Book 2, letter 19. To Cicero, on his friend Pompey

Book 2, letter 19

Part 1 of 3

To Cicero, on his friend Pompey the Great.

                                              Cicero

December 2018 CE

Dear Cicero,

I drove out past the salt flats today, through the sandy wastelands and stubble and rubble of old pioneer farmsteads. While bush fires ravage the north-east coast of my country, floods inundate the streets of a major eastern city and in my own region, here in the borderlands, drought tightens its grip and we all begin to believe in dreams, like rain dance magic, even as we forget what real rain feels like.

This might be my last letter to you for a while. Or at least, my last letter regarding your work. I'm having a sort of crisis of faith, it's hard to tell. I'm an up and down sort of person, a typical artist really, pushed around by mood swings and passions. Perhaps I'm just in a slump. I've been reading your letters, your treatise On Duties, and your biography (written by A.Trollope, 1870), searching for references to your friend Pompey, or to Sulla, both of whom I plan on writing about. Perhaps I will say a few things about Pompey today...I'm not sure.

Your soul is so close to mine
I know what you dream.
Friends scan each other's depths;
Would I be a Friend, if I didn't?
A Friend is a mirror of clear water;
I see my gains in you, and my losses.

- Jalal-ud-Din Rumi
(Translated by Andrew Harvey from A Year of Rumi)

A friend sent this poem to me today. A gentle reminder of an important truth. We are mirrors of each other, aren't we? Cicero my dear friend, you support me in my dark moods, you uplift me when I despair, you offer truth when all my ideas prove to be delusions. I am as thankful to you as I am to my living friends who offer their wisdom and compassion, who feel as I feel and who strive to make their happiness my happiness.

Non scholae sed vitae discimus

We learn not for school, but for life.

In writing about friends, there are a lot of things to consider. There is the sort of friendship Rumi describes, and which you certainly had with Atticus, who was a second self, as you proudly declare.

Then there was Pompey.

                                               Pompey

It might be better to think of him as your political ally, but you express real friendship for him in your letters, an affection which he seemed to return only when it was convenient. A fair weather friend, we might say. You and he both strove to attain glory for Rome and for the Republic, but Pompey betrayed both in the end, when he joined with Caesar and Crassus to form the Triumvirate and overthrow the old republican methods of government.

The Roman republic always had two Consuls, which actually seems really similar to the two party political system of my country, a system designed to keep in check any single leader who might strive for kingship, by having an equally powerful leader in a position to oppose such an attempt. That's the idea, but of course it is susceptible to corruptions and abuses, just like my own democracy. The Liberal and Labor parties in Australia were once two sides of a political debate, striving for different aims and serving different interests. Now they seem like two sides of a single coin. It doesn't matter which side the coin falls on, we are governed by the same greedy ignorance of the corporate powers that fund both parties.

In Rome though, it got out of hand in a different way with the first Triumvirate. Essentially three Consuls, sharing their power and using their pact of alliance to totally dominate the entire political field, voting themselves in for longer terms in office, granting themselves governorships in wealthy foreign provinces, always ready to back each other up in their collective efforts to overthrow the republic and, by using the quasi-democratic system against itself, to elect themselves into positions of absolute power.

Crassus, Pompey and Caesar.

                                              Crassus

Crassus was the money man, Pompey was the great war hero, defeater of the pirates, and Caesar, that fast talking, fast walking, fashion setting, conqueror of Gaul, was the schemer who orchestrated the whole Triumvirate.

But today I want to write about Pompey. Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus.

Pompey, whom his enemies dubbed Adulescens Carnifex “The Adolescent Butcher”, followed in his father's footsteps, and came to lead armies when he was only twenty three. He rose to a position of military power and reputation during the final years of the Roman civil wars when he raised three legions on his own and lead them against the enemies of Sulla, whom Pompey had wanted to impress.

The civil wars and Sulla in particular, are something I will have to cover in more detail later, since they relate directly to the Catiline Conspiracy, but I will say this here, quoting from Plutarch, in his life of Pompey, from the Rex Warner translation of 1958: (I'm going to quote from Plutarch quite a lot, as usual. I do love his books, as you well know Cicero)...

The disasters (of the civil wars) that had fallen upon Rome had brought her to such a pass that, there being no hope of freedom, people longed only for a milder form of slavery.

After the tumultuous years of the Gracchi brothers, who were assassinated as punishment for their efforts to reform the Republic, Rome descended into further turmoil, each new conflict giving rise to worse tyrants who oppressed the people with greater violence and despotism, until Sulla took power, and through his 'proscriptions', had every single one of his political enemies murdered (some three thousand or so...), and all their property turned over to him, and to the men who killed on his behalf.

                                                                      Sulla

This is the Sulla who Pompey wanted to impress, and Pompey formed up three new legions, (15,000 men), to help him in his conquest of his own country. On his way to join Sulla, Pompey was attacked by the Roman generals Carinas, Cloelius and Brutus, who surrounded him with their three armies, but when Pompey formed up his cavalry and charged at Brutus' forces, they were routed. The other two generals began quarrelling amongst themselves and retreated.

Pompey later faced the army of the Consul, Scipio Asiaticus, “...but before the two lines were within range of each other's javelins Scipio's men shouted greetings to Pompey's and came over to their side.”

You see, it's little details like this that change the whole tone of the conflict. Scipio was Consul, that means he was the legally elected leader of the Roman people, but the whole army led by him simply crossed over to Pompey's side rather than fight at all. It says something of the popularity of Pompey's cause, and the public support for Sulla as well. There are lots of stories of Roman legions behaving in this way, and it sheds light on the political delicacy with which a general had to handle his men. I try to imagine something like this happening in my own country, a civil war being fought, and the government forces changing sides to follow the leadership of some popular young commander who had formed his own private army. It's crazy.

As I write this letter, there is a great swelling of public disgust for the Australian government and their obvious corruption, but I cannot imagine a twenty three year old Aussie boy from Canberra raising his own army and convincing the government troops to defect to his side as he marched on the Capital city. It is precisely the existence of private armies who were loyal to their generals that stands out as a huge difference between our cultures Cicero, although it wasn't that long ago that a young man in Germany did as Pompey did, and raised a private force with which he took over his own government in collusion with other powerful, and violent men.

The story of the Night of the Long Knives has a chilling similarity to the proscriptions of Sulla.

Cicero, you were a young man living in Rome through these proscriptions. You even served, although somewhat unwillingly, in the army under Sulla during the civil wars, or Social Wars, as they are most often called. Proscriptions seems quite a polite way to describe death squads murdering people in the streets and in their homes, with the express purpose of confiscating everything they owned, land, slaves, property, and handing it over to Sulla in exchange for lavish payments. Lists of names were published and posted in public so that anyone who wanted, could take up the highly paid work of a killer for hire.

There are stories of people going out in the morning to find their own names written on those lists, and being killed in the crowd before they could take a dozen steps to make their escape. Often people were proscribed for no other reason than their wealth, or their ownership of a certain property which the allies of Sulla wished to possess. One such victim is famously quoted as declaring just before he was killed in the street, “My Alban farm has done me in!”

It seems a marvel that you survived, Cicero. There is a speech (Pro Roscio) that you delivered just after the proscriptions had officially come to an end but while Sulla was still in power, in which you denounce the obvious criminal violence and thefts of of his death squads. You were on the rise, politically, and willing to speak out against tyranny, as a young man might who has not yet learned to fear death. Actually, you left Rome shortly after giving this speech, to study philosophy and oratory in Attica. A prudent move. Still, it is surprising that Sulla let you live, when he could have so easily done away with you.

What kind of world we would live in now, if you had died young Cicero? Did you know that there are several towns in America, called Cicero? If Sulla had written your name on his lists, the whole world would look different today, I don't think there is any way to overestimate the impact you have had on the future.