Imperium:

by Robert Harris

  News of this assembly and the toppling of the statue had by now reached the governor’s palace, and when we tried to leave the senate house we found the building ringed with Roman soldiers. The meeting was dissolved on Metellus’s orders, Heraclius arrested, and Cicero ordered to report to the governor at once. There could easily have been a bloody riot, but Cicero leapt up on to the back of a cart and told the Sicilians to calm themselves, that Metellus would not dare to harm a Roman senator acting on the authority of a praetor’s court – although he did add, and only half in jest, that if he had not emerged by nightfall, they might perhaps make enquiries as to his whereabouts. He then clambered down and we allowed ourselves to be conducted over the bridge and on to the Island.

  The Metellus family were at this time approaching the zenith of their power. In particular, the branch of the clan that had produced the three brothers, Quintus, Lucius and Marcus – all then in their forties – looked set to dominate Rome for years to come. It was, as Cicero said, a three-headed monster, and this middle head – the second brother, Lucius – was in many ways the most formidable of all. He received us in the royal chamber of the governor’s palace with the full panoply of his imperium – an imposing, handsome figure, seated in his curule chair beneath the unyielding marble gaze of a dozen of his predecessors, flanked by his lictors, with his junior magistrate and his clerks behind him, and an armed sentry on the door.

  ‘It is a treasonable offence,’ he began, without rising and without preliminaries, ‘to foment rebellion in a Roman province.’

  ‘It is also a treasonable offence,’ retorted Cicero, ‘to insult the people and senate of Rome by impeding their appointed representative in his duties.’

  ‘Really? And what kind of Roman representative addresses a Greek senate in its native tongue? Everywhere you have gone in this province, you have stirred up trouble. I shall not have it! We have too small a garrison to keep order among so many natives. You are making this place ungovernable, with your damned agitation.’

  ‘I assure you, Governor, the resentment is against Verres, not against Rome.’

  ‘Verres!’ Metellus banged the arm of his chair. ‘Since when did you care about Verres? I shall tell you when. Since you saw a chance to use him as a way of advancing yourself, you shitty little seditious lawyer!’

  ‘Take this down, Tiro,’ Cicero said, without removing his steady gaze from Metellus. ‘I want a verbatim record. Such intimidation is entirely admissible in court.’

  But I was too frightened even to move, for there was a lot of shouting now from the other men in the room, and Metellus had jumped to his feet. ‘I order you,’ he said, ‘to return the documents you stole this morning!’

  ‘And I remind the governor,’ replied Cicero calmly, ‘with the greatest respect, that he is not on the parade ground, that he is addressing a free Roman citizen, and I shall discharge the duty I have been assigned!’

  Metellus had his hands on his hips and was leaning forward, his broad chin thrust out. ‘You will undertake to return those documents now, in private – or you will be ordered to return them tomorrow in court, before the whole of Syracuse!’

  ‘I choose to take my chance in court, as always,’ said Cicero, with a tiny inflection of his head. ‘Especially knowing what an impartial and honourable judge I shall have in you, Lucius Metellus – the worthy heir of Verres!’

  I know I have this conversation exactly right, because the moment we were outside the chamber – which was very soon after this last exchange – Cicero and I reconstructed it while it was still fresh in our memories, in case he did indeed have occasion to use it in court. (The fair copy remains to this day among his papers.)

  ‘That went well,’ he joked, but his hand and voice were trembling, for it was now plain that his whole mission, perhaps even his mortal safety, was in the gravest peril. ‘But if you seek power,’ he said, almost to himself, ‘and if you are a new man, this is what you have to do. Nobody is ever going simply to hand it to you.’

  We returned at once to the house of Flavius and worked all night, by the weak light of smoky Sicilian candles and stuttering oil lamps, to prepare for court the following morning. Frankly, I did not see what Cicero could possibly hope to achieve, except humiliation. Metellus was never going to award judgement in his favour, and besides – as Cicero had privately conceded – the right of law lay with the tax company. But fortune, as the noble Terence has it, favours the brave, and she certainly favoured Cicero that night. It was young Frugi who made the breakthrough. I have not mentioned Frugi as often in this narrative as I should have done, chiefly because he had that kind of quiet decency which does not attract much comment, and which is only noticed when its possessor has gone. He had spent the day on the tax company records, and in the evening, despite having caught Cicero’s cold, he refused to go to bed, and switched his attention instead to the evidence collected by the Syracusan senate. It must have been long after midnight when I suddenly heard him utter a cry, and then he beckoned us all over to the table. Laid out across it was a series of wax tablets, detailing the company’s banking activities. Taken on their own, the lists of names, dates and sums loaned meant little. But once Frugi compared it with the list compiled by the Syracusans of those who had been forced to pay a bribe to Verres, we could see they tallied exactly: his victims had raised the funds they needed to buy him off by borrowing. Better still was the effect produced when he laid out a third set of accounts: the company’s receipts. On the same dates exactly the same sums had been redeposited with the tax company by a character named ‘Gaius Verrucius’. The depositor’s identity was so crudely forged, we all burst out laughing, for obviously the name originally entered had been ‘Verres’, but in every case the last two letters had been scraped off and ‘ucius’ added as a replacement.

  ‘So Verres demanded a bribe,’ said Cicero, with growing excitement, ‘and insisted his victim borrow the necessary cash from Carpinatius – no doubt at an extortionate rate of interest. Then he reinvested the bribe with his friends in the tax company, so that he not only protected his capital but earned an extra share of the profits as well! Brilliant villain! Brilliant, greedy, stupid villain!’ And after executing a brief dance of delight, he flung his arms around the embarrassed Frugi and kissed him warmly on both cheeks.

  Of all Cicero’s courtroom triumphs, I should say that the one he enjoyed the following day was among the sweetest – especially considering that technically it was not a victory at all but a defeat. He selected the evidence he needed to take back to Rome, and Lucius, Frugi, Sositheus, Laurea and I each carried a box of documents down to the Syracusan forum, where Metellus had set up his tribunal. An immense throng of local people had already gathered. Carpinatius was sitting waiting for us. He fancied himself as quite a lawyer, and presented his own case, quoting all the relevant statutes and precedents establishing that tax records could not be removed from a province, and generally giving the impression that he was merely the humble victim of an over-mighty senator. Cicero hung his head and put on such a mime of dejection I found it hard to keep a straight face. When at last he got to his feet he apologised for his actions, conceded he was wrong in law, begged forgiveness from the governor, promised gladly to return the documents to Carpinatius, but – he paused – but there was one small point he did not understand, which he would be very grateful to have cleared up first. He picked up one of the wax tablets and studied it in bafflement. ‘Who exactly is Gaius Verrucius?’

  Carpinatius, who had been smiling happily, looked like a man struck in the chest by an arrow fired from very short range, while Cicero, in a puzzled manner, as if it were all a mystery far beyond his comprehension, pointed out the coincidence of names, dates and sums in the tax company’s records and the claims of bribery compiled by the Syracusan senate.

  ‘And there is another thing,’ said Cicero pleasantly. ‘This gentleman, who did so much business with you, does not appear in your accounts before his near-namesake, Gaius Verres, ca
me to Sicily, and he has not done any business with you since Gaius Verres left. But in those three years when Verres was here, he was your biggest client.’ He showed the accounts to the crowd. ‘And it is unfortunate – do you see? – that whenever the slave who wrote up your records came to put down his name, he always made the same slip of his stylus. But there we are. I am sure there is nothing suspicious about it. So perhaps you could simply tell the court who this Verrucius is, and where he can be found.’

  Carpinatius looked helplessly towards Metellus, as someone in the crowd shouted, ‘He does not exist!’ ‘There never was anyone in Sicily called Verrucius!’ yelled another. ‘It is Verres!’ And the crowd started chanting: ‘It is Verres! It is Verres!’

  Cicero held up his hand for silence. ‘Carpinatius insists I cannot remove these records from the province, and I concede in law he is correct. But nowhere in law does it say I cannot make a copy, as long as it is fair, and properly witnessed. All I need is help. Who here will help me copy these records, so that I can take them back to Rome and bring this swine Verres to justice for his crimes against the people of Sicily?’

  A plantation of hands sprang up. Metellus tried to call for silence, but his words were lost in the din of people shouting their support. Cicero, with Flavius to help him, picked out all the most eminent men in the city – Sicilian and Roman alike – and invited them to come forward and take a share of the evidence, whereupon I handed each volunteer a tablet and stylus. I could see Carpinatius out of the corner of my eye frantically trying to struggle across to Metellus, and I could see Metellus with his arms folded scowling furiously down from his raised bench at the chaos of his court. Eventually, he simply turned on his heel and strode angrily up the steps and into the temple behind him.

  Thus ended Cicero’s visit to Sicily. Metellus, I am sure, would dearly have liked to have arrested him, or at least prevented him from removing evidence. But Cicero had won over too many adherents in both the Roman and the Sicilian communities. To have seized him would have caused an insurrection, and as Metellus had conceded, he did not have the troops to control the entire population. By the end of that afternoon, the copies of the tax company’s records had been witnessed, sealed and transferred to our guarded ship in the harbour, where they joined the other trunks of evidence. Cicero himself remained only one more night on the Island, drawing up the list of witnesses he wished to bring to Rome. Lucius and Frugi agreed to remain behind in Syracuse to arrange their transportation.

  The following morning they came down to the dock to see Cicero off. The harbour was packed with well-wishers, and he made a gracious speech of thanks. ‘I know that I carry in this fragile vessel the hopes of this entire province. In so far as it lies within my power, I shall not let you down.’ Then I helped him on to the deck, where he stood with fresh tears shining on his cheeks. Consummate actor that he was, I knew that he could summon any emotion at will, but I am sure that on that day his feelings were unfeigned. I wonder, indeed, looking back on it, if he somehow knew that he would never return to the island again. The oars dipped and stroked us out into the channel. The faces on the quayside blurred, the figures dwindled and disappeared, and slowly we headed out through the mouth of the harbour and into open water.

  VIII

  THE JOURNEY BACK from Regium to Rome was easier than our progress south had been, for by now it was early spring, and the mainland was soft and welcoming. Not that we had much opportunity to admire the birds and flowers. Cicero worked every mile of the way, propped up, swaying and pitching in the back of his covered wagon, assembling the outline of his case against Verres. I would fetch documents from the baggage cart as he needed them, and trot along at the rear of his carriage taking down his dictation, which was no easy feat. His plan, as I understood it, was to separate the mass of evidence into four sets of charges – corruption as a judge, extortion in collecting taxes and official revenues, the plundering of private and municipal property, and, finally, illegal and tyrannical punishments. Witness statements and records were grouped accordingly, and even as he bounced along, he began drafting whole passages of his opening speech. (Just as he had trained his body to carry the weight of his ambition, so he had, by effort of will, cured himself of travel sickness, and over the years he was to do a vast amount of work while journeying up and down Italy.) In this manner, almost without his noticing where he was, we completed the trip in less than a fortnight and came at last to Rome on the Ides of March, exactly two months after we had left the city.

  Hortensius, meanwhile, had not been idle, and an elaborate decoy prosecution was now underway. Of course, as Cicero had suspected, it had been designed partly as a trap to lure him into leaving Sicily early. Dasianus had not bothered to travel to Greece to collect any evidence. He had never even left Rome. But that had not stopped him from bringing charges against the former governor of Achaia in the extortion court, and the praetor, Glabrio, with nothing to do until Cicero returned, had found himself with little option but to let him proceed. And so there he was, day after day, this long-forgotten nonentity, droning away before a bored-looking jury of senators, with Hortensius at his side. And when Dasianus’s loquacity flagged, the Dancing Master would rise in his graceful way, and pirouette about the court, making his own elaborate points.

  Quintus, ever the well-trained staff officer, had prepared a daily campaign schedule while we had been away, and had set it up in Cicero’s study. Cicero went to inspect it the moment he entered the house, and one glance revealed the shape of Hortensius’s plan. Blobs of red dye marked the festivals when the court would not be sitting. Once those were removed, there were only twenty full working days until the senate went into recess. The recess itself lasted a further twenty days, and was followed immediately by the five-day Festival of Flora. Then there was the Day of Apollo, the Tarentine Games, the Festival of Mars, and so on. Roughly one day in four was a holiday. ‘To put it simply,’ said Quintus, ‘judging by the way it is going, I think Hortensius will have no trouble occupying the court until almost the consular elections at the end of July. Then you yourself have to face the elections for aedile at the beginning of August. The earliest we are likely to be able to get into court, therefore, is the fifth. But then in the middle of August, Pompey’s games begin – and they are scheduled to last for a full fifteen days. And then of course there are the Roman Games, and the Plebeian Games—’

  ‘For pity’s sake,’ exclaimed Cicero, peering at the chart, ‘does nobody in this wretched town do anything except watch men and animals kill one other?’ His high spirits, which had sustained him all the way from Syracuse, seemed visibly to leak from him at that moment, like air from a bladder. He had come home ready for a fight, but Hortensius was far too shrewd to meet him head-on in open court. Blocking and attrition: these were to be his tactics, and they were nicely judged. Everyone knew that Cicero’s resources were modest. The longer it took him to get his case to court, the more money it would cost him. Within a day or two, our first few witnesses would start arriving in Rome from Sicily. They would expect to have their travel and accommodation costs defrayed, and to be compensated for their loss of earnings. On top of this, Cicero was having to fund his election campaign for aedile. And assuming he won, he would then have to find the money to maintain himself in the office for a year, repairing public buildings and staging two more sets of official games. He could not afford to skimp these duties: the voters never forgave a cheapskate.

  So there was nothing for it but to endure another painful session with Terentia. They dined alone together on the night of his return from Syracuse, and later I was summoned by Cicero and told to bring him the draft passages of his opening speech. Terentia was lying stiffly on her couch when I went in, stabbing irritably at her food; Cicero’s plate, I noticed, was untouched. I was glad to hand him the document case and escape immediately. Already the speech was vast and would have taken at least two days to deliver. Later, I heard him pacing up and down, declaiming parts of it, and I realise
d she was making him rehearse his case, before deciding whether to advance him any more money. She must have liked what she heard, for the following morning Philotimus arranged for us to draw a line of credit for another fifty thousand. But it was humiliating for Cicero, and it is from around this time that I date his increasing preoccupation with money, a subject which had never previously interested him in the least.

  I sense that I am dawdling in this narrative, having already reached my eighth roll of Hieratica, and need to speed it up a little, else either I shall die on the job, or you will be worn out reading. So let me dispense with the next four months very quickly. Cicero was obliged to work even harder than before. First of all in the mornings he had to deal with his clients (and of course there was a great backlog of casework to get through, which had built up while we were in Sicily). Then he had to appear in court or the senate, whichever was in session. He kept his head down in the latter, anxious in particular to avoid falling into conversation with Pompey the Great, fearful either that Pompey might ask him to drop his prosecution of Verres and give up his candidacy for aedile, or – worse – offer to help, which would leave him beholden to the mightiest man in Rome, an obligation he was determined to avoid. Only when the courts and senate adjourned for public holidays and recesses was he was able to transfer all his energies to the Verres prosecution, sorting out and mastering the evidence, and coaching the witnesses. We were bringing around one hundred Sicilians to Rome, and as for virtually all of them it was their first visit, they needed to have their hands held, and this task fell to me. I became a kind of one-man tour agent, running around the city, trying to stop them falling prey to Verres’s spies, or turning into drunks, or getting into fights – and a homesick Sicilian, let me tell you, is no easy charge. It was a relief when young Frugi returned from Syracuse to lend me a hand (cousin Lucius having remained in Sicily to keep the supply of witnesses and evidence flowing). Finally, in the early evenings, accompanied by Quintus, Cicero resumed his visits to the tribal headquarters to canvass for the aedileship.