While
this was going on, your close friend and secretary, your freedman
Tiro, was ill again, and many letters pass between you, as with your
customary paternal concern, you insist on his resting and getting the
best medical care that your substantial wealth can afford before
travelling to join with you again.
CCLXXXIV
To
Tiro
November
3rd, 50BCE
“If you do
what will best conduce to your recovery, you will be most strictly be
obeying my wishes. In considering these matters let your own heart
be your guide. I miss you : yes! But I also love you. Love prompts
the wish to see you in good health; the other motive would make me
wish to see you as soon as possible. The former is therefore to be
preferred. Accordingly, let your first care be to get well : of the
innumerable services which you have done me this will be the most
acceptable.”
CCLXXXV
To
Tiro
November
5th, 50BCE
“I cannot
express to you in a letter, nor do I wish to do so, what my feelings
are. I will merely say, that the greatest possible pleasure both to
yourself and me will be to see you as soon as possible in restored
health. We arrived at Alyzia on the third day after leaving you.
The place is 120 stades (about 15 miles) south of Leucas. At Leucas
I am expecting either to receive you, or a letter from you by the
hands of Mario. Let your efforts to be well be as strong as your
affection for me, or as you know mine to be for you.”
I have been reading Seneca's epistle on friendship, and with your
life thus encompassed by the troubles of your friends, I found this
little section worth quoting here from Epistle IX, On Philosophy and
Friendship, from the Epistulae Morales.
“For what
purpose then, do I make a man my friend? In order to have someone
for whom I may die, whom I may follow into exile, against whose death
I may stake my own life, and pay the pledge too....Beyond question,
the feeling of a lover has in it something akin to friendship; one
might call it friendship run mad.”
This
idea, this feeling, that true friendship is the willingness to die
for that friend is a powerful sentiment that seems extreme in my
peaceful life, yet, only a few weeks ago a friend of mine expressed a
similar notion. She stated that she could never love a man whom she
felt would not willingly sacrifice his life to protect her. This
concept of sacrifice, which must be familiar to you Cicero,
considering your feelings for Pompey and his cause, runs somewhat
against the grain of my own feeling, which has more in common with a
statement made by the 20th century military commander,
Patton, which, as he was addressing his soldiers, went something like
this:
People say
that you must be willing to sacrifice your life to protect your
country. This is wrong. You have to live! You have to make the
enemy sacrifice his life.
Of course, this is a hypothetical
discussion, there are circumstances where sacrifice is the only
option, dangerous situations in which no enemy is present that might
be slain for the greater good of protecting what I love. I,
like you Cicero, am no soldier, no trained combatant, and do not
possess the skills for military action, yet you led troops to battle
(not 'in battle'), to protect the Roman province of Cilicia, and at
the end of your life, you willingly stuck your neck out for the
assassins sword, not to protect any friend, but in defence of your
own dignity, knowing that to go on living in fear, on the run, served
no good purpose. Even though your son would then live without his
father, you died in such a way that your courage would be an example.
Perhaps this was your last gift to him.
But
I am getting ahead of myself, there are many years to go before that
day.
So,
getting back to Caesar, there is something about the debt situation
in Rome that I would like to bring up. It goes back to the Gracchus
brothers, and it concerns the obscene levels of debt experienced by
both rich and poor in Rome. The proposal of debt cancellation is
generally thought of as a policy which would be supported by the
plebeian poor, but there were just as many of the upper class
citizens who were in debt 'up to their eyeballs' as we say, and whose
votes and political support could be bought with the promise of debt
cancellation. Of course, most of the tribunes and senators who had
tried to introduce such a policy in the past were assassinated, but
Caesar found a different solution. Plutarch tells it this way in his
Life of Caesar:
[29.2]
However, by
the time that the consulship of Marcellus was over Caesar was already
in a most lavish way making available to public figures in Rome the
wealth which he had won in Gaul. He paid the enormous debts of the
tribune Curio; and he gave the consul Paulus fifteen hundred talents
with which he added to the beauty of the forum by building the famous
Basillica which was erected in the place of the one known as 'the
Fulvia'.
*
By
December 50 BCE, War was knocking on the door. Pompey was already
marching with his forces and Caesar got closer to Rome every day.
You write to Atticus (CCXCV) “The political situation gives me
great terror every day...what we want is peace. From a victor, among
many evil results, one, at any rate will be the rise of a tyrant.
Later, in speaking of Caesar, you point out the ugly truth of
your own involvement in the present trouble. For I am one who
thinks it more expedient to yield to his demands than to fight. For
it is too late in the day to be resisting a man, whom we have been
nursing up against ourselves the ten years past.
The
choice between tyrants is no choice at all. Seneca, who was writing
a hundred years after your death, said something rather poignant on
the topic, and though it regards that gruff stoic, Cato, I think
perhaps that it might apply to you as well. I quote now from Epistle
XIV
“Cato's
voice strove to check a civil war. Cato parted the swords of
maddened chieftains. When some fell foul of Pompey and others fell
foul of Caesar, Cato defied both parties at once! Nevertheless, one
may question whether, in those days, a wise man ought to have taken
any part in public affairs,...It is not now a question of freedom;
long since has freedom gone to rack and ruin. The question is
whether it is Caesar or Pompey who controls the state. Why, Cato,
should you take sides in that dispute? It is no business of yours;
a tyrant is being selected. What does it concern you who conquers?
'The better man may win; but the winner is bound to be the worse
man'.”
'Potest
melior vincere, non potest non peior esse, qui vicerit'
Or,
as Tacitus puts it in his Histories (Bk 1, section 50) “Prayers
for either would be impious, vows for either would be blasphemy, when
from their conflict you can learn only that the conqueror must be the
worse of the two.”
Though
Tacitus was in that instance making this point about Otho and
Vitellius, he knew very well the history of Pompey and Caesar.
Tacitus, like Seneca, had probably read some of your books, Cicero,
perhaps even some of your letters. Yet it is eerily familiar that in
politics it so often boils down to a choice between two tyrants.
What is a wise man to do in such a circumstance? It would be
expedient to simply leave Italy, to take your family and run as far
from Rome as possible. But you, Cicero, could never abandon the
Republic, though it had long since crumbled and you stood trembling
in the ruins calling for peace, for justice.
CCXCVII
To
Atticus
December
50 BCE
“We should
have resisted him (Caesar)
when he was weak, and that would have been easy. Now we are
confronted by eleven legions, cavalry at his desire, the
Transpandani, the city rabble, all these tribunes, a rising
generation corrupted as we see, a leader of such influence and
audacity. With such a man we must either fight a pitched battle, or
admit his candidature in virtue of the law. “Fight,” say you,
“rather than be a slave.” To what end? To be proscribed if
beaten : to be a slave after all, if victorious. “What do you mean
to do then?” say you. Just what animals do, who when scattered
follow the flocks of their own kind. As an ox follows a herd, so
shall I follow the loyalists or whoever are said to be the loyalists,
even if they take a disastrous course.”
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