Imperium:

by Robert Harris

  In such a way did he speak, working all his persuasive powers upon his cousin, as if Lucius were a one-man jury which he needed to convince – reading his face, trying to find within it clues to the right words and arguments which would unlock his support.

  ‘But Pompey,’ said Lucius, bitterly. ‘After what he did to you before!’

  ‘All I needed, Lucius, was one thing – one tiny, tiny favour – and that was the assurance that I could proceed as I wished, and call my witnesses straight away. No bribery was involved; no corruption. I just knew I had to be sure to secure Glabrio’s consent beforehand. But I could hardly, as the prosecutor, approach the praetor of the court myself. So I racked my brains: who could?’

  Quintus said, ‘There was only one man in Rome, Lucius.’

  ‘Exactly!’ cried Cicero. ‘Only one man to whom Glabrio was honour-bound to listen. The man who had given him his son back, when his divorced wife died – Pompey.’

  ‘But it was not a tiny favour,’ said Lucius. ‘It was a massive interference. And now there is a massive price to be paid for it – and not by you, but by the people of Sicily.’

  ‘The people of Sicily?’ repeated Cicero, beginning to lose his temper. ‘The people of Sicily have never had a truer friend than me. There would never have been a prosecution without me. There would never have been an offer of one and a half million without me. By heaven, Gaius Verres would have been consul in two years’ time but for me! You cannot reproach me for abandoning the people of Sicily!’

  ‘Then refuse to pay his rent,’ said Lucius, seizing hold of his hand. ‘Tomorrow, in court, press for the maximum damages, and to hell with Pompey. You have the whole of Rome on your side. That jury will not dare to go against you. Who cares about Pompey? In five months’ time, as he says himself, he will not even be consul. Promise me.’

  Cicero clasped Lucius’s hand fervently in both of his and gazed deep into his eyes – the old double-grip sincere routine, which I had seen so often in this very room. ‘I promise you,’ he said. ‘I promise you I shall think about it.’

  PERHAPS HE DID think about it. Who am I to judge? But I doubt it can have occupied his mind for more than an instant. Cicero was no revolutionary. He never desired to set himself at the head of a mob, tearing down the state: and that would have been his only hope of survival, if he had turned Pompey against him as well as the aristocracy. ‘The trouble with Lucius,’ he said putting his feet up on the desk after his cousin had gone, ‘is that he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.’

  ‘Do you think Verres bribed Pompey to intervene, to lower the damages?’ asked Quintus, voicing exactly the possibility which had occurred to me.

  ‘It could be. More likely he simply wants to avoid being caught in the middle of a civil war between the people and the senate. Speaking for myself, I would be happy to seize everything Verres possesses, and leave the wretch to live on Gaulish grass. But that is not going to happen,’ he sighed, ‘so we had better see how far we can make this one and a half million stretch.’

  The three of us spent the rest of the evening compiling a list of the most worthy claimants, and after Cicero had deducted his own costs, of close to one hundred thousand, we reckoned he could just about manage to fulfil his obligations, at least to the likes of Sthenius, and to those witnesses who had travelled all the way to Rome. But what could one say to the priests? How could one put a price on looted temple statues made of gems and precious metals, long since broken up and melted down by Verres’s goldsmiths? And what payment could ever recompense the families and friends of Gavius and Herennius and the other innocents he had murdered? The work gave Cicero his first real taste of what it is like to have power – which is usually, when it comes down to it, a matter of choosing between equally unpalatable options – and fairly bitter he found it.

  We went into court in the usual manner the following morning, and there was the usual big crowd in their usual places – everything the same, in fact, except for the absence of Verres, and the presence of twenty or thirty men of the magistrates’ patrol, stationed around the perimeter of the tribunal. Glabrio made a short speech, opening the session and warning that he would not tolerate any disturbances similar to those which had occurred the previous day. Then he called on Hortensius to make a statement.

  ‘Due to ill health,’ Hortensius began, and there was the most wonderful shout of laughter from all sides. It was some time before he was able to proceed. ‘Due to ill health,’ he repeated, ‘brought on by the strain of these proceedings, and wishing to spare the state any further disruption, my client Gaius Verres no longer proposes to offer a defence to the charges brought by the special prosecutor.’

  He sat down. There was applause from the Sicilians at this concession, but little response from the spectators. They were waiting to take their lead from Cicero. He stood, thanked Hortensius for his statement – ‘somewhat shorter than the speeches he is in the habit of making in these surroundings’ – and demanded the maximum penalty under the Cornelian Law: a full loss of civil rights, in perpetuity, ‘so that never again can the shadow of Gaius Verres menace his victims or threaten the just administration of the Roman republic’. This elicited the first real cheer of the morning.

  ‘I wish,’ continued Cicero, ‘that I could undo his crimes, and restore to both men and gods all that he has robbed from them. I wish I could give back to Juno the offerings and adornments of her shrines at Melita and Samos. I wish Minerva could see again the decorations of her temple at Syracuse. I wish Diana’s statue could be restored to the town of Segesta, and Mercury’s to the people of Tyndaris. I wish I could undo the double injury to Ceres, whose images were carried away from both Henna and Catina. But the villain has fled, leaving behind only the stripped walls and bare floors of his houses here in Rome and in the country. These are the only assets which can be seized and sold. His counsel assesses the value of these at one and a half million sesterces, and this is what I must ask for and accept as recompense for his crimes.’

  There was a groan, and someone shouted, ‘Not enough!’

  ‘It is not enough. I agree. And perhaps some of those in this court, who defended Verres when his star was rising, and others who promised him their support if they found themselves among his jurors, might inspect their consciences – might inspect, indeed, the contents of their villas!’

  This brought Hortensius to his feet to complain that the prosecutor was talking in riddles.

  ‘Well,’ responded Cicero in a flash, ‘as Verres provided him with an ivory sphinx, the consul-elect should find no difficulty solving riddles.’

  It cannot have been a premeditated joke, as Cicero had no idea what Hortensius was going to say. Or perhaps, on second thoughts, having written that, I am being naïve, and it was actually part of that store of spontaneous witticisms which Cicero regularly laid up by candlelight to use should the opportunity arise. Whatever the truth, it was proof of how important humour can be on a public occasion, for nobody now remembers a thing about that last day in court except Cicero’s crack about the ivory sphinx. I am not even sure, in retrospect, that it is particularly funny. But it brought the house down, and transformed what could have been an embarrassing speech into yet another triumph. ‘Sit down quickly’ – that was always Molon’s advice when things were going well, and Cicero took it. I handed him a towel and he mopped his face and dried his hands as the applause continued. And with that, his exertions in the prosecution of Gaius Verres were at an end.

  THAT AFTERNOON, THE senate met for its final debate before it went into a fifteen-day recess for Pompey’s games. By the time Cicero had finished smoothing matters over with the Sicilians, he was late for the start of the session, and we had to run together from the Temple of Castor, right across the forum to the senate house. Crassus, as the presiding consul for the month, had already called the house to order and was reading the latest dispatch from Lucullus on the progress of the campaign in the East. Rather than interrup
t him by making a conspicuous entry, Cicero stood at the bar of the chamber, and we listened to Lucullus’s report. The aristocratic general had, by his own account, scored a series of crushing victories, entering the kingdom of Tigranes, defeating the king himself in battle, slaughtering tens of thousands of the enemy, advancing deeper into hostile territory to capture the city of Nisibisis, and taking the king’s brother as hostage.

  ‘Crassus must feel like throwing up,’ Cicero whispered to me gleefully. ‘His only consolation will be to know that Pompey is even more furiously jealous.’ And, indeed, Pompey, sitting beside Crassus, his arms folded, did look sunk in a gloomy reverie.

  When Crassus had finished speaking, Cicero took advantage of the lull to enter the chamber. The day was hot and the shafts of light from the high windows lit jewelled swirls of midges. He walked purposefully, head erect, watched by everyone, down the central aisle, past his old place in obscurity by the door, towards the consular dais. The praetorian bench seemed full, but Cicero stood patiently beside it, waiting to claim his rightful place, for he knew – and the house knew – that the ancient reward for a successful prosecutor was the assumption of the defeated man’s rank. I do not know how long the silence went on, but it seemed an awfully long time to me, during which the only sound came from the pigeons in the roof. It was Afranius who finally beckoned to him to sit beside him, and who cleared sufficient space by roughly shoving his neighbours along the wooden seat. Cicero picked his way across half a dozen pairs of outstretched legs and wedged himself defiantly into his place. He glanced around at his rivals, and met and held the gaze of each. No one challenged him. Eventually, someone rose to speak, and in a grudging voice congratulated Lucullus and his victorious legions – it might have been Pompey, now I come to think of it. Gradually the low drone of background conversation resumed.

  I close my eyes and I see their faces still in the golden light of that late-summer afternoon – Cicero, Crassus, Pompey, Hortensius, Catulus, Catilina, the Metellus brothers – and it is hard for me to believe that they, and their ambitions, and even the very building they sat in, are now all so much dust.

  PART TWO

  PRAETORIAN

  68–64 BC

  ‘Nam eloquentiam quae admirationem non habet nullam iudico.’

  ‘Eloquence which does not startle I don’t consider eloquence.’

  Cicero, letter to Brutus, 48 BC

  X

  I PROPOSE TO resume my account at a point more than two years after the last roll ended – an elision which I fear says much about human nature, for if you were to ask me: ‘Tiro, why do you choose to skip such a long period in Cicero’s life?’ I should be obliged to reply: ‘Because, my friend, those were happy years, and few subjects make more tedious reading than happiness.’

  The senator’s aedileship turned out to be a great success. His chief responsibility was to keep the city supplied with cheap grain, and here his prosecution of Verres reaped him a great reward. To show their gratitude for his advocacy, the farmers and grain merchants of Sicily not only helped him by keeping their prices low: on one occasion they even gave him an entire shipment for nothing. Cicero was shrewd enough to ensure that others shared the credit. From the aediles’ headquarters in the Temple of Ceres, he passed this bounty on for distribution to the hundred or so precinct bosses who really ran Rome, and many, out of gratitude, became his clients. With their help, over the following months, he built an electoral machine second to none (Quintus used to boast that he could have a crowd of two hundred on the streets within an hour whenever he chose), and henceforth little occurred in the city which the Ciceros did not know about. If some builders or a shopkeeper, for example, needed a particular licence, or wished to have their premises put on to the water supply, or were worried about the state of a local temple, sooner or later their problems were likely to come to the notice of the two brothers. It was this laborious attention to humdrum detail, as much as his soaring rhetoric, which made Cicero such a formidable politician. He even staged good games – or, rather, Quintus did, on his behalf – and at the climax of the Festival of Ceres, when, in accordance with tradition, foxes were released into the Circus Maximus with flaming torches tied to their backs, the entire crowd of two hundred thousand rose to acclaim him in the official box.

  ‘That so many people can derive so much pleasure from such a revolting spectacle,’ he said to me when he returned home that night, ‘almost makes one doubt the very premise on which democracy is based.’ But he was pleased nevertheless that the masses now thought of him as a good sport, as well as ‘the Scholar’ and ‘the Greek’.

  Matters went equally well with his legal practice. Hortensius, after a typically smooth and untroubled year as consul, spent increasingly lengthy periods on the Bay of Naples, communing with his bejewelled fish and wine-soaked trees, leaving Cicero in complete domination of the Roman bar. Gifts and legacies from grateful clients soon began flowing in such profusion that he was even able to advance his brother the million he needed to enter the senate – for Quintus had belatedly set his heart on a political career, even though he was a poor speaker and Cicero privately believed that soldiering was better suited to his temperament. But despite his increasing wealth and prestige, Cicero refused to move out of his father’s house, fearing it would tarnish his image as the People’s Champion to be seen swanking around on the Palatine Hill. Instead, without consulting Terentia, he borrowed heavily against his future earnings to buy a grand country villa, thirteen miles from the prying eyes of the city voters, in the Alban Hills near Tusculum. She pretended to be annoyed when he took her out to see it, and maintained that the elevated climate was bad for her rheumatics. But I could tell that she was secretly delighted to have such a fashionable retreat, only half a day’s journey from Rome. Catulus owned the adjoining property, and Hortensius also had a house not far away, but such was the hostility between Cicero and the aristocrats that, despite the long summer days he spent reading and writing in his villa’s cool and poplared glades, they never once invited him to dine. This did not disturb Cicero; rather, it amused him, for the house had once belonged to the nobles’ greatest hero, Sulla, and he knew how much it must irritate them to see it in the hands of a new man from Arpinum. The villa had not been redecorated for more than a decade, and when he took possession an entire wall was devoted to a mural showing the dictator receiving a military decoration from his troops. Cicero made sure all his neighbours knew that his first act as owner was to have it whitewashed over.

  Happy, then, was Cicero in the autumn of his thirty-ninth year: prosperous, popular, well rested after a summer in the country, and looking forward to the elections the following July, when he would be old enough to stand for a praetorship – the final stepping-stone before the glittering prize of the consulship itself.

  And at this critical juncture in his fortunes, just as his luck was about to desert him and his life become interesting again, my narrative resumes.

  AT THE END of September it was Pompey’s birthday, and for the third year in succession Cicero received a summons to attend a dinner in his honour. He groaned when he opened the message, for he had discovered that there are few blessings in life more onerous than the friendship of a great man. At first, he had found it flattering to be invited into Pompey’s inner circle. But after a while he grew weary of listening to the same old military anecdotes – usually illustrated by the manoeuvring of plates and decanters around the dinner table – of how the young general had outwitted three Marian armies at Auximum, or killed seventeen thousand Numidians in a single afternoon at the age of twenty-four, or finally defeated the Spanish rebels near Valencia. Pompey had been giving orders since he was seventeen and perhaps for this reason had developed none of Cicero’s subtlety of intellect. Conversation as the senator enjoyed it – spontaneous wit, shared gossip, sharp observations which might be spun off mutually into some profound or fantastic dissertation on the nature of human affairs – all this was alien to Pompey. The gener
al liked to hold forth against a background of respectful silence, assert some platitude, and then sit back and bask in the flattery of his guests. Cicero used to say he would sooner have all his teeth drawn by a drunken barber in the Forum Boarium than listen to another of these mealtime monologues.

  The root of the problem was that Pompey was bored. At the end of his consulship, as promised, he had retired into private life with his wife, young son and baby daughter. But then what? Lacking any talent for oratory, there was nothing to occupy him in the law courts. Literary composition held no interest for him. He could only watch in a stew of jealousy as Lucullus continued his conquest of Mithradates. Not yet forty, his future, as the saying went, seemed all behind him. He would make occasional forays down from his mansion and into the senate, not to speak but to listen to the debates – processions for which he insisted on an immense escort of friends and clients. Cicero, who felt obliged to walk at least part of the way with him, observed that it was like watching an elephant trying to make itself at home in an anthill.

  But still, he was the greatest man in the world, with a huge following among the voters, and not to be crossed, especially with an election less than a year away. Only that summer he had secured a tribuneship for his crony Gabinius: he still kept a hand in politics. So on the thirtieth day of September, Cicero went off as usual to the birthday party, returning later in the evening to regale Quintus, Lucius and myself with an account of events. Like a child, Pompey delighted in receiving presents, and Cicero had taken him a manuscript letter in the hand of Zeno, the founder of stoicism, two centuries old and extremely valuable, which had been acquired for him in Athens by Atticus. He would dearly have loved to have kept it for his own library in Tusculum, but he hoped that by giving it to Pompey he could begin to tempt the general into an interest in philosophy. Instead, Pompey had barely glanced at it before setting it aside in favour of a gift from Gabinius, of a silver rhino horn containing some Egyptian aphrodisiac made of baboon excrement. ‘How I wish I could have retrieved that letter!’ groaned Cicero, flopping down on to a couch, the back of his hand resting on his forehead. ‘Even now it’s probably being used by some kitchen maid to light the fire.’