Imperium

Roll X

I PROPOSE TO RESUME MY ACCOUNT at a point more than two years after the last roll ended-an elision which I fear says much about human nature, for if you were to ask me: “Tiro, why do you choose to skip such a long period in Cicero’s life?” I should be obliged to reply: “Because, my friend, those were happy years, and few subjects make more tedious reading than happiness.”

The senator’s aedileship turned out to be a great success. His chief responsibility was to keep the city supplied with cheap grain, and here his prosecution of Verres reaped him a great reward. To show their gratitude for his advocacy, the farmers and corn merchants of Sicily helped him by keeping their prices low: on one occasion they even gave him an entire shipment for nothing. Cicero was shrewd enough to ensure that others shared the credit. From the aediles’ headquarters in the Temple of Ceres, he passed this bounty on for distribution to the hundred or so precinct bosses who really ran Rome, and many, out of gratitude, became his clients. With their help, over the following months, he built an electoral machine second to none (Quintus used to boast that he could have a crowd of two hundred on the streets within an hour whenever he chose), and henceforth little occurred in the city which the Ciceros did not know about. If a shopkeeper or some builders, for example, needed a particular license, or wished to have their premises put on to the water supply, or were worried about the state of a local temple, sooner or later their problems were likely to come to the notice of the two brothers. It was this laborious attention to humdrum detail, as much as his soaring rhetoric, which made Cicero such a formidable politician. He even staged good games-or, rather, Quintus did, on his behalf-and at the climax of the Festival of Ceres, when, in accordance with tradition, foxes were released into the Circus Maximus with flaming torches tied to their backs, the entire crowd of two hundred thousand rose to acclaim him in the official box.

“That so many people can derive so much pleasure from such a revolting spectacle,” he said to me when he returned home that night, “almost makes one doubt the very premise on which democracy is based.” But he was pleased nevertheless that the masses now thought of him as a good sport, as well as “the Scholar” and “the Greek.”

Matters went equally well with his legal practice. Hortensius, after a typically smooth and untroubled year as consul, spent increasingly lengthy periods on the Bay of Naples, communing with his bejeweled fish and wine-soaked trees, leaving Cicero in complete domination of the Roman bar. Gifts and legacies from grateful clients soon began flowing in such profusion that he was even able to advance his brother the million he needed to enter the Senate-for Quintus had belatedly set his heart on a political career, even though he was a poor speaker, and Cicero privately believed that soldiering was better suited to his temperament. But despite his increasing wealth and prestige, Cicero refused to move out of his father’s house, fearing it would tarnish his image as the People’s Champion to be seen swanking around on the Palatine Hill. Instead, without consulting Terentia, he borrowed heavily against his future earnings to buy a grand country villa, thirteen miles from the prying eyes of the city voters, in the Alban Hills near Tusculum. She pretended to be annoyed when he took her out to see it, and maintained that the elevated climate was bad for her rheumatics. But I could tell that she was secretly delighted to have such a fashionable retreat, only half a day’s journey from Rome. Catulus owned the adjoining property, and Hortensius also had a house not far away, but such was the hostility between Cicero and the aristocrats that, despite the long summer days he spent reading and writing in his villa’s cool and poplared glades, they never once invited him to dine. This did not disturb Cicero; rather, it amused him, for the house had once belonged to the nobles’ greatest hero, Sulla, and he knew how much it must have irritated them to see it in the hands of a new man from Arpinum. The villa had not been redecorated for more than a decade, and when he took possession an entire wall was devoted to a mural showing the dictator receiving a military decoration from his troops. Cicero made sure all his neighbors knew that his first act as owner was to have it whitewashed over.

Happy, then, was Cicero in the autumn of his thirty-ninth year: prosperous, popular, well rested after a summer in the country, and looking forward to the elections the following July, when he would be old enough to stand for a praetorship-the final stepping-stone before the glittering prize of the consulship itself.

And at this critical juncture in his fortunes, just as his luck was about to desert him and his life become interesting again, my narrative resumes.

AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER it was Pompey’s birthday and for the third year in succession Cicero received a summons to attend a dinner in his honor. He groaned when he opened the message, for he had discovered that there are few blessings in life more onerous than the friendship of a great man. At first, he had found it flattering to be invited into Pompey’s inner circle. But after a while he grew weary of listening to the same old military anecdotes-usually illustrated by the maneuvering of plates and decanters around the dinner table-of how the young general had outwitted three Marian armies at Auximum, or killed seventeen thousand Numidians in a single afternoon at the age of twenty-four, or finally defeated the Spanish rebels near Valencia. Pompey had been giving orders since he was seventeen and perhaps for this reason had developed none of Cicero ’s subtlety of intellect. Conversation as the senator enjoyed it-spontaneous wit, shared gossip, sharp observations which might be spun off mutually into some profound or fantastic dissertation on the nature of human affairs-all this was alien to Pompey. The general liked to hold forth against a background of respectful silence, assert some platitude, and then sit back and bask in the flattery of his guests. Cicero used to say he would sooner have all his teeth drawn by a drunken barber in the Forum Boarium than listen to another of these mealtime monologues.

The root of the problem was that Pompey was bored. At the end of his consulship, as promised, he had retired into private life with his wife, young son, and baby daughter. But then what? Lacking any talent for oratory, he had nothing to occupy him in the law courts. Literary composition held no interest for him. He could only watch in a stew of jealousy as Lucullus continued his conquest of Mithradates. Not yet forty, his future, as the saying went, seemed all behind him. He would make occasional forays down from his mansion and into the Senate, not to speak but to listen to the debates-processions for which he insisted on an immense escort of friends and clients. Cicero, who felt obliged to walk at least part of the way with him, observed that it was like watching an elephant trying to make itself at home in an anthill.

But still, he was the greatest man in the world, with a huge following among the voters, and not to be crossed, especially with an election less than a year away. Only that summer he had secured a tribuneship for his crony Gabinius: he still kept a hand in politics. So on the thirtieth day of September, Cicero went off as usual to the birthday party, returning later in the evening to regale Quintus, Lucius, and myself with an account of events. Like a child, Pompey delighted in receiving presents, and Cicero had taken him a manuscript letter in the hand of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, a letter two centuries old and extremely valuable, which had been acquired for him in Athens by Atticus. He would dearly have loved to have kept it for his own library in Tusculum, but he hoped that by giving it to Pompey he could begin to tempt the general into an interest in philosophy. Instead, Pompey had barely glanced at it before setting it aside in favor of a gift from Gabinius: a silver rhino horn containing some Egyptian aphrodisiac made of baboon excrement. “How I wish I could have retrieved that letter!” groaned Cicero, flopping down onto a couch, the back of his hand resting on his forehead. “Even now it’s probably being used by some kitchen-maid to light the fire.”

“Who else was there?” asked Quintus eagerly. He had only been back in Rome for a few days, following his term as quaestor in Umbria, and was avid for the latest news.

“Oh, the usual cohort. Our fine new tribune-elect, Gabinius, obviously, and his father-in-law, the art connoisseur, Palicanus; Rome ’s greatest dancer, Afranius; that Spanish creature of Pompey’s, Balbus; Varro, the household polymath. Oh, and Marcus Fonteius,” he added lightly, but not so lightly that Lucius did not immediately detect the significance.

“And what did you talk about with Fonteius?” inquired Lucius, in the same clumsy attempt at an offhand manner.

“This and that.”

“His prosecution?”

“Naturally.”

“And who is defending the rascal?”

Cicero paused, and then said quietly, “I am.”

I should explain, for those not familiar with the case, that this Fonteius had been governor of Further Gaul about five years earlier, and that one winter, when Pompey was particularly hard-pressed fighting the rebels in Spain, Fonteius had sent the beleagured general sufficient supplies and fresh recruits to enable him to survive until the spring. That had been the start of their friendship. Fonteius had gone on to make himself extremely rich, in the Verres manner, by extorting various illegal taxes out of the native population. The Gauls had at first put up with it, telling themselves that robbery and exploitation have ever been the handmaids of civilization. But after Cicero ’s triumphant prosecution of the governor of Sicily, the chief of the Gauls, Induciomarus, had come to Rome to ask the senator to represent them in the extortion court. Lucius had been all for it; in fact it was he who had brought Induciomarus to the house: a wild-looking creature, dressed in his barbarian outfit of jacket and trousers-he gave me quite a shock when I opened the door to him one morning. Cicero, however, had politely declined. A year had passed, but now the Gauls had finally found a credible legal team in Plaetorius, who was a praetor-elect, and Marcus Fabius as his junior. The case would soon be in court.

“That is outrageous,” said Lucius hotly. “You cannot defend him. He is as guilty as Verres was.”

“Nonsense. He has neither killed anyone, nor falsely imprisoned anyone, either. The worst that can be said is that he once imposed excessive duties on the wine traders of Narbonne and made some locals pay more than others to repair the roads. Besides,” added Cicero quickly, before Lucius could challenge this somewhat generous interpretation of Fonteius’s activities, “who are you or I to determine his guilt? It is a matter for the court to decide, not us. Or would you be a tyrant and deny him an advocate?”

“I would deny him your advocacy,” Lucius responded. “You have heard from Induciomarus’s own lips the evidence against him. Is all that to be canceled out, simply because Fonteius is a friend of Pompey?”

“It has nothing to do with Pompey.”

“Then why do it?”

“Politics,” said Cicero, suddenly sitting up, swinging himself around, and planting his feet on the floor. He fixed his gaze on Lucius and said very seriously, “The most fatal error for any statesman is to allow his fellow countrymen, even for an instant, to suspect that he puts the interests of foreigners above those of his own people. That is the lie which my enemies spread about me after I represented the Sicilians in the Verres case, and that is the calumny which I can lay to rest if I defend Fonteius now.”

“And the Gauls?”

“The Gauls will be represented perfectly adequately by Plaetorius.”

“Not as well as they would be by you.”

“But you say yourself that Fonteius has a weak case. Let the weakest case be defended by the strongest advocate. What could be fairer than that?”

Cicero flashed him his most charming smile, but for once Lucius refused to be parted from his anger. Knowing, I suspect, that the only sure way to defeat Cicero in argument was to withdraw from the conversation altogether, he stood and limped across to the atrium. I had not realized until that moment how ill he looked, how thin and stooped; he had never really recovered from the strain of his efforts in Sicily. “Words, words, words,” he said bitterly. “Is there no end to the tricks you can make them perform? But, as with all men, your great strength is also your weakness, Marcus, and I am sorry for you, absolutely I am, because soon you will not be able to tell your tricks from the truth. And then you will be lost.”

Cicero laughed. “‘The truth.’ Now there is a loose term for a philosopher to use!” But he was addressing his witticism to the air, for Lucius had gone.

“He will be back,” said Quintus.

But he did not come back, and over the following days Cicero went about his preparations for the trial with the determined expression of a man who has resigned himself to some distasteful but necessary surgical procedure. As for his client: Fonteius had been anticipating his prosecution for three years, and had used the time well, to acquire a mass of evidence to support his defense. He had witnesses from Spain and Gaul, including officers from Pompey’s camp, and various sly and greedy tax farmers and merchants-members of the Roman community in Gaul, who would have sworn that night was day and land sea if it would have turned them a reasonable profit. The only trouble, as Cicero realized once he had mastered his brief, was that Fonteius was plainly guilty. He sat for a long time staring at the wall in his study, while I tiptoed around him, and it is important that I convey what he was doing, for it is necessary in order to understand his character. He was not merely trying, as a cynical and second-rate advocate might have done, to devise some clever tactic in order to outwit the prosecution. He was trying to find something to believe in. That was the core of his genius, both as an advocate and as a statesman. “What convinces is conviction,” he used to say. “You simply must believe the argument you are advancing, otherwise you are lost. No chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win the case, if your audience senses that belief is missing.” Just one thing to believe in, that was all he needed, and then he could latch on to it, build out from it, embellish it, and transform it just for the space of an hour or two into the most important issue in the world-and deliver it with a passion that would obliterate the flimsy rationality of his opponents. Afterwards he would usually forget it entirely. And what did he believe in when it came to Marcus Fonteius? He gazed at the wall for many hours and concluded only this: that his client was a Roman, being assailed within his own city by Rome ’s traditional enemy, the Gauls, and that whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, that was a kind of treachery.

Such was the line which Cicero took when he found himself once again in the familiar surroundings of the extortion court before the Temple of Castor. The trial lasted from the end of October until the middle of November, and was most keenly fought, witness by witness, right up until the final day, when Cicero delivered the closing speech for the defense. From my place behind the senator, I had, from the opening day, kept an eye out for Lucius among the crowd of spectators, but it was only on that last morning that I fancied I saw him, a pale shadow, propped against a pillar at the very back of the audience. If it was him-and I do not know for sure that it was-I have often wondered what he thought of his cousin’s oratory as he tore into the evidence of the Gauls, jabbing his finger at Induciomarus-“Does he actually know what is meant by giving evidence? Is the greatest chief of the Gauls worthy to be set on the same level as even the meanest citizen of Rome?”-and demanding to know how a Roman jury could possibly believe the word of a man whose gods demanded human victims: “For who does not know that to this very day they retain the monstrous and barbarous custom of sacrificing men?” What would he have said to Cicero ’s description of the Gaulish witnesses, “swaggering from end to end of the Forum, with proud and unflinching expressions on their faces and barbarian menaces upon their lips”? And what would he have made of Cicero’s brilliant coup de théâtre at the very end, of producing in court, in the closing moments of his speech, Fonteius’s sister, a vestal virgin, clad from head to toe in her official garb of a flowing white gown, with a white linen shawl around her narrow shoulders, who raised her white veil to show the jury her tears-a sight which made her brother also break down weeping? Cicero laid his hand gently on his client’s shoulders.

“From this peril, gentlemen, defend a gallant and a blameless citizen. Let the world see that you place more confidence in the evidence of our fellow countrymen than in that of foreigners, that you have greater regard for the welfare of our citizens than for the caprice of our foes, that you set more store by the entreaties of she who presides over your sacrifices than by the effrontery of those who have waged war against the sacrifices and shrines of all the world. Finally, gentlemen, see to it-and here the dignity of the Roman people is most vitally engaged-see to it that you show that the prayers of a vestal maid have more weight with you than do the threats of Gauls.”

Well, that speech certainly did the trick, both for Fonteius, who was acquitted, and for Cicero, who was never again regarded as anything less than the most fervent patriot in Rome. I looked up after I had finished making my shorthand record, but it was impossible to discern individuals in the crowd anymore-it had become a single, seething creature, aroused by Cicero ’s technique to a chanting ecstasy of national self-glorification. Anyway, I sincerely hope that Lucius was not present, and there must surely be a chance that he was not, for it was only a few hours later that he was discovered at his home quite dead.

CICERO WAS DINING PRIVATELY with Terentia when the message came. The bearer was one of Lucius’s slaves. Scarcely more than a boy, he was weeping uncontrollably, so it fell to me to take the news in to the senator. He looked up blankly from his meal when I told him, stared straight at me, and said irritably, “No,” as if I had offered him the wrong set of documents in court. And for a long time that was all he said: “No, no.” He did not move; he did not even blink. The working of his brain seemed locked. It was Terentia who eventually spoke, suggesting gently that he should go and find out what had happened, whereupon he started searching dumbly for his shoes. “Keep an eye on him, Tiro,” she said quietly to me.

Grief kills time. All that I retain of that night, and of the days which followed, are fragments of scenes, like some luridly brilliant hallucinations left behind after a fever. I recall how thin and wasted Lucius’s body was when we found it, lying on its right side in his cot, the knees drawn up, the left hand laid flat across his eyes, and how Cicero, in the traditional manner, bent over him with a candle, to call him back to life. “What was he seeing?” That was what he kept asking: “What was he seeing?” Cicero was not, as I have indicated, a superstitious man, but he could not rid himself of the conviction that Lucius had been presented with a vision of unparalleled horror at the end, and that this had somehow frightened him to death. As to how he died-well, here I must confess to carrying a secret all these years, of which I shall be glad now to unburden myself. There was a pestle and mortar in the corner of that little room, with what Cicero -and I, too, at first-took to be a bunch of fennel lying beside it. It was a reasonable supposition, for among Lucius’s many chronic ailments was poor digestion, which he attempted to relieve by a solution of fennel oil. Only later, when I was clearing the room, did I rub those lacy leaves with my thumb and detect the frightful, musty, dead-mouse odor of hemlock. I knew then that Lucius had tired of this life, and for whatever reason-despair at its injustices, weariness with his ailments-had chosen to die like his hero, Socrates. This information I always meant to share with Cicero and Quintus. But for some reason, in the sadness of those days, I kept it to myself, and then the proper time for disclosure had passed, and it seemed better to let them continue to believe he had died involuntarily.

I also recall how Cicero spent such a great sum on flowers and incense that after Lucius had been cleaned and anointed and laid on his funeral couch in his finest toga, his skinny feet pointing toward the door, he seemed, even in that drab November, to be in an Elysian grove of petals and fragrant scent. I remember the surprising number, for such a solitary man, of friends and neighbors who came to pay their respects, and the funeral procession at dusk out to the Esquiline Field, with young Frugi weeping so hard he could not catch his breath. I recall the dirges and the music, and the respectful glances of the citizens along the route-for this was a Cicero they were bearing to meet his ancestors, and the name now counted for something in Rome. Out on the frozen field, the body lay on its pyre under the stars, and the great orator struggled to deliver a brief eulogy. But his words would not perform their tricks for him on that occasion, and he had to give up. He could not even collect himself sufficiently to apply the torch to ignite the wood, and passed the task instead to Quintus. As the flames shot high, the mourners threw their gifts of scent and spices onto the bonfire, and the perfumed smoke, flecked with orange sparks, curled up to the Milky Way. That night I sat with the senator in his study as he dictated a letter to Atticus, and it is surely a tribute to the affection which Lucius also inspired in that noble heart that this was the first of Cicero ’s hundreds of letters which Atticus chose to preserve:

“Knowing me as well as you do, you can appreciate better than most how deeply my cousin Lucius’s death has grieved me, and what a loss it means to me both in public and in private life. All the pleasure that one human being’s kindness and charm can give another I had from him.”

DESPITE HAVING LIVED IN ROME for many years, Lucius had always said that he wished to have his ashes interred in the family vault in Arpinum. Accordingly, on the morning after the cremation, the Cicero brothers set off with his remains on the three-day journey east, accompanied by their wives, having sent word ahead to their father of what had happened. Naturally, I went, too, for although Cicero was in the mourning period, his legal and political correspondence could not be neglected. Nevertheless, for the first-and, I think, the only-time in all our years together, he transacted no official business on the road, but simply sat with his chin in his hand, staring at the passing countryside. He and Terentia were in one carriage, Quintus and Pomponia in another, endlessly bickering-so much so that I saw Cicero draw his brother aside and plead with him, for the sake of Atticus, if for no one else, to make the marriage work. “Well,” retorted Quintus, with some justice, “if the good opinion of Atticus is that important to you, why do you not marry her?” We stayed the first night at the villa in Tusculum and had reached as far as Ferentium on the Via Latina when a message reached the brothers from Arpinum that their father had collapsed and died the previous day.

Given that he was in his sixties and had been ailing for many years, this was obviously less of a shock than the death of Lucius (the news of which had apparently proved the final blow to the old man’s fragile health). But to leave one house festooned with the pine and cypress boughs of mourning and to arrive at another similarly adorned was the height of melancholy, made worse by the mischance that we reached Arpinum on the twenty-fifth day of November, that date kept sacred to Proserpina, Queen of Hades, who carries into effect the curses of men upon the souls of the dead. The Ciceros ’ villa lay three miles out of the town, down a winding stony road, in a valley ringed by high mountains. It was cold at this altitude, the peaks already draped with the vestal veils of snow which they would wear till May. I had not been back for ten years, and to see it all as I remembered aroused strange feelings in me. Unlike Cicero, I had always preferred the country to the town. I had been born here; my mother and father had both lived and died here; for the first quarter century of my life, these springy meadows and crystal streams, with their tall poplars and verdant banks, had been the limit of my world. Seeing how much I was affected, and knowing how devoted I had been to the old master, Cicero invited me to accompany him and Quintus to the funeral couch, to say good-bye. In a way, I owed their father almost as much as they did, for he had taken a shine to me when I was a lad, and educated me so that I could help with his books, and then had given me the chance to travel with his son. As I bent to kiss his cold hand, I had a strong sense of returning home, and then the idea came to me that perhaps I could remain here and act as steward, marry some girl of equal station, and have a child of my own. My parents, despite their status as domestic slaves rather than farm laborers, had both died in their early forties; I had to reckon on having, at best, only ten years left myself. (Little do we know how the fates will play us!) I ached to imagine that I might depart the earth without issue, and I resolved to raise the matter with Cicero at the earliest opportunity.

Thus it was that I came to have rather a profound conversation with him. On the day after our arrival, the old master was buried in the family vault, then Lucius’s ashes in their alabaster vase were interred beside him, and finally a pig was sacrificed to keep the spot holy. The next morning Cicero took a tour around his newly inherited estate and I went with him in case he needed to dictate any notes, for the place (which was so heavily mortgaged as to be virtually worthless) was in a dilapidated state, and much work needed to be done. Cicero observed that it was originally his mother who had managed the property; his father had always been too much of a dreamer to cope with land agents and agricultural suppliers; after her death, he had slowly let it all go to ruin. This was, I think, the first time in more than a decade in his service that I had heard him mention his mother. Helvia was her name. She had died twenty years earlier, when he was in his teens, by which time he had left for Rome to be educated. I could barely remember anything of her myself, except that she had a reputation for terrible strictness and meanness-the sort of mistress who marked the jars to check if the slaves had stolen anything and took great pleasure in whipping them if she suspected that they had.

“Never a word of praise from her, Tiro,” he said, “either for myself or my brother. Yet I tried so hard to please her.” He stopped and stared across the fields to the fast-moving, ice-cold river-the Fibrenus, it was called-in the center of which was a little island, with a wooded grove and a small pavilion, half tumbled down. “That was where I used to go and sit as a boy,” he said wistfully. “The hours I spent there! In my mind I was going to be another Achilles, albeit of the law courts rather than the battlefield. You know your Homer: ‘Far to excel, out-topping all the rest!’”

He was silent for a while, and I recognized this as my opportunity. And so I put my plan to him-I gabbled it out, fairly ineptly, I suppose: that I might remain here and bring the farm back up to scratch for him-and all the while he kept looking at that childhood island of his. “I know exactly what you mean,” he said with a sigh when I had finished. “I feel it, too. This is the true fatherland of myself and my brother, for we are descended from a very ancient family of this place. Here are our ancestral cults, here is our race, here are many memorials of our forefathers. What more need I say?” He turned to look at me, and I noticed how very clear and blue his eyes were, despite all his recent weeping. “But consider what we have seen this week-the empty, senseless shells of those we loved-and think what a terrible audit Death lays upon a man. Ah!” He shook his head vigorously, as if emptying it of a bad dream, then returned his attention to the landscape. After a while he said, in a very different voice, “Well, I tell you, for my part, I do not propose to die leaving one ounce of talent unspent, or one mile of energy left in my legs. And it is your destiny, my dear fellow, to walk the road with me.” We were standing side by side; he prodded me gently in the ribs with his elbow. “Come on, Tiro! A secretary who can take down my words almost as quickly as I can utter them? Such a marvel cannot be spared to count sheep in Arpinum! So let us have no more talk of such foolishness.”

And that was the end of my pastoral idyll. We walked back up to the house, and later that afternoon-or perhaps it was the following day, the memory plays such tricks-we heard the sound of a horse galloping very fast along the road from the town. It had started to rain, that much I do remember, and everyone was cooped up irritably indoors. Cicero was reading, Terentia sewing, Quintus practicing drawing his sword, Pomponia lying down with a headache. (She still maintained that politics was “boring,” which drove Cicero into a quiet frenzy. “Such a stupid thing to say!” he once complained to me. “Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men’s souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring!”) Anyway, at the noise of hooves clattering to a halt I went out to greet the rider and took from him a letter bearing the seal of Pompey the Great. Cicero opened it himself and let out a shout of surprise. “Rome has been attacked!” he announced, causing even Pomponia to rouse herself briefly from her couch. He read on rapidly. The consular war fleet had been set on fire in its winter anchorage at Ostia. Two praetors, Sextilius and Bellinus, together with their lictors and staff, had been kidnapped. It was all the work of pirates and designed to spread terror, pure and simple. There was panic in the capital. The people were demanding action. “Pompey wants me with him straightaway,” said Cicero. “He is calling a council of war at his country estate the day after tomorrow.”