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Ahenobarbus, who never lost an opportunity to undermine Caesar, said, ‘All our best fighting men are in Gaul. Caesar has ten legions – a huge number. Why don’t we order him to send a couple to Syria to fill the breach?’

At the mention of Caesar’s name there was a perceptible stirring of hostility in the room.

‘He recruited those legions,’ pointed out Pompey. ‘I agree they would be more useful in the east. But he regards those men as his own.’

‘Well he needs to be reminded they are not his own. They exist to serve the republic, not him.’

Looking round at the senators all nodding vigorously in agreement, Cicero said afterwards that it was only at that moment that he realised the true significance of Crassus’s death. ‘Because, dear Tiro, what have we learned while writing our Republic? Divide power three ways in a state and tension is balanced; divide it in two and sooner or later one side must seek to dominate the other – it is a natural law. Disgraceful as he was, Crassus at least preserved the equilibrium between Pompey and Caesar. But with him gone, who will do it now?’

And so we drifted towards calamity. At times, Cicero was shrewd enough to see it. ‘Can a constitution devised centuries ago to replace a monarchy, and based upon a citizens’ militia, possibly hope to run an empire whose scope is beyond anything ever dreamed of by its framers? Or must the existence of standing armies and the influx of inconceivable wealth inevitably destroy our democratic system?’

And then at other times he would dismiss such apocalyptic talk as excessively gloomy and argue that the republic had endured all manner of disasters in the past – invasions, revolutions, civil wars – and had always somehow survived them: why should this time be any different?

But it was.

The elections that year were dominated by two men. Clodius sought to be praetor. Milo ran for the consulship. The violence and the bribery of the campaign were beyond anything the city had ever seen, and yet again polling day had to be postponed repeatedly. It was now more than a year since the republic had elected legitimate consuls. The Senate was presided over by an interrex, often a nonentity, on a rolling five-day mandate; the fasces of the consuls were placed symbolically in the Temple of Libitina, goddess of the dead. Hurry back to Rome, Cicero wrote to Atticus, who was on another of his business trips. Come and look at the empty husks of the real old Roman Republic we used to know.

It was a measure of how desperate things were becoming that Cicero vested all his hopes in Milo, even though Milo was entirely his opposite: crude and brutal, lacking in eloquence or indeed any political skill apart from the staging of gladiatorial games to enthuse the voters, the costs of which had left him bankrupt. Milo had outlived his usefulness to Pompey, who would have nothing more to do with him, and who was supporting his opponents, Scipio Nasica and Plautius Hypsaeus. But Cicero still needed him. I have firmly concentrated all my efforts, all my time, care, diligence and thought, my whole mind in short, on winning the consulship for Milo. He saw him as the best bulwark against the eventuality he dreaded most: Clodius’s election to the consulship.

Cicero often asked me to perform small services for Milo during that campaign. For example, I went back through our files and prepared lists of our old supporters for him to canvass. I also set up meetings between him and Cicero’s clients in the various tribal headquarters. I even took him bags of money that Cicero had raised from wealthy donors.

One day in the new year, Cicero asked me, as a favour, if I would spend a short time observing Milo’s campaign at first hand. ‘To put the matter bluntly, I’m worried he’s going to lose. You know elections as well as I do. Watch him with the voters. See if anything can be done to improve his prospects. If he loses and Clodius wins, I don’t need to tell you it will be a disaster for me.’

I cannot pretend that I was delighted with the assignment, but I did as I was asked, and on the eighteenth day of January I turned up at Milo’s house, which was on the steepest part of the Palatine, behind the Temple of Saturn. A listless crowd was gathered outside, but of the would-be consul himself there was no sign. I knew then that Milo’s candidacy was in trouble. If a man is standing for election and feels himself to have a chance of winning, he works every hour of the day. But Milo did not emerge until the middle of the morning, and when he did, he took me to one side to complain about Pompey, who he said was entertaining Clodius that very morning at his country house in the Alban Hills.