Imperium

by Robert Harris

  Roll 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 also from Italy, so Cicero 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 realize 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 characterized 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 then 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 toward 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.

  AMID 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 realized how much he missed having a boy of his own. A large part of any man’s motivation in pursuing the consulship would 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 outmaneuvered by her husband on her own territory as skillfully 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 age 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 realization 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 favorite line of attack—the shamefulness of Cicero’s lackeying toward Pompey and his coterie of provincials, the way that this had set the family in opposition to all who were most honorable 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 semipaternal 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 Neopolitan 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 (“organized 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 commander 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 eastward, 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.

  Cicero followed his patron’s fantastic progress with mixed feelings (“‘Pompeiopolis!’ Dear gods, the vulgarity of it!”), not least because he knew that the more swollen with success Pompey became, the longer the shadow he would cast over his own career. Meticulous planning and overwhelming numerical superiority: these were Pompey’s favorite tactics, both on the battlefield and in Rome, and as soon as phase one of his campaign—the destruction of the pirates—was completed, phase two began in the Forum, when Gabinius started agitating to have the command of the Eastern legions stripped from Lucullus and awarded to Pompey. He used the same trick as before, employing his powers as tribune to summon witnesses to the rostra, who gave the people a sorry picture of the war against Mithradates. Some of the legions, unpaid for years, had simply refused to leave their winter camp. The poverty of these ordinary fighting men Gabinius contrasted with the immense wealth of their aristocratic commander, who had shipped back so much booty from the campaign that he had bought an entire hill just outside the gates of Rome and was building a great palace there, with all the state rooms named after the gods. Gabinius subpoened Lucullus’s architects and had them brought to the rostra, where he forced them to show to the people all their plans and models. Lucullus’s name from that time on became a synonym for outrageous luxury, and the angry citizens burned his effigy in the Forum.

  In December, Gabinius and Cornelius stood down as tribunes, and a new creature of Pompey’s, the tribune-elect, Caius Manilius, took over the safeguarding of his interests in the popular assemblies. He immediately proposed a law granting command of the war against Mithradates to Pompey, along with the government of the provinces of Asia, Cilicia, and Bithynia—the latter two held by Lucullus. Any thin hopes that Cicero might have entertained of lying low on the issue were destroyed when Gabinius came to see him bearing a message from Pompey. This briskly conveyed the general’s good wishes, along with his hopes that Cicero would support the lex Manilia “in all its provisions,” not only behind the scenes but also in public, from the rostra.

  “In all its provisions,” repeated Gabinius, with a smirk. “You know what that means.”

  “I presume it means the clause which appoints you to the command of the legions on the Euphrates, thus giving you legal immunity from prosecution now that your term as tribune has expired.”

  “You have it.” Gabinius grinned and di
d a passable impersonation of Pompey, drawing himself up and puffing out his cheeks. ‘Is he not clever, gentlemen? Did I not tell you he was clever?’”

  “Calm yourself, Gabinius,” said Cicero wearily. “I assure you there is no one I would rather see heading off to the Euphrates than you.”

  It is dangerous in politics to find oneself a great man’s whipping boy. Yet this was the role in which Cicero was now becoming trapped. Men who would never have dared to directly insult or criticize Pompey could instead land blows on his lawyer-surrogate with impunity, knowing that everyone would guess their real target. But there was no escaping a direct order from the commander in chief, and so this became the occasion of Cicero’s first speech from the rostra. He took immense trouble over it, dictating it to me several days beforehand, and then showing it to Quintus and Frugi for their comments. From Terentia he prudently withheld it, for he knew he would have to send a copy to Pompey and it was therefore necessary for him to ladle on the flattery. (I see from the manuscript, for example, that Pompey’s “superhuman genius as a commander” was amended at Quintus’s suggestion to Pompey’s “superhuman and unbelievable genius as a commander.”) He hit upon a brilliant slogan to sum up Pompey’s success—“one law, one man, one year”—and fretted over the rest of the speech for hours, conscious that if he failed on the rostra, his career would be set back and his enemies would say he did not have the common touch to move the plebs of Rome. When the morning came to deliver it, he was physically sick with nerves, retching again and again into the latrine while I stood next to him with a towel. He was so white and drawn that I actually wondered if he would have the legs to get all the way down to the Forum. But it was his belief that a great performer, however experienced, must always be frightened before going onstage—“the nerves should be as taut as bowstrings if the arrows are to fly”—and by the time we reached the back of the rostra he was ready. Needless to say, he was carrying no notes. We heard Manilius announce his name and the applause begin. It was a beautiful morning, clear and bright; the crowd was huge. He adjusted his sleeves, drew himself erect, and slowly ascended into the noise and light.