Lustrum

Pompey the Great returned to Italy, making land at Brundisium. The senate's messengers raced in relays nearly three hundred miles to Rome to bring the news. According to their dispatches, twenty thousand of Pompey's legionaries had disembarked with him, and the following day he addressed them in the town's forum. 'Men,' he was reported to have said, 'I thank you for your service. We have put an end to Mithradates, the republic's greatest enemy since Hannibal, and performed heroic deeds together that the world will remember for a thousand years. It is a bitter day that sees us part. But ours is a nation of laws, and I have no authority from the senate and people to maintain an army in Italy. Disperse to your native cities. Go back to your homes. I promise you your services will not go unrewarded. There will be money and land for all of you. You have my word. And in the meantime, stand ready for my summons to join me in Rome, where you will receive your bounty and we shall celebrate the greatest triumph the mother-city of our newly enlarged empire has ever seen!'
    With that, he set off on the road to Rome, accompanied by only his official escort of lictors and a few close friends. As news of his humble entourage spread, it had the most amazing effect. People had feared he would move north with his army, leavinga swathe of countryside behind them stripped bare as if by locusts. Instead, the Warden of Land and Sea merely ambled along in a leisurely fashion, stopping to rest in country inns, as if he were nothing more grand than a sightseer returning from a foreign holiday. In every town along the route – in Tarentum and in Venusia, across the mountains and down on to the plains of Campania, in Capua and in Minturnae – the crowds turned out to cheer him. Hundreds decided to leave their homes and follow him, and soon the senate was receiving reports that as many as five thousand citizens were on the march with him to Rome.
    Cicero read of all this with increasing alarm. His long letter to Pompey was still unacknowledged, and even he was beginning to perceive that his boasting about his consulship might have done him harm. Worse, he now learned from several sources that Pompey had formed a bad impression of Hybrida, having travelled through Macedonia on his journey back to Italy, witnessing at first hand his corruption and incompetence, and that when he reached Rome he would press for the governor's immediate recall. Such a move would threaten Cicero with financial ruin, not least because he had yet to receive a single sesterce from Hybrida. He called me to his library and dictated a long letter to his former colleague
: I shall try to protect your back with all my might, provided I do not seem to be throwing my trouble away. But if I find that it gets me no thanks, I shall not let myself be taken for an idiot – even by you
. A few days after Saturnalia there was a farewell dinner for Atticus, at the end of which Cicero gave him the letter and asked him to deliver it to Hybrida personally. Atticus swore to discharge this duty the moment he reached Macedonia, and then, amid many tears and embraces, the two best friends said their farewells. It was a source of deep sadness to both men that Quintus had not bothered to come and see him off.
    With Atticus gone from the city, worries seemed to press in on Cicero from every side. He was deeply concerned, and I even more so, by the worsening health of his junior secretary, Sositheus. I had trained this lad myself, in Latin grammar, Greek and shorthand, and he had become a much-loved member of the household. He had a melodious voice, which was why Cicero came to rely on him as a reader. He was twenty-six or thereabouts, and slept in a small room next to mine in the cellar. What started as a hacking cough developed into a fever, and Cicero sent his own doctor down to examine him. A course of bleeding did no good; nor did leeches. Cicero was very much affected, and most days he would sit for a while beside the young man's cot, holding a cold wet towel to his burning forehead. I stayed up with Sositheus every night for a week, listening to his rambling nonsense talk and trying to calm him down and persuade him to drink some water.
    It is often the case with these dreadful fevers that the final crisis is preceded by a lull. So it was with Sositheus. I remember it very well. It was long past midnight. I was stretched out on a straw mattress beside his cot, huddled against the cold