A Pillar of Iron: A Novel of Ancient Rome

  “Tullia!” he said. “This has wearied you more than it has wearied me.”

  She tried to smile, then all at once she burst into tears and threw herself into his arms. He held her on his knee and vaguely tried to console her, and wiped her cheeks and smoothed her soft fine hair, and kissed her. His alarm grew.

  “Tell me!” he cried. “What is wrong with my darling, the sweetness of my life?”

  Then, for the first time, he heard of the wounds of his beloved brother who had almost died in his service, and the death of his devoted son-in-law, Piso Frugi, who had worked so valorously for the return of Cicero from exile. Tullia was a widow, and she not yet nineteen years of age. Piso had died of a sudden fever, but physicians suspected poison. She sat on her father’s knee, bereaved, desolate, brokenhearted, and Cicero, sorrowful himself, reflected that his child could so forget her suffering as to come to meet him in the midst of her grief.

  “You should have told me, dearest one,” he murmured, as he consoled and kissed her. “You should not have come to greet me, and add more burdens to the desperate one you carry. I shall sacrifice in behalf of Piso when I arrive in Rome. My brother—”

  “My uncle, Quintus, has only just risen from his bed, where he almost died,” said Tullia, mortified that she had weakly brought such sad news to her father in the midst of his triumphs.

  “I have been so blind!” said Cicero. “If I had taken but a moment to observe you, my daughter, I should have seen how stricken you were, and how pale. But no! I was absorbed in my own vindication, and listening too hard to plaudits and the false speeches of those who greeted me, and who had spurned me only a year ago!”

  He forgot his joy in his mourning for his son-in-law, and in the terrible thought that Quintus might have been killed by his, Cicero’s, enemies. “I have brought disaster to those I love best,” he said.

  But Tullia, resolutely wiping away her tears, consoled him instead. She despised herself that on the eve of her father’s greatest triumph she had weighted sorrow on him; she implored his forgiveness; she ought to have refrained and not have succumbed to female weakness, and cravenly sought consolation. Now, all was ruined. Cicero said, forcing himself to smile, “Piso would desire for me to rejoice, and Quintus will greet me on the morrow. For their sakes, alone, I shall be what they wish,” and he made a grimace, “the Hero crowned with laurel and receiving the homage of Rome.” They wept in each other’s arms, and though Cicero assured his daughter that nothing would be dimmed for him, his heart was heavy and torn. When Tullia had gone to her own chamber rebellion flared in him, and bitterness. Were it not for him Quintus should not have nearly died of wounds; the young and ardent and passionate Piso would be living, he who had so loved life, and with such humor. Cicero did not sleep that night, thinking and often hating.

  A hot gray dawn had hardly appeared at the edge of the night-purple sky when Cicero was awakened by a furious and triumphant blast of trumpets, the passionate clamor of drums and the roar of thousands of voices. His first thought was, “Have they decided to murder me, after all?” Then chiding himself for what was only partly irony, he rose to stand at his window and see the flaring of crimson torches. The handsome villa was surrounded by Quintus’ legion, on foot and on horse and in chariots, and banners were already unfurled and as red as blood in the torchlight, and metal gleamed on harness and armor and spear and blade, and the horses pranced and lictors and fasces were raised and there was much shouting and wheeling and gathering in formation, and beyond the legion heaved masses of people who had come from Rome, itself, to gather in his train. A returning general, victorious and bearing coffers of looted gold and thousands of slaves, could not have received a more thunderous ovation. Tullia came running into her father’s chamber, half in excitement and half in fear, and he took her hands and said, “They would be just as vociferous and noisy if I were being led to execution!”

  A gilded chariot had been sent for him and his daughter from the Senate, and after a hasty breakfast he entered the vehicle, lifting his arms high to greet the incredible crush of newly arriving people joining those who were already there. It was as if all Rome had emptied herself to rush beyond her gates to meet him and follow after him as they followed conquerers. Then the procession began, the trumpets and the drums and cymbals leading, the officers prancing on their black horses, and then Cicero in his shining chariot, and behind him tens of thousands of dancing and screaming and slapping men and women hardly held in check by the following legionnaires. He saw nothing but an ocean of heads, crowned with flowers, and new rivers of humanity flowing into it all along the Via Appia and tributary roads. The sun had raised half a red rim against the burning gray pall of the eastern sky, and a dull scarlet light began to touch tops of distant monuments along the way and the roofs of houses rising on hills, and made sanguine little pools near the road and a few thin small streams. Swallows rose with cries, and from the early autumnal earth there breathed forth the scent of hay and ripening fruit and scorched soil and warm stone and bronzed grass. Now the scarlet light in the east towered upward like a conflagration and the sides of white villas were stained with it and the climbing white walls on the hills also. There was no wind; all was very still and strangely echoing, and the tumultuous voices of the people and the trumpets and drums and cymbals were suddenly dim in Cicero’s ears, as if he dreamed. Tullia saw her father’s face; it was as pale and calm as a statue’s, and as expressionless. He held the gilded reins like a mighty hero and stood proudly and deep in thought, but she saw the bloody light of the torches and the bloody light of the rising sun in the folds of his noble white toga and in the pits of his eyes. She thought to herself that it was very ominous, for all the triumphal procession and the noise and the lifted banners, for now the dust was rising under thousands of running feet and it, too, was scarlet. There was no color at all but red and gray, and for a moment the girl’s heart was shaken with fear as if she had glimpsed a procession in Hades, and from her narrow seat in the chariot she reached out to touch her father’s arm.

  Then all at once the uproarious scene sparkled into other colors as the sun mounted, yet the sky remained oddly crepuscular and sweltering. Now the walls of Rome could be seen, granite intermixed with yellow stone, and above them, the city itself, red, flaming gold, gleaming umber, light green and blue, all its tiled roofs afire as if a thousand thousand bonfires had been built upon them to hail the hero.

  Cicero looked upon his distant city, his home, and for the first time his face was moved. Tears rushed into his eyes. His heart was exalted, as if he were a youth again. He did not hear the trumpets, the drums and the cymbals, the roaring of chariot wheels, the pound of hoofs, the earthquake of feet all about him. He saw and heard nothing but Rome, waiting for him, crowded and gigantic and throbbing with vital power against the sinister sky. Home, home, he murmured to himself, and wished he might be alone to walk to that mirage lifting against the sky higher and higher at every moment.

  Then he was struck by the blackest melancholy and sadness. All that once was Rome was dead. The corpse remained, still vibrating from the life that had left it, the sacred life of departed men. The corpse would decompose if not today then surely tomorrow. What remained then of this city which was at once host and parasite, a corpse and a breathing monster, a still-beating heart and a skeleton? A promise and a threat to the ages, a hope and a warning. What empires lay fetal in the womb of time, still blind, still formless, still deaf, not yet stirring, which would be born as Rome had been born, and would die as she had died? All that was in the universe, Aristotle had averred, is not diminished nor increased by time. All that was is and forevermore will be, nothing added, nothing taken away, though galaxies would disappear and new rainbowed universes flash into being, and new suns rise on new planets—and, on this small world new nations would be born and would be forgotten before the sun and the moon passed away. To these nations, then, Rome was a legacy, a law, a tomb, and an omen. Ah, let them remember Rome, lest they s
hare her fate!

  Cicero came to himself with a start. He could no longer see autumnal fields; they were crowded with multitudes, waving to him, shouting, raising hands high to clap. They were a multitude of colors in their garments; they laughed gleefully to him, proud of their numbers and their demonstrations. And behind him they followed the procession like a vehement river, for all the countryside had joined the Romans who had left the city to greet him. His horses and the interior of the chariot were covered with the flowers of autumn. The sun was too brilliant in his eyes and the heat was stupendous and the noise beyond endurance. Cicero smiled, bowed to the acclamations, the shouts, the yells and the occasional Italianate derisive sound. In truth, the latter made him smile and pleased him more in his present mood than the adulation.

  “I feel ridiculous,” Cicero murmured to his daughter, and when he heard his own words his mood shifted again and he was lighter of heart. Not even the whisper in his ears that Catilina had really triumphed, and not himself, could do more than, for an instant, chill his soul.

  The whole Senate, in their white and scarlet robes, met him at the gates, and the tribunes, and the magistrates, and more teeming mobs with even more raucous voices. Pompey was there, and Crassus and Julius Caesar, on great white horses, as grand as statues. It was Julius who drove his horse through the ranks of the triumphant legionnaires to approach Cicero’s chariot, and it was Julius who leaped like a youth into the chariot itself to embrace Cicero and kiss his cheek. The mobs were tremendously moved at this, and smiled and wept for no discernible reason. Pompey rode beside the chariot on his horse and smiled down with a little gloom upon Cicero. Crassus trotted at the head of the procession as if he were the hero, and not Cicero, and the mobs cheered him also with exuberance.

  “Happy is this day!” Julius cried in Cicero’s ear under the uproar. “My life is now complete, and that I swear, my dearest Marcus!”

  But now the soldiers at the gates raised their own trumpets and drums and conversation could not be continued. It was as if the whole world had gone mad with its own cheering and yelling and cries, and all was covered with clouds of dust golden-red in the morning sunlight.

  Cicero longed to rest in the house of Atticus, but first he must address the Senate, who wept openly when he sat in his old seat. They let him compose himself. He seemed to be listening to the demonstrations of joy and welcome of the huge masses of people outside, whose ovations did not lessen in intensity for a long while. He seemed to be looking about him, pondering, his eyes unreadable. But in truth his mood of sadness and despondency had returned to him, and a curious sense of strangeness as if he were a stranger in a strange land, and did not know how to speak to the inhabitants. He had dreamed of this day with longing and sorrow and despair, hardly believing that it would ever come to pass. It had come to pass—and he could bring no emotion to his mind but bitterness.

  The Senate waited self-righteously to be congratulated on their magnanimity by this great and famous orator, who had so moved, enraged and stunned them by his voice and words in the past, whose eloquence had made them marvel so that they had listened with more attention than they had ever given the most celebrated actor. Whether in agreement or in hostility, they had never felt indifference toward him, or ennui. His voice had always been like the jagged lightning of Jupiter, illuminating and blinding or staggering the soul, or arousing the utmost hate or fear. There had been times when he had appeared to glow before them, incandescent with the emotion that had seized him, and which he had conveyed to them with its own power.

  He wanted to blast them with fire and with anger, to reveal to them the mountebanks and liars and fearful and hypocrites and the arrogant which they were, the men who had trembled at the very name of Catilina and had pronounced his death, and then had accused the instrument of that death of violating the Constitution, of ignoring points of order, and had finally censured and exiled him, execrating his methods. He wanted to hurl the thunderbolts of his violent wrath upon them and reduce them to ashes.

  But, it was not politic. He looked at them, and his treacherous heart felt pity for them that they were not men who had the fortitude to stand by their decisions nor even to agree that those decisions had been necessary in the awful face of danger. He had been their victim. He must now praise them and thank them. He rose to his feet, and a deep sigh of anticipation stirred them.

  “This day,” he said, “is equivalent to immortality.” (Immortalitatis instar fuit.)

  He forgot the Senate in his own sudden emotions of joy, for all at once he was flooded with the reality that he was indeed home and he remembered nothing else. Elation lifted his soul so that he felt a sense of physical elevation. He launched into a panegyric of the Senate, of the people of Rome, “who had carried me upon their shoulders into my beloved city.” His voice was like golden music, and the Senate was exalted at hearing themselves described as mighty men of honor, as the bulwark of Rome, as the repository of republican virtues and guardians of the city. It seemed to Cicero in those deliriously joyous moments that he spoke truly and that these were not the men he remembered who had condemned him to an exile that had almost cost his life. They were Romans, and he was a Roman also, and so they were brothers greeting each other after a long and bitter separation. He eulogized the people of Rome also; his soul appeared to expand to embrace the whole nation. His words were repeated by those near the door of the Senate and carried to the farthest throng so that thunderous echoes accompanied all he said. Everything to him was outlined with radiance, and his voice conveyed his jubilation and his happiness. Weariness fell from him; he was young again and valiant and believed in humanity. The Senate wept; the people wept.

  When he left the Senate Chamber he was accompanied by Senators who seemed to want to be close to him, and jostled each other. The crowd hailed him in voices they used for the worship of divinity. It was not until he stood on the Senate steps and looked at the seething Forum and the vociferous faces that the morning’s despondency seized him again though in far worse measure, and his spirit sickened with a deathly nausea. None guessed it; his smile was fixed on his face. He thought, None of them means it. It is only an excuse for a fiesta, for the license to shout and scream with hysteria, to lose control, to jump and leap without fear of a frowning and censorious glance, to embrace, to romp, to behave as heedless animals all voice and exuberance. How heavy is the yoke of humanity on the shoulders of men!

  Atticus’ house on the Palatine was his temporary home, where he was welcomed by a weeping and laughing Terentia and a boisterous young son, and Pomponia and her son, and hordes of friends already feasting and wining while waiting for him. Atticus, who had left for Greece only a few days before, had written a letter for him: “Alas, I do not know the exact day of your return, or if the Senate will, at the last hour, revoke the comita! But anticipating that you will be summoned home I have placed my house at your disposal and all my goods and my slaves, and have invited your family to be with you. In the meantime, I must go to Athens and other parts of Greece in pursuit of my inconsiderate and irresponsible authors who, when their hands are filled with a few sesterces, leave Rome for other parts, notably those of small taxes, to commune, as they say, with the Muses and refresh their lazy souls. Does it matter to them that I have broadcast the news of a forthcoming book of theirs, and engaged extra scribes and have given them advances on royalties—which they immediately spend without having earned them? No! They must take their surly visages and their sesterces, to lie in the sun and disport themselves with local harlots and haunt the wine shops! They have no sense of duty. I embrace you, beloved Marcus, but must also remind you that you, too, owe me another volume.”

  Cicero forced himself to embrace his wife, to thank her for her efforts in his behalf, though he noticed that but a single year had aged and fattened her and had narrowed her once lovely eyes even more. But he rejoiced in his son, in whose face, red-cheeked and merry, he fancied he discerned preternatural wisdom and a love for learning a
nd all the virtues. Terentia informed him, glowing with pride and happiness, that the Triumvirate in person were visiting him that evening for a banquet, which she, forgetting frugality, had lavishly arranged. He was shown to his apartments by bowing slaves and he looked upon the sumptuousness of them and recalled that he now had no house of his own, that Publius Clodius had built on the site a temple ironically dedicated to Liberty, and had appropriated the rest of the grounds for himself. He threw himself upon the bed and despite the continuing uproar of crowds which had accompanied him here he let himself fall into an exhausted sleep.

  Before sunset he went to the house of Quintus on the Carinae—the house so full of his own memories—where he found his brother still recovering from his wounds. There, for the first time, as he sat beside Quintus holding his hand, he learned of the true and desperate state of affairs in Rome. There was a serious shortage of grain in the city. A famine had begun. Sicily and Egypt, from whence came most of the cereals which supplied Rome, had reported extremely poor harvests that year. Clodius, emulating Catilina, had formed his own gangs of malcontents and criminals and had trained them in the manner of an army, which only he could control. He had incited them, and only lately, against the Senate itself, which they had actually stoned while it was in session. Several of the Senators had been wounded. The people had some justice on their side: Anticipating famine, the storers of corn had raised their prices enormously, so much so that cereals were often beyond the means of small purses. Some of Clodius’ mobs had even threatened to burn down Caesar’s beloved Temple of Jupiter. The people, as usual, cared little for liberty, but they cared everything for their bellies, so it was easy to arouse them to inflammatory madness at a word.