As the nomadic Brutus and Cassius struggle to raise foreign money for an army, Mark Antony changes his post-consul itinerary from Macedonia to Gaul. The plan is derailed when Cicero delivers an in-absentia message to the Senate, then throws his support to Octavian, the new Caesar. Vorenus, meantime, is in a battle of his own, having provoked an all-out gang war in the Aventine Collegium that he blames on Pullo. At Atia's villa, Octavia passes the hours getting high on hemp, while a duplicitous youth named Duro looks for the chance to set in motion a deadly plan hatched by Servilia.

The Consul is a Whore
Inside the Episode
With Jonathan Stamp

Cicero, eh? Brave man for a coward.

He finally got it together to stick it to Antony, even if he wasn't quite able to deliver his brilliantly eloquent attack in person.

Cicero really hated Antony, I mean really hated him. In the letters we still have written after the assassination of Caesar there is one theme that keeps returning. Brutus and Cassius made a mistake in not getting rid of Antony when they had the chance.

In reality Cicero ran away. He sailed from Italy on July 17th, from the port of Pompeii, some four months after Caesar's death. He was headed for Greece where he could see how things developed and stay out of harm's way.

But the gods conspired against him, specifically the weather gods. Terrible, unseasonable storms struck in the Straits of Messina off Sicily and he had to turn back. And once back in Italy, he decided to that he wasn't going to run any more.

He returned to Rome and wrote a series of speeches aimed against Antony. He called them the Philippics. This was after a Greek orator called Demosthenes who wrote a series of fabulously insulting speeches directed against Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great. They were all warnings against the threat of tyranny posed by the Kingdom of Macedon. Of course no one listened and within a decade Alexander had overrun the whole of Greece.

Cicero fared better, although he was to pay a high price, (watch Episode Six for that one). His invective did wake Rome up to Antony's excesses and no wonder, it's great stuff.

The gibes in last night's episode are all taken directly from the second of the speeches, the so-called Second Philippic. Here's another example that we didn't include:

"Let's consider your behavior from boyhood onwards...a bankrupt before you came of age, you then graduated to man's clothing, except it wasn't the toga virilis that you put on, but a woman's dress. Your first civic job? As a public prostitute, with a fixed price. Not cheap either. But then your Sugar Daddy intervened and took you off the market: a promotion you could call it. He made a sound, steady married woman of you".

Now that's the kind of stuff we should be looking out for in the next presidential campaign.


Documentarian and historian Jonathan Stamp is a former Executive Producer in the BBC History Department and acted as Consultant and Co-Producer on Rome.