Imperium:

by Robert Harris

  Shortly before midnight, a messenger arrived to say that Pompey was approaching the city along the Via Latina. A score of his veterans had been stationed at the Capena Gate to escort him home by torchlight, in case his enemies resorted to desperate tactics, but Quintus – who had spent much of the night touring the city with the precinct bosses – reported to his brother that the streets were quiet. Eventually, cheering outside announced the great man’s arrival, and suddenly there he was among us, bigger than ever, grinning, shaking hands, clapping backs; even I received a friendly punch on the shoulder. The senators clamoured for Pompey to make a speech, at which Cicero remarked, a touch too loudly, ‘He cannot speak yet: I have not written what he should say.’ Just for a moment I saw a shadow flash across Pompey’s face, but yet again Caesar came to Cicero’s rescue, howling with laughter, and when Pompey suddenly grinned and wagged his finger in mock-reproach, the atmosphere relaxed into the joshing humour of an officers’ mess, where the triumphant commander expects to be ribbed.

  Whenever I picture the word imperium it is always Pompey who comes into my mind – Pompey that night, hovering over his map of the Mediterranean, distributing dominion over land and sea as casually as he dispensed his wine (‘Marcellinus, you can have the Libyan sea, while you, Torquatus, shall have eastern Spain …’), and Pompey the following morning, when he went down into the forum to claim his prize. The annalists later reckoned that twenty thousand crammed into the centre of Rome to see him anointed world commander. It was such a throng that even Catulus and Hortensius dared not commit some last act of resistance, although I am sure they would have liked to, but were instead obliged to stand with the other senators, putting the best face on it they could; Crassus, typically, could not even manage that, and stayed away altogether. Pompey did not say much, mostly a few protestations of humble gratitude, crafted by Cicero, and an appeal for national unity. But then he did not have to say anything: his presence alone had caused the price of grain in the markets to halve, such was the confidence he inspired. And he finished with the most wonderful theatrical flourish, which can only have come from Cicero: ‘I shall now put on again that uniform once so dear and so familiar to me, the sacred red cloak of a Roman commander in the field, and I shall not take it off again until victory in this war is won – or I shall not survive the outcome!’ He raised his hand in salute and left the platform – was wafted from the platform would be a better way of putting it, on a wind of acclamation. The applause was still going on when suddenly, beyond the rostra, he came into view again – steadily climbing the steps of the Capitol, now wearing the paludamentum, that bright scarlet cloak which is the mark of every Roman proconsul on active service. As the people went wild with enthusiasm, I glanced across to where Cicero was standing next to Caesar. Cicero’s expression was one of amused distaste, but Caesar’s was enraptured, as if he were already glimpsing his own future. Pompey carried on into the precincts of the Capitoline Triad, where he sacrificed a bull to Jupiter, and left the city immediately afterwards, without saying goodbye to Cicero or to anyone else. It was to be six years before he returned.

  XIII

  IN THE ANNUAL elections for praetor that summer, Cicero topped the poll. It was an ugly, scrappy campaign, fought in the aftermath of the struggle over the lex Gabinia, when trust between the political factions had broken down. I have before me the letter which Cicero wrote to Atticus that summer, expressing his disgust at all things in public life: ‘It is unbelievable in how short a time how much worse you will find them than when you left.’ Twice the balloting had to be abandoned halfway through when fighting broke out on the Field of Mars. Cicero suspected Crassus of hiring thugs to disrupt the voting, but could not prove it. Whatever the truth, it was not until September that the eight praetors-elect were finally able to assemble in the senate house to determine which court each would preside over in the coming year. The selection, as usual, was to be settled by drawing lots.

  The most coveted office was that of urban praetor, who in those days ran the justice system and was ranked third in the state, behind the two consuls; he also had responsibility for staging the Games of Apollo. If that was the plum, then the post to be avoided at all costs was the embezzlement court, a job of stunning tedium. ‘Of course, I should like the urban praetorship,’ Cicero confided to me as we walked down to the senate that morning. ‘And frankly, I should rather hang myself than sort out embezzlement for a year. But I shall willingly settle for anything in between.’ He was in a buoyant mood. The elections were concluded at last and he had won the most votes. Pompey was gone not only from Rome but from Italy, so he had no great man looming over him. And he was getting very close to the consulship now – so close he could almost feel that ivory chair beneath him.

  There was always a full chamber for these lot-drawing ceremonies, combining as they did high politics with a game of chance, and by the time we arrived the majority of the senators had already gone in. Cicero entered to a noisy reception, with cheers from his old supporters among the pedarii and abusive shouts from the aristocrats. Crassus, stretched out in his usual position on the consular front bench, regarded him through half-closed eyes, like a big cat pretending to be asleep while a little bird hops by. The election had turned out much as Cicero had expected, and if I give you here the names of the other praetors-elect, I believe you will have a good sense of how politics stood at that time. Apart from Cicero, there were only two other men of obvious ability waiting calmly to draw their lots. By far the most talented was Aquilius Gallus, who some say was a better lawyer even than Cicero, and who was already a respected judge; in fact, he was something of a paragon – brilliant, modest, just, kindly, a man of supreme taste, with a magnificent mansion on the Viminal Hill; Cicero had it in mind to approach the older man to be his running-mate for consul. Next to Gallus, at least in gravitas, was Sulpicius Galba, of a distinguished aristocratic family, who had so many consular masks in his atrium, it was inconceivable he would not be one of Cicero’s rivals for the consulship; but although he was honest and able, he was also harsh and arrogant – that would count against him in a tight election. Fourth in talent, I suppose, although Cicero sometimes burst out laughing at his absurdities, was Quintus Cornificius, a rich religious fundamentalist, who talked endlessly about the need to revive Rome’s declining morals – ‘the candidate of the gods’, Cicero called him. After that, I am afraid, there was a great shelving-away in ability: remarkably, all the other four praetors-elect were men who had previously been expelled from the senate, for deficiencies in either funds or morals. The oldest of these was Varinius Glaber, one of those clever, bitter men who expect to succeed in life and cannot believe it when they realise they have failed – already a praetor seven years earlier, he had been given an army by the senate to put down the revolt of Spartacus; but his legions were weak and he had been beaten repeatedly by the rebel slaves, eventually retiring from public life in humiliation. Then there was Caius Orchivius – ‘all push and no talent’, as Cicero characterised him – who had the support of a big voting syndicate. In seventh place when it came to brains Cicero placed Cassius Longinus – ‘that barrel of lard’ – who was sometimes called the fattest man in Rome. Which left, in eighth, none other than Antonius Hybrida, the drinker who kept a slave girl for a wife, whom Cicero had agreed to help in the elections on the grounds that here, at least, would be one praetor whose ambitions he would not have to worry about. ‘Do you know why they call him “Hybrida”?’ Cicero asked me one day. ‘Because he’s half man, half imbecile. I wouldn’t award him the half, personally.’

  But those gods to whom Cornificius was so devoted have a way of punishing such hubris, and they duly punished Cicero that day. The lots were placed in an ancient urn which had been used for this purpose for centuries, and the presiding consul, Glabrio, called up the candidates in alphabetical order, which meant that Antonius Hybrida went first. He dipped his trembling hand into the urn for a token and gave it to Glabrio, who raised an eyebrow and th
en read out: ‘Urban praetor.’ There was a moment of silence, and then the chamber rang with such a shout of laughter that the pigeons roosting in the roof all took off in a great burst of shit and feathers. Hortensius and some of the other aristocrats, knowing that Cicero had helped Hybrida, pointed towards the orator and clapped their sides in mockery. Crassus almost fell off his bench with delight, while Hybrida himself – soon to be the third man in the state – stood beaming all around him, no doubt misinterpreting the derision as pleasure at his good fortune.

  I could not see Cicero’s face, but I could guess what he was thinking: that his bad luck would surely now be completed by drawing embezzlement. Gallus went next and won the court which administered electoral law; Longinus the fat man received treason; and when candidate-of-the-gods Cornificius was awarded the criminal court, the odds were starting to look decidedly grim – so much so that I was sure the worst was about to happen. But thankfully it was the next man up, Orchivius, who drew embezzlement. When Galba was given responsibility for hearing cases of violence against the state, that meant there were only two possibilities left for Cicero – either his familiar stamping-ground of the extortion court, or the position of foreign praetor, which would have left him effectively the deputy of Hybrida: a grim fate for the cleverest man in the city. As he stepped up to the dais to draw his lot, he gave a rueful shake of his head – you can scheme all you like in politics, the gesture seemed to say, but in the end it all comes down to luck. He thrust his hand into the urn and drew out – extortion. There was a certain pleasing symmetry in that it was Glabrio, the former president of this very court in which Cicero had made his name, who read out the announcement. So that left the foreign praetorship to Varinius, the victim of Spartacus. Thus the courts were settled for the following year, and the preliminary field lined up for the consulship.

  A MID ALL this rush of political events, I have neglected to mention that Pomponia had become pregnant in the spring – proof, as Cicero wrote triumphantly to Atticus when he passed on the news, that the marriage with Quintus must be working after all. Not long after the praetorian elections, the child was born, a healthy boy. It was a matter of great pride to me, and a mark of my growing standing within the family, that I was invited to attend the lustrical, on the ninth day following the birth. The ceremony was held at the Temple of Tellus, next to the family house, and I doubt whether any nephew could have had a more doting uncle than Cicero, who insisted on commissioning a splendid amulet from a silversmith as a naming-present. It was only after baby Quintus had been blessed by the priest with holy water, and Cicero took him in his arms, that I realised how much he missed having a boy of his own. A large part of any man’s motivation in pursuing the consulship must surely have been that his son, and grandson, and sons of his sons to infinity, could exercise the right of ius imaginum, and display his likeness after death in the family atrium. What was the point in founding a glorious family name if the line was extinct before it even started? And glancing across the temple to Terentia, carefully studying her husband as he stroked the baby’s cheek with the back of his little finger, I could see that the same thought was in her mind.

  The arrival of a child often prompts a keen reappraisal of the future, and I am sure this was what led Cicero, shortly after the birth of his nephew, to arrange for Tullia to become betrothed. She was now ten years old, his cynosure as ever, and rare was the day, despite his legal and political work, when he did not clear a little space to read to her or play some game. And it was typical of his mingling of tenderness and cunning that he first raised his plan with her, rather than with Terentia. ‘How would you like,’ he said to her one morning, when the three of us were in his study, ‘to get married one day?’ When she replied that she would like that very much, he asked her whom in all the world she would most like to have as a husband.

  ‘Tiro!’ she cried, flinging her arms around my waist.

  ‘I am afraid he is much too busy helping me to have time to take a wife,’ he replied solemnly. ‘Who else?’

  Her circle of grown-up male acquaintances was limited, so it was not long before she raised the name of Frugi, who had spent so much time with Cicero since the Verres case, he was almost a part of the family.

  ‘Frugi!’ exclaimed Cicero, as if the idea had never before occurred to him. ‘What a wonderful thought! And you are sure this is what you want? You are? Then let us go and tell your mama immediately.’

  In this way Terentia found herself outmanoeuvred by her husband on her own territory as skilfully as if she had been some cretinous aristocrat in the senate. Not that she could have found much to object to in Frugi, who was a good enough match even for her – a gentle, diligent young man, now aged twenty-one, from an extremely distinguished family. But she was far too shrewd not to see that Cicero, by creating a substitute whom he could train and bring on to a public career, was doing the next best thing to having a son of his own. This realisation no doubt made her feel threatened, and Terentia always reacted violently to threats. The betrothal ceremony in November went smoothly enough, with Frugi – who was very fond of his fiancée, by the way – shyly placing a ring on her finger, under the approving gaze of both families and their households, with the wedding fixed for five years hence, when Tullia would be pubescent. But that night Cicero and Terentia had one of their most ferocious fights. It blew up in the tablinum before I had time to get out of the way. Cicero had made some innocuous remark about the Frugis being very welcoming to Tullia, to which Terentia, who had been ominously quiet for some time, responded that it was indeed very good of them, considering.

  ‘Considering what?’ asked Cicero wearily. He had obviously decided that arguing with her that night was as inevitable as vomiting after a bad oyster, and that he might as well get it out of the way at once.

  ‘Considering the connection they are making,’ she responded, and very quickly she was launched on her favourite line of attack – the shamefulness of Cicero’s lackeying towards Pompey and his coterie of provincials, the way that this had set the family in opposition to all who were most honourable in the state, and the rise of mob rule which had been made possible by the illegal passage of the lex Gabinia. I cannot remember all of it, and in any case what does it matter? Like most arguments between husband and wife it was not about the thing itself, but a different matter entirely – that is, her failure to produce a son, and Cicero’s consequent semi-paternal attachment to Frugi. Nevertheless, I do remember Cicero snapping back that, whatever Pompey’s faults, no one disputed that he was a brilliant soldier, and that once he had been awarded his special command and had raised his troops and put to sea, he had wiped out the pirate threat in only forty-nine days. And I also recall her crushing retort, that if the pirates really had been swept from the sea in seven weeks, perhaps they had not been quite the menace that Cicero and his friends had made them out to be in the first place! At that point, I managed to slip out of the room and retreat to my little cubicle, so the rest was lost to me. But the mood in the house during the following days was as fragile as Neapolitan glass.

  ‘You see how hard pressed I am?’ Cicero complained to me the next morning, rubbing his forehead with his knuckles. ‘There is no respite for me anywhere, either in my business or my leisure.’

  As for Terentia, she became increasingly preoccupied with her supposed barrenness, and took to praying daily at the Temple of the Good Goddess on the Aventine Hill, where harmless snakes roamed freely in the precincts to encourage fertility and no man was allowed to set eyes upon the inner sanctum. I also heard from her maid that she had set up a small shrine to Juno in her bedroom.

  Secretly, I believe Cicero shared Terentia’s opinion of Pompey. There was something suspicious as well as glorious about the speed of his victory (‘Organised at the end of winter,’ as Cicero put it, ‘started at the beginning of spring, and finished by the middle of the summer’), which made one wonder whether the whole enterprise could not have been handled perfectly well by a commande
r appointed in the normal way. Still, there was no denying his success. The pirates had been rolled up like a carpet, driven from the waters of Sicily and Africa eastwards, through the Illyrian Sea to Achaia, and then purged from the whole of Greece. Finally, they had been trapped by Pompey himself in their last great stronghold, Coracesium, in Cilicia, and in a huge battle on sea and land, ten thousand had been killed and four hundred vessels destroyed. Another twenty thousand had been captured. But rather than have them crucified, as no doubt Crassus would have done, Pompey had ordered the pirates to be resettled inland with their wives and families, in the depopulated towns of Greece and Asia Minor – one of which he renamed, with characteristic modesty, Pompeiopolis. All this he did without reference to the senate.