The Dictator

by Robert Harris

  Afterwards he consented to walk back with Cicero to Quintus’s house and take a cup of wine. He made no reference to Cicero’s exile, no enquiries after his health, no apology for his failure years before to help Cicero stand up to Clodius, which was what had opened the door to the whole disaster in the first place. He talked only of himself and of the future, childlike in his eager anticipation of his grain commissionership and the opportunities it would give him for travel and patronage. “And you, of course, my dear Cicero, must be one of my fifteen legates—whichever one you like, wherever you want to go. Sardinia? Sicily? Egypt? Africa?”

  “Thank you,” said Cicero. “It is generous of you, but I must decline. My priority now has to be my family—restoring us to our property, comforting my wife and children, revenging us on our enemies and trying to recover our fortune.”

  “You’ll recover your fortune quicker in the grain business than any other, I assure you.”

  “Even so, I must remain in Rome.”

  The broad face fell. “I’m disappointed, I can’t pretend otherwise. I want the name of Cicero attached to this commission. It will add weight. What about you?” he said, turning to Quintus. “You could do it, I suppose.”

  Poor Quintus! The last thing he wanted, having returned from two tours of duty in Asia, was to go abroad again and deal with farmers and grain merchants and shipping agents. He squirmed. He protested his unfitness for the office. He looked to Cicero for support. But Cicero could hardly deny Pompey a second request, and this time he said nothing.

  “All right: it’s done.” Pompey clapped his hands on the armrests of his chair to signal that the matter was settled, and pushed himself up on to his feet. He grunted with the effort and I noticed he was getting rather stout. He was in his fiftieth year, the same age as Cicero. “Our republic is passing through the most strenuous times,” he said, putting his arms around the brothers’ shoulders. “But we shall come through them, as we always have, and I know that you will both play your part.” He clasped the two men tightly, squeezed them, and held them there, pinned on either side of his commodious chest.

  Early the following morning, Cicero and I walked up the hill to inspect the ruins of his house. The palatial building in which he had invested so much of his wealth and prestige had been entirely pulled down; nine tenths of the huge plot was weeds and rubble; it was barely possible to discern the original layout of the walls through the tangled overgrowth. Cicero stooped to pick up one of the scorched bricks poking from the ground. “Until this place is restored to me, we shall be entirely at their mercy—no money, no dignity, no independence…Every time I step outdoors I shall have to look up here and be reminded of my humiliation.” The edges of the brick crumbled in his hands and the red dust trickled through his fingers like dried blood.

  At the far end of the plot a statue of a young woman had been set up on top of a high plinth. Fresh offerings of flowers were piled around the base. By consecrating the site as a shrine to Liberty, Clodius believed he had made it inviolable and thus impossible for Cicero to reclaim. The marble figure was shapely in the morning light, with long tresses and a diaphanous dress slipping down to expose a naked breast. Cicero regarded her with his hands on his hips. Eventually he said, “Surely Liberty is always depicted as a matron with a cap?” I agreed. “So who, pray, is this hussy? Why, she is no more the embodiment of a goddess than I am!”

  Until that moment he had been sombre, but now he started to laugh, and when we returned to Quintus’s house he set me the task of discovering where Clodius had acquired the statue. That same day he petitioned the College of Pontiffs to return his property to him on the grounds that the site had been improperly consecrated. A hearing was fixed for the end of the month, and Clodius was summoned to defend his actions.

  When the day arrived, Cicero admitted he felt ill-prepared and out of practice. Because his library was still in storage, he had been unable to consult all the legal sources he needed. He was also, I am sure, nervous at the prospect of confronting Clodius face to face. To be beaten by his enemy in a street brawl was one thing; to lose to him in a legal dispute would be a calamity.

  The headquarters of the pontifical college were then in the old Regia, said to be the most ancient building in the city. It stood like its modern successor at the point where the Via Sacra divides and enters the Forum, although the noise of that busy spot was entirely deadened by the thickness of its high and windowless walls. The candlelit gloom of the interior made one forget that outside it was bright and sunny. Even the chilly, tomblike air smelt sacred, as if it had been undisturbed for more than six hundred years.

  Fourteen of the fifteen pontiffs were seated at the far end of the crowded chamber, waiting for us. The only absentee was their chief, Caesar: his chair, grander than the others, stood empty. Among the priests were several I knew well—Spinther, the consul; Marcus Lucullus, brother of the great general, Lucius, who was said to have lately lost his reason and to be confined to his palace outside Rome; and the two rising young aristocrats Q. Scipio Nasica and M. Aemilius Lepidus. And here at last I saw the third triumvir, Crassus. The curious conical hat of animal fur the pontiffs were required to wear robbed him of his most distinctive feature, his baldness. His crafty face was quite impassive.

  Cicero took a seat facing them while I sat on a stool at his back, ready to pass any documents he required. Behind us was an audience of eminent citizens, including Pompey. Of Clodius there was no sign. Whispered conversations gradually ceased. The silence grew oppressive. Where was he? Perhaps he might not come. With Clodius one never knew. But then at last he swaggered in, and I felt myself turn cold at the sight of the man who had caused us so much anguish. “Little Miss Beauty,” Cicero used to call him, but in middle age he had outgrown the insult. His luxuriant blond curls were nowadays cut as tight to his skull as a golden helmet; his thick red lips had lost their pout. He appeared hard, lean, disdainful—a fallen Apollo. As is often the case with the bitterest of enemies, he had started out as a friend. But then he had outraged law and morality once too often, by disguising himself as a woman and defiling the sacred rite of the Good Goddess. Cicero had been obliged to give evidence against him, and from that day on Clodius had sworn vengeance. He sat on a chair barely three paces from Cicero, but Cicero continued to stare straight ahead, and the two men never once looked at one another.

  The senior pontiff by age was Publius Albinovanus, who must have been eighty. In a quavering voice he read out the point at issue—“Was the shrine to Liberty, lately erected on the property claimed by M. Tullius Cicero, consecrated in accordance with the rites of the official religion or not?”—and invited Clodius to speak first.

  Clodius left it just long enough to indicate his contempt for the whole proceeding, and then slowly got to his feet. “I am appalled, holy fathers,” he began in his slangy patrician drawl, “and dismayed, but not surprised, that the exiled murderer Cicero, having brazenly slaughtered Liberty during the time of his consulship, should now seek to compound the offence by tearing down her image…”

  He brought up every slander that had ever been made against Cicero—his illegal killing of the Catiline conspirators (“the sanction of the Senate is no excuse for executing five citizens without a trial”), his vanity (“if he objects to this shrine, it is mostly out of jealousy since he regards himself as the only god worth worshipping”) and his political inconsistency (“this is the man whose return was supposed to mean the restoration of senatorial authority, and yet whose first act was to betray it by winning dictatorial powers for Pompey”). It was not without impact. It would have played well in the Forum. But it failed entirely to address the legal point at issue: was the shrine properly consecrated or not?

  He argued for an hour, and then it was Cicero’s turn, and it was a measure of how effective Clodius had been that he was obliged to speak extempore to begin with, defending his support for Pompey’s grain commission. Only after he had answered that could he turn to making his main
case: that the shrine could not be held to be consecrated because Clodius was not legally a tribune when he dedicated it. “Your transfer from patrician to pleb was sanctioned by no decree of this college, was entered upon in defiance of all pontifical regulations, and must be held to be null and void; and if that is invalid your entire tribunate falls to the ground.” This was dangerous territory: everyone knew it was Caesar who had organised Clodius’s adoption as a pleb. I saw Crassus lean forwards listening intently. Sensing the danger, and perhaps remembering his undertaking to Caesar, Cicero swerved away: “Does this mean I am saying that all Caesar’s laws were illegal? By no means; for none of them any longer affects my interests, apart from those aimed with hostile intent against my own person.”

  He pressed on, switching to an attack on Clodius’s methods, and now his oratory took flight—his arm outstretched, his finger pointing at his enemy, the words almost tumbling from his mouth in his passion: “Oh, you abominable plague spot of the state, you public prostitute! What harm had you suffered at the hands of my unhappy wife that you harassed, plundered and tortured her so brutally? Or from my daughter, who lost her beloved husband? Or from my little son, who still lies awake weeping at night? But it was not just my family you attacked—you waged a bitter war against my very walls and doorposts!”

  However his real coup was to reveal the origins of the statue Clodius had set up. I had tracked down the workmen who had erected it and learnt that the piece had been donated by Clodius’s brother Appius, who had carried it off from Tanagra, in Boeotia, where it had graced the tomb of a well-known local courtesan.

  The whole room roared with laughter when Cicero revealed this fact. “So this is his idea of Liberty—a courtesan’s likeness, erected over a foreign tomb, stolen by a thief and set up again by a sacrilegious hand! And she is the one who drives me from my house? Holy fathers, this property cannot be lost to me without inflicting disgrace upon the state. If you believe that my return to Rome has been a source of pleasure to the immortal gods, to the Senate, to the Roman people and to all of Italy, then let it be your hands that reinstall me in my home.”

  Cicero sat to loud murmurs of approval from the distinguished audience. I stole a look at Clodius. He was scowling at the floor. The pontiffs leaned in to confer. Crassus seemed to be doing most of the talking. We had expected a decision at once. But Albinovanus straightened and announced that the college would need more time to consider their verdict: it would be relayed to the Senate the following day. This was a blow. Clodius stood, bent down to Cicero as he passed and hissed, through a false smile, just loud enough for me to hear, “You will die before that place is rebuilt.” He left the chamber without another word. Cicero pretended nothing had happened. He lingered to chat with many old friends, with the result that we were among the last to leave the building.

  Outside the chamber was a courtyard containing the famous white board on which the chief priest by tradition in those days published the state’s official news. This was where Caesar’s agents posted his Commentaries, and here was where we found Crassus standing—ostensibly reading the latest dispatch but in truth waiting to intercept Cicero. He had taken off his cap; here and there little wisps of brown fur still adhered to his high-domed skull.

  “So, Cicero,” he said in his unsettlingly jovial manner, “you were pleased with the effect of your speech?”

  “Reasonably, thank you. But my opinion has no value. It’s for you and your colleagues to decide.”

  “Oh, I thought it effective enough. My only regret is that Caesar wasn’t present to hear it.”

  “I shall send him a copy.”

  “Yes, be sure that you do. Mind you, reading is all very well. But how would he vote on the issue? That’s what I have to decide.”

  “And why do you have to decide that?”

  “Because he wishes me to act as his proxy and cast his vote as I think fit. Many colleagues will follow my lead. It is important I get it right.”

  He grinned, showing yellow teeth.

  “I have no doubt you will. Good day to you, Crassus.”

  “Good day, Cicero.”

  We passed out of the gate, Cicero cursing under his breath, and had gone only a few paces when Crassus suddenly called out after him, and hurried to catch us up. “One last thing,” he said. “In view of these tremendous victories that Caesar has won in Gaul, I wondered if you would be good enough to support a proposal in the Senate for a period of public celebration in his honour.”

  “Why does it matter if I support it?”

  “Obviously it would add weight, given the history of your relations with Caesar. People would notice. And it would be a noble gesture on your part. I’m sure Caesar would appreciate it.”

  “How long would this period of celebration last?”

  “Oh…fifteen days should just about do it.”

  “Fifteen days? That’s nearly twice as long as Pompey was voted for conquering Spain.”

  “Yes, well one could argue that Caesar’s victories in Gaul are twice as important as Pompey’s in Spain.”

  “I’m not sure Pompey would agree.”

  “Pompey,” retorted Crassus with emphasis, “must learn that a triumvirate consists of three men, not one.”

  Cicero gritted his teeth and bowed. “It would be an honour.”

  Crassus bowed in return. “I knew you would do the patriotic thing.”

  —

  The following day, Spinther read out the pontiffs’ judgement to the Senate: unless Clodius could provide written proof that he had consecrated the shrine on instructions from the Roman people, “the site can be restored to Cicero without sacrilege.”

  A normal man now would have given up. But Clodius wasn’t normal. Though he might pretend to be a pleb, he was still a Claudian—a family who took pride in hounding their enemies to the grave. First he lied and told a meeting of the people that the judgement had actually gone in his favour and called on them to defend “their” shrine. Then, when the consul-designate Marcellinus proposed a motion in the Senate to return to Cicero his three properties—in Rome, Tusculum and Formiae, “with compensation to restore them to their former state”—Clodius tried to talk out the session, and would have succeeded had he not, after three hours on his feet, been howled down by an exasperated Senate. Nor were his tactics entirely without effect. Frightened of antagonising the plebs, and to Cicero’s dismay, the Senate agreed to pay compensation of only two million sesterces to rebuild the house on the Palatine, and just half a million and a quarter of a million respectively for the repairs at Tusculum and Formiae—far below the actual costs.

  For the past two years most of Rome’s builders and craftsmen had been employed on Pompey’s immense development of public buildings on the Field of Mars. Grudgingly—because anyone who has ever employed builders learns quickly never to let them out of one’s sight—Pompey agreed to transfer a hundred of his men to Cicero. Work on restoring the Palatine house began at once, and on the first morning of construction Cicero had the great pleasure of swinging an axe at the head of Liberty and smashing it clean off, then crating up the remains and having them delivered to Clodius with his compliments.

  I knew Clodius would retaliate, and one morning soon afterwards, when Cicero and I were working on some legal papers in Quintus’s tablinum, we heard what sounded like heavy footsteps clumping across the roof. I went out into the street and was lucky not to be struck on the head by bricks dropping from the sky. Panicking workmen came running round the corner and shouted that a gang of Clodius’s toughs had overrun the site and were demolishing the new walls and hurling the debris down on to Quintus’s house. Just then Cicero and Quintus came out to see what the trouble was, and yet again they had to send a messenger to Milo to request the assistance of his gladiators. It was just as well, for no sooner had the runner gone than there was a series of flashes overhead, and burning brands and lumps of flaming pitch started landing all around us. Fires broke out on the roof. The terrified househol
d had to be evacuated, and everyone, including Cicero and even Terentia, was pressed into service to pass buckets of water, drawn from the street fountains, from hand to hand to try to prevent the house from burning down.

  Crassus had a monopoly of the city’s fire services, and fortunately for us, he was at his home on the Palatine. He heard the commotion, came out into the street, saw what was going on, and turned up himself in a shabby tunic and slippers, with one of his teams of fire slaves dragging a water tender equipped with pumps and hoses. But for them the building would have been lost; as it was, the damage caused by the water and smoke rendered the place uninhabitable, and we had to move out while it was repaired. We loaded our luggage into carts and, with night coming on, made our way across the valley to the Quirinal hill, to seek temporary refuge in the house of Atticus, who was still away in Epirus. His narrow, ancient house was fine for an elderly bachelor of fixed and moderate habits; it was less ideal for two families with extensive households and warring spouses. Cicero and Terentia slept in separate parts of the building.

  Eight days later, as we were walking along the Via Sacra, we heard an outburst of shouts and the sound of running feet behind us, and turned to see Clodius and a dozen of his henchmen flourishing cudgels and even swords, sprinting to attack us. We had the usual bodyguard of Milo’s men and they hustled us into the doorway of the nearest house. In their panic, Cicero was pushed to the ground and gashed his head and twisted his ankle but otherwise was unharmed. The startled owner of the house in which we sought refuge, Tettius Damio, took us in and gave us a cup of wine, and Cicero talked calmly to him of poetry and philosophy until we were told that our attackers had been driven off and the coast was clear; then he said his thanks and we continued on our way home.

  Cicero was in that state of elation that sometimes follows a close brush with death. His appearance, however, was a different matter—limping, with a bloodied forehead and torn and dirty clothes—and the instant Terentia saw him she cried out in shock. Useless for him to protest that it was nothing, that Clodius had been put to flight, and that his descent to such tactics showed how desperate he was becoming: Terentia would not listen. The siege, the fire and now this: she insisted that they all should leave Rome at once.