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everything he can to get your exile overturned. His blood is up. He wants you back in Rome, you and me and him, fighting side by side, to save the republic from Clodius and his gang! What do you say to that?”
    He was like a dog that has just laid a kill at its master’s feet; if he’d had a tail, it would have been thumping against the fabric of the couch. But if Milo had expected either delight or gratitude, he was to be disappointed. Depressed in spirit and ragged in appearance though he might be, Cicero had nevertheless seen straight through to the heart of the matter. He swilled his wine around in his cup, frowning before he spoke.
    “And does Caesar agree to this?”
    “Ah now,” said Milo, shifting slightly on his couch, “that’s for you to settle with him. Pompey will play his part, but you must play yours. It would be hard for him to campaign to bring you back if Caesar were to object very strongly.”
    “So he wants me to reconcile with him?”
    “His word was to reassure him.”
    It had grown dark while we were talking. The household slaves had lit lamps around the perimeter of the garden; their gleams were clouded with moths. But no light was on the table, so I couldn’t properly make out Cicero’s expression. He was silent for a long while. It was terrifically hot as usual, and I was conscious of the night sounds of Macedonia—the cicadas and the mosquitoes, the occasional dog bark, the voices of local people in the street, speaking in their strange, harsh foreign tongue. I wondered if Cicero was thinking the same as I was—that another year in such a place as this would kill him. Perhaps he was, because eventually he let out a sigh of resignation and said, “And in what terms am I supposed to ‘reassure’ him?”

    “That’s up to you. If any man can find the right words, it’s you. But Caesar has made it clear to Pompey that he needs something in writing before he’ll even think of reconsidering his position.”
    “Am I supposed to give you a document to take back to Rome?”
    “No, this part of the arrangement has to be between you and Caesar. Pompey thinks it would be best if you sent your own private emissary to Gaul—someone you trust, who could deliver some form of written undertaking into Caesar’s hands personally.”
    Caesar—everything seemed to come back to him eventually. I thought again of the sound of his trumpets leaving the Field of Mars, and in the stifling gloom I sensed rather than saw that both men had turned to look at me.

How easy it is for those who play no part in public affairs to sneer at the compromises required of those who do. For two years Cicero had stuck to his principles and refused to join with Caesar, Pompey and Crassus in their “triumvirate” to control the state. He had denounced their criminality in public; they had retaliated by making it possible for Clodius to become a tribune; and when Caesar had offered him a legateship in Gaul that would have given him legal immunity from Clodius’s attacks, Cicero had refused it, because acceptance would have made him Caesar’s creature.
    But the price of upholding those principles had been banishment, poverty and heartbreak. “I have made myself powerless,” he said to me, after Milo had gone off to bed, leaving us alone to discuss Pompey’s offer, “and where is the virtue in that? What use am I to my family or my principles stuck in this dump for the rest of my life? Oh, no doubt one day I could become some kind of shining example to be taught to bored pupils: the man who refused ever to compromise his conscience. Perhaps after I’m safely dead they might even put up a statue of me at the back of the rostra. But I don’t want to be a monument. My skill is statecraft, and that requires me to be alive and in Rome.” He fell silent. “Then again, the thought of having to bend the knee to Caesar is scarcely bearable. To have suffered all this, and then to have to go creeping back to him like some