Ad Familiares 2.16
Ad Familiares 2.16
Headnote
Cicero to M. Caelius Rufus, written from his villa at Cumae on the fourth day before the Nones of May — Perseus dateline Scr. in Cumano iv Non. Mai. a. 705 (49), that is, 4 May 49 BC. The salutation styles Cicero imperator, the title that has clung to him since his Cilician proconsulship and the lictors of which (the “awkward pomp of my lictors”) he complains in the body of the letter. Caelius, who had been Cicero’s quaestor of sorts at Rome and his lively correspondent throughout the Cilician year, has gone over to Caesar; he has written a coaxing, half-anxious letter urging Cicero not to take ship for Greece and warning him of risks to himself and his family if he does. Cicero replies a week after his letter to Servius Sulpicius (Fam. 4.2) and is on the brink of the very decision he denies to Caelius he has made.
The letter is among the most exposed psychological documents of the spring of 49: Cicero protests too much that he has no intention of joining Pompey, that he is merely looking for a quiet solitudo in Italy, that his fondness for the seaside villas means nothing — while admitting, in the same breath, that he would gladly take ship “for the sake of quiet,” that the dignity of his imperatorial laurel has become a target for malice, and that his model in neutrality is the late Q. Hortensius. The reference to Dolabella, Cicero’s son-in-law and at this point a young Caesarian, is the closest the letter comes to confession: amid the wreckage Cicero had hoped that Dolabella’s debts might at least have been wiped out by his change of side, and his “dishonourable days” for his father-in-law are the weeks when he served Caesar in the city while Cicero was still wavering. The closing throwaway about the gifted toga praetexta for the boy of Oppius — one of Caesar’s chief agents at Rome — is the carefully placed proof that he has not yet broken with the other side.
Your letter would have caused me great pain, were it not that reason itself by now has driven out every distress, and that long despair over public affairs has hardened my mind against any fresh grief. Yet how it came about that you should have inferred from my earlier letter what you write you did, I do not know. What was there in it but a lament for the times? — a lament which troubles my mind no more than it does yours. For I do not recognize the keenness of intellect which I myself observe in you as failing to see what I see; what amazes me is that you, who ought to know me through and through, could have been brought to suppose me either so improvident as to break away from the rising fortune for the failing and the all-but-prostrate, or so inconstant as to fling away the goodwill I had won from a man at the height of his power, to desert myself, and to take part — a thing I avoided at the outset and have always avoided — in a civil war. What then is this “grim decision” of mine?
Magno dolore me adfecissent tuae litterae, nisi iam et ratio ipsa depulisset omnis molestias et diuturna desperatione rerum obduruisset animus ad dolorem novum. sed tamen, qua re acciderit ut ex meis superioribus litteris id suspicarere, quod scribis, nescio; quid enim in illis fuit praeter querelam temporum? quae non meum animum magis sollicitum habent quam tuum. nam non eam cognovi aciem ingeni tui, quod ipse videam, te id ut non putem videre; illud miror, adduci potuisse te, qui me penitus nosse deberes, ut existimares aut me tam improvidum, qui ab excitata fortuna ad inclinatam et prope iacentem desciscerem, aut tam inconstantem, ut conlectam gratiam florentissimi hominis effunderem a meque ipse deficerem et, quod initio semperque fugi, civili bello interessem. quod est igitur meum ’triste consilium’?
To withdraw, perhaps, into some quiet retreat. For you know my temper — of which you once had something like its match — and you know besides my disgust, in the eyes as much as in the stomach, at the insolence of the overbearing. To this is added the awkward pomp of my lictors and the name of imperator by which I am still addressed. If I were rid of that load, I should be content with however small a hiding-place in Italy; but this laurel of mine catches the eye, and now the busy little tongues, of the malevolent. And though that was the case, still I have never given a thought to leaving the country except with your good people’s approval. But you know my modest estates: I am obliged to be on one of them, lest I become a burden to my friends. And because I am at my easiest on the coastal ones, I raise in some quarters the suspicion that I mean to take ship — which I might not, in fact, be unwilling to do, if it could be done for the sake of quiet; but for war, how does that fit? — particularly to make war on a man whom I hope I have satisfied, on the side of a man who in no way can ever now be satisfied.
ut discederem fortasse in aliquas solitudines. Nosti enim non modo stomachi mei, cuius tu similem quondam habebas, sed etiam oculorum in hominum insolentium indignitate fastidium. accedit etiam molesta haec pompa lictorum meorum nomenque imperi, quo appellor. eo si onere carerem, quamvis parvis Italiae latebris contentus essem; sed incurrit haec nostra laurus non solum in oculos, sed iam etiam in voculas malevolorum. quod cum ita esset, nil tamen umquam de profectione nisi vobis approbantibus cogitavi. sed mea praediola tibi nota sunt; in his mihi necesse est esse, ne amicis molestus sim. quod autem in maritimis facillime sum, moveo non nullis suspicionem velle me navigare; quod tamen fortasse non nollem, si possem ad otium; nam ad bellum quidem qui convenit? praesertim contra eum, cui spero me satis fecisse, ab eo, cui iam satis fieri nullo modo potest.
Then again, you could most easily have made out my view back at the time when you met me on the road at Cumae. For I did not hide T.\ Ampius’s report from you; you saw how I shrank from the abandonment of the city when I heard of it. Did I not declare to you that I would endure anything sooner than leave Italy for civil war? What then has happened to make me change my mind? Has not everything rather happened to keep me in it? Believe this of me, as I think you do: out of all these miseries I seek nothing else than that men should one day understand that I have wanted nothing more than peace, and that, when peace had been despaired of, I have shunned nothing so much as civil arms. I do not think I shall ever regret this constancy. I remember that our friend Q.\ Hortensius used to make it his boast, in this same line, that he had never taken part in a civil war; my own credit will shine the brighter, because in his case the thing was set down to want of spirit, while in mine I do not think such a verdict is open.
deinde sententiam meam tu facillime perspicere potuisti iam ab illo tempore, cum in Cumanum mihi obviam venisti. non enim te celavi sermonem T. Ampi; vidisti, quam abhorrerem ab urbe relinquenda, cum audissem; nonne tibi adfirmavi quidvis me potius perpessurum quam ex Italia ad bellum civile exiturum? quid ergo accidit, cur consilium mutarem? nonne omnia potius, ut in sententia permanerem? credas hoc mihi velim, quod puto te existimare, me ex his miseriis nihil aliud quaerere nisi ut homines aliquando intellegant me nihil maluisse quam pacem, ea desperata nihil tam fugisse quam arma civilia. huius me constantiae puto fore ut numquam paeniteat. etenim memini in hoc genere gloriari solitum esse familiarem nostrum, Q Hortensium, quod numquam bello civili interfuisset; hoc nostra laus erit inlustrior, quod illi tribuebatur ignaviae, de nobis id existimari posse non arbitror.
Nor do those prospects frighten me which, in the most loyal and affectionate spirit, you set out to me as cause for alarm. For there is no bitterness which does not seem to be hanging over us all amid this upheaval of the whole world — a bitterness which, for the state’s sake, I should most gladly have bought off, even at the price of just those private and domestic losses against which you bid me take precautions.
nec me ista terrent, quae mihi a te ad timorem fidissime atque amantissime proponuntur. nulla est enim acerbitas, quae non omnibus hac orbis terrarum perturbatione impendere videatur; quam quidem ego a re publica meis privatis et domesticis incommodis libentissime vel istis ipsis, quae tu me mones ut caveam, redemissem.
For my son — I am glad you hold him dear — I shall leave, if there is any state to leave it in, patrimony enough in the memory of my name; if there is none, then nothing will befall him separately from the rest of the citizens. As for your urging me to look out for my son-in-law, that excellent young man and one most dear to me — can you doubt, when you know how highly I value him, and how much higher still my Tullia, that this care presses on me with the greatest weight? all the more because amid our common miseries this was the one gleam of hope I cherished, that my Dolabella, or rather ours, would be set free from the troubles he had brought on himself by his generosity. I should be glad if you would inquire what days he endured while he was in the city — how bitter they were to him, how dishonourable to me, his father-in-law.
filio meo, quem tibi carum esse gaudeo, si erit ulla res publica, satis amplum patrimonium relinquam in memoria nominis mei; sin autem nulla erit, nihil accidet ei separatim a reliquis civibus. nam quod rogas ut respiciam generum meum, adulescentem optimum mihique carissimum, an dubitas, qui scias quanti cum illum tum vero Tulliam meam faciam, quin ea me cura vehementissime sollicitet, et eo magis, quod in communibus miseriis hac tamen oblectabar specula, Dolabellam meum vel potius nostrum fore ab iis molestiis, quas liberalitate sua contraxerat, liberum? velim quaeras, quos ille dies sustinuerit, in urbe dum fuit, quam acerbos sibi, quam mihimet ipse socero non honestos.
And so I am neither awaiting this Spanish outcome — of which, by the way, I am as well informed as you write you are — nor laying any subtle scheme. If there is ever to be a commonwealth again, surely there will be a place for me in it; if not, you yourself, I imagine, will come into the same wildernesses where you will hear that I have settled. Yet perhaps I am playing the prophet, and all this will end better. For I remember the despair of the men who were old when I was young. Maybe I am imitating them now and falling into the failing of age. I should be glad if it were so; but still —.
itaque neque ego hunc Hispaniensem casum exspecto, de quo mihi exploratum est ita esse, ut tu scribis, neque quicquam astute cogito. si quando erit civitas, erit profecto nobis locus; sin autem non erit, in easdem solitudines tu ipse, ut arbitror, venies, in quibus nos consedisse audies. sed ego fortasse vaticinor et haec omnia meliores habebunt exitus. recordor enim desperationes eorum, qui senes erant adulescente me. Eos ego fortasse nunc imitor et utor aetatis vitio. velim ita sit; sed tamen—.
I expect you have heard that I have had the toga praetexta woven for Oppius’s boy; our friend Curtius is thinking of dipping his twice in dye, but the dyer holds him up. I have thrown that in by way of showing you that I can still find something to laugh at in the midst of vexation. About Dolabella’s affair, the line I have written — look to it, please, as though it were your own. The last word will be this: I shall do nothing turbulent, nothing rash; but I do beg you, wherever I may be on earth, to look after me and my children as our friendship and your own loyalty demand.
togam praetextam texi Oppio puto te audisse; nam Curtius noster dibaphum cogitat, sed eum infector moratur. hoc aspersi, ut scires me tamen in stomacho solere ridere. de re Dolabellae quod scripsi, suadeo videas, tamquam si tua res agatur. extremum illud erit: nos nihil turbulenter, nihil temere faciemus; te tamen oramus, quibuscumque erimus in terris, ut nos liberosque nostros ita tueare, ut amicitia nostra et tua fides postulabit.