The Dictator

by Robert Harris

  Around midday, smoke began to issue from the small windows set high up in the walls of the Senate chamber. Sheets of orange flame and scraps of burning books whirled against the sky, while from inside came a terrifying and uninterrupted roar, as if a vent had been opened to the underworld. An hour later the roof split from end to end; thousands of tiles and spars of fiery timber plunged soundlessly from view; there was a strange interval of silence; and then the noise of the crash passed over us like a hot wind.

  The fountain of smoke and dust and ashes lingered above the centre of Rome in a pall for several days, until the rain washed it away; and in this manner the last mortal vestiges of Publius Clodius Pulcher and the ancient assembly building he had reviled all his life vanished together from the face of the earth.

  The destruction of the Senate house had a powerful effect on Cicero. He went down the next day under heavy guard, grasping a stout stick, and clambered around the smouldering ruins. The blackened brickwork was still warm to the touch. The wind howled through the gaping holes, and from time to time from above our heads some piece of debris would dislodge and fall with a soft thump into the drifts of ash. Six hundred years that temple had stood there—a witness to the greatest moments in Rome’s existence, and his own—and now it had gone in less than half an afternoon.

  Everyone, including Cicero, assumed that Milo would now go into voluntary exile, or at any rate that he would keep well clear of Rome. But that was to underrate the bravado of the man. Far from lying low, he put himself at the head of an even larger force of gladiators and re-entered the city that same afternoon, barricading himself in his house. The grieving supporters of Clodius immediately laid siege to it. But they were easily driven off by arrows. They then went in search of a less formidable fortress on which to vent their anger, and found one in the home of the interrex, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.

  Although he was only thirty-six, and not yet even praetor, Lepidus was a member of the College of Pontiffs, and in the absence of any elected consuls that was enough to make him temporary chief magistrate. The damage inflicted on his property was slight—his wife’s nuptial couch was broken up and her weaving destroyed—but the assault created a sense of outrage and panic in the Senate.

  Lepidus, ever conscious of his dignity, played up the incident for all it was worth; indeed, this was the beginning of his rise to prominence. (Cicero used to say that Lepidus was the luckiest politician he knew: every time he made a mess of something he was showered with rewards—“He is a sort of genius of mediocrity.”) The young interrex summoned a meeting of the Senate to be held outside the city walls, on the Field of Mars, in Pompey’s new theatre—a large chamber within the complex had to be specially consecrated for the occasion—and he invited Pompey to attend.

  This was three days after the burning of the Senate house.

  Pompey duly obliged, sweeping down the hill from his palace surrounded by two hundred legionaries in full battle array—an entirely legal display of force, as he held military imperium as governor of Spain. But still—nothing like it had been seen since the days of Sulla. He left them picketed in the portico of the theatre while he went inside and listened modestly as his supporters demanded that he be appointed dictator for six months so that he could take the steps necessary to restore order: call up all the military reservists in Italy, put Rome under curfew, suspend the imminent elections and bring the killers of Clodius to justice.

  Cicero saw the danger at once and rose to speak. “No one has greater respect for Pompey than I,” he began, “but we must be careful not to do our enemies’ work for them. To argue that to preserve our freedoms we must suspend our freedoms, that to safeguard elections we must cancel elections, that to defend ourselves from dictatorship we must appoint a dictator—what logic is this? We have elections scheduled. We have candidates on the ballot. The canvass is completed. The best way for us to show confidence in our institutions is to allow them to function normally and to elect our magistrates as our ancestors taught us in the olden time.”

  Pompey nodded, as if he could not have put the issue better himself, and at the end of the session he made an elaborate show of congratulating Cicero on his staunch defence of the constitution. But Cicero was not fooled. He saw exactly what Pompey was up to.

  That night, Milo came to visit him for a council of war. Also present was Caelius Rufus, now a tribune and a long-term supporter and close friend of Milo. From down in the valley came the sound of scuffling, of dogs barking and occasional shouts and cries. A group of men carrying flaming torches ran across the Forum. But most citizens were too afraid to venture out and stayed in their houses behind barred doors. Milo seemed to think he had the election in the bag. After all, he had rid the state of Clodius, for which most decent people were grateful, and the burning-down of the Senate house and the violence in the streets had appalled the majority of voters.

  Cicero said, “I agree that if there were a ballot tomorrow, Milo, you would probably win it. But there is not going to be a ballot. Pompey will see to that.”

  “How can he?”

  “He’ll use the campaign as a cover to manufacture an atmosphere of hysteria so that the Senate and the people will be forced to turn to him to abort the elections.”

  Rufus said, “He’s bluffing. He doesn’t have the power.”

  “Oh, he has the power, and he knows it. All he has to do is sit tight and wait for things to come to him.”

  Milo and Rufus both dismissed Cicero’s fears as the nervousness of an old man, and the next day resumed campaigning with fresh energy. But Cicero was right: the mood in Rome was too jittery for normal electioneering and Milo walked straight into Pompey’s trap. One morning soon after their meeting Cicero received an urgent summons to see Pompey. He found the great man’s house ringed with soldiers and Pompey himself in an elevated part of the garden with double his normal bodyguard. Seated in the portico with him was a man Pompey introduced as Licinius, the owner of an eating house near the Circus Maximus. Pompey ordered Licinius to repeat his tale to Cicero, and Licinius duly described how he had overheard a group of Milo’s gladiators plotting at his counter to murder Pompey, and how, when they realised he was listening, they had tried to silence him by stabbing him: as proof he showed Cicero a minor flesh wound just beneath his ribs.

  Of course, as Cicero said to me afterwards, the whole story was absurd. “For a start, whoever heard of such feeble gladiators? If that kind of man wishes to silence you, you are silenced.” But it didn’t matter. The eating-house plot, as it became known, joined all the other rumours now circulating about Milo—that he had turned his house into an arsenal filled with swords, shields and javelins; that he had stocks of brands hidden throughout the city in order to burn it down; that he had shipped arms along the Tiber to his villa at Ocriculum; that the assassins who had murdered Clodius would be turned loose on his opponents in the election…

  The next time the Senate met, no less a figure than Marcus Bibulus, Caesar’s former consular colleague and passionate lifelong enemy, rose to propose that Pompey should hold office by emergency decree as sole consul. This was remarkable enough; what no one had anticipated was the reaction of Cato. A hush fell over the chamber as he got to his feet. “I would not have proposed this motion myself,” he said, “but seeing as it has been laid before us, I propose we accept it as a sensible compromise. Some government is better than no government; a sole consulship is better than a dictatorship; and Pompey is more likely to rule wisely than anyone else.”

  Coming from Cato, this was almost unbelievable—he had used the word “compromise” for the first time in his life—and no one looked more stunned than Pompey. Afterwards, so the story went, he invited Cato back to his house to thank him personally and to ask him in future to be his private adviser in all matters of state. “You have no need to thank me,” replied Cato, “for I only did what I believed to be in the best interests of the republic. If you wish to talk to me alone I shall certainly be at your disposal. Bu
t I shall say nothing to you in private that I wouldn’t say anywhere else, and I shall never hold my tongue in public to please you.”

  Cicero observed their new closeness with deep foreboding. “Why do you think men like Cato and Bibulus have suddenly thrown in their lot with Pompey? Do you imagine they believe all this nonsense about a plot to murder him? Do you think they’ve suddenly changed their minds about him? Not at all! They’ve given him sole authority because they see him as their best hope of checking the ambitions of Caesar. I’m sure Pompey recognises this and believes he can control them. But he’s wrong. Don’t forget I know him. His vanity is his weakness. They will flatter him and load him down with powers and honours, and he won’t even notice what they’re doing, until one day it will be too late—they will have set him on a collision course with Caesar. And then we shall have war.”

  Cicero went straight from the Senate meeting to find Milo, and told him in blunt terms that he must now abandon his campaign for the consulship. “If you send a message to Pompey before nightfall and announce that you are withdrawing your candidacy in the interests of national unity, you might just head off a prosecution. If you don’t, you’re finished.”

  “And if I am prosecuted,” responded Milo slyly, “will you defend me?”

  I had expected Cicero to say it was impossible. Instead he sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “Listen to me, Milo—listen carefully. When I was at the lowest point of my life, six years ago in Thessalonica, you were the only one who offered me hope. Therefore you can rest assured, whatever happens I shan’t turn my back on you now. But for pity’s sake, don’t let it come to that. Write to Pompey today.”

  Milo promised to think about it, although naturally he did not withdraw. The vaulting ambition that had carried him, in a mere half-dozen years, from ownership of a gladiator school to the brink of the consulship, was hardly likely at this late stage to be bridled by caution and good sense. Besides, his campaign debts were so enormous (some said the amount he owed was seventy million sesterces) that he was facing exile whatever he did; he gained nothing by giving up now. So he continued with his canvass and Pompey moved ruthlessly to destroy him by setting up an inquiry into the events of the eighteenth and nineteenth of January—including the murder of Clodius, the burning of the Senate house and the attack on the home of Lepidus—under the chairmanship of Domitius Ahenobarbus. The slaves of Milo and Clodius were put to the torture to ascertain the facts, and I feared that some poor wretch, in his desperation, might remember my presence at the scene, which would have been embarrassing to Cicero. But I seem to have been blessed with the sort of personality that nobody notices—the reason perhaps why I have survived to write this account—and nobody mentioned me.

  The inquiry led to Milo’s trial for murder at the beginning of April and Cicero was required to honour his pledge to defend him. It was the only time I ever saw him prostrated by nerves. Pompey had filled the centre of the city with soldiers to guarantee order. But the effect was the opposite of reassuring. They blockaded every approach to the Forum and guarded the main public buildings. All the shops were closed. An atmosphere of tension and dread lay over the city. Pompey himself came to watch the proceedings and took a seat high up on the steps of the Temple of Saturn, surrounded by troops. Yet despite the show of force, the vast pro-Clodian crowd was allowed to intimidate the court. They jeered both Milo and Cicero whenever they tried to speak and made it difficult for the defence to be heard. All outrage and emotion was on their side—the brutality of the crime, the spectacle of the weeping widow and her fatherless children, and above all perhaps that curious retrospective sanctity that settles over the reputation of any politician, however worthless, if his career is cut off in its prime.

  As chief defence advocate, allowed under the special rules of the court only two hours to speak, Cicero had an almost impossible task. He could hardly pretend that Milo, who had openly boasted of what he had done, was innocent of the crime. Indeed some of Milo’s supporters, such as Rufus, thought that Cicero should make a virtue of it and argue that the murder was not a crime at all but a public service. Cicero recoiled from that line of reasoning. “What are you saying? That any man can be condemned to death without trial and summarily executed by his enemies if it suits enough people? That’s mob rule, Rufus—exactly what Clodius believed in—and I refuse to stand up in a Roman court and make such a case.”

  The only feasible alternative was to argue that the killing was justified on the grounds of self-defence—but that was difficult to reconcile with the evidence that Clodius had been dragged out of the tavern and finished off in cold blood. Still, it was not impossible. I had known Cicero to win from weaker positions. And he wrote a good speech. However, on the morning he was due to deliver it, he woke gripped by a terrible anxiety. At first I took no notice. He was often nervous before a big oration, and suffered from loose bowels and vomiting. But this morning was different. He was not gripped by fear, which he sometimes called “cold strength” and had learned how to harness; rather he was simply in a funk and could not remember a word of what he was supposed to say.

  Milo suggested he should go down to the Forum in a closed litter and wait somewhere out of sight, calmly composing himself until it was time for him to speak; and this was what we tried. Cicero, at his request, had been provided with a bodyguard by Pompey for the duration of the trial, and they cordoned off a part of the Grove of Vesta and kept everyone away while the orator reclined beneath the thick embroidered canopy, trying to commit his speech to memory and occasionally leaning out to retch on the sacred earth. But although he could not see the crowd, he could hear it chanting and roaring nearby, and that was almost worse. When the praetor’s clerk finally came to fetch us, Cicero’s legs were so weak he could barely stand. As we walked into the Forum, the noise was terrific, and the sunlight glinting on the armour and weapons of the soldiers dazzled our eyes.

  The Clodians jeered Cicero when he appeared and jeered him all the louder when he tried to speak. His nerves were so obvious he actually confessed them in his opening sentence—“I am afraid, gentlemen of the jury: an unseemly condition in which to begin a speech in defence of the bravest of men, but there it is”—and blamed his fear squarely on the rigged nature of the hearing: “Wherever I look, I look in vain for the familiar environment of the courts and the traditional procedure of the law.”

  Unfortunately, complaining about the rules of a contest is always a sure sign of a man who knows he is about to lose it, and although Cicero made some effective points—“Suppose, gentlemen, I could induce you to acquit Milo, but only on condition that Clodius comes back to life again: why all those terrified glances?”—a speech is only as good as its delivery. By thirty-eight votes to thirteen the jury found Milo guilty, and he was sent into exile for life. His property was hastily auctioned at knock-down prices to pay his creditors, and Cicero directed Terentia’s steward, Philotimus, to buy a lot of it anonymously so that it could be disposed of later and the profits handed to Milo’s wife, Fausta: she had made it clear she would not be accompanying her husband into exile. A day or two later Milo went off with remarkable cheerfulness to Massilia in southern Gaul. His departure was very much in the spirit of a gladiator who knew he would lose eventually and was simply grateful to have lived so long. Cicero tried to make amends by publishing the speech he would have given if his nerves hadn’t got the better of him. He sent a copy to Milo, who replied charmingly a few months later that he was glad Cicero hadn’t spoken it, for otherwise I should not be eating such wonderful Massilian mullets.

  —

  Soon after Milo left Rome, Pompey invited Cicero to dinner to show there were no hard feelings. Cicero went off grumbling and reeled home afterwards in such a state of amazement that he came and woke me up, for who should have been at the dinner table but the widow of Publius Crassus, the teenaged Cornelia—and Pompey had married her!

  Cicero said, “Well, naturally I congratulated him—she’s a beautiful a
nd accomplished girl, even if she is young enough to be his granddaughter—and then I asked him, by way of conversation, what Caesar had made of the match. He looked at me with great disdain and said that he hadn’t even told Caesar: what business was it of Caesar’s? He was fifty-three years old and he would marry whomever he pleased!

  “I replied, as gently as I could, that perhaps Caesar might take a different view—after all, he had sought a marital alliance and been rebuffed, and the bride’s father has not exactly shown himself a friend of Caesar’s. To which Pompey replied, ‘Oh, don’t worry about Scipio, he’s entirely friendly. I’m appointing him my consular colleague for the remainder of my term!’ Is the man mad, do you suppose? Caesar is going to look at Rome and think that the whole place has been taken over by the aristocratic party, with Pompey at their head.” Cicero groaned and closed his eyes; I guessed he had drunk rather a lot. “I told you this would happen. I am Cassandra—doomed to see the future yet destined never to be believed.”

  Cassandra or not, there was one consequence of Pompey’s special consulship that Cicero had not foreseen. To help end electoral corruption, Pompey had decided to reform the laws relating to the fourteen provincial commands. Up to this point, consuls and praetors had always left Rome immediately upon the expiry of their term of office to take up their allotted province; and because of the huge sums that could be extorted from such commands, a practice had arisen of candidates borrowing against their expected earnings in order to fund their election campaigns. Pompey, with amazing hypocrisy considering his own abuse of the system, decided to put a stop to all that. Henceforth, a period of five years would have to elapse between holding office in Rome and taking up a governorship overseas. To fill such positions in the interim it was decreed that every senator of praetorian rank who had never done their turn as governor would have to draw lots for the vacant provinces.