Dictator

by Robert Harris

  I stammered my way through the transcript of my notes, all the while conscious of Servilia’s stare, and at the end she said with great contempt, “A grain commissionership in Asia! It was for this that Caesar was assassinated—so that my son could become a corn merchant?”

  “Even so,” said Cicero, “I think he should take it. It’s better than nothing—certainly better than staying here.”

  Brutus said, “I agree with you on your last point at least. I can’t stay hidden from view any longer. I’m losing respect with every day that passes. But Asia? No, what I really need to do is go to Rome and do what the urban praetor always does at this time of year—stage the Games of Apollo and show myself to the Roman people.” His sensitive face was full of anguish.

  “You can’t go to Rome,” replied Cicero. “It’s far too dangerous. Listen, the rest of us are more or less expendable, but not you, Brutus—your name and your honour make you the great rallying point of freedom. My advice is to take this commission, do some honourable public work far away from Italy in safety, and await more favourable events. Things will change: in politics they always do.”

  At that moment Cassius arrived and Servilia asked Cicero to repeat what he’d just said. But whereas adversity had reduced Brutus to a state of noble suffering, it had put Cassius in a rage, and he started pounding on the table: “I did not survive the massacre at Carrhae and save Syria from the Parthians in order to be made a grain collector in Sicily! It’s an insult.”

  Cicero said, “Well then, what will you do?”

  “Leave Italy. Go abroad. Go to Greece.”

  “Greece,” observed Cicero, “will soon be rather crowded, whereas first of all Sicily is safe, second you’ll be doing your duty like a good constitutionalist, and third and above all you’ll be closer to Italy to exploit opportunities when they arise. You must be our great military commander.”

  “What sort of opportunities?”

  “Well, for example, Octavian could yet cause all sorts of trouble for Antony.”

  “Octavian? That’s one of your jokes! He’s far more likely to come after us than he is to pursue a quarrel with Antony.”

  “Not at all—I saw the boy when he was on the Bay of Naples, and he’s not as ill-disposed towards us as you might think. ‘It’s my legacy I want, not vengeance’—those were his very words. His real enemy is Antony.”

  “Then Antony will crush him.”

  “But Antony has to crush Decimus first, and that’s when the war will start—when Antony tries to take Nearer Gaul away from him.”

  “Decimus,” said Cassius bitterly, “is the man who has let us down more than any other. Just think what we could have done with those two legions of his if he’d brought them south in March! But it’s too late now: Antony’s Macedonian legions will outnumber him two to one.”

  The mention of Decimus was like the breaking of a dam. Denunciations flowed from everyone round the table, Favonius especially, who maintained he should have warned them he was mentioned in Caesar’s will: “That did more to turn the people against us than anything else.”

  Cicero listened in growing dismay. He intervened to say that there was no point in weeping over past errors, but couldn’t resist adding, “Besides, if it’s mistakes you’re talking about, never mind Decimus—the seeds of our present plight were sown when you failed to call a meeting of the Senate, failed to rally the people to our cause, and failed to seize control of the republic.”

  “Well upon my word!” exclaimed Servilia. “I never heard anything like it—to be accused of a lack of resolution by you of all people!”

  Cicero glowered at her and immediately fell silent, his cheeks burning either with fury or embarrassment, and not long after that the meeting ended. My notes record only two conclusions. Brutus and Cassius agreed grudgingly at least to consider accepting their grain commissionerships, but only after Servilia announced in her grandest manner that she would arrange for the wording of the Senate resolution to be couched in more flattering terms. And Brutus reluctantly conceded that it was impossible for him to go to Rome and that his praetorian games would have to be staged in his absence. Apart from that the conference was a failure, with nothing decided. As Cicero explained to Atticus in a letter dictated on the way home, it was now a case of “every man for himself”: I found the ship going to pieces, or rather its scattered fragments. No plan, no thought, no method. Hence, though I had no doubts before, I am now all the more determined to escape from here, and as soon as I possibly can.

  The die was cast. He would go to Greece.

  —

  As for me, I was almost sixty and had privately resolved that the time had come for me to leave Cicero’s service and live what remained of my life alone. I knew from the way he talked that he wasn’t expecting us to part company. He assumed we would share a villa in Athens and write philosophy together until one or other of us died of old age. But I could not face leaving Italy again. My health was not good. And love him as I did, I was tired of being a mere appendage to his brain.

  I dreaded having to tell him and kept postponing the fateful moment. He undertook a kind of farewell progress south through Italy, saying goodbye to all his properties and reliving old memories, until eventually we reached Puteoli at the beginning of July—or Quintilis, as he still defiantly insisted on calling it. He had one last villa he wished to visit, along the Bay of Naples in Pompeii, and he decided he would leave on the first leg of his journey abroad from there, hugging the coast down to Sicily and boarding a merchant ship in Syracuse (he judged it too dangerous to sail from Brundisium, as the Macedonian legions were due to start arriving any day). To convey all his books, his property and household staff, I hired three ten-oared boats. He took his mind off the voyage, which he dreaded, by trying to decide what literary composition we should undertake while at sea. He was working on three treatises simultaneously, moving between them as his reading and his inclination took him: On Friendship, On Duties and On Virtues. With these he would complete his great scheme of absorbing Greek philosophy into Latin and of turning it in the process from a set of abstractions into principles for living.

  He said, “I wonder if this would be a good opportunity for us to write our version of Aristotle’s Topics? Let’s face it: what could be more useful in this time of chaos than to teach men how to use dialectics to construct reasoned arguments? It could be in the form of a dialogue, like the Disputations—you playing one part and I the other. What do you think?”

  “My friend,” I replied hesitantly, “if I may call you that, I have wanted for some time to speak to you but have not been sure how to do it.”

  “This sounds ominous! You’d better go on. Are you ill again?”

  “No, but I need to tell you I have decided not to accompany you to Greece.”

  “Ah.” He stared at me for what felt like a very long time, his jaw moving slightly as it often did when he was trying to find the right word. Finally he said, “Where will you go instead?”

  “To the farm you so kindly gave me.”

  His voice was very quiet: “I see, and when would you want to do that?”

  “At any time convenient to you.”

  “The sooner the better?”

  “I don’t mind when it is.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “It can be tomorrow if you like. But that is not necessary. I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

  “Tomorrow then.” And with that he turned back to his Aristotle.

  I hesitated. “Would it be all right if I borrowed young Eros from the stables and the little carriage, to transport my belongings?”

  Without looking up he replied, “Of course. Take whatever you need.”

  I left him alone and spent the remainder of the day and the evening packing my belongings and carrying them out into the courtyard. He did not appear for dinner. The next morning there was still no sign of him. Young Quintus, who was hoping for a place on Brutus’s staff and staying with us while his uncle tri
ed to fix an introduction, said that he had gone off very early to visit Lucullus’s old house on the island of Nesis. He put a consoling hand on my shoulder. “He asked me to tell you goodbye.”

  “He didn’t say more than that? Just goodbye?”

  “You know how he is.”

  “I know how he is. Would you please tell him I’ll come back in a day or two to say a proper farewell?”

  I felt quite sick, but determined. I had made up my mind. Eros drove me to the farm. It was not far, only two or three miles, but the distance seemed much greater as I moved from one world to another.

  The overseer and his wife had not been expecting me so soon but nonetheless seemed pleased to see me. One of the slaves was called from the barn to carry my luggage into the farmhouse. The boxes containing my books and documents went straight upstairs into the raftered room I had selected earlier as the site for my little library. It was shuttered and cool. Shelves had been put up as I requested—rough and rustic, but I didn’t care—and I set about unpacking at once. There is a wonderful line in one of Cicero’s letters to Atticus in which he describes moving into a property and says: I have put out my books and now my house has a soul. That was how I felt as I emptied my boxes. And then to my surprise in one of them I discovered the original manuscript of On Friendship. Puzzled, I unrolled it, thinking I must have brought it with me by mistake. But when I saw that Cicero had copied out at the top of the roll in his shaking hand a quotation from the text, on the importance of having friends, I realised it was a parting gift:

  If a man ascended into heaven and gazed upon the whole workings of the universe and the beauty of the stars, the marvellous sight would give him no joy if he had to keep it to himself. And yet, if only there had been someone to describe the spectacle to, it would have filled him with delight. Nature abhors solitude.

  —

  I allowed two days to pass before I returned to the villa in Puteoli to say my proper goodbye: I needed to be sure I was strong enough in my resolve not to be persuaded out of it. But the steward told me Cicero had already left for Pompeii and I returned at once to the farm. From my terrace I had a sweeping view of the entire bay, and often I found myself standing there peering into the immense blueness, which ran from the misty outline of Capri right round to the promontory at Misenum, wondering if any of the myriad ships I could see was his. But then gradually I became caught up in the routine of the farm. It was almost time to harvest the vines and the olives, and despite my creaking knees and my soft scholar’s hands, I donned a tunic and a wide-brimmed straw hat and worked outside with the rest, rising with the light and going to bed when it faded, too exhausted to think. Gradually the pattern of my former life began to fade from my mind, like a carpet left out in the sun. Or so I thought.

  I had no cause to leave my property save one: the place had no bath. A good bath was the thing I missed most, apart from Cicero’s conversation. I couldn’t bear to wash myself only in the cold water from the mountain spring. Accordingly I commissioned the construction of a bathhouse in one of the barns. But that couldn’t be done until after the harvest, and so I took to riding off every two or three days to use one of the public baths that are found everywhere along that stretch of coast. I tried many different establishments—in Puteoli itself, in Bauli and in Baiae—until I decided Baiae had the best, on account of the natural hot sulphurous water for which the area is famous. The clientele was sophisticated and included the freedmen of senators who had villas nearby; some of whom I knew. Without even meaning to, I began to pick up the latest gossip from Rome.

  Brutus’s games had passed off well, I discovered: no expense spared, even though the praetor himself was not present. Brutus had amassed hundreds of wild beasts for the occasion and, desperate for popular acclaim, he gave orders that every last one of them should be used up in fights and hunts. There were also musical performances and plays, including Tereus, a tragedy by Accius that contained copious references to the crimes of tyrants: apparently it received knowing applause. But unfortunately for Brutus, his games, although generous, were quickly overshadowed by an even more lavish set that Octavian gave immediately afterwards in honour of Caesar. It was the time of the famous comet, the hairy star that rose every day an hour before noon—we could see it even in the brilliantly sunny skies of Campania—and Octavian claimed it was nothing less than Caesar ascending into heaven. Caesar’s veterans were greatly taken with this notion, I was told, and young Octavian’s fame and reputation began to soar with the comet.

  Not long after this I was lying one afternoon in a hot pool on a terrace overlooking the sea when some men joined me who I soon gathered by their talk were on the staff of Calpurnius Piso. He had a veritable palace about twenty miles away at Herculaneum and I suppose they must have decided to break their journey from Rome and complete their travelling the next day. I didn’t consciously eavesdrop but I had my eyes closed and they may have thought I was sleeping. At any rate, I quickly pieced together the sensational intelligence that Piso, the father of Caesar’s widow, had made an outspoken attack on Antony in the Senate, accusing him of theft, forgery and treason, of aiming at a new dictatorship and of setting the nation on the road to a second civil war. When one of them said, “Aye, and there’s not another man in Rome with the courage to say it, now that our so-called liberators are all either hiding or have fled abroad,” I thought with a pang of Cicero, who would have hated to know that he had been supplanted as an upholder of liberty by Piso, of all people.

  I waited until they’d moved on before I climbed out of the pool. I remember I thought I would have a massage while I pondered what I’d just heard. I was moving towards the shaded area where the tables were set out when a woman appeared carrying a pile of freshly laundered towels. I cannot say I recognised her at once—it must have been fifteen years since I had last set eyes on her—but a few paces after we had passed one another I stopped and looked round. She had done the same. I recognised her then all right. It was the slave girl Agathe whose freedom I had bought before I went into exile with Cicero.

  —

  This is Cicero’s story, not mine; it is certainly not Agathe’s. Nevertheless, our three lives were entwined, and before I resume the main part of my story I believe she deserves some mention.

  I had met her when she was seventeen and a slave in the bath chambers of Lucullus’s great villa in Misenum. She and her parents, by then dead, had been seized as slaves in Greece and brought to Italy as part of Lucullus’s war booty. Her beauty, her gentleness and her plight all moved me. When I saw her next she was in Rome, one of six household slaves produced as witnesses at the trial of Clodius to support Lucullus’s contention that Clodius, his former brother-in-law, had committed incest and adultery in Misenum with his ex-wife. After that I glimpsed her just once more, when Cicero visited Lucullus before going into exile. She seemed to me by then to be broken in spirit and half dead. Having some small savings put aside, on the night we fled Rome I gave the money to Atticus so that he could purchase her from Lucullus on my behalf and set her free. I had kept an eye out for her in Rome over the years but had never seen her.

  She was thirty-six, still beautiful to me, although I could tell from her lined face and raw-boned hands that she still had to work hard. She seemed embarrassed and kept brushing back loose strands of grey hair with the back of her wrist. After a few awkward pleasantries there was a difficult silence and I found myself saying, “Forgive me, I am keeping you from your work—you will be in trouble with the owner.”

  “There will be no trouble on that score,” she replied, laughing for the first time. “I am the owner.”

  After that we began to talk more freely. She told me she had tried to find me when she was freed, but of course by then I was in Thessalonica. Eventually she had come back to the Bay of Naples: it was the place she knew best and it reminded her of Greece. Because of her experience in the household of Lucullus, she had found plentiful work as an overseer in the local hot baths. After ten y
ears some wealthy clients, merchants in Puteoli, had set her up in this place, and now it belonged to her. “But all this is because of you. How can I ever begin to thank you for your kindness?”

  Live the good life, Cicero had said: learn that virtue is the sole prerequisite for happiness. As we sat on a bench in the sunshine, I felt I had proof of that particular piece of his philosophy, at least.

  —

  My sojourn on the farm lasted forty days.

  On the forty-first, the eve of the Festival of Vulcan, I was working in the vineyard in the late afternoon when one of the slaves called out to me and pointed down the track. A carriage, accompanied by twenty men on horseback, was bouncing over the ruts, throwing up so much dust in the shafts of summer sunshine, it looked as if it was travelling on golden clouds. It drew up outside the villa and from it descended Cicero. I suppose I had always known in my heart that he would come looking for me. I was fated never to escape. As I walked towards him, I snatched off my straw hat and swore to myself that on no account would I be persuaded to return with him to Rome. Beneath my breath I whispered, “I will not listen…I will not listen…I will not listen…”

  I could see at once from the swing of his shoulders as he wheeled round to greet me that he was in tremendous spirits. Gone was the drooping dejection of recent times. He put his hands on his hips and roared with laughter at my appearance. “I leave you alone for a month and see what happens! You have turned into the elder Cato’s ghost!”

  I arranged for his entourage to be given refreshment while we went on to the shaded terrace and drank some of last year’s wine, which he pronounced to be not bad at all. “What a view!” he exclaimed. “What a place to live out one’s declining years! Your own wine, your own olives…”

  “Yes,” I replied carefully, “it suits me very well. I shan’t be going far. And your plans? What happened to Greece?”

  “Ah well, I got as far as Sicily, whereupon the southerly winds got up and kept blowing us back into harbour and I began to wonder if the gods weren’t trying to tell me something. Then, while we were stuck in Regium waiting for better weather, I heard about this extraordinary attack on Antony made by Piso. You must have heard the commotion even here. After that, letters came from Brutus and Cassius saying that Antony was definitely starting to weaken—they were to be offered provinces after all, and he had written to them saying he hoped they would soon be able to come to Rome. He has summoned the Senate for a meeting on the first of September and Brutus has sent a letter to all former consuls and praetors asking them to attend.