Sessa Aurunca and Cicero

After his stay in Naples, Edward Hutton toured the Campania. He visited ancient Sessa Aurunca and nearby Formia, the site of the villa of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the ancient Roman lawyer, writer, and orator. Here is his account of the tragic death of that famous man.

   

There used to be places in the world as it were enchanted: one of these was Sessa Aurunca. Sessa remained to us from the Golden Age and perhaps in the Golden Age all Italy was as spellbound. The little town lay in a groin of antique lava, a combe rather, of the old volcano Roccamonfina, and was the ancient centre of the Aurunci who have left their name to the half ruined but still serviceable Roman bridge, whose majestic ivy-clad arches I used so often to visit.

 

And what a scene was there! The Gulf of Gaeta lay before one, not to be outdone for beauty. The coast curved like a sickle and Gaeta on its great headland, visionary, seemingly immaterial, half divined, closed the view westward. There in the inmost curve of the coast lay Formia where from his villa Cicero was used so often to write to Atticus. Southwood Monte Massico closed the view caressed by the bluest of seas. Somewhere there the Liris wandered. One seemed to be living in a picture by Claude, in a landscape serene and ideal like something in a dream. Here were the gracious trees, the broken fountain, the lonely stone-pine on the hillside. And there surely under the cypress a goatherd watched his sparse flock—I seemed to hear the faint notes of his pipe, while all the earth lay Danae to the sun….

 

Where has it gone? The broad black tarmac motor road has blotted out the dust and the stones of the Via Appia, the exhaust of the automobiles have silenced my shepherd’s pipe, the ruins of the Romans, rather tidied up, remain amid the ruins of my vision. …

 

I left Minturno in the evening light which glorified the exquisite classic landscape through which I passed almost in a dream, to Formia. There to find my friend and to sleep for I had had a long day, and, though the distance was not great, the days when I used to tramp all over Italy and scarcely feel tired were now long ago.  So Formia it was;  and after dinner I went to bed and as one will when weary began to think over the day, and then of Cicero and his villa here at Formia and his letters to Atticus and of the horrible end that came of it all in this very place.

 

It was Petrarch who loved and reproached him in one of those strange letters he wrote to Cicero’s Shade—it was Petrarch who asked him: “Why did you entangle yourself in so much contention, in such utterly profitless quarrels? Why did you forsake the leisure more suited to your age, your profession and your station in life? What madness drove you to assail Antony?”

 

Oh, have we not all asked him that?

 

But when he delivered those Philippics he was at the height of his glory, overwhelmed by rapturous applause, the very hero of the scene. … But those with whom he was dealing—did he not divine, did he not know, they were all selfish, cold-hearted place-seekers, politicians eager only to be in with the victor whoever and whatever he might b? And so when the fatal news arrived of the inion of Lepidus with Antony, the defection of Octavianus, who was actually marching on Rome itself, it was evident that all was lost. The usurpers were triumphant, and the lists of the proscribed—well, they could not but include the name of Marcus Tullius Cicero.

 

Warned of his danger at his Tusculan villa, he set out for the coast and embarked at Antium, but like Marius was driven by weather to land and make his way to Formiae, where sick in body and mind he sought his beloved villa, resolved no longer to fly from his fate. “Let me die in the country I have so often saved.” But as Antony’s murderers approached, his attendants forced him into a litter and hurried him through the woods towards the shore. They were overtaken and prepared to defend their master with their lives. But the old man bade them set down the litter and, holding his chin with his left hand as his wont was, he looked steadily on his murderers being as he was all squalid and unshorn; his countenance wasted with care; and stretching out of the litter he called upon his murderers to strike.

 

They cut off his head and his hands, which had written the Philippics, and bore them to Rome, where by the orders of Antony they were nailed to the Rostra after Fulvia, Antony’s wife, had thrust a hairpin through the tongue.

 

Cicero was in his sixty-fourth year. No one, not even those who have loved him best, can altogether defend the weakness of his character, inconsistent and irresolute as it was. But his death was courageous…and his death pays for all the weaknesses of his life. He was a good man. Besides, perhaps we owe to him and to Vergil the survival of Latin culture and civilization.

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 137-144.