Lustrum

by Robert Harris

  'So,' he summarised, 'Pompey fears he will lose face if his bills don't pass, and he asks me to set aside past enmities and give him my support, for the sake of the republic?'

  'That's it.'

  'Well, I have not forgotten the way he tried to take the credit for defeating Spartacus – a victory that was entirely mine – and you can tell him that I would not raise a hand to help him even if my life depended on it. How is your new house, by the way?'

  'Very fine, thank you.'

  After that Cicero decided to approach Metellus Celer, who was now consul-elect. It took him a while to summon up the nerve to go next door: this would be the first time he had stepped over the threshold since Clodius committed his outrage at the Good Goddess ceremony. In fact, like Crassus, Celer could not have been friendlier. The prospect of power suited him – he had been bred for it, like a racehorse – and he too listened judiciously as Cicero made out his case.

  'I no more care for Pompey's hauteur than you do,' concluded Cicero, 'but the fact remains that he is by far the most powerful man in the world, and it will be a disaster if he ends up alienated from the senate. But that is what will happen if we don't try to give him his legislation.'

  'You think he will retaliate?'

  'He says he will have no option except to find his friends elsewhere, which obviously means the tribunes or, even worse, Caesar. And if he follows that route, we'll have popular assemblies, vetoes, riots, paralysis, the people and the senate at one another's throats – in short, a disaster.'

  'That's a grim picture, I agree,' said Celer, 'but I'm afraid I cannot help you.'

  'Even for the sake of the country?'

  'By divorcing my sister in such a public fashion, Pompey humiliated her. He also insulted me, my brother and all my family. I've learned what sort of man he is: utterly untrustworthy, interested only in himself. You should beware of him, Cicero.'

  'You have good cause for grievance, no one can doubt that. But think what magnanimity it would show if you were able to say in your inaugural address that for the good of the nation Pompey should be accommodated.'

  'It would not show magnanimity. It would show weakness. The Metelli may not be the oldest family in Rome, or the grandest, but we have become the most successful, and we have done it by never yielding an inch to our enemies. Do you know that creature we have as our heraldic symbol?'

  'The elephant?'

  'The elephant, that's right. We have it because our ancestors beat the Carthaginians, but also because an elephant is the animal our family most resembles. It is massive, it moves slowly, it never forgets, and it always prevails.'

  'Yes, and it is also quite stupid, and therefore easily caught.'

  'Maybe,' agreed Celer, with a twitch of annoyance. 'But then you set too great a store by cleverness, in my opinion,' and he stood to signal that the interview was over.

  He led us into the atrium with its huge display of consular death masks, and as we crossed the marbled floor he gestured to his ancestors, as if all those massed bland, dead faces proved his point more eloquently than any words. We had just reached the entrance hall when Clodia appeared with her maids. I have no idea whether this was coincidental or deliberate, but I suspect the latter, for she was very elaborately coiffed and made up, considering the hour of the morning: 'In full night-time battle rig,' as Cicero said afterwards. He bowed his head to her.

  'Cicero,' she responded, 'you have become a stranger to me.'

  'True, alas, but not by choice.'

  Celer said, 'I was told you two had become great friends while I was away. I'm glad to see you speaking again.' When I heard those words, and the casual way he uttered them, I knew at once that he had no idea of his wife's reputation. He possessed that curious innocence about the civilian world which I have noticed in many professional soldiers.

  'You are well, I trust, Clodia?' enquired Cicero politely.

  'I am prospering.' She looked at him from under her long lashes. 'And so is my brother in Sicily – despite your efforts.'

  She flashed him a smile that was as warm as a blade and swept on, leaving the faintest wash of perfume in her wake. Celer shrugged and said, 'Well, there it is. I wish she talked to you as much as she does to this damned poet who's always trailing round after her. But she's very loyal to Clodius.'

  'And does he still plan to become a plebeian?' asked Cicero. 'I wouldn't have thought having a pleb in the family would have gone down at all well with your illustrious ancestors.'

  'It will never happen.' Celer checked to see that Clodia was out of earshot. 'Between you and me, I think the fellow is an absolute disgrace.'

  This exchange, at least, cheered Cicero, but otherwise all his politicking had come to nothing, and the following day, as a last resort, he went to see Cato. The stoic lived in a fine but artfully neglected house on the Aventine, which smelled of stale food and unwashed clothes and offered nothing to sit on except hard wooden chairs. The walls were undecorated. There were no carpets. Through an open door I caught a glimpse of two plain and solemn teenage girls at work on their sewing, and I wondered if those were the daughters or nieces Pompey had wanted to marry. How different Rome would have been if only Cato had consented to the match! We were shown by a limping porter into a small and gloomy chamber, where Cato conducted his official business beneath a bust of Zeno. Once again Cicero laid out the case for making a compromise with Pompey, but Cato, like the others before him, would have none of it.

  'He has too much power as it is,' said Cato, repeating his familiar complaint. 'If we let his veterans form colonies throughout Italy, he'll have a standing army at his beck and call. And why in the name of heaven should we be expected to confirm all his treaties without examining them one by one? Are we the supreme governing body of the Roman republic or little girls to be told where to sit and what to do?'

  'True,' said Cicero, 'but we have to face reality. When I went to see him, he could not have made his intentions plainer: if we won't work with him, he'll get a tribune to lay the legislation he wants before a popular assembly, and that will mean endless conflict. Or, worse, he'll throw in his lot with Caesar when he gets back from Spain.'

  'What are you afraid of ? Conflict can be healthy. Nothing good comes except through struggle.'

  'There's nothing good about a struggle between people and senate, believe me. It will be like Clodius's trial, only worse.'

  'Ah!' Cato's fanatical eyes widened. 'You are confusing separate issues there. Clodius was acquitted not because of the mob but because of a bribed jury. And there's an obvious remedy for jury-bribing, which I intend to pursue.'

  'What do you mean by that?'

  'I intend to lay a bill before the house that will remove from all jurors who are not senators their traditional immunity to prosecution for bribery.'

  Cicero clutched his hair. 'You can't do that!'

  'Why not?'

  'Because it will look like an attack by the senate on the people!'

  'It's no such thing. It's an attack by the senate on dishonesty and corruption.'

  'Maybe so, but in politics, how things look is often more important than what they are.'

  'Then politics needs to change.'

  'At least, I beg you, don't do it now – not on top of everything else.'

  'It's never too soon to right a wrong.'

  'Now listen to me, Cato. Your integrity may be second to none, but it obliterates your good sense, and if you carry on like this, your noble intentions will destroy our country.'

  'Better destroyed than reduced to a corrupt monarchy.'

  'But Pompey doesn't want to be a monarch! He's disbanded his army. All he's ever tried to do is work with the senate, yet all he's received is rejection. And far from corrupting Rome, he has done more to extend its power than any man alive!'

  'No,' said Cato, shaking his head, 'no, you are wrong. Pompey has subjugated peoples with whom we had no quarrel, he has entered lands in which we have no business, and he has brought home wealth
we have not earned. He is going to ruin us. It is my duty to oppose him.'

  From this impasse, not even Cicero's agile brain could devise a means of escape. He went to see Pompey later that afternoon to report his failure, and found him in semi-darkness, brooding over the model of his theatre. The meeting was too short even for me to take a note. Pompey listened to the news, grunted, and as we were leaving called after Cicero, 'I want Hybrida recalled from Macedonia at once.'

  This threatened Cicero with a serious personal crisis, for he was being hard-pressed by the moneylenders. Not only did he still owe a sizeable sum for the house on the Palatine; he had also bought several new properties, and if Hybrida stopped sending him a share of his spoils in Macedonia – which he had at last begun to do – he would be seriously embarrassed. His solution was to arrange for Quintus's term as governor of Asia to be extended for another year. He was then able to draw from the treasury the funds that should have gone to defray his brother's expenses (he had full power of attorney) and hand the whole lot over to his creditors to keep them quiet. 'Now don't give me one of your reproachful looks, Tiro,' he warned me, as we came out of the Temple of Saturn with a treasury bill for half a million sesterces safely stowed in my document case. 'He wouldn't even be a governor if it weren't for me, and besides, I shall pay him back.' Even so, I felt very sorry for Quintus, who was not enjoying his time in that vast, alien and disparate province and was very homesick.

  Over the next few months, everything played out as Cicero had predicted. An alliance of Crassus, Lucullus, Cato and Celer blocked Pompey's legislation in the senate, and Pompey duly turned to a friendly tribune named Fulvius, who laid a new land bill before the popular assembly. Celer then attacked the proposal with such violence that Fulvius had him committed to prison. The consul responded by having the back wall of the gaol dismantled so that he could continue to denounce the measure from his cell. This display of resolution so delighted the people, and discredited Fulvius, that Pompey actually abandoned the bill. Cato then alienated the Order of Knights entirely from the senate by stripping them of jury immunity and also refusing to cancel the debts many had incurred by unwise financial speculation in the East. In both of these actions he was absolutely right morally whilst being at the same time utterly wrong politically.

  Throughout all this, Cicero made few public speeches, confining himself entirely to his legal practice. He was very lonely without Quintus and Atticus, and I often caught him sighing and muttering to himself when he thought he was alone. He slept badly, waking in the middle of the night and lying there with his mind churning, unable to nod off again until dawn. He confided to me that during these intervals, for the first time in his life, he was plagued with thoughts of death, as men of his age – he was forty-six – frequently are. 'I am so utterly forsaken,' he wrote to Atticus, 'that my only moments of relaxation are those I spend with my wife, my little daughter and my darling Marcus. My worldly, meretricious friendships may make a fine show in public, but in the home they are barren things. My house is crammed of a morning, I go down to the forum surrounded by droves of friends, but in all the crowds I cannot find one person with whom I can exchange an unguarded joke or let out a private sigh.'

  Although he was too proud to admit it, the spectre of Clodius also disturbed his rest. At the beginning of the new session, a tribune by the name of Herennius introduced a bill on the floor of the senate proposing that the Roman people should meet on the Field of Mars and vote on whether or not Clodius should be permitted to become a pleb. That did not alarm Cicero: he knew the measure would swiftly be vetoed by the other tribunes. What did disturb him was that Celer spoke up in support of it, and after the senate was adjourned he sought him out.

  'I thought you were opposed to Clodius transferring to the plebs?'

  'I am, but Clodia nags me morning and night about it. The measure won't pass in any case, so I hope this will give me a few weeks' peace. Don't worry,' he added quietly. 'If ever it comes to a serious fight, I shall say what I really feel.'

  This answer did not entirely reassure Cicero, and he cast about for some means of binding Celer to him more closely. As it happened, a crisis was developing in Further Gaul. A huge number of Germans – one hundred and twenty thousand, it was reported – had crossed the Rhine and settled on the lands of the Helvetii, a warlike tribe, whose response was to move westwards in their turn, into the interior of Gaul, looking for fresh territory. This situation was deeply troubling to the senate, and it was decided that the consuls should at once draw lots for the province of Further Gaul, in case military action proved necessary. It promised to be a glittering command, full of opportunites for wealth and glory. Because both consuls were competitors for the prize – Pompey's clown, Afranius, was Celer's colleague – it fell to Cicero to conduct the ballot, and while I will not go so far as to say he rigged it – as he had once before for Celer – nevertheless it was Celer who drew the winning token. He quickly repaid the debt. A few weeks later, when Clodius returned to Rome from Sicily after his quaestorship was over, and stood up in the senate to demand the right to transfer to the plebs, it was Celer who was the most violent in his opposition.

  'You were born a patrician,' he declared, 'and if you reject your birthright you will destroy the very codes of blood and family and tradition on which this republic rests!'

  I was standing at the door of the senate when Celer made his about-turn, and the expression on Clodius's face was one of total surprise and horror. 'I may have been born a patrician,' he protested, 'but I do not wish to die one.'

  'You most assuredly will die a patrician,' retorted Celer, 'and if you continue on your present course, I tell you frankly, that inevitability will befall you sooner rather than later.'

  The senate murmured with astonishment at this threat, and although Clodius tried to brush it off, he must have known that his chances of becoming a pleb, and thus a tribune, lay at that moment in ruins.

  Cicero was delighted. He lost all fear of Clodius and from then on foolishly took every opportunity to taunt him and jeer at him. I remember in particular an occasion not long after this when he and Clodius found themselves walking together into the forum to introduce candidates at election time. Unwisely, for plenty around them were listening, Clodius took the opportunity to boast that he had now taken over from Cicero as the patron of the Sicilians, and henceforth would be providing them with seats at the Games. 'I don't believe you were ever in a position to do that,' he sneered.

  'I was not,' conceded Cicero.

  'Mind you, space is hard to come by. Even my sister, as consul's wife, says she can only give me one foot.'

  'Well, I wouldn't grumble about one foot in your sister's case,' replied Cicero. 'You can always hoist the other.'

  I had never before heard Cicero make a dirty joke, and afterwards he rather regretted it as being 'unconsular'. Still, it was worth it at the time for the roars of laughter it elicited from everyone standing around, and also for the effect it had on Clodius, who turned a fine shade of senatorial purple. The remark became famous and was repeated all over the city, although mercifully no one had the courage to relay it back to Celer.

  And then, in an instant, everything changed, and as usual the man responsible was Caesar – who, although he had been away from Rome for almost exactly a year, had never been far from Cicero's thoughts.

  One afternoon towards the end of May, Cicero was sitting on the front bench in the senate house next to Pompey. He had arrived late for some reason, otherwise I am sure he would have got wind of what was coming. As it was, he heard it at the same time as everyone else. After the auguries had been taken, Celer got to his feet to declare that a dispatch had just arrived from Caesar in Further Spain, which he now proposed to read.

  'To the senate and people of Rome, from Gaius Julius Caesar, imperator—'

  At the word 'imperator', a stir of excitement went around the chamber, and I saw Cicero abruptly sit up and exchange looks with Pompey.

  'From
Gaius Julius Caesar, imperator,' repeated Celer, with greater emphasis, 'greetings. The army is well. I have taken a legion and three cohorts across the mountains called Herminius and pacified the lands on either side of the river Durius. I have dispatched a flotilla from Gades seven hundred miles north and captured Brigantium. I have subdued the tribes of Callaecia and Lusitania and been saluted imperator in the field by the army. I have concluded treaties that will yield annual revenues of twenty million sesterces to the treasury. The rule of Rome now extends to the furthermost shores of the Atlantic sea. Long live our republic.'

  Caesar's language was always terse, and it took a moment for the senate to grasp the momentous nature of what they had just been told. Caesar had been sent out merely to govern Further Spain, a province thought to be more or less pacified, but had somehow contrived to conquer the neighbouring country! His financial backer Crassus immediately jumped to his feet and proposed that Caesar's achievement be rewarded with three days of national thanksgiving. For once, even Cato was too dazed to object, and the motion was carried unanimously. Afterwards, the senators spilled out into the bright sunshine. Most were talking excitedly about this brilliant feat. Not so Cicero: in the midst of that animated throng, he walked with the slow tread and downcast eyes of a man at a funeral. 'After all his scandals and near-bankruptcies, I thought he was finished,' he muttered to me as he reached the door, 'at least for a year or two.'

  He beckoned me to follow, and we went and stood in a shady spot in the senaculum, where presently we were joined by Hortensius, Lucullus and Cato; all three looked equally mournful.

  'So, what is next for Caesar?' asked Hortensius gloomily. 'Will he try for the consulship?'

  'I should say it's certain, wouldn't you?' replied Cicero. 'He can easily afford the campaign – if he's giving twenty million to the treasury, you can be sure he's keeping much more for himself.'