Book two, Letter four, part three of five.

To Cicero, on the subject of Friends and Enemies

July 24th

The day of rain has passed and today again I am draped in sunshine and shadows beneath the green leaves of lime trees. I listen on and on to your speeches Cicero, and just as Petrarch warned me, I learn that I should not be so quick to judge you. For in the closing words of your second Philippic, I find this:

“I defended the republic as a young man, I will not abandon it now that I am old. I scorned the sword of Cataline, I will not quail before yours. No, I will rather cheerfully expose my own person, if the liberty of the city can be restored by my death.

May the indignation of the Roman people at last bring forth what it has been so long labouring with. In truth, if twenty years ago in this very temple I asserted that death could not come prematurely upon a man of consular rank, with how much more truth must I now say the same of an old man? To me, indeed, O conscript fathers, death is now even desirable, after all the honours which I have gained, and the deeds which I have done. I only pray for these two things: one, that dying I may leave the Roman people free. No greater boon than this can be granted me by the immortal gods. The other, that every one may meet with a fate suitable to his deserts and conduct towards the republic. ”

And from the third Philippic you recount the horrific tale of Antony's' slaughter of three hundred centurions for the crime of remaining loyal to the Republic and not joining with him in his war against Octavian and the Republic.

“A man who in the house of his entertainer at Brundusium ordered so many most gallant men and virtuous citizens to be murdered, and whose wife’s face was notoriously besprinkled with the blood of men dying at his and her feet. Who is there of us, or what good man is there at all, whom a man stained with this barbarity would ever have spared; especially as he was coming hither much more angry with all virtuous men than he had been with those whom he had massacred there?”

Antony really does seem a madman and a drunkard, yet also somehow he was a powerful commander, a cunning manipulator of men and fortunes. He used money to buy every loyalty, and he sold what he stole from Rome to pay for his avarice and debauchery. It seems Cicero, that his villainy was equal to your valour.

Yet I wonder at the loyalty of the troops who did follow Antony. For what did they fight? What cause enabled their spirit to, in the end, conquer the republic, even Rome herself, for they were Roman soldiers who followed Antony in his war against you, and against the Republic. Were they mere mercenaries, or were they the long disenfranchised Italian allies of Rome who had grown weary of their second class rights and sought only to plunder the crown jewel of their own country and gain something of the wealth and status denied to them by the Senate. Those soldiers who followed Antony considered you, Cicero, their enemy as much as Antony considered you so. There is hot blood splattered over every page of your speeches as the crisis of civil war drove brother against brother.

A crisis which in the end caused Antony to plunder the prisons for more soldiers, buying their loyalty with the promise of gold and land and freedom. What an army it must have been that in the end with Antony, marched into Rome, driving you from the city, and ultimately to your death.