Imperium

by Robert Harris

  “Bravo!” said Terentia. “Spoken like a true philosopher, who has never stood for office in his life.”

  Pomponia yawned noisily. “Can we talk about something else? Politics is so dull.”

  She was a tiresome woman whose only obvious attraction, apart from her prominent bust, was that she was Atticus’s sister. I saw the eyes of the two Cicero brothers meet, and my master give a barely perceptible shake of his head: ignore her, his expression said, it is not worth arguing over. “All right,” he conceded, “enough of politics. But I propose a toast.” He raised his cup and the others did the same. “To our old friend Sthenius. If nothing else, may this day have seen the beginning of the restoration of his fortunes. Sthenius!”

  The Sicilian’s eyes were wet with tears of gratitude.

  “Sthenius!”

  “And Thermae, Cicero,” added Terentia, her small dark eyes, her shrew’s eyes, bright with malice over the rim of her drink. “Do not let us forget Thermae.”

  I TOOK MY MEAL ALONE in the kitchen and went exhausted to bed with my lamp and a book of philosophy which I was too tired to read. (I was free to borrow whatever I liked from the household’s small library.) Later I heard the guests all leave and the bolts slam shut on the front door. I heard Cicero and Terentia mount the stairs in silence and go their separate ways, for she had long since taken to sleeping in another part of the house to avoid being woken by him before dawn. I heard Cicero’s footsteps on the boards above my head, and then I blew out my lamp, and that was the last sound I heard as I surrendered myself to sleep—his footsteps pacing, up and down, up and down.

  It was six weeks later that we heard the news from Sicily. Verres had ignored the entreaties of his father. On the first day of December, in Syracuse, exactly as he had threatened, he had judged Sthenius in his absence, found him guilty of espionage, sentenced him to be crucified, and dispatched his officials to Rome to arrest him and return him for execution.

  Roll III

  THE GOVERNOR OF SICILY’S contemptuous defiance caught Cicero off guard. He had been convinced he had struck a gentlemen’s agreement which would safeguard his client’s life. “But then of course,” he complained bitterly, “none of them is a gentleman.” He stormed around the house in an uncharacteristic rage. He had been tricked! They had played him for a fool! He would march down to the Senate House right there and then and expose their villainous lies! I knew he would calm down before long, for he was only too aware that he lacked the rank simply to demand a hearing in the Senate: he would risk humiliation.

  But there was no escaping the fact that he was under a heavy obligation to protect his client, and on the morning after Sthenius had learned his fate, Cicero convened a meeting in his study to determine how best to respond. For the first time that I can remember, all his usual callers were turned away, and six of us crammed into that small space: Cicero, brother Quintus, cousin Lucius, Sthenius, myself (to take notes), and Servius Sulpicius, already widely regarded as the ablest jurist of his generation. Cicero began by inviting Servius to give his legal opinion.

  “In theory,” said Servius, “our friend has a right of appeal in Syracuse, but only to the governor, that is to Verres himself; so that avenue is closed to us. To bring a prosecution against Verres himself is not an option: as a serving governor, he has executive immunity; besides, Hortensius is the praetor of the extortion court until January; and besides both of these, the jury will be composed of senators who will never convict one of their own. You could table another motion in the Senate, but you have already tried that, and presumably if you tried again you would merely meet with the same result. Continuing to live openly in Rome is not an option for Sthenius—anyone convicted of a capital crime is automatically subject to banishment from the city, so it is impossible for him to remain here. Indeed, Cicero, you are liable to prosecution yourself if you harbor him under your roof.”

  “So what is your advice?”

  “Suicide,” said Servius. Sthenius let out a terrible groan. “No, really, I am afraid you should consider it. Before they catch hold of you. You do not want to suffer the scourge, the hot irons, or the torments of the cross.”

  “Thank you, Servius,” said Cicero, cutting him off swiftly, before he had an opportunity to describe those torments in further detail. “Tiro, we need to find Sthenius a place where he can hide. He cannot stay here any longer. It is the first place they will look. As for the legal situation, Servius, your analysis strikes me as faultless. Verres is a brute, but a cunning brute, which is why he felt strong enough to press ahead with the conviction. In short, having thought about the matter overnight, it seems to me that there is only one slim possibility.”

  “Which is?”

  “To go to the tribunes.”

  This suggestion produced an immediate stir of unease, for the tribunes were at that time an utterly discredited group. Traditionally they had checked and balanced the power of the Senate by voicing the will of the common people. But ten years earlier, after Sulla had defeated the forces of Marius, the aristocrats had stripped them of their powers. They could no longer summon meetings of the people, or propose legislation, or impeach the likes of Verres for high crimes and misdemeanors. As a final humiliation, any senator who became a tribune was automatically disqualified from standing for senior office—that is, the praetorship or the consulship. In other words, the tribuneship was designed to be a political dead end—a place to confine the ranting and the rancorous, the incompetent and the unpromotable: the effluent of the body politic. No senator of any nobility or ambition would go anywhere near it.

  “I know your objections,” said Cicero, waving the room to be silent. “But the tribunes still have one small power left to them, do they not, Servius?”

  “That is true,” agreed Servius. “They do have a residual potestas auxilii ferendi.” Our blank looks gave him satisfaction. “It means,” he explained pedantically, “that they have the right to offer their protection to private persons against the unjust decisions of magistrates. But I must warn you, Cicero, that your friends, among whom I have long counted it an honor to number myself, will think much the less of you if you start dabbling in the politics of the mob. Suicide,” he repeated. “Where is the objection? We are all mortal. For all of us, it is only a matter of time. And this way you go with honor.”

  “I agree with Servius about the danger we run if we approach the tribunes,” said Quintus. (It was usually “we” when Quintus spoke about his elder brother.) “Whether we like it or not, power in Rome nowadays lies with the Senate and with the nobles. That’s why our strategy has always been to build your reputation carefully, through your advocacy in the courts. We shall do ourselves irreparable damage with the men who really matter if the feeling gets around that you are merely another rabble-rouser. Also—I hesitate to raise this, Marcus—but have you considered Terentia’s reaction if you were to follow this course?”

  Servius guffawed at that. “You will never conquer Rome, Cicero, if you cannot rule your wife.”

  “Conquering Rome would be child’s play, Servius, believe me, compared with ruling my wife.”

  And so the debate went on. Lucius favored an immediate approach to the tribunes, no matter what the consequences. Sthenius was too numb with misery and fear to have a coherent opinion on anything. At the very end, Cicero asked me what I thought. In other company, this might have caused surprise, a slave’s view not counting for much in most Romans’ eyes, but these men were used to the way that Cicero sometimes turned to me for advice. I replied cautiously that it seemed to me that Hortensius would not be happy to learn of Verres’s action, and that the prospect of the case becoming a public scandal might yet force him to put more pressure on his client to see sense: going to the tribunes was a risk, but on balance it was one worth taking. The answer pleased Cicero.

  “Sometimes,” he said, summing up the discussion with an aphorism I have never forgotten, “if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a f
ight—start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through. Thank you, gentlemen.” And with that the meeting was adjourned.

  THERE WAS NO TIME to waste, for if the news from Syracuse had already reached Rome, it was a fair assumption that Verres’s men were not far behind. Even while Cicero was talking, I had conceived an idea for a possible hiding place for Sthenius, and the moment the conference was over, I went in search of Terentia’s business manager, Philotimus. He was a plump and lascivious young man, generally to be found in the kitchen, pestering the maids to satisfy one or the other, or preferably both, of his vices. I asked him if there was a spare apartment available in one of his mistress’s tenement blocks, and when he replied that there was, I bullied him into giving me the key. I checked the street outside the house for suspicious loiterers, and when I was satisfied that it was safe, I persuaded Sthenius to follow me.

  He was in a state of complete dejection, his dreams of returning to his homeland dashed, in hourly terror of being arrested. And I fear that when he first saw the squalid building in Subura in which I said he would now have to live, he must have felt that even we had abandoned him. The stairs were rickety and gloomy. There was evidence of a recent fire on the walls. His room, on the fifth floor, was barely more than a cell, with a straw mattress in the corner and a tiny window which offered no view, except across the street to another, similar apartment, close enough for Sthenius to reach out and shake hands with his neighbor. For a latrine he had a bucket. But if it didn’t offer him comfort, it at least offered him security—dropped, unknown, into this warren of slums, it would be almost impossible for him to be found. He asked me, in a plaintive tone, to sit with him awhile, but I had to get back and gather all the documents relating to his case, so that Cicero could present them to the tribunes. We were fighting time, I told him, and left at once.

  The headquarters of the tribunes were next door to the Senate House, in the old Basilica Porcia. Although the tribunate was only a shell, from which all the flesh of power had been sucked, people still hung around its building. The angry, the dispossessed, the hungry, the militant—these were the denizens of the tribunes’ basilica. As Cicero and I walked across the Forum, we could see a sizable crowd jostling on its steps to get a view of what was happening inside. I was carrying a document case, but still I cleared a way for the senator as best I could, receiving some kicks and curses for my pains, as these were not citizens with any great love for a purple-bordered toga.

  There were ten tribunes, elected annually by the people, and they always sat on the same long wooden bench, beneath a mural depicting the defeat of the Carthaginians. It was not a large building, but packed, noisy, and warm, despite the December cold outside. A young man, bizarrely barefoot, was haranguing the mob as we entered. He was an ugly, raw-faced youth with a brutal, grating voice. There were always plenty of cranks in the Basilica Porcia, and I took him at first to be just another, as his entire speech seemed to be devoted to arguing why one particular pillar should not, on any account, be demolished, or even moved one inch, to give the tribunes more room. And yet for some curious reason, he compelled attention. Cicero began listening to him very carefully, and after a while he realized—from the constant references to “my ancestor”—that this peculiar creature was none other than the great-grandson of the famous Marcus Porcius Cato, who had originally built the basilica and given it his name.

  I mention this here because young Cato—he was then twenty-three—was to become such an important figure, both in the life of Cicero and the death of the republic. Not that one would have guessed it at the time. He looked destined for nowhere more significant than the asylum. He finished his speech, and as he went by, wild-eyed and unseeing, he knocked into me. What remains in my mind is the animal stink of him, his hair matted with damp, and the patches of sweat the size of dinner plates spreading under the armpits of his tunic. But he had won his point, and that pillar stayed absolutely in its place for as long as the building stood—which was not, alas, to be many years longer.

  However, returning to my story, the tribunes were a poor lot on the whole, but there was one among them who stood out for his talent and his energy, and that was Lollius Palicanus. He was a proud man, but of low birth, from Picenum in the Italian northeast, the power base of Pompey the Great. It had been assumed that when Pompey returned from Spain he would use his influence to try to gain his fellow-countryman a praetorship, and Cicero had been as surprised as everybody else earlier in the summer when Palicanus had suddenly announced his candidacy for the tribunate. But on this particular morning he looked happy enough with his lot. The fresh crop of tribunes always began their term of office on the tenth day of December, so he must have been very new in the job. “Cicero!” he bellowed the moment he saw us. “I had been wondering when you would show up!”

  He told us that he had already heard the news from Syracuse, and he wanted to talk about Verres. But he wanted to talk in private, for there was more at stake, he said mysteriously, than the fate of one man. He proposed meeting us at his house on the Aventine Hill in an hour, to which Cicero agreed, whereupon Palicanus immediately ordered one of his attendants to guide us, saying he would follow separately.

  It turned out to be a rough and unpretentious place, in keeping with the man, close to the Lavernal Gate, just outside the city wall. The thing I remember most clearly was the larger-than-life-size bust of Pompey, posed in the headgear and armor of Alexander the Great, which dominated the atrium. “Well,” said Cicero after he had contemplated it for a while, “I suppose it makes a change from the Three Graces.” This was exactly the sort of droll but inappropriate comment which used to get repeated around the town, and which invariably found its way back to its victim. Luckily, only I was present on this occasion, but I took the opportunity to pass on what the consul’s clerk had said regarding his joke about Gellius mediating between the philosophers. Cicero pretended to be sheepish and promised to be more circumspect in the future—he knew, he said, that people liked their statesmen to be dull—but naturally he soon forgot his resolution.

  “That was a good speech you made the other week,” said Palicanus the moment he arrived. “You have the stuff in you, Cicero, you really have, if I may say so. But those blue-blooded bastards screwed you over, and now you are in the shit. So what exactly are you planning to do about it?” (This was more or less how he spoke—rough words in a rough accent—and the aristocrats used to have some sport with him over his elocution.)

  I opened my case and handed the documents to Cicero, and he quickly laid out the situation regarding Sthenius. When he had finished he asked what chance there was of receiving any help from the tribunes.

  “That depends,” said Palicanus, with a quick lick of his lips and a grin. “Come and sit down and let us see what is to be done.”

  He took us through into another room, small and completely overwhelmed by a huge wall painting of a laureled Pompey, this time dressed as Jupiter, complete with lightning bolts shooting from his fingers.

  “Do you like it?” asked Palicanus.

  “It is remarkable,” said Cicero.

  “Yes, it is,” he said, with some satisfaction. “That is art.”

  I took a seat in the corner, beneath the Picenean deity, while Cicero, whose eye I dared not meet, settled himself at the opposite end of the couch to our host.

  “What I am about to tell you, Cicero, is not to be repeated outside this house. Pompey the Great”—Palicanus nodded to the painting, in case we were in any doubt as to whom he meant—“will soon be returning to Rome for the first time in six years. He will come with his army, so there can be no fancy double-dealing from our noble friends. He will seek the consulship. And he will get the consulship. And he will get it unopposed.”

  He leaned forward eagerly, expecting shock or surprise, but Cicero received this sensational intelligence as coolly as if he we
re being told the weather.

  “So in return for your helping me over Sthenius, I am to support you over Pompey?”

  “You are a canny one, Cicero, you have the stuff in you. What do you think?”

  Cicero rested his chin in his hand and gazed at Palicanus. “Quintus Metellus will not be happy, for a start. You know the old poem—‘In Rome Metalliare, ’tis fate, / Elected to the consulate.’ He has been scheduled since birth to have his turn next summer.”

  “Has he indeed? Well he can kiss my backside. How many legions did Quintus Metellus have behind him the last time you looked?”

  “Crassus has legions,” Cicero pointed out. “So has Lucullus.”

  “Lucullus is too far away, and besides, he has his hands full. As for Crassus—well, it is true that Crassus hates Pompey’s guts. But the thing about Crassus is that he is not a proper soldier. He is a businessman, and that type always cuts a deal.”

  “And then there is the little matter of its being completely unconstitutional. You have to be forty-two at the time of the consular election, and Pompey is how old?”

  “Just thirty-four.”

  “Indeed. Almost a year younger than me. And a consul is also required to have been elected to the Senate and to have served as praetor, neither of which has Pompey achieved. He has never made a political speech in his life. To put the matter simply, Palicanus, seldom has a man been less qualified for the post.”

  Palicanus made a dismissive gesture. “All that may be true, but let us face facts—Pompey has run whole countries for years, and done it with proconsular authority to boot. He is a consul, in all but name. Be realistic, Cicero. You cannot expect a man such as Pompey to come back to Rome and start at the bottom, running for quaestor like some political hack. What would that do to his dignity?”

  “I appreciate his feelings, but you ask my opinion, and I am giving it to you, and I tell you the aristocrats will not stand for it. All right, perhaps if he has ten thousand men outside the city, they will have no choice but to let him become consul, but sooner or later his army will go home and then how will he…Ha!” Cicero suddenly threw back his head and started laughing. “That is very clever.”