"All honest men killed Caesar....some lacked design, some courage, some opportunity: none lacked the will."
Cicero, Philippics (II.29)
On July 14, 44 BC, four months after Caesar's assassination and anxious over the unsettled state of affairs, Cicero fled to Greece. But, rebuked by his friend Atticus, who had asked him "Can you with honour, you who talk of a noble death—can you with honour abandon your country" (Letters, XVI.7), he quit his journey and returned to Rome on August 31. A meeting of the Senate was called by Antony for the next day to propose that an extra day be added to all public thanksgivings in Caesar's honor. Pleading exhaustion, Cicero did not attend and was assailed by Antony for his absence. When Cicero did appear the day after (in Antony's own absence), he delivered the first of what would be fourteen Philippics. Named after the speeches given by Demosthenes against Philip II of Macedonia more than three centuries earlier (Juvenal later called them divina Philippica, Satires IV.10.125), they argued against tyranny and for the restoration of the Republic.
Although more moderate than those that followed, Antony was angered nevertheless by allusions that he himself was a potential tyrant. The vitriol increased as the Philippics mounted in number: "What is more shameful than that he should be living who set on the diadem, while all men confess that he was rightly slain who flung it away" (Second Philippic, XXXIII.87). "What peace can there be, in the first place, between Marcus Antonius and the Senate? With what aspect can he regard you? With what eyes can you in our turn regard him? Who of you will not hate him? Whom of you will he not hate? Come, is it only he who hates you, and you him" (Seventh Philippic, VIII.21)? "When he thinks the death of Caesar should be avenged he proposes death not only for the perpetrators of that deed, but also for those who not resent it" (Thirteenth Philippic, XVIII.39). "I always took the same line before the people; and not only against Antonius himself have I always inveighed, but also against his abettors and agents in crime, both those here and those with him, in a word against the whole house of Marcus Antonius" (Twelfth Philippic, VII.18). And finally, a foreboding reference to Cicero himself: "Brief is the life given us by nature; but the memory of life nobly resigned is everlasting. And if that memory had been no longer than this life of ours, who would be so mad as, by the greatest labour and peril, to strive for the utmost height of honour and glory" (Fourteenth Philippic, XII.3).
Having allied themselves in a triumvirate, Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus did indeed set about proscribing their respective enemies. For two days, Octavian argued that Cicero's name should not be added to the list. But Antony was implacable, insisting that he be the first to be put to death (Plutarch, Life of Cicero, XLVI.5)— "together with his son, his brother, and his brother's son and all his household, his faction, and his friends" (Appian, Civil Wars, IV.19.1). Cicero was killed on December 7, 43 BC, aged sixty-three, his head and hands (having penned the Philippics) hacked off. The next year, Brutus and Cassius were defeated at Philippi and committed suicide—as did Antony and Cleopatra after their defeat at Actium eleven years later. Rome now would be ruled by an emperor.
Fulvia, Antony's wife, who had been married to Clodius, Cicero's implacable enemy, vented her hatred on the dead orator as well. Cassius Dio writes that, before the head and hands were prominently exposed on the Rostra (at the very place where Cicero had inveighed against Antony), she took the head in her hands and spat on it. Then, setting it on her knees, opened the mouth and, with pins from her hair, pierced the tongue that had argued so eloquently against her husband (Roman History, XLVII.8.4).
Proud of his own role in the murder, Popillius Laenas, the tribune who had been sent to kill the man who once had defended him in court against a charge of parricide, set up a statue of himself wearing a wreath, sitting beside the severed head of Cicero (XLVII.11.2). Antony was so pleased with the death of his "greatest and most bitter enemy" that he added a bonus to his reward of 25,000 Attic drachmas (equivalent to Roman denarii), multiplying it by a factor of ten (Appian, Civil Wars, IV.11.1, 19.20).
Philologus, who had been educated by Cicero and was a freedman of Quintus, Cicero's brother, also betrayed his benefactor, revealing his location to the pursuing Romans. He, in turn, was given up to Pomponia who, even though she and Quintus were divorced, forced the man to cut off his own flesh bit by bit, roast the pieces, and eat them (Plutarch, XLIX.3).
Quintus, who had been hidden by his son, gave himself up when he heard that the boy was being tortured to reveal the location. But he did not utter a word and the father, filled with admiration and pity, revealed himself and so was slain (Dio, XLVII.10.6–7).
As to Cicero's own son, he allied himself with Octavian and fought at the Battle of Actium. Co-consul when Antony afterwards committed suicide, he had the small consolation of announcing his death to the Senate, who took down the statues of Antony and made void any honors paid to him. "Thus the heavenly powers devolved upon the family of Cicero the final steps in the punishment of Antony" (Plutarch, XLIX.6).
The enmity of Publius Clodius Pulcher for Cicero stemmed from an incident that had occurred almost twenty years before, in 62 BC, when Clodius, who was enamored of Caesar's wife, Pompeia, had disguised himself as a woman in an attempt to see her at Caesar's residence, where the mysteries of Bona Dea were being celebrated. He was discovered hiding there and a scandal ensued. As pontifex maximus, Caesar divorce Pompeia, who had to be above even the suspicion of adultery (Plutarch, Life of Julius Caesar, X.9; Life of Cicero, XXIX.9; Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar, LXXIV.2). Clodius was charged with sacrilege but insisted that he was not in Rome at the time—an alibi that Cicero contradicted when he testified that he had spoken with the intruder that day.
Intriguingly, it was thought that the testimony had been at the insistence of Terentia, Cicero's wife, to allay her suspicion that Clodius' sister Clodia wanted to marry her husband (Plutarch, Life of Cicero, XXIX; Life of Julius Caesar, IX–X). As for the beautiful Clodia, she was supposed to have slept with her own brother and poisoned her husband—and was a lover of Catullus, who famously wrote of her as the "Lesbia" of his poems. Replaced in her affections by Marcus Caelius Rufus, the scorned poet lashed out at him. "O, Caelius, my Lesbia, that Lesbia, Lesbia whom alone Catullus loved more than himself and all his own, now in the cross-roads and alleys serves [glubit] the filthy lusts of the descendants of lordly-minded Remus" (LVIII).
The Latin verb glubo is defined by the Oxford Latin Dictionary as "to strip the bark from"— although the meaning is uncertain in the context of Catullus' poem, which is why translations of the verb are so varied (and demur). Likely, the metaphor of skinning or peeling refers to retracting the foreskin of the penis or husking it by some other means.
In 56 BC, when Caelius Rufus, who lived in an apartment block owned by Clodius, eventually grew distant, Clodia took him to court, charging that he had attempted to poison her. Cicero successfully defended his friend and protégé, using the defense (Pro Caelio) to avenge himself on Clodius as well. Clodia, herself, was attacked as this "Medea of the Palatine" (VIII) or, as Caelius phrased it, a quadrantariam Clytaemestram, a "Clytemnestra who sold her favours for a farthing"—from quadrans, the smallest coin denomination (a quarter of an as) and the nominal price of admission to the baths (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, VIII.6.53; Pro Caelio, LXII; Plutarch, Life of Cicero, XXIX.5). Yet, in spite of this enmity, Cicero wrote to Atticus in 45 BC inquiring about buying her house and gardens, although he doubted that Clodia would sell (XII.42.2).
In 58 BC, Clodius was elected tribune, for which he had made himself eligible by petitioning to change his status from that of a patrician to plebeian. He then proposed that any official who had executed a citizen without due process of law was to be exiled. Cicero, who, as consul five years earlier, had executed several participants in the Catiline conspiracy (including Lentulus, Antony's step-father), was obliged to take refuge in Thessalonica. Clodius had Cicero condemned and his property confiscated, burning down his magnificent house on the Palatine (as well as his villas) and erecting in its place a shrine to liberty (Plutarch, Life of Cicero, XXXIII.1; Dio, XXXVIII.14–17, XXXIX.11). Their contents were appropriated by the consuls, marble columns from the house on the Palatine being carted through the street, and the decorations and very trees of the villa at Tusculum transferred to the neighboring consul's property (Cicero, De Domo Sua, LXII). When, sixteen months later, Cicero returned from exile and was able to begin rebuilding on the site, having argued that, since Clodius' adoption into a plebeian family was illegal, his actions as tribune were illegal as well, Clodius' gang drove away the workmen and later attacked Cicero in the street. The enmity continued when an earth tremor prompted the soothsayers to pronounce that some divinity must be angry because a consecrated site was being used for a residence, and Clodius argued that it must be Cicero's (Dio, XXXIX.20).
Velleius Paterculus, whose compendium of Roman History survived in a single, now lost manuscript provides an epitaph for Cicero.
"But you accomplished nothing, Mark Antony—for the indignation that surges in my breast compels me to exceed the bounds I have set for my narrative—you accomplished nothing, I say, by offering a reward for the sealing of those divine lips and the severing of that illustrious head, and by encompassing with a death-fee the murder of so great a consul and of the man who once had saved the state. You took from Marcus Cicero a few anxious days, a few senile years, a life which would have been more wretched under your domination than was his death in your triumvirate; but you did not rob him of his fame, the glory of his deeds and words, nay you but enhanced them. He lives and will continue to live in the memory of the ages, and so long as this universe shall endure—this universe which, whether created by chance, or by divine providence, or by whatever cause, he, almost alone of all the Romans, saw with the eye of his mind, grasped with his intellect, illumined with his eloquence—so long shall it be accompanied throughout the ages by the fame of Cicero. All posterity will admire the speeches that he wrote against you, while your deed to him will call forth their execrations, and the race of man shall sooner pass from the world than the name of Cicero be forgotten" (II.66.3–5).
Writing to Atticus on July 8, Cicero was amazed to discover that the games which Brutus was sponsoring were to be in "July"—the new name given to the month of Quinctilis in honor of Julius Caesar, who had been born in that month. "Good heavens! 'Nones of July'! Confound their impudence! But one can be losing one's temper all day long. Could anything be more unseemly than 'July' for Brutus? Nothing that I've ever seen" (Letters, XVI.1). And, indeed, Brutus himself was "quite extraordinarily upset" about the change, as Cicero wrote two days later (Letters, XVI.4).
References: Cicero: Letters to Atticus (Vol. IV) (1999) translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Loeb Classical Library); Catullus (1988) translated by J. W. Mackail (Loeb Classical Library); C. Velleius Paterculus: The Roman History (1924) translated by Frederick W. Shipley (Loeb Classical Library); The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (1982) by J. N. Adams; "Clodia Metelli" (1983) by Marilyn B. Skinner, in Transactions of the American Philological Association, 113, 273-287; Cicero: Philippics (1926) translated by Walter C. A. Ker (Loeb Classical Library).
