Then in January of the next year, (45BCE) writing to Cassius Longinus, you admit your true feelings concerning
life under Caesar. The speech of lavish thanks to Caesar, given
before the senate, is proved false by the following honest testimony
given in private:
DXXIX
To Cassius Longinus
“...Can we laugh then? You will
say. No, by Hercules, not very easily. Yet other means of
distraction from our troubles we have none. Where then, you will
say, is your philosophy? Yours indeed is in the kitchen, mine in the
schools only gives me annoyance. For I am ashamed of being a slave.
Accordingly, I pose as being busy about other things, to avoid the
reproach of Plato...”
Plato, he seems as
influential now as he was in you day Cicero. The reproach of which
you speak comes from The Republic, 387b, which says that men
ought to “...be free and fear slavery worse than death.”
It is a death that
I wish now to finally confront. The death of Marcellus.
He didn't come back to Rome immediately
after his pardon, but began his journey in the following spring. To
refuse the pardon of a tyrant, is to insult him with indifference to
his wishes. I am sure that Marcellus' absence from Rome was seen as
a continued statement of opposition to Caesar. You wrote him a short
letter in January, gently reminding him of your feelings on the
matter.
DXXXV
Jan 45BCE
“...Do your best, then, to come at
the earliest opportunity : your coming, believe me, will be welcomed
not only by us, I mean by your personal friends, but by absolutely
everybody. I say this because it occurs to me sometimes to be a
little afraid that you have a fancy for postponing your departure...”
A few months later,
in May, your good friend Servius Sulpicius Rufus wrote to you with
the news that Marcellus had been murdered.
DCXII
Servius Sulpicius
Rufus to Marcus Tullius Cicero
May 31st
45BCE
Athens.
Servius sends many good wishes to
Cicero. Though I know that I shall be giving you no very pleasant
news, yet since chance and nature bear the sway among us men, I
thought it encumbent on me to give you information of whatever kind
it might be. On the 23rd of May, on sailing into the
Piraeus, I met my colleague M.Marcellus, and spent the day there in
order to enjoy his society. Next day, when I parted from him with
the design of going from Athens to Boeotia, and finishing what
remained of my legal business, he told me that he intended to sail
round Cape Malea and make for Italy. On the third day after that,
just as I was intending to start from Athens, at the tenth hour of
the night my friend Publius Postumius called on me with the
information that my colleage M. Marcellus just after dinner had been
stabbed with a dagger by his friend P. Magius Cilo, and had received
two wounds, one in the stomach, a second in the head behind the ear;
but that hopes were entertained that he might survive; and that
Magius had killed himself afterwards. He added that he had been sent
by Marcellus to tell me this, and to ask me to send some physicians.
Accordingly I summoned some physicians, and immediately started just
as day was breaking. When I was not far from Piraeus, a slave of
Acidinus me me bearing a note containing information that Marcellus
had expired a little before daybreak.
So there is
a man of most illustrious character cut off in a most distressing
manner by the vilest of men. His personal enemies had spared him in
consideration of his character; but one of his own friends was found
to inflict death upon him. However, I continued my journey to his
tent. There I found two freedmen and a few slaves: they said the rest
had run away in terror, because their master had been killed in front
of the tent. I was obliged to carry him back to the city in the same
litter in which I had ridden down and to use my own bearers: and
there, considering the means at my disposal at Athens, I saw to his
having an honourable funeral. I could not induce the Athenians to
grant him a place of burial within the city, as they alleged that
they were prevented by religious scruples from doing so; and it is a
fact that they had never granted that privilege to anyone. But they
allowed us, which was the next best thing, to bury him in any
gymnasium we chose. We chose a place in the most famous gymnasium in
the world—that of the Academy—and there we burnt the body, and
afterwards saw to these same Athenians giving out a contract for the
construction of a marble monument over him. So I think I have done
all for him alive and dead required by our colleagueship and close
connexion. Goodbye.
Call me paranoid if
you wish, but it seems all to easy for Caesar to have arranged the
murder-suicide of Marcellus and Magius Clio. The convenient excuse
of the debt motivated desperation of Magius, the easy distance from
Rome, plus, the elimination of one's enemies had become a time
honoured tradition in the generations-long civil conflict of Rome.
Sulla practically made assassination legal, so bold and open handed
was he in his proscriptions. It seems naive to consider Marcellus'
murder to be unconnected to Caesar's wishes, especially if Marcellus
was as important and as influential as both you and Rufus seem to
think he was.
So, apologetic as I
am to bring up this terrible event in your life, I do so in defence
of you Cicero. If you are a coward for having submitted to Caesar,
then so too was every other able bodied and active citizen in Rome.
If you decided that your life was worth the price, then I must agree
with you. You believed that your life might still be worth something
even under the tyranny of a dictator, you believed that you might
still serve the Republic. You chose to suffer whatever indignity
might be forced upon you, in order that you might yet defend the
virtues and ideals of your beloved Rome.
I can only imagine
what heartbreak and self doubt you must have felt, to know that the
man you had so encouraged to return to Rome, Marcellus, the man whom
you had debased yourself before Caesar in order to secure his pardon,
was then murdered. Did you suspect that you had been used? Did you
consider that Caesar had given his pardon knowing that Marcellus
would only attempt to return to Rome if you begged him? Were you the
bait that brought Caesar's enemy close enough to be murdered by his
men, and that murder blamed on a money hungry debt-crippled
desperado?
Yet Caesar was
killed, and you Cicero, would not repeat your much maligned
submission a second time, so when Marc Antony rose to replace
Caesar, you stood firm against him.
A letter for
another day, my dear friend.
With gratitude and
respect
Morgan
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