You're Dead to Me, Cicero

7th December 43 BC.

Making enemies among the rich and elite classes of Roman society was never a good idea, even when it was, at times, largely unavoidable. So when Marcus Tullius Cicero openly made an enemy of Mark Antony, he must have hoped that he could wield enough influence to have the executor of Julius Caesar's estate strangled and thrown in the Tiber before Mark Antony could do the same. When it transpired that Caesar had left his rather ill-gotten fortune to his young charge, Octavian, and also named him heir, Cicero saw an opportunity, loudly announced that Octavian was just the sort of chap the people of Rome needed to rule them, and declared that he was sure the young man wouldn't make the same mistakes as his adoptive father.

He was bang on the money, too, because Octavian certainly didn't make the same mistakes his father had. But not quite in the same way that Cicero had expected. When Octavian and Mark Antony had one of their many rapprochements in November of 43BC, they got together with Marcus Lepidus and formed the triumvirate that was, nominally at least, to run the affairs of the Roman state in harmony. It didn't, of course, but that story is for another day. What it did allow was for each member of the triumvirate to draw up a list of their enemies and, as a little light aperitif before the serious afternoon banquet of a Roman power struggle, they all got to proscribe those enemies, round them up and beat the living shit out of them.

As it turned out, not all of the crumbly old senators, equities and hangers-on named on the list ended up being executed. Many were simply stripped of a proportion of their wealth and then expelled from Rome to somewhere absolutely awful, like a beautiful and isolated island off the Adriatic Coast. You'd love it there, but then you aren't a Roman senator, and you might as well have been dumped in the middle of the Mojave Desert and told to dig your own toilet. If you weren't in Rome with your ear trumpet to the paper-thin walls of political intrigue, you might as well be nowhere.

Octavian, having wrung Cicero's support dry of everything he could need from him, put up token resistance to his name being included on the list. Mark Antony, however, was rubbing his hands in giddy excitement. The process for bringing the proscribed to justice was described by Appian:

"It was ordered that the heads of all the victims should be brought to the triumvirs for a fixed reward, which to a free person was payable in money and to a slave in both money and freedom... The proscription edict was in the following words: 'Marcus Lepidus, Marcus Antonius, and Octavius Caesar, chosen by the people to set in order and regulate the Republic, declare as follows: "Had not perfidious traitors begged for mercy and when they obtained it become the enemies of their benefactors and conspired against them, neither would Gaius Caesar have been slain by those who he saved by his clemency after capturing them in war, whom he admitted to his friendship, and upon whom he heaped offices, honours, and gifts; nor should we have been compelled to use this widespread severity against those who have insulted us and declared us public enemies [Cicero had tried to get Mark Antony declared a public enemy]. Now, seeing that the malice of those who have conspired against us, and by whose hands Gaius Caesar perished, cannot be mollified by kindness, we prefer to anticipate our enemies rather than suffer at their hands."'

(Civil War 4.2.7-8)

Cicero was a popular chap among the people, and wherever he was looked for, his hunters found only shrugs and silence. He was finally found on the 7th of December 43 BC, leaving his villa at Formiae in a litter, hoping to reach the coast and make a break for the safety of Macedonia. When his killers, a centurion named Herennius and a tribune called Popilius, arrived at the villa, Cicero's slaves said they had no idea where he was, but he was given away by Philologus, a freedman of his brother Quintus Cicero.

Like a gladiator accepting defeat, he bowed to his captors and proffered his neck so as to hasten the gruesome task. His last words were:

Ego vero consisto. Accede, veterane, et, si hoc saltim potes recte facere, incide cervicem.

I go no further: approach, veteran soldier, and, if you can at least do so much properly, sever this neck.

Herennius obliged him and cut off his head. Under instructions from Mark Antony, his hands, with which he had written so many terrible words against him, were also cut off and were nailed, along with his head, on the Rostra in the Forum.

Cicero was the only victim of the proscriptions to have his remains displayed in such a manner. In another story, Mark Antony's wife, Fulvia, pulled out the tongue and stabbed it repeatedly with a hairpin as revenge against the words uttered against her husband.

When Mark Antony and Cleopatra were defeated at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, so paving the way for Octavian to become Augustus and for the Empire to take a distinct path towards one modelled on Western Mediterranean values rather than those of the decadent and immoral East, a man stood up announced the victory to the Senate. That man was Marcus Tullius Cicero Minor.

Cicero's son.

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