Imperium:

by Robert Harris

  ‘Who else was there?’ asked Quintus eagerly. He had only been back in Rome for a few days, following his term as quaestor in Umbria, and was avid for the latest news.

  ‘Oh, the usual cohort. Our fine new tribune-elect Gabinius, obviously, and his father-in-law, the art connoisseur Palicanus; Rome’s greatest dancer, Afranius; that Spanish creature of Pompey’s, Balbus; Varro, the household polymath. Oh, and Marcus Fonteius,’ he added lightly, but not so lightly that Lucius did not immediately detect the significance.

  ‘And what did you talk about with Fonteius?’ enquired Lucius, in the same clumsy attempt at an offhand manner.

  ‘This and that.’

  ‘His prosecution?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘And who is defending the rascal?’

  Cicero paused, and then said quietly, ‘I am.’

  I should explain, for those not familiar with the case, that this Fonteius had been governor of Further Gaul about five years earlier, and that one winter, when Pompey was particularly hard pressed fighting the rebels in Spain, he had sent the beleaguered general sufficient supplies and fresh recruits to enable him to survive until the spring. That had been the start of their friendship. Fonteius had gone on to make himself extremely rich, in the Verres manner, by extorting various illegal taxes out of the native population. The Gauls had at first put up with it, telling themselves that robbery and exploitation have ever been the handmaids of civilisation. But after Cicero’s triumphant prosecution of the governor of Sicily, the chief of the Gauls, Induciomarus, had come to Rome to ask the senator to represent them in the extortion court. Lucius had been all for it; in fact it was he who had brought Induciomarus to the house: a wild-looking creature, dressed in his barbarian outfit of jacket and trousers – he gave me quite a shock when I opened the door to him one morning. Cicero, however, had politely declined. A year had passed, but now the Gauls had finally found a credible legal team in Plaetorius, who was a praetor-elect, and Marcus Fabius as his junior. The case would soon be in court.

  ‘That is outrageous,’ said Lucius, hotly. ‘You cannot defend him. He is as guilty as Verres was.’

  ‘Nonsense. He has neither killed anyone nor falsely imprisoned anyone either. The worse that can be said is that he once imposed excessive duties on the wine traders of Narbonne, and made some locals pay more than others to repair the roads. Besides,’ added Cicero quickly, before Lucius could challenge this somewhat generous interpretation of Fonteius’s activities, ‘who are you or I to determine his guilt? It is a matter for the court to decide, not us. Or would you be a tyrant and deny him an advocate?’

  ‘I would deny him your advocacy,’ Lucius responded. ‘You have heard from Induciomarus’s own lips the evidence against him. Is all that to be cancelled out, simply because Fonteius is a friend of Pompey?’

  ‘It has nothing to do with Pompey.’

  ‘Then why do it?’

  ‘Politics,’ said Cicero, suddenly sitting up and swinging himself round so that his feet were planted on the floor. He fixed his gaze on Lucius and said very seriously: ‘The most fatal error for any statesman is to allow his fellow countrymen, even for an instant, to suspect that he puts the interests of foreigners above those of his own people. That is the lie which my enemies spread about me after I represented the Sicilians in the Verres case, and that is the calumny which I can lay to rest if I defend Fonteius now.’

  ‘And the Gauls?’

  ‘The Gauls will be represented perfectly adequately by Plaetorius.’

  ‘Not as well as they would be by you.’

  ‘But you say yourself that Fonteius has a weak case. Let the weakest case be defended by the strongest advocate. What could be fairer than that?’

  Cicero flashed him his most charming smile, but for once Lucius refused to be parted from his anger. Knowing, I suspect, that the only sure way to defeat Cicero in argument was to withdraw from the conversation altogether, he stood and limped across to the atrium. I had not realised until that moment how ill he looked, how thin and stooped; he had never really recovered from the strain of his efforts in Sicily. ‘Words, words, words,’ he said bitterly. ‘Is there no end to the tricks you can make them perform? But, as with all men, your great strength is also your weakness, Marcus, and I am sorry for you, absolutely I am, because soon you will not be able to tell your tricks from the truth. And then you will be lost.’

  ‘The truth,’ laughed Cicero. ‘Now there is a loose term for a philosopher to use!’ But he was addressing his witticism to the air, for Lucius had gone.

  ‘He will be back,’ said Quintus.

  But he did not come back, and over the following days Cicero went about his preparations for the trial with the determined expression of a man who has resigned himself to some distasteful but necessary surgical procedure. As for his client: Fonteius had been anticipating his prosecution for three years, and had used the time well, to acquire a mass of evidence to support his defence. He had witnesses from Spain and Gaul, including officers from Pompey’s camp, and various sly and greedy tax farmers and merchants – members of the Roman community in Gaul, who would have sworn that night was day and land sea if it would have turned them a reasonable profit. The only trouble, as Cicero realised once he had mastered his brief, was that Fonteius was plainly guilty. He sat for a long time staring at the wall in his study, while I tiptoed around him, and it is important that I convey what he was doing, for it is necessary in order to understand his character. He was not merely trying, as a cynical and second-rate advocate might have done, to devise some clever tactic in order to outwit the prosecution. He was trying to find something to believe in. That was the core of his genius, both as an advocate and as a statesman. ‘What convinces is conviction,’ he used to say. ‘You simply must believe the argument you are advancing, otherwise you are lost. No chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win the case, if your audience senses that belief is missing.’ Just one thing to believe in, that was all he needed, and then he could latch on to it, build out from it, embellish it, and transform it just for the space of an hour or two into the most important issue in the world, and deliver it with a passion that would obliterate the flimsy rationality of his opponents. Afterwards he would usually forget it entirely. And what did he believe in when it came to Marcus Fonteius? He gazed at the wall for many hours and concluded only this: that his client was a Roman, being assailed within his own city by Rome’s traditional enemy, the Gauls, and that whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, that was a kind of treachery.

  Such was the line which Cicero took when he found himself once again in the familiar surroundings of the extortion court before the Temple of Castor. The trial lasted from the end of October until the middle of November, and was most keenly fought, witness by witness, right up until the final day, when Cicero delivered the closing speech for the defence. From my place behind the senator, I had, from the opening day, kept an eye out for Lucius among the crowd of spectators, but it was only on that last morning that I fancied I saw him, a pale shadow, propped against a pillar at the very back of the audience. And if it was he – and I do not know it was – I have often wondered what he thought of his cousin’s oratory, as he tore into the evidence of the Gauls, jabbing his finger at Induciomarus – ‘Does he actually know what is meant by giving evidence? Is the greatest chief of the Gauls worthy to be set on the same level as even the meanest citizen of Rome?’ – and demanding to know how a Roman jury could possibly believe the word of a man whose gods demanded human victims: ‘For who does not know that to this very day they retain the monstrous and barbarous custom of sacrificing men?’ What would he have said to Cicero’s description of the Gaulish witnesses, ‘swaggering from end to end of the forum, with proud and unflinching expressions on their faces and barbarian menaces upon their lips’? And what would he have made of Cicero’s brilliant coup de théâtre at the very end, of producing in court, in the closing moments of his speech, Fonteius’s sis
ter, a vestal virgin, clad from head to toe in her official garb of a flowing white gown, with a white linen shawl around her narrow shoulders, and who raised her white veil to show the jury her tears – a sight which made her brother also break down weeping? Cicero laid his hand gently on his client’s shoulder.

  ‘From this peril, gentlemen, defend a gallant and blameless citizen. Let the world see that you place more confidence in the evidence of our fellow countrymen than in that of foreigners, that you have greater regard for the welfare of our citizens than for the caprice of our foes, that you set more store by the entreaties of she who presides over your sacrifices than by the effrontery of those who have waged war against the sacrifices and shrines of all the world. Finally, gentlemen, see to it – and here the dignity of the Roman people is most vitally engaged – see to it that you show that the prayers of a vestal maid have more weight with you than the threats of Gauls.’

  Well, that speech certainly did the trick, both for Fonteius, who was acquitted, and for Cicero, who was never again regarded as anything less than the most fervent patriot in Rome. I looked up after I had finished making my shorthand record, but it was impossible to discern individuals in the crowd any more – it had become a single, seething creature, aroused by Cicero’s technique to a chanting ecstasy of national self-glorification. Anyway, I sincerely hope that Lucius was not present, and there must surely be a chance that he was not, for it was only a few hours later that he was discovered at his home quite dead.

  CICERO WAS DINING privately with Terentia when the message came. The bearer was one of Lucius’s slaves. Scarcely more than a boy, he was weeping uncontrollably, so it fell to me to take the news in to the senator. He looked up blankly from his meal when I told him, and stared straight at me, and said irritably, ‘No,’ as if I had offered him the wrong set of documents in court. And for a long time that was all he said: ‘No, no.’ He did not move; he did not even blink. The working of his brain seemed locked. It was Terentia who eventually spoke, and suggested gently that he should go and find out what had happened, whereupon he started searching dumbly for his shoes. ‘Keep an eye on him, Tiro,’ she said quietly to me.

  Grief kills time. All that I retain of that night, and of the days which followed, are fragments of scenes, like some luridly brilliant hallucinations left behind after a fever. I recall how thin and wasted Lucius’s body was when we found it, lying on its right side in his cot, the knees drawn up, the left hand laid flat across his eyes, and how Cicero, in the traditional manner, bent over him with a candle, to call him back to life. ‘What was he seeing?’ – that was what he kept asking: ‘What was he seeing?’ Cicero was not, as I have indicated, a superstitious man, but he could not rid himself of the conviction that Lucius had been presented with a vision of unparalleled horror at the end, and that this had somehow frightened him to death. As to how he died – well here I must confess to carrying a secret all these years, of which I shall be glad now to unburden myself. There was a pestle and mortar in the corner of that little room, with what Cicero – and I, too, at first – took to be a bunch of fennel lying beside it. It was a reasonable supposition, for among Lucius’s many chronic ailments was poor digestion, which he attempted to relieve by a solution of fennel oil. Only later, when I was clearing the room, did I rub those lacy leaves with my thumb, and detect the frightful, musty, dead-mouse odour of hemlock. I knew then that Lucius had tired of this life, and for whatever reason – despair at its injustices, weariness with his ailments – had chosen to die like his hero, Socrates. This information I always meant to share with Cicero and Quintus. But for some reason, in the sadness of those days, I kept it to myself, and then the proper time for disclosure had passed, and it seemed better to let them continue to believe he had died involuntarily.

  I also recall how Cicero spent such a great sum on flowers and incense that, after Lucius had been cleaned and anointed and laid on his funeral couch in his finest toga, his skinny feet pointing towards the door, he seemed, even in that drab November, to be in an Elysian grove of petals and fragrant scent. I remember the surprising number, for such a solitary man, of friends and neighbours who came to pay their respects, and the funeral procession at dusk out to the Esquiline Field, with young Frugi weeping so hard he could not catch his breath. I recall the dirges and the music, and the respectful glances of the citizens along the route – for this was a Cicero they were bearing to meet his ancestors, and the name now counted for something in Rome. Out on the frozen field, the body lay on its pyre under the stars, and the great orator struggled to deliver a brief eulogy. But his words would not perform their tricks for him on that occasion, and he had to give up. He could not even collect himself sufficiently to apply the torch to ignite the wood, and passed the task instead to Quintus. As the flames shot high the mourners threw their gifts of scent and spices on to the bonfire, and the perfumed smoke, flecked with orange sparks, curled up to the Milky Way. That night I sat with the senator in his study as he dictated a letter to Atticus, and it is surely a tribute to the affection which Lucius also inspired in that noble heart that this was the first of Cicero’s hundreds of letters which Atticus chose to preserve:

  ‘Knowing me as well as you do, you can appreciate better than most how deeply my cousin Lucius’s death has grieved me, and what a loss it means to me both in public and in private life. All the pleasure that one human being’s kindness and charm can give another I had from him.’

  DESPITE HAVING LIVED in Rome for many years, Lucius had always said that he wished to have his ashes interred in the family vault in Arpinum. Accordingly, on the morning after the cremation, the Cicero brothers set off with his remains on the three-day journey east, accompanied by their wives, having sent word ahead to their father of what had happened. Naturally, I went too, for although Cicero was in the mourning period, his legal and political correspondence could not be neglected. Nevertheless, for the first – and, I think, the only – time in all our years together, he transacted no official business on the road, but simply sat with his chin in his hand, staring at the passing countryside. He and Terentia were in one carriage, Quintus and Pomponia in another, endlessly bickering – so much so that I saw Cicero draw his brother aside and plead with him, for the sake of Atticus, if for no one else, to make the marriage work. ‘Well,’ retorted Quintus, with some justice, ‘if the good opinion of Atticus is that important to you, why do you not marry her?’ We stayed the first night at the villa in Tusculum, and had reached as far as Ferentium on the Via Latina when a message reached the brothers from Arpinum that their father had collapsed and died the previous day.

  Given that he was in his sixties and had been ailing for many years, this was obviously less of a shock than the death of Lucius (the news of which had apparently proved the final blow to the old man’s fragile health). But to leave one house festooned with the pine and cypress boughs of mourning and to arrive at another similarly adorned was the height of melancholy, made worse by the mischance that we reached Arpinum on the twenty-fifth day of November, that date kept sacred to Proserpina, Queen of Hades, who carries into effect the curses of men upon the souls of the dead. The Ciceros’ villa lay three miles out of the town, down a winding stony road, in a valley ringed by high mountains. It was cold at this altitude, the peaks already draped with the vestal veils of snow which they would wear till May. I had not been back for ten years, and to see it all as I remembered aroused strange feelings in me. Unlike Cicero, I had always preferred the country to the town. I had been born here; my mother and father had both lived and died here; for the first quarter-century of my life, these springy meadows and crystal streams, with their tall poplars and verdant banks, had been the limit of my world. Seeing how much I was affected, and knowing how devoted I had been to the old master, Cicero invited me to accompany him and Quintus to the funeral couch, to say goodbye. In a way, I owed their father almost as much as they did, for he had taken a shine to me when I was a lad, and educated me so that I could help with his
books, and then had given me the chance to travel with his son. As I bent to kiss his cold hand, I had a strong sense of returning home, and then the idea came to me that perhaps I could remain here, and act as steward, marry some girl of equal station, and have a child of my own. My parents, despite their status as domestic slaves rather than farm labourers, had both died in their early forties; I had to reckon on having, at best, only ten years left myself. (Little do we know how the fates will play us!) I ached to imagine that I might depart the earth without issue and I resolved to raise the matter with Cicero at the earliest opportunity.

  Thus it was that I came to have rather a profound conversation with him. On the day after our arrival, the old master was buried in the family vault, then Lucius’s ashes in their alabaster vase were interred beside him, and finally a pig was sacrificed to keep the spot holy. The next morning Cicero took a tour around his newly inherited estate, and I went with him in case he needed to dictate any notes, for the place (which was so heavily mortgaged as to be virtually worthless) was in a dilapidated state, and much work needed to be done. Cicero observed that it was originally his mother who had managed the property; his father had always been too much of a dreamer to cope with land agents and agricultural suppliers; after her death, he had slowly let it all go to ruin. This was, I think, the first time in more than a decade in his service that I had heard Cicero mention his mother. Helvia was her name. She had died twenty years earlier, when he was in his teens, by which time he had left for Rome to be educated. I could barely remember anything of her myself, except that she had a reputation for terrible strictness and meanness – the sort of mistress who marked the jars to check if the slaves had stolen anything, and took great pleasure in whipping them if she suspected that they had.