Imperium

by Robert Harris

  “I have the honor to inform you that I have become the father of a little son. Terentia is well.”

  HOW TRANSFORMED A HOUSE is by the presence of a healthy newborn baby! I believe, although it is seldom acknowledged, that this must be because it is a double blessing. The unspoken dreads which attend all births—of agony, death, and deformity—are banished, and in their place comes this miracle of a fresh life. Relief and joy are intertwined.

  Naturally, I was not permitted upstairs to see Terentia, but a few hours later Cicero brought his son down and proudly showed him off to the household and his clients. To be frank, not much was visible, apart from an angry little red face and a lick of fine dark hair. He was wrapped up tight in the woollen swaddling clothes which had performed the same service for Cicero more than forty years earlier. The senator also had a silver rattle preserved from his infancy which he tinkled above the tiny face. He carried the infant tenderly into the atrium and pointed to the spot where he dreamed that one day his consular image would hang. “And then,” he whispered, “you will be Marcus Tullius Cicero, son of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the consul—how does that sound? Not bad, eh? There will be no taunts of “new man” for you! Here you are, Tiro—make the acquaintance of a whole new political dynasty.” He offered the bundle to me, and I held it nervously, in that way the childless do when handed a baby, and was relieved when the nurse took him from me.

  Cicero, meanwhile, was once again contemplating the blank spot on his atrium wall and had fallen into one of his reveries. I wonder what it was he was seeing there: his death mask, perhaps, staring back at him, like a face in the mirror? I inquired after the health of Terentia, and he said, distractedly, “Oh, she is very well. Very strong. You know what she is like. Strong enough, at least, to resume belaboring me for making an alliance with Catilina.” He dragged his gaze away from the empty wall. “And now,” he sighed, “I suppose we had better keep our appointment with the villain.”

  When we reached the house of Catilina, we found the former governor of Africa in a charming humor. Cicero later made a list of his “paradoxical qualities” and I give it here, for it was nicely put: “to attach many by friendship, and to retain them by devotion; to share what he possessed with all, and to be at the service of all his friends in time of need, with money, influence, effort, and—if necessary—with reckless crime; to control his natural temper as occasion required, and to bend and turn it this way and that; to be serious with the strict, easy with the liberal, grave with the old, amiable with the young, daring with criminals, dissolute with the depraved…” This was the Catilina who was waiting for us that day. He had already heard about the birth of Cicero’s son and pumped his advocate’s hand in warm congratulation, and then produced a beautiful calfskin box, which he insisted Cicero open. Inside was a baby’s silver amulet which Catilina had acquired in Utica. “It is merely a local trinket to ward off ill health and evil spirits,” he explained. “Please give it to your lad with my blessing.”

  “Well,” replied Cicero, “this is handsome of you, Catilina.” And it was indeed exquisitely engraved, certainly no mere trinket: when Cicero held it to the light I saw all manner of exotic wild animals chasing one another, linked by a motif of curling serpents. For one last moment he toyed with it and weighed it in his palm, but then he replaced it in its box and handed it back to Catilina. “I am afraid I cannot accept it.”

  “Why?” asked Catilina, with a puzzled smile. “Because you are my advocate, and advocates cannot be paid? Such integrity! But this is only a trifle for a baby!”

  “Actually,” said Cicero, drawing in his breath, “I have come to tell you I am not going to be your advocate.”

  I was in the act of unpacking all the legal documents onto a small table which stood between the two men. I had been watching them in a sideways fashion, but now I put my head down and carried on. After what seemed to me a long silence, I heard Catilina say, in a quiet voice, “And why is that?”

  “To speak frankly: because you are so obviously guilty.”

  Another silence, and then Catilina’s voice, when it came, was once again very calm. “But Fonteius was guilty of extortion against the Gauls, and you represented him.”

  “Yes. But there are degrees of guilt. Fonteius was corrupt but harmless. You are corrupt and something else entirely.”

  “That is for the court to decide.”

  “Normally I would agree. But you have purchased the verdict in advance, and that is not a charade I wish to be a part of. You have made it impossible for me to convince myself that I am acting honorably. And if I cannot convince myself, then I cannot convince anyone else—my wife, my brother, and now, perhaps more important, my son, when he is old enough to understand.”

  At this point I risked a look at Catilina. He was standing completely motionless, his arms hanging loosely by his sides, and I was reminded of an animal that has suddenly come across a rival—it was a type of predatory stillness: watchful and ready to fight. He said lightly, but it seemed to me the lightness was now more strained, “You realize this is of no consequence to me, but only to yourself? It does not matter who is my advocate; nothing changes for me. I shall be acquitted. But for you now—instead of my friendship, you will have my enmity.”

  Cicero shrugged. “I prefer not to have the enmity of any man, but when it is unavoidable, I shall endure it.”

  “You will never have endured an enmity such as mine, I promise you that. Ask the Africans.” He grinned. “Ask Gratidianus.”

  “You removed his tongue, Catilina. Conversation would be difficult.”

  Catilina swayed forward slightly, and I thought he might do to Cicero what he had only half done to Clodius the previous evening, but that would have been an act of madness, and Catilina was never wholly mad: things would have been far easier if he had been. Instead he checked himself and said, “Well then, I suppose I must let you go.”

  Cicero nodded. “You must. Leave the papers, Tiro. We have no need of them now.”

  I cannot remember if there was any further conversation; I do not believe there was. Catilina and Cicero simply turned their backs on each other, which was the traditional means of signaling enmity, and so we left that ancient, empty, creaking mansion and went out into the heat of the Roman summer.

  Roll XV

  NOW BEGAN A MOST DIFFICULT and anxious period in Cicero’s life, during which I am sure he often regretted that he had made such an enemy of Catilina and had not found some innocuous excuse to wriggle out of his commitment to defend him. For there were, as he often observed, only three possible outcomes to the coming election, and none was pleasant. Either he would be consul and Catilina would not—in which case who could tell what lengths his resentful and defeated rival might be willing to go to? Or Catilina would be consul and he would not, and all the resources of the office would be turned against him. Or—and this, I think, alarmed him most of all—he and Catilina might be consuls together, in which case his dream of supreme imperium would degenerate into a yearlong running battle, and the business of the republic would be paralyzed by their acrimony.

  The first shock came when the trial of Catilina opened a couple of days later, because who should step forward to act as chief defense advocate but the senior consul himself, Lucius Manlius Torquatus, head of one of the oldest and most respected patrician families in Rome. Catilina was escorted into court by all the traditional old guard of the aristocracy—Catulus, of course, but also Hortensius, Lepidus, and the elder Curio. The only consolation for Cicero was that Catilina’s guilt was utterly manifest, and Clodius, who had his own reputation to consider, actually made quite a decent job of drawing out the evidence. Although Torquatus was an urbane and precise attorney, he could only (to use the crude phrase of the time) apply so much perfume to this particular turd. The jury had been bribed, but the record of Catilina’s behavior in Africa was sufficiently shocking that they very nearly found him guilty, and he was only acquitted per infamiam—that is, he was dishonorabl
y discharged from the court. Clodius, fearful of retaliation from Catilina and his supporters, departed the city soon afterwards, to serve on the staff of Lucius Murena, the new governor of Further Gaul. “If only I had prosecuted Catilina myself!” groaned Cicero. “He would be with Verres in Massilia by now, watching the waves coming in!” But at least he had avoided the dishonor of serving as Catilina’s defender—for which, incidentally, he gave much credit to Terentia, and thereafter he was always more willing to listen to her advice.

  Cicero’s campaign strategy now called for him to leave Rome for four months and travel north to canvass, all the way up to the borders of Italy in Nearer Gaul. No consular candidate, as far as I am aware, had ever done such a thing before, but though he loathed to leave the city for so long, Cicero was convinced it was worth it. When he stood for aedile, the number of registered electors was some four hundred thousand; but now those rolls had been revised by the censors, and with the extension of the franchise as far north as the River Po, the electorate had increased to almost one million. Very few of these citizens would ever bother to travel all the way to Rome to cast their votes in person. But Cicero reckoned that if he could persuade just one in ten of those he met to make the effort, it could give him a decisive edge on the Field of Mars.

  He fixed his departure for after the Roman Games, which began that year as usual on the fifth day of September. And now came Cicero’s second—I will not call it a shock exactly, but it was certainly more troubling than a mere surprise. The Roman Games were always given by the curule aediles, one of whom was Caesar. As with Antonius Hybrida, nothing much was expected of him, for he was known to be hard up. But Caesar took the whole production over, and in his lordly way he declared that the games were in honor not only of Jupiter but also of his dead father. For days beforehand he had workmen in the Forum building colonnades, so that people could stroll around and see the wild beasts he had imported, and the gladiators he had bought—no fewer than three hundred and twenty pairs, clad in silver armor, the greatest number ever produced for a public spectacle. He laid on banquets, held processions, and staged plays. On the morning of the games themselves the citizens of Rome woke to discover that he had, overnight, erected a statue of the populist hero Marius—the aristocrats’ great hate figure—within the precincts of the Capitol. Catulus immediately insisted that a session of the Senate be called, and tabled a motion demanding that the statue be removed at once. But Caesar responded with contempt, and such was his popularity in Rome that the Senate did not dare to press the matter further.

  Everyone knew that the only man who could possibly have lent Caesar the money for the entire extravaganza was Crassus, and Cicero returned from the Roman Games in the same dejected manner that he had come back from Hybrida’s Games of Apollo. It was not that Caesar, six years his junior, was ever likely to run against him personally in an election, but rather that Crassus was clearly up to something, and he could not work out what. That night Cicero described to me a part of the entertainment. “Some poor wretch, a criminal, was led out naked into the center of the circus, armed with a wooden sword, and then they released a panther and a lion to attack him, which no doubt they had starved for weeks. The man put on a reasonable show, using the only advantage which he had—his brains—dashing this way and that, and for a while it looked as though he might succeed in making the beasts attack one another instead of him. The crowd was cheering him on. But then he tripped and the creatures tore him to pieces. And I looked to one side of me at Hortensius and the aristocrats, all laughing and applauding, and at Crassus and Caesar side by side on the other, and I thought to myself, Cicero: that man is you.”

  His personal relations with Caesar were always cordial, not least because Caesar enjoyed his jokes, but he had never trusted him, and now that he suspected Caesar was in alliance with Crassus, he began to keep a greater distance. There is another story I should tell about Caesar. Around this time Palicanus came to call, seeking Cicero’s support for his own bid for the consulship. Oh, dear—poor Palicanus! He was a cautionary lesson in what can happen in politics if one becomes too dependent on the favor of a great man. He had been Pompey’s loyal tribune, and then his loyal praetor, but he had never been given his share of the spoils once Pompey had achieved his special commands, for the simple reason there was nothing left he could offer in return; he had been bled dry. I picture him, day after day sitting in his house, staring at his gigantic bust of Pompey, or dining alone beneath that mural of Pompey as Jupiter—truthfully, he had about as much chance of becoming consul as I did. But Cicero tried to let him down kindly and said that although he could not form an electoral alliance with him, he would at least try to do something for him in the future (of course, he never did). At the end of the interview, just as Palicanus was rising, Cicero, keen to end on a friendly note, asked to be remembered to his daughter, the blowsy Lollia, who was married to Gabinius.

  “Oh, do not talk to me about that whore!” responded Palicanus. “You must have heard? The whole city is talking about it! She is being screwed every day by Caesar!”

  Cicero assured him he had not heard.

  “Caesar,” said Palicanus bitterly. “Now, there is a duplicitous bastard! I ask you: is that any time to bed a comrade’s wife—when he is a thousand miles away, fighting for his country?”

  “Disgraceful,” agreed Cicero. “Mind you,” he said to me after Palicanus had gone, “if you are going to do such a thing, I should have thought that was the ideal time. Not that I am an expert on such matters.” He shook his head. “Really, though, one has to wonder about Caesar. If a man would steal your wife, what wouldn’t he take from you?”

  Yet again I almost told him what I had witnessed in Pompey’s house; and yet again I thought the better of it.

  IT WAS ON A CLEAR AUTUMN morning that Cicero bade a tearful good-bye to Terentia, Tullia, and little Marcus, and we left the city to begin his great campaign tour of the north. Quintus, as usual, remained behind to nurse his brother’s political interests, while Frugi was entrusted with the legal casework. As for young Caelius, this became the occasion of his finally leaving Cicero and going to the household of Crassus to complete his internship.

  We traveled in a convoy of three four-wheeled carriages, pulled by teams of mules—one carriage for Cicero to sleep in, another specially fitted out as an office, and a third full of luggage and documents; other, smaller vehicles trailed behind for the use of the senator’s retinue of secretaries, valets, muleteers, cooks, and heaven knows who else, including several thick-set men who acted as bodyguards. We left by the Fontinalian Gate, with no one to see us off. In those days, the hills to the north of Rome were still pine-clad, apart from the one on which Lucullus was just completing his notorious palace. The patrician general had now come back from the East, but was unable to enter the city proper without forfeiting his military imperium, and with it his right to a triumph. So he was lingering out here amid his spoils of war, waiting for his aristocratic cronies to assemble a majority in the Senate to vote him triumphator, but the supporters of Pompey, among them Cicero, kept blocking it. Mind you, even Cicero glanced up from his letters long enough to take a look at this colossal structure, the roof of which was just visible over the treetops, and I secretly hoped that we might catch a glimpse of the great man himself, but of course he was nowhere to be seen. (Incidentally, Quintus Metellus, the sole survivor of the three Metelli brothers, had also recently returned from Crete, and was also holed up outside the city in anticipation of a triumph which, again, the ever-jealous Pompey would not allow. The plight of Lucullus and Metellus was a source of endless amusement to Cicero: “a traffic jam of generals,” he called them, “all trying to get into Rome through the Triumphal Gate!”) At the Mulvian Bridge we paused while Cicero dashed off a final note of farewell to Terentia. Then we crossed the swollen waters of the Tiber and turned north onto the Flaminian Way.

  We made extremely good time on that first day, and shortly before nightfall we reached O
criculum, about thirty miles north of the city. Here we were met by a prominent local citizen who had agreed to give Cicero hospitality, and the following morning the senator went into the forum to begin his canvass. The secret of effective electioneering lies in the quality of the staff work done in advance, and here Cicero was very fortunate to have attached to his campaign two professional agents, Ranunculus and Filum, who traveled ahead of the candidate to ensure that a decent crowd of supporters would always be waiting in each town when we arrived. There was nothing about the electoral map of Italy which these two rascals did not know: who among the local knights would be offended if Cicero did not stop to pay his respects, and who should be avoided; which were the most important tribes and centuries in each particular district, and which were most likely to come his way; what were the issues which most concerned the citizens, and what were the promises they expected in return for their votes. They had no other topic of conversation except politics, yet Cicero could sit with them late into the night, swapping facts and stories, as happily as he could converse with a philosopher or a wit.

  I would not weary you with all the details of the campaign, even if I could remember them. Dear gods, what a heap of ash most political careers amount to when one really stops to consider them! I used to be able to name every consul for the past one hundred years, and most praetors for the past forty. Now they have almost entirely faded out of my memory, quenched like lights at midnight around the Bay of Naples. Little wonder that the towns and crowds of Cicero’s consular campaign have all merged into one generalized impression of hands shaken, stories listened to, bores endured, petitions received, jokes told, undertakings given, and local worthies smoothed and flattered. The name of Cicero was famous by this time, even outside Rome, and people turned out to see him en masse, especially in the larger towns where law was practiced, for the speeches he had prepared for the prosecution of Verres—even those he had not delivered—had been extensively copied and circulated. He was a hero to both the lower classes and the respectable knights, who saw him as a champion against the rapacity and snobbery of the aristocracy. For this reason, not many grand houses opened their doors to him, and we had to endure taunts and even, occasionally, missiles whenever we passed close to the estates of one or other of the great patricians.