Late May 2018 CE

Dearest Cicero

''The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.'

I played in the streets today with my band, our dancer dressed in black and blue transforming the music into movement, meeting the crowd half way, translating for them the complicated chords and rhythms and making a moving picture show of songs that strike and soar across unfamiliar ground. I see her dance, I see the crowd watching her and the way they engage with the music through the medium of her body, and I know that her dance is born of our songs, and that our hands and hearts and minds and feet all combine to make something unique, timelessly wrought in the echoing air of the city street.

I have been pondering your words, pondering the long time to come when you do not exist, and knowing that I exist in that future for you. I am one for whom your immortality is a living reality, and though I am small, tiny in comparison with your greatness, I too feel the force of the future pulling me forward into my destiny and beyond into death and the vast wavering darkness of the endless centuries after I am gone from the world and all memory of me is gone.

Inspired by the living pulse of your writing, I write. Inspired by your immortality, I strive to become immortal, to live a life worthy of immortality.

Now I sit writing in a tavern situated on the broad road leading north from the city to the port. I am drinking locally brewed cold ale from a clear glass. As the sunset grows grey with the early autumn evening, workmen come in, their bright work clothes stained with the days labours. One man steps down from his stool to re-kindle the fire in its hearth, while the bar girl lights a second fire in the next room. I have Plutarch with me, The Rise and Fall of Athens. He's a bit after your time, about eighty years between your death and his birth, but this book is telling stories from five hundred or more years before you. I wonder if you know of the legends of Theseus, founder of Athens? Today I was in a comic book store, (story books with as many pictures as words) and there it was on the shelf in hard cover, the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, which is an incredibly popular story even now, told and re-told in many different ways, in books, theatre and our modern moving pictures (I'll explain later...).

I have been listening to another audio book this week, The Life of Cicero, by Anthony Trollope. Written in the 1870's. I have been hearing today of your return from exile (which you might be interested to know is a method of punishment not in use at all any more), and your involvement in the trial of Milo regarding the murder of Clodius. It is a fascinating story of corruption and senatorial gang warfare, and your speech seems credited as a very early example of legal forensics. What a bloody and frightening time to be in Rome, yet you seemed reluctant to leave it when granted the position of Governor of Cilicia, which everyone writes of as a year of magnificent leadership. This reluctance to leave Rome I find remarkable. I do not feel the same sense of devotion to my own nation that you seem to, and in finding myself so, I feel that I am somehow impoverished by a certain lack of pride in my home country. My modern cynicism seems to prevent it.

But about your Governorship in Cilicia, I think that I should quote Plutarch for you, from his biography of your life.

Gifts he would not receive, not even when the kings offered them, and he relieved the provincials from the expense of entertainments; but he himself daily received men of pleasing accomplishments at banquets which were not expensive, although generous. His house, too, had no door-keeper, nor did anyone ever see him lying a-bed, but early in the morning he would stand or walk in front of his chamber and receive those who came to pay him their respects. It is said moreover, that he never ordered any man to be chastised with rods or to have his raiment torn from him, and that he never inflicted angry abuse or contumelious punishments. He discovered that much of the public property had been embezzled, and by restoring it he made the cities well-to-do, and men who made restitution he maintained in their civil rights without further penalties. He engaged in war, too, and routed the robbers who made their homes on Mount Amanus; and for this he was actually saluted by his soldiers as Imperator. When Caelius the orator asked Cicero to send him panthers from Cilicia for a certain spectacle at Rome, Cicero, pluming himself upon his exploits, wrote to him that there were no panthers in Cilicia; for they had fled to Caria in indignation because they alone were warred upon, while everything else enjoyed peace.

There are few politicians of my own century who might receive such a glowing review of their achievements. This age seems marred by the same impious disregard for good governance that your own was, a political era defined more by its lies than it's honesty. My modern cynicism? Or does that sound familiar to you too?

Which brings me to the next question.

Marc Antony. I know you probably don't want to talk about him, but I was listening to your Philippic against him today, your open letter I think we would call it today. The things you attest as to his behaviour are shocking even now, perhaps even more shocking than in your own time. From the stories I read, Roman conventions of acceptable behaviour included things considered debauchery now, but the claims you make of Antony are fantastic. There is a single minded madness to his continued abuses of himself and to his dereliction of duty, it hardly seems possible that such things could be true, let alone known by the public and tolerated. His alcoholism is legendary, as are his sexual appetites, but the tragedy of Pompey's home is what I want to really address.

Just to make sure I'm getting it right, I'll tell you what I know.

Pompey the Great, a military and civil leader of such renown and nobility that his name is nearly synonymous with 'ceremonial splendour' in my own language. Pompey whose army was finally defeated by Caesar's, and who fled to Egypt only to be murdered on the shores of the Nile by two of his own guards. Pompey whose head was then severed and presented to Caesar in a jar by King Ptolemy, brother of Cleopatra.

Pompey, whose house upon his death was put up for auction and which was purchased by Antony.

Antony who you assert then “...squandered Pompey's substantial fortune, not in a few months, but in a few days...whole store rooms disposed of as gifts to unmitigated scoundrels. Actors and actresses grabbing everything they wanted, the place packed with gamblers, crammed with inebriates. For days on end in many parts of the house, the orgies of drinking went on an on.”

Pompey, “whose house for months afterwards no one could pass without weeping.”

Mark Antony, this dull brute, this insane drunk, this spineless, morally corrupted idiot, this gangster.

Mark Antony. Is this the man on whose order you were murdered?

You Cicero, saviour of Rome. You who defeated the Cataline Conspiracy. You who spoke out against Verres. You Cicero who were an eloquent voice of reason and intellect and justice, and who post-mortem have become the eloquent voice of generations more who speak with your words and with your convictions and with your passions.

You Cicero, murdered and your corpse desecrated by Herennius, a centurion and Popilius, a tribune, on the orders of that inebriated imbecile, Marc Antony. You Cicero, whose last words are recorded as:

"There is nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier, but do try to kill me properly."

You Cicero whose legend, immortalised by Plutarch has survived to this day.

“Then he himself, clasping his chin with his left hand, as was his wont, looked steadfastly at his slayers, his head all squalid and unkempt, and his face wasted with anxiety, so that most of those that stood by covered their faces while Herennius was slaying him. For he stretched his neck forth from the litter and was slain, being then in his sixty-fourth year. Herennius cut off his head, by Antony's command, and his hands — the hands with which he wrote the Philippics. For Cicero himself entitled his speeches against Antony "Philippics," and to this day the documents are called Philippics.”

My question...though I do not wish to ask it, or to know your answer: Could it really be true, that the flame of your glorious life was snuffed out by the rough, dismissive ignorance of an ignoble, power mad drunk?

Can lights as bright as yours truly be extinguished by such dull and gloomy death bringers?

That you are dead, no one can dispute. I found a photo of your tomb. Born January 3^rd 106BCE – Died December 7th, 43BCE. That you lived, none can deny, for despite your unjust end, the justice and veracity of your life has lived on through your writing.

''The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.'

So I, living in that endless time after your existence came to an end, write to you, dear Cicero.

With admiration and a growing sense of wonder,

Morgan.