The Dictator

by Robert Harris

  “Good. Then with your agreement I’ll speak third and do the winding-up—my usual preference. I’ll put on a good show, don’t worry. We should have the whole thing wrapped up in a day or two.”

  Bestia by this time had moved from an attitude of deep suspicion to one of hardly being able to believe his luck that the greatest advocate in Rome was willing to speak on his behalf. And when Cicero strolled into court a couple of days later, his appearance provoked gasps of surprise. Rufus in particular was stunned. The very fact that Cicero, of all people—whom Bestia had once plotted to murder—should now appear as his supporter more or less guaranteed his acquittal. And so it proved. Cicero made an eloquent speech, the jury voted, and Bestia was found not guilty.

  As the court was rising, Rufus came over to Cicero. For once his normal charm was gone. He had been counting on an easy victory; instead his career had been checked. He said bitterly, “Well, I hope you’re satisfied, although such a triumph brings you nothing but dishonour.”

  “My dear Rufus,” replied Cicero, “have you learnt nothing? There is no more honour in a legal dispute than there is in a wrestling match.”

  “What I’ve learnt, Cicero, is that you still bear me a grudge and will stop at nothing to gain revenge on your enemies.”

  “Oh my dear, poor boy, I don’t regard you as my enemy. You’re not important enough. I have bigger fish to catch.”

  That really infuriated Rufus. He said, “Well, you can tell your client that as he insists on continuing as a candidate, I shall bring a second charge against him tomorrow—and the next time you rise in his defence, if you dare, I give you fair warning: I shall be waiting for you!”

  He was as good as his word: very soon afterwards, Bestia and his son brought the new writ round to show Cicero. Bestia said hopefully, “You’ll defend me again, I hope?”

  “Oh no, that would be very foolish. One can’t spring the same surprise twice. No, I’m afraid I can’t be your advocate again.”

  “So what’s to be done?”

  “Well, I can tell you what I’d do in your place.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I’d lay a counter-suit against him.”

  “For what?”

  “Political violence. That takes precedence over bribery cases. Therefore you’ll have the advantage of putting him on trial first, before he can get you into court.”

  Bestia conferred with his son. “We like the sound of it,” he announced. “But can we really make a case against him? Has he actually committed political violence?”

  “Of course,” said Cicero. “Didn’t you hear? He was involved in the murder of several of those Egyptian envoys. Ask around town,” he continued. “You’ll find lots of people willing to tell tales. There’s one man in particular you should go to see, although of course you never heard the name from me: you’ll understand why the moment I say it. You should talk to Clodius, or better still to that sister of his. I hear Rufus used to be her lover, and when his ardour cooled, he tried to get rid of her with poison. You know what that family is like—they love their vengeance. You should offer to let them join your suit. With the Claudii beside you, you’ll be unbeatable. But remember—you never got any of this from me.”

  I had worked very closely with Cicero for many years. I had grown used to his clever tricks. I did not think him capable of surprising me any more. That day proved me wrong.

  Bestia thanked him profusely, swore to be discreet and went off full of purpose. A few days later, a notice to prosecute was posted in the Forum: he and Clodius had combined forces to charge Rufus with both the attacks on the Alexandrian envoys and the attempted murder of Clodia. The news caused a sensation. Almost everyone believed that Rufus would be found guilty and sentenced to exile for life, and that the career of Rome’s youngest senator was over.

  When I showed him the list of charges, Cicero said, “Oh dear. Poor Rufus. He must be feeling very wretched. I think we should visit him and cheer him up.”

  And so we set off to find the house that Rufus was renting. Cicero, who at the age of fifty was starting to feel stiff in his limbs on cold winter mornings, rode in a litter, while I walked alongside him. Rufus turned out to be lodging on the second floor of an apartment block in the less fashionable part of the Esquiline, not far from the gate where the undertakers ply their trade. The place was gloomy even at midday, and Cicero had to ask the slaves to light candles. In the dim light we discovered their master in a drunken sleep, curled up beneath a pile of blankets on a couch. He groaned and rolled over and begged to be left alone, but Cicero dragged away his covers and told him to get up on his feet.

  “What’s the point? I’m finished!”

  “You’re not finished. Quite the contrary: we have that woman exactly where we want her.”

  “We?” repeated Rufus, squinting up at Cicero through bloodshot eyes. “When you say ‘we,’ does that imply you’re on my side?”

  “Not merely on your side, my dear Rufus. I am going to be your advocate!”

  “Wait,” said Rufus. He touched his hand gently to his forehead, as if checking it was still intact. “Wait a moment—did you plan all this?”

  “Consider yourself to have been given a political education. And now let us agree that the slate is wiped clean between us, and concentrate on beating our common enemy.” Rufus began to swear. Cicero listened for a while, then interrupted him. “Come, Rufus. This is a good bargain for us both. You’ll get that harpy off your back once and for all, and I’ll satisfy the honour of my wife.”

  Cicero held out his hand. At first Rufus recoiled. He pouted and shook his head and muttered. But then he must have realised he had no choice. At any rate, eventually he extended his own hand, Cicero shook it warmly, and with that the trap he had laid for Clodia snapped shut.

  —

  The trial was scheduled to take place at the start of April, which meant it would coincide with the opening of the Festival of the Great Mother, with its famous parade of castrated holy men. Even so, there was no doubting which would be the greater attraction, especially when Cicero’s name was announced as one of Rufus’s advocates. The others were to be Rufus himself, and Crassus, in whose household Rufus had also served an internship as a young man. I am certain Crassus would have preferred not to have performed this service for his former protégé, especially given the presence of Cicero on the bench beside him, but the rules of patronage placed him under a heavy obligation. On the other side once again were young Atratinus and Herennius Balbus—both furious at Cicero’s duplicity, not that he cared a fig for their opinion—and Clodius, representing the interests of his sister. No doubt he too would have preferred to be at the Great Mother’s festivities, which he, as aedile, was supposed to oversee, but he could hardly have backed out of the trial when his family’s honour was at stake.

  I cherish my memories of Cicero at this time, in the weeks before Rufus’s trial. He seemed once again to hold all the threads of life in his hands, just as he had in his prime. He was active in the courts and in the Senate. He went out to dinner with his friends. He even moved back in to the house on the Palatine. True, it was not entirely finished. The place still reeked of lime and paint; workmen trailed mud in from the garden. But Cicero was so delighted to be back in his own home, he did not care. His furniture and books were fetched out of storage, the household gods were placed on the altar, and Terentia was summoned back from Tusculum with Tullia and Marcus.

  Terentia entered the house cautiously and moved between the rooms with her nose wrinkled in distaste at the pungent smell of fresh plaster. She had never much cared for the place from the start, and was not about to change her opinion now. But Cicero persuaded her to stay: “That woman who caused you so much pain will never harm you again. She may have laid a hand on you. But I promise you: I shall flay her alive.”

  He also, to his great delight, after two years’ separation, heard that Atticus had at last returned from Epirus. The moment he reached the city gates, he
came straight round to inspect Cicero’s rebuilt house. Unlike Quintus, Atticus had not changed at all. His smile was still as constant, his charm as thickly laid-on—“Tiro, my dear fellow, thank you so much for taking care of my oldest friend so devotedly”—his figure as trim, his silvery hair as sleek and well cut. The only difference was that now he trailed a shy young woman at least thirty years his junior, whom he introduced to Cicero…as his fiancée! I thought Cicero might faint with shock. Her name was Pilia. She was of an obscure family, with no money and no particular beauty either—just a quiet, homely country girl. But Atticus was besotted. At first Cicero was greatly put out. “It’s ridiculous,” he grumbled to me when the couple had gone. “He’s three years older even than I am! Is it a wife he’s after or a nurse?” I suspect he was mostly offended because Atticus had never mentioned her before, and worried that she might disrupt the easy intimacy of their friendship. But Atticus was so obviously happy, and Pilia so modest and cheerful, that Cicero soon came round to her, and sometimes I saw him glancing at her in an almost wistful way, especially when Terentia was being shrewish.

  Pilia quickly became a close friend and confidante of Tullia. They were the same age and of similar temperaments, and I often saw them walking together, holding hands. Tullia had been a widow by this time for a year and encouraged by Pilia now declared herself ready to take a new husband. Cicero made enquiries about a suitable match and soon came up with Furius Crassipes—a young, rich, good-looking aristocrat, of an ancient but undistinguished family, eager for a career as a senator. He had also recently inherited a handsome house and a park just beyond the city walls. Tullia asked me for my opinion.

  I said, “What I think doesn’t matter. The question is: do you like him?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Do you think you do or are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Then that is enough.”

  In truth I thought Crassipes was more in love with the idea of Cicero as a father-in-law than Tullia as a wife. But I kept this view to myself. A wedding date was fixed.

  Who knows the secrets of another’s marriage? Certainly not I. Cicero, for example, had long complained to me of Terentia’s peevishness, of her obsession with money, of her superstition and her coldness and her rude tongue. And yet the whole of this elaborate legal spectacle he had contrived to be enacted in the centre of Rome was for her—his means of making amends for all the wrongs she had suffered because of the failure of his career. For the first time in their long marriage, he laid at her feet the greatest gift he had to offer her: his oratory.

  Not that she wanted to listen to it, mind you. She had hardly ever heard him speak in public, and never in the law courts, and had no desire to start now. It took considerable amounts of Cicero’s eloquence simply to persuade her to leave the house and come down to the Forum on the morning he was due to speak.

  By this time the trial was in its second day. The prosecution had already laid out its case, Rufus and Crassus had responded, and only Cicero’s address remained to be heard. He had sat through the other speeches with barely concealed impatience; the details of the case were irrelevant to him and the advocates bored him. Atratinus, in his disconcertingly piping voice, had portrayed Rufus as a libertine, addicted to pleasure, sunk in debt, “a pretty-boy Jason in perpetual search of a golden fleece” who had been paid by Ptolemy to intimidate the Alexandrian envoys and arrange the murder of Dio. Clodius had spoken next and described how his sister, “this chaste and distinguished widow,” had been tricked by Rufus into giving him gold out of the goodness of her heart—money she had thought was to finance public entertainment but which he had used to bribe Dio’s assassins—and how Rufus had then provided poison to her slaves to kill her and so cover his traces. Crassus, in his plodding way, and Rufus, with typical verve, had rebutted each of the charges. But the balance of opinion was that the prosecution had made its case and that the young reprobate was likely to be found guilty. This was the state of play when Cicero arrived in the Forum.

  I conducted Terentia to her seat while he made his way through the thousands of spectators and went up the steps of the temple to the court. Seventy-five jurors had been empanelled. Beside them sat the praetor Domitius Calvinus with his lictors and scribes. To the left was the prosecution, with their witnesses arrayed behind them. And there in the front row, modestly attired but very much the centre of attention, was Clodia. She was almost forty but still beautiful, a grande dame with those famous huge dark eyes of hers that could invite intimacy one moment and threaten murder the next. She was known to be excessively close to Clodius—so much so that they had often been accused of incest. I saw her head turn very slightly to follow Cicero as he walked across to his place. Her expression was one of disdainful indifference. But she must have wondered what was coming.

  Cicero adjusted the folds of his toga. He had no notes. A hush fell over the vast throng. He glanced across to where Terentia was sitting. Then he turned to the jury. “Gentlemen, anyone who doesn’t know our laws and customs might wonder why we are here, during a public festival, when all the other courts are suspended, to judge a young man of hard work and brilliant intellect—especially when it turns out he is being attacked by a person he once prosecuted, and by the wealth of a courtesan.”

  At that, a great roar went rolling around the Forum, like the sound the crowd makes at the start of the games when a famous gladiator makes his first thrust. This was what they had come to see! Clodia stared straight ahead as if she had been turned to marble. I am sure that she and Clodius would never have brought their prosecution if they had thought there was a chance of Cicero being against them; but there was no escape now.

  Having laid down a marker of what was to come, Cicero then proceeded to build his case. He conjured a picture of Rufus that was unrecognisable to those of us who knew him—of a sober, hard-working servant of the commonwealth whose main misfortune was to be “born not unhandsome,” and thus to have come to the attention of Clodia, “the Medea of the Palatine,” into whose neighbourhood he had moved. He stood behind the seated Rufus and clasped his hand on his shoulder. “His change of residence has been for this young man the cause of all his misfortunes and of all the gossip, for Clodia is a woman not only of noble birth but of notoriety, of whom I will say no more than what is necessary to refute the charges.”

  He paused to allow the sense of anticipation to build. “Now, as many of you will know, I am on terms of great personal enmity with this woman’s husband…” He stopped and snapped his fingers in exasperation. “I meant to say brother: I always make that mistake.”

  His timing was perfect, and to this day even people who otherwise know nothing of Cicero still quote that joke. Almost everyone in Rome had felt the arrogance of the Claudii at some point down the years; to see them ridiculed was irresistible. Its effect not just on the audience but on the jury and even the praetor was wonderful to behold.

  Terentia turned to me in puzzlement. “Why is everyone laughing?”

  I did not know what to reply.

  When order was restored, Cicero continued, with menacing friendliness: “Well, I am truly sorry to have to make this woman an enemy, especially as she is every other man’s friend. So let me first ask her whether she prefers me to deal with her severely, in the old-fashioned manner, or mildly, in the modern way?”

  And then, to her evident horror, Cicero actually started walking across the court towards her. He was smiling, hand extended, inviting her to choose—the tiger playing with its prey. He halted barely a pace away from her.

  “If she prefers the old method, then I must call up from the dead one of those full-bearded men of antiquity to rebuke her…”

  I have often pondered what Clodia should have done at this point. On reflection I believe her best course would have been to laugh along with Cicero—to try to win over the sympathy of the crowd by some piece of pantomime that would have shown she was entering into the spirit of the joke. But she was a C
laudian. Never before had anyone dared openly to laugh at her, let alone the common people in the Forum. She was outraged, probably panicking, and so she responded in the worst way possible: she turned her back on Cicero like a sulky child.

  He shrugged. “Very well, let me call up a member of her own family—to be specific, Appius Claudius the Blind. He will feel the least sorrow since he won’t be able to see her. If he were to appear, this is what he would say…”

  And now Cicero addressed her in a ghostly voice, his eyes closed, his arms raised straight out in front of him; even Clodius started laughing. “Oh woman, what hast thou to do with Rufus, this stripling who is young enough to be thy son? Why hast thou been either so intimate with him as to give him gold, or caused such jealousy as to warrant the administering of poison? Why was Rufus so closely connected with thee? Is he a kinsman? A relative by marriage? A friend of thine late husband? None of these! What else could it have been then between you two except reckless passion? O woe! Was it for this that I brought water to Rome, that thou mightest use it after thy incestuous debauches? Was it for this that I built the Appian Way, that thou mightest frequent it with a train of other women’s husbands?”

  With that, the ghost of old Appius Claudius evaporated and Cicero addressed Clodia’s turned back in his normal voice. “But if you prefer a more congenial relative, let us speak to you in the voice of your youngest brother over there, who loves you most dearly—who, as a boy, in fact, being of a nervous disposition and prey to night terrors, always used to get into bed with his big sister. Imagine him saying to you”—and now Cicero perfectly imitated Clodius’s fashionable slouching stance and plebeian drawl—“what’s there to worry about, sister? So what if you fancied some young fellow. He was handsome. He was tall. You couldn’t get enough of him. You knew you were old enough to be his mother. But you were rich. So you bought him things to purchase his affection. It didn’t last long. He called you a hag. Well, forget him—just find yourself another one, or two, or ten. After all, that’s what you usually do.”