Lustrum

supporters: he had not expected a different outcome. Servius, on the other hand, took his defeat badly, and came to see Cicero in his tent after the declaration to pour out a tirade against him for permitting the most corrupt campaign in history. 'I shall challenge it in the courts. My case is overwhelming. This battle is not over yet, by any means!' He stamped off, followed by his attendants carrying their document cases full of evidence. Cicero, slumped with exhaustion on his curule chair, swore as he watched him leave. I tried to make some consoling remarks, but he told me roughly to be quiet and to do something useful for a change by helping him take off that damned breastplate. His skin had been chafed raw by the metal edges, and the moment he was free of it he seized it in both hands and hurled it in a fury to the other side of the tent, where it landed with a clatter.

VIII
    A terrible melancholy now overcame Cicero, of a depth I had never seen before. Terentia went off with the children to spend the rest of the summer in the higher altitudes and cooler glades of Tusculum, but the consul stayed in Rome, working. The heat was more than usually oppressive, the stink of the great drain beneath the forum rose to envelop the hills, and many hundreds of citizens were carried off by the sweating fever, the stench of their corpses adding to the noisome atmosphere. I have often wondered what history would have found to say about Cicero if he had also succumbed to a fatal illness at that time – and the answer is 'very little'. At the age of forty-three he had won no military victories. He had written no great books. True, he had achieved the consulship, but then so had many nonentities, Hybrida being the most obvious example. The only significant law he had carried on to the statute book was Servius's campaign finance reform act, which he heartily disliked. In the meantime Catilina was still at liberty and Cicero had lost a great deal of prestige by what was seen as his panicky behaviour on the eve of the poll. As the summer turned to autumn, his consulship was almost three quarters done and dribbling away to nothing – a fact he realised more keenly than anybody.
    One day in September I left him alone with a pile of legalpapers to read. It was almost two months after the elections. Servius had made good his threat to prosecute Murena and was seeking to have his victory declared null and void. Cicero felt he had little choice except to defend the man whom he had done so much to make consul. Once again he would appear alongside Hortensius, and the amount of evidence to be mastered was immense. But when I returned some hours later the documents were still untouched. He had not moved from his couch, and was clutching a cushion to his stomach. I asked if he was ill. 'I have a dryness of the heart,' he said. 'What's the point of going on with all this work and striving? No one will ever remember my name – not even in a year's time, let alone in a thousand. I'm finished – a complete failure.' He sighed and stared at the ceiling, the back of his hand resting on his forehead. 'Such dreams I had, Tiro – such hopes of glory and renown. I meant to be as famous as Alexander. But it's all gone awry somehow. And do you know what most torments me as I lie awake at night? It's that I cannot see what I could have done differently.'
    He continued to keep in touch with Curius, whose grief at the death of his mistress had not abated; in fact he had become ever more obsessed. From him Cicero learned that Catilina was continuing to plot against the state, and now much more seriously. There were disturbing reports of covered wagons full of weapons being moved under cover of darkness along the roads outside Rome. Fresh lists of possibly sympathetic senators had been drawn up, and according to Curius these now included two young patrician senators, M. Claudius Marcellus and Q. Scipio Nasica. Another ominous sign was that G. Manlius, Catilina's wild-eyed military lieutenant, had disappeared from his usual haunts in the back streets of Rome and was rumoured to be touring Etruria, recruiting armed bands of supporters. Curiuscould produce no written evidence for any of this – Catilina was much too cunning for that – and eventually, after asking a few too many questions, he came under suspicion from his fellow conspirators and began to be excluded from their inner circle. Thus Cicero's only first-hand source of information gradually ran