He had known of Terentia’s latent distaste for his borrowing her family’s money in the early days of their marriage, and her hatred of having in recent years to sell jewellery to settle household debts, but had never thought she would dare to fling it at him like a weapon, even in one of her frequent fits of passion. Terentia, meanwhile, had begun once more to tremble, and cowered away from the heavy disdain in the words which Cicero next spoke.
“The day has long since passed when I relied on your money to finance my advancement, Terentia, and your personality, such as it has become these days, offers little else in the way of encouragement to maintain a marriage.”
Terentia laughed nervously. “You think threats of divorce will chasten me? I have ten times the pride and one hundred times the dignity!”
“Then let your pride and your dignity keep you happy,” Cicero sighed, too tired to struggle any longer against the tide of her disappointment, “as I am clearly no longer able.”
It was an unimpressive end to what had once been the most efficient and useful of marriages. As Cicero walked away he allowed Tiro to place a thick cloak around his shoulders, and they swept out into the damp early evening. They returned to the old house on the Argiletum and Cicero quietly instructed Tiro to begin to draft a divorce contract, allowing Terentia all the money she had leant to his political career in its infancy, along with significant interest.
The following Spring, when a letter arrived from the secretary of his daughter’s former husband, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, informing him of his beloved Tullia’s death following the birth of her second son, Terentia had long since departed for the Bay of Neapolis and set up her household at a villa in Misenum. With Atticus at his Illyrian villa, it seemed there was no one left in Rome but Tiro to comfort Cicero in his grief.
*
M. Junius Brutus, M. Tullius Cicero S.D.
Cicero, allow me to express my deepest sadness at the news of the death of your daughter. You spoke to me of Tullia many years ago in Greece, after which I had the privilege of meeting her a number of times, on each of which occasion I was struck by the intelligence of her conversation and the uncanny perspicacity of her political insight. She seemed, as the common saying goes, a fig fallen not far from the tree. I am unable to comprehend the depth of your loss, and wish there were some small comfort my words could bring you in your distress. I beg you to remember me your friend, as always.
Roma. a.d. vi Id. Mar. 45
*
Continued: Chapter 2
***