Imperium

Roll XII

FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS there was only one topic in Rome, and that was the pirates. Gabinius and Cornelius, in the phrase of the time, “lived on the rostra”-that is, every day they kept the issue of the pirate menace before the people by issuing fresh proclamations and summoning more witnesses. Horror stories were their speciality. For example, it was put about that if one of the pirates’ prisoners announced that he was a Roman citizen, his captors would pretend to be frightened and beg forgiveness. They would even fetch a toga for him to wear, and shoes for his feet, and bow whenever he passed, and this game would go on for a long time, until at last, when they were far out at sea, they would let down a ladder and tell him he was free to go. If their victim refused to walk, he would be flung overboard. Such tales enraged the audience in the Forum, who were accustomed to the magical incantation “I am a Roman citizen” guaranteeing deference throughout the world.

Cicero himself did not speak from the rostra. Oddly enough, he had never yet done so, having decided early on to hold back until a moment in his career when he could make the maximum impact. He was naturally tempted to make this the issue on which he broke his silence, for it was a popular stick with which to beat the aristocrats. But in the end he decided against it, reasoning that the measure already had such overwhelming backing in the streets, he would be better employed behind the scenes, plotting strategy and trying to tempt over waverers in the Senate. For this reason, his crucial importance has been frequently neglected. Instead of the fiery public orator he played the moderate for a change, working his way up and down the senaculum, listening to the complaints of the pedarii, promising to relay messages of commiseration and entreaty to Pompey, and dangling-very occasionally-half offers of preferment to men of influence. Each day a messenger came to the house from Pompey’s estate in the Alban Hills bearing a dispatch containing some fresh moan or inquiry or instruction (“Our new Cincinnatus does not seem to be spending much time plowing,” observed Cicero with a wry smile), and each day the senator would dictate to me a soothing reply, often giving the names of men it might be useful for Pompey to summon out for interview. This was a delicate task, since it was important to maintain the pretense that Pompey was taking no further part in politics. But a combination of greed, flattery, ambition, realization that some kind of special command was inevitable, and fear that it might go to Crassus eventually brought half a dozen key senators into Pompey’s camp, the most significant of whom was Lucius Manlius Torquatus, who had only just finished serving as praetor and was certain to run for the consulship the following year.

Crassus remained, as always, the greatest threat to Cicero’s schemes, and naturally he was not idle during this time, either. He, too, went around making promises of lucrative commissions, and winning over adherents. For connoisseurs of politics it was fascinating to observe the perennial rivals, Crassus and Pompey, so evenly poised. Each had two tame tribunes; each could therefore veto the bill; and each had a list of secret supporters in the Senate. Crassus’s advantage over Pompey was the support of most of the aristocrats, who feared Pompey more than any other man in the republic; Pompey’s advantage over Crassus was the popularity he enjoyed among the masses on the streets. “They are like two scorpions, circling each other,” said Cicero, leaning back in his chair one morning, after he had dictated his latest dispatch to Pompey. “Neither can win outright, yet each can kill the other.”

“Then how will victory ever be achieved?”

He looked at me, then suddenly lunged forward and slammed his palm down on his desk with a speed that made me jump. “By the one which strikes the other by surprise.”

At the time he made that remark there were only four days left before the lex Gabinia was due to be voted on by the people. He still had not thought of a means of circumventing Crassus’s veto. He was wearied and discouraged, and once again began to talk of our retiring to Athens and studying philosophy. That day passed, and the next, and the next, and still no solution presented itself. On the final day before the vote, I rose as usual at dawn and opened the door to Cicero’s clients. Now that he was known to be so close to Pompey, these morning levees had doubled in size compared to the old days, and the house was crowded with petitioners and well-wishers at all hours, much to Terentia’s annoyance. Some of them had famous names, for example, on this particular morning, Antonius Hybrida, who was the second son of the great orator and consul Marcus Antonius, and who had just finished a term as tribune; he was a fool and a drunk, but protocol dictated he would have to be seen first. Outside it was gray and raining and the callers had brought in with them a wet-dog smell of moist, stale clothes and damp hair. The black and white mosaic floor was streaked with tracks of mud, and I was just contemplating summoning one of the household slaves to mop up when the door opened again and who should step in but Marcus Licinius Crassus himself. I was so startled, I briefly forgot to be alarmed, and gave him as natural a greeting as if he had been a nobody come to request a letter of introduction.

“And a very good morning to you, Tiro,” he returned. He had only met me once, yet he still remembered my name, which frightened me. “Might it be possible to have a word with your master?” Crassus was not alone but had brought with him Quintus Arrius, a senator who followed him around like a shadow, and whose ridiculously affected speech-always adding an aspirate to a vowel: “Harrius” was how he pronounced his name-was to be so memorably parodied by that cruelest of poets, Catullus. I hurried through into Cicero’s study, where he was doing his usual trick of dictating a letter to Sositheus while signing documents as quickly as Laurea could produce them.

“You will never guess who is here!” I cried.

“Crassus,” he replied, without looking up.

I was immediately deflated. “You are not surprised?”

“No,” said Cicero, signing another letter. “He has come to make a magnanimous offer, which is not really magnanimous at all, but which will show him in a better light when our refusal to agree to it becomes public. He has every reason to compromise, while we have none. Still, you had better show him in before he bribes all my clients away from me. And stay in the room and take a note, in case he tries to put words into my mouth.”

So I went out to fetch Crassus-who was indeed glad-handing his away around Cicero’s tablinum, to the awed amazement of all concerned-and showed him into the study. The junior secretaries left, and there were just the four of us-Crassus, Arrius, and Cicero all seated, and myself, standing in the corner and taking notes.

“You have a very nice house,” said Crassus, in his friendly way. “Small but charming. You must tell me if you think of selling.”

“If it ever catches fire,” responded Cicero, “you will be the first to know.”

“Very droll,” said Crassus, clapping his hands and laughing with great good humor. “But I am perfectly serious. An important man such as yourself should have a larger property, in a better neighborhood. The Palatine, of course. I can arrange it. No, please,” he added, as Cicero shook his head, “do not dismiss my offer. We have had our differences, and I should like to make a gesture of reconciliation.”

“Well, that is handsome of you,” said Cicero, “but alas, I fear the interests of a certain gentleman still stand between us.”

“They need not. I have watched your career with admiration, Cicero. You deserve the place you have won in Rome. It is my view that you should achieve the praetorship in the summer, and the consulship itself two years after that. There-I have said it. You may have my support. Now what do you say in reply?”

This was indeed a stunning offer, and at that moment I grasped an important point about clever men of business: that it is not consistent meanness which makes them rich (as many vulgarly assume), but rather the capacity, when necessary, to be unexpectedly, even extravagantly generous. Cicero was entirely caught off balance. He was effectively being offered the consulship, his life’s dream, on a platter-an ambition he had never even dared voice in the presence of Pompey, for fear of arousing the great man’s jealousy.

“You overwhelm me, Crassus,” he said, and his voice was so thick with emotion he had to cough to clear it before he could continue. “But fate has once again cast us on different sides.”

“Not necessarily. On the day before the people vote, surely the time has arrived for a compromise? I accept that this supreme command is Pompey’s conception. Let us share it.”

“A shared supreme command is an oxymoron.”

“We shared the consulship.”

“Yes, but the consulship is a joint office, based on the principle that political power should always be checked. Running a war is entirely different, as you know far better than I. In warfare, any hint of division at the top is fatal.”

“This command is so huge, there is easily room enough for two,” said Crassus airily. “Let Pompey take the east, and I the west. Or Pompey the sea and I the land. Or vice versa. I do not mind. The point is that between us, we can rule the world, with you as the bridge that links us.”

I am sure that Cicero had expected Crassus to come in threatening and aggressive, tactics which a career in the law courts had long since taught him how to handle. But this unexpectedly generous approach had him reeling, not least because what Crassus was suggesting was both sensible and patriotic. It would also be the ideal solution for Cicero, enabling him to win the friendship of all sides. “I shall certainly put your offer to him,” promised Cicero. “He shall have it in his hands before the day is out.”

“That is no use to me!” scoffed Crassus. “If it were a matter of merely putting a proposal, I could have sent Arrius here out to the Alban Hills with a letter, could I not, Arrius?”

“Hindeed you could.”

“No, Cicero, I need you actually to bring this about.” He leaned in close and moistened his lips; there was something almost lecherous about the way Crassus talked of power. “I shall be frank with you. I have set my heart upon resuming a military career. I have all the wealth a man could want, but that can only be a means and not an end in itself. Can you tell me what nation ever erected a statue to a man because he was rich? Which of the earth’s many peoples mingles the name of some long-dead millionaire in its prayers because of the number of houses he once possessed? The only lasting glory is on the page-and I am no poet!-or on the battlefield. So you see, you really must deliver the agreement of Pompey for our bargain to stick.”

“He is not a mule to be driven to market,” objected Cicero, whom I could see was starting to recoil again from the crudeness of his old enemy. “You know what he is like.”

“I do. Too well! But you are the most persuasive man in the world. You got him to leave Rome-do not deny it! Now surely you can convince him to come back?”

“His position is that he will come back as the sole supreme commander, or he will not come back at all.”

“Then Rome will never see him again,” snapped Crassus, whose friendliness was beginning to peel away like a thin layer of cheap paint on one of his less salubrious properties. “You know perfectly well what is going to happen tomorrow. It will unfold as predictably as a farce at the theater. Gabinius will propose your law and Trebellius, on my behalf, will veto it. Then Roscius, also on my instructions, will propose an amendment, setting up a joint command, and dare any tribune to veto that. If Pompey refuses to serve, he will look like a greedy child, willing to spoil the cake rather than share it.”

“I disagree. The people love him.”

“The people loved Tiberius Gracchus, but it did him no good in the end. That was a horrible fate for a patriotic Roman, which you might do well to remember.” Crassus stood. “Look to your own interests, Cicero. Surely you can see that Pompey is leading you to political oblivion? No man ever became consul with the aristocracy united against him.” Cicero also rose and warily took Crassus’s proffered hand. The older man grasped it hard and pulled him close. “On two occasions,” he said in a very soft voice, “I have offered the hand of friendship to you, Marcus Tullius Cicero. There will not be a third.”

With that, he strode out of the house, and at such a pace I could not get in front of him to show him out, or even open the door. I returned to the study to find Cicero standing exactly where I had left him, frowning at his hand. “It is like touching the skin of a snake,” he said. “Tell me-did I mishear him, or is he suggesting that Pompey and I might suffer the same fate as Tiberius Gracchus?”

“Yes: ‘a horrible fate for a patriotic Roman,’” I read from my notes. “What was the fate of Tiberius Gracchus?”

“Cornered like a rat in a temple and murdered by the nobles, while he was still tribune, and therefore supposedly inviolable. That must have been sixty years ago, at least. Tiberius Gracchus!” He clenched his hand into a fist. “You know, for a moment, Tiro, he almost had me believing him, but I swear to you, I would sooner never be consul than feel that I had only achieved it because of Crassus.”

“I believe you, senator. Pompey is worth ten of him.”

“A hundred, more like-for all his absurdities.”

I busied myself with a few things, straightening the desk and collecting the morning’s list of callers from the tablinum, while Cicero remained motionless in the study. When I returned again, a curious expression had come over his face. I gave him the list and reminded him that he still had a houseful of clients to receive, including a senator. Absentmindedly he selected a couple of names, among them Hybrida’s, but then he suddenly said, “Leave things here to Sositheus. I have a different task for you to perform. Go to the National Archive and consult the Annals for the consular year of Mucius Scaevola and Calpurnius Piso Frugi. Copy down everything relating to the tribuneship of Tiberius Gracchus and his agrarian bill. Tell nobody what you are doing. If anyone asks you, make something up. Well?” He smiled for the first time in a week and made a shooing gesture, flicking his fingers at me. “Go on, man. Go!”

After so many years in his service I had become used to these bewildering and peremptory commands, and once I had wrapped myself up against the cold and wet I set off down the hill. Never had I known the city so grim and hard-pressed-in the depths of winter, under a dark sky, freezing, short of food, with beggars on every corner, and even the occasional corpse in the gutter of some poor wretch who had died in the night. I moved quickly through the dreary streets, across the Forum and up the steps to the archive. This was the same building in which I had discovered the meager official records of Gaius Verres, and I had been back on many errands since, especially when Cicero was aedile, so my face was familiar to the clerks. They gave me the volume I needed without asking any questions. I took it over to a reading desk beside the window and unrolled it with my mittened fingers. The morning light was weak, it was very drafty, and I was not at all sure what I was looking for. The Annals, at least in those days before Caesar got his hands on them, gave a very straight and full account of what had happened in each year: the names of the magistrates, the laws passed, the wars fought, the famines endured, the eclipses, and the other natural phenomena observed. They were drawn from the official register that was written up each year by the pontifex maximus, and posted on the white board outside the headquarters of the college of priests.

History has always fascinated me. As Cicero himself once wrote: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?” I quickly forgot the cold and could have spent all day happily unwinding that roll, poring over the events of more than sixty years before. I discovered that in this particular year, Rome’s six hundred and twenty-first, King Attalus III of Pergamon had died, bequeathing his country to Rome; that Scipio Africanus Minor had destroyed the Spanish city of Numantia, slaughtering all of its five thousand inhabitants, apart from fifty whom he saved to walk in chains in his triumph; and that Tiberius Gracchus, the famous radical tribune, had introduced a law to share out the public land among the common people, who were then, as always, suffering great hardship. Nothing changes, I thought. Gracchus’s bill had infuriated the aristocrats in the Senate, who saw it as threatening their estates, and they had persuaded or suborned a tribune named Marcus Octavius to veto the law. But because the people were unanimous in their support for the bill, Gracchus had argued from the rostra that Octavius was failing in his sacred duty to uphold their interests and had called upon the people to begin voting Octavius out of office, tribe by tribe. When the first seventeen of the thirty-five tribes had voted overwhelmingly for Octavius’s removal, Gracchus had suspended the polling and appealed to him to withdraw his veto. Octavius had refused, whereupon Gracchus had “called upon the gods to witness that he did not willingly wish to remove his colleague,” had balloted the eighteenth tribe, and achieved a majority, and Octavius had been stripped of his tribuneship (“reduced to the rank of a private citizen, he departed unobserved”). The agrarian law had then been passed. But the nobles, as Crassus had reminded Cicero, had exacted their revenge a few months later, when Gracchus had been surrounded in the temple of Fides, beaten to death with sticks and clubs, and his body flung in the Tiber.

I unfastened the hinged notebook from my wrist and took out my stylus. I remember how I glanced around to make sure I was alone before I opened it and started copying the relevant passages from the Annals, for now I understood why Cicero had been so emphatic about the need for secrecy. My fingers were freezing and the wax was hard; the script I produced was atrocious. At one point, when Catulus himself, the patron of the archive, appeared in the doorway and stared straight at me, I felt as if my heart would shatter the bones of my breast. But the old man was nearsighted, and I doubt he would have known who I was in any case; he was not that sort of politician. After talking for a while with one of his freedmen, he left. I finished my transcription and almost ran out of that place, down the icy steps and back across the Forum toward Cicero’s house, carrying my wax tablet pressed close to me, sensing I had never done a more significant morning’s work in my life.

When I reached the house, Cicero was still ensconced with Antonius Hybrida, although as soon as he saw me waiting near the door, he drew their conversation to a close. Hybrida was one of those well-bred, fine-boned types, who had ruined himself and his looks with wine. I could smell his breath even from where I stood: it was like fruit rotting in a gutter. He had been thrown out of the Senate a few years previous for bankruptcy and loose morals-specifically, corruption, drunkenness, and buying a beautiful young slave girl at an auction and living openly with her as his mistress. But the people, in that peculiar way of theirs, rather loved him for his rakish ways, and now that he had served a year as their tribune, he had worked his way back into the Senate. I waited until he had gone before I gave Cicero my notes. “What did he want?” I asked.

“My support in the elections for praetor.”

“He has a nerve!”

“I suppose he has. I promised to back him, though,” said Cicero carelessly, and seeing my surprise he explained, “At least with him as praetor I shall have one fewer rival for the consulship.”

He laid my notebook on his desk and read it carefully. Then he put his elbows on either side of it, rested his chin in the palms of his hands, hunched forward, and read it again. I pictured his quick thoughts running ahead in the way that water runs along the cracks in a tiled floor-first onward, and then spreading to either side, blocked in one spot, advancing in another, widening and branching out, all the little possibilities and implications and likelihoods in shimmering fluid motion. Eventually he said, half to himself and half to me, “Such a tactic had never been tried before Gracchus used it, and has never been attempted since. One can see why. What a weapon to put into any man’s hands! Win or lose, we should have to live with the consequences for years.” He looked up at me. “I am not sure, Tiro. Perhaps it would be better if you erased it.” But when I made a move toward the desk, he said quickly, “And then again perhaps not.” Instead, he told me to fetch Laurea and a couple of the other slaves and have them run around to all the senators in Pompey’s inner group, asking them to assemble after the close of official business that afternoon. “Not here,” he added quickly, “but in Pompey’s house.” Thereupon he sat down and began writing out, in his own hand, a dispatch to the general, which was sent off with a rider who had orders to wait and return with a reply. “If Crassus wants to summon up the ghost of Gracchus,” he said grimly when the letter had gone, “he shall have him!”

Needless to say, the others were agog to hear why Cicero had summoned them, and once the courts and offices were shut for the day, everyone turned up at Pompey’s mansion, filling all the seats around the table, except for the absent owner’s great throne, which was left empty as a mark of respect. It may seem strange that such clever and learned men as Caesar and Varro were ignorant of the precise tactics which Gracchus had used as tribune, but remember that he had been dead by then for sixty-three years, that huge events had intervened, and that there was not yet the mania for contemporary history which was to develop over the coming decades. Even Cicero had forgotten it until Crassus’s threat dislodged some distant memory from the time when he was studying for the bar. There was a profound hush as he read out the extract from the Annals, and when he had finished, an excited hubbub. Only the white-haired Varro, who was the oldest present, and who remembered hearing from his father about the chaos of the Gracchus tribunate, expressed reservations. “You would create a precedent,” he said, “by which any demagogue could summon the people, and threaten to dispose of any of his colleagues whenever he felt he had a majority among the tribes. Indeed, why stop at a tribune? Why not remove a praetor, or a consul?”

“We would not create the precedent,” Caesar pointed out impatiently. “Gracchus created it for us.”

“Exactly,” said Cicero. “Although the nobles may have murdered him, they did not declare his legislation illegal. I know what Varro means, and to a degree I share his unease. But we are in a desperate struggle, and obliged to take some risks.”

There was a murmur of assent, but in the end the most decisive voices in favor were those of Gabinius and Cornelius, the men who would actually have to stand before the people and push the legislation through, and thus be chiefly subject to the nobles’ retaliation, both physical and legal.

“The people overwhelmingly want this supreme command, and they want Pompey to be given it,” declared Gabinius. “The fact that Crassus’s purse is deep enough to buy two tribunes should not be allowed to frustrate their will.”

Afranius wanted to know if Pompey had expressed an opinion.

“This is the dispatch I sent to him this morning,” said Cicero, holding it up, “and here on the bottom is the reply he sent back instantly, and which reached me here at the same time as you all did.” Everyone could see what he had scrawled, in his large, bold script: the single word “Agreed.” That settled the matter. Afterwards, Cicero instructed me to burn the letter.

THE MORNING OF THE ASSEMBLY was bitterly cold, with an icy wind whipping around the colonnades and temples of the Forum. But the chill did not deter a vast assembly from turning out. On major voting days, the tribunes transferred themselves from the rostra to the Temple of Castor, where there was more space to conduct the ballot, and workmen had been busy overnight, erecting the wooden gangways up which the citizens would file to cast their votes. Cicero arrived early and discreetly, with only myself and Quintus in attendance, for as he said as he walked down the hill, he was only the stage manager of this production and not one of its leading performers. He spent a little while conferring with a group of tribal officers, then retreated with me to the portico of the Basilica Aemilia, from where he would have a good view of the proceedings and could issue instructions as necessary.

It was a dramatic sight, and I guess I must be one of the very few left alive who witnessed it-the ten tribunes lined up on their bench, among them, like hired gladiators, the two matched pairs of Gabinius and Cornelius (for Pompey) versus Trebellius and Roscius (for Crassus); the priests and the augurs all standing at the top of the steps to the temple; the orange fire on the altar providing a flickering point of color in the grayness; and spread out across the Forum the great crowd of voters, red-faced in the cold, milling around the ten-foot-high standard of their particular tribe. Each standard carried its name proudly in large letters-AEMILIA, CAMILIA, FABIA, etc.-so that its members, if they wandered off, could see where they were supposed to be. There was much joking and horse trading among the groups, until the trumpet of the herald called them to order. Then the official crier gave the legislation its second reading in a penetrating voice, after which Gabinius stepped forward and made a short speech. He had joyful news, he said: the news that the people of Rome had been praying for. Pompey the Great, deeply moved by the sufferings of the nation, was willing to reconsider his position and serve as supreme commander-but only if it was the unanimous desire of them all. “And is it your desire?” demanded Gabinius, to which there was a huge demonstration of enthusiasm. This went on for some time, thanks to the tribal officers. In fact, whenever it seemed the volume might be waning, Cicero would give a discreet signal to a couple of these officers, who would relay it across the Forum, and the tribal standards would start waving again, rekindling the applause. Eventually, Gabinius motioned them to be quiet. “Then let us put it to the vote!”

Slowly-and one had to admire his courage in standing up at all, in the face of so many thousands-Trebellius rose from his place on the tribunes’ bench and came forward, his hand raised to signal his desire to intervene. Gabinius regarded him with contempt, and then roared to the crowd, “Well, citizens, should we let him speak?”

“No!” they screamed in response.

To which Trebellius, in a voice made shrill by nerves, shouted, “Then I veto the bill!”

At any other time in the past four centuries, excepting the year when Tiberius Gracchus was tribune, this would have been the end of the legislation. But on that fateful morning, Gabinius motioned the jeering crowd to be silent. “Does Trebellius speak for you all?”

“No!” they chanted back. “No! No!”

“Does he speak for anyone here?” The only sound was the wind: even the senators who supported Trebellius dared not raise their voices, for they were standing unprotected among their tribes and would have been set upon by the mob. “Then, in accordance with the precedent set by Tiberius Gracchus, I propose that Trebellius, having failed to observe the oath of his office and represent the people, be removed as tribune, and that this be voted on immediately!”

Cicero turned to me. “And now the play begins,” he said.

For a moment, the citizenry simply looked at one another. Then they started nodding, and a sound of realization grew out of the crowd-that is how I think of it now, at any rate, as I sit in my little study with my eyes closed and try to remember it all-a realization that they could do this, and that the grandees in the Senate were powerless to stop them. Catulus, Hortensius, and Crassus, in great alarm, started pushing their way toward the front of the assembly, demanding a hearing, but Gabinius had stationed a few of Pompey’s veterans along the bottom steps and they were not allowed to pass. Crassus, in particular, had lost all his usual restraint. His face was red and contorted with rage as he tried to storm the tribunal, but he was pushed back. He noticed Cicero watching and pointed at him, shouting something, but he was too far away and there was too much noise for us to hear. Cicero smiled at him benignly. The crier read out Gabinius’s motion-“That the people no longer desire Trebellius to be their tribune”-and the electoral clerks dispersed to their stations. As usual, the Suburana were the first to vote, filing up the gangplank two abreast to cast their ballots, then down the stone steps at the side of the temple and back into the Forum. The city tribes followed one after the other, and every one of them voted for Trebellius to be stripped of his office. Then the rural tribes started balloting. This all took several hours, and throughout it Trebellius looked gray with anxiety and frequently conferred with his companion, Roscius. At one point he disappeared from the tribunal. I did not see where he went, but I guess it must have been to plead with Crassus to release him from his obligation. All across the Forum, small huddles of senators gathered as their tribes finished voting, and I noticed Catulus and Hortensius going, grim-faced, from group to group. Cicero also did the rounds, leaving me behind as he circulated among the senators, talking to some of those, such as Torquatus and his old ally Marcellinus, whom he had secretly persuaded to switch to Pompey’s camp.

At length, after seventeen tribes had voted to oust Trebellius, Gabinius ordered a pause in the balloting. He summoned Trebellius to the front of the tribunal and asked him whether he was prepared now to bow to the will of the people, and by so doing keep his tribunate, or whether it would be necessary to hold an eighteenth ballot and cast him out of office. This was Trebellius’s chance to enter history as the hero of his cause, and I have often wondered whether, in his old age, he looked back on his decision with regret. But I suppose he still had hopes of a political career. After a short hesitation, he signaled his assent and his veto was withdrawn. I need hardly add that he was subsequently despised by both sides and never heard of again.

All eyes now turned to Roscius, Crassus’s second tribune, and it was at this point, sometime in the early afternoon, that Catulus appeared again at the foot of the temple steps, cupped his hands to his mouth, and shouted up to Gabinius, demanding a hearing. As I have mentioned before, Catulus commanded great respect among the people for his patriotism. It was therefore hard for Gabinius to refuse him, not least because he was regarded as the senior ex-consul in the Senate. He gestured to the veterans to let him pass, and Catulus, despite his age, shot up the steps like a lizard. “This is a mistake,” Cicero muttered to me.

Gabinius told Cicero afterwards that he thought the aristocrats, seeing that they had lost, might now be willing to concede in the interests of national unity. But not at all. Catulus railed against the lex Gabinia and the illegal tactics being used to drive it through. It was madness, he declared, for the republic to entrust its security to one man. Warfare was a hazardous business, especially at sea: what would happen to this special command if Pompey was killed? Who would be his replacement? A cry went up of “You!” which, however flattering, was not at all the response that Catulus wanted. He knew he was far too old to go off soldiering. What he really wanted was a dual command-Crassus and Pompey-because even though he detested Crassus personally, he reckoned that the richest man in Rome would at least provide a counterweight to Pompey’s power. But by now Gabinius had begun to realize his error in letting Catulus speak. The winter days were short. He needed to finish the voting by sunset. He roughly interrupted the former consul and told him he had had his say: it was time to put the matter to the ballot. Roscius thereupon sprang forward and tried to make a formal proposal splitting the supreme command in two, but the people were becoming exasperated and refused to give him a hearing. In fact, they set up such a deafening clamor it was said that the noise killed a raven flying overhead and sent it plummeting to the earth. All Roscius could do against the uproar was raise two fingers to veto the legislation and signify his belief that there should be two commanders. Gabinius knew that if he had to call yet another ballot to remove a tribune, he would lose the light, and with it the chance of establishing the supreme command that day-and who could tell what lengths the aristocrats might go to if they had a chance to regroup overnight? So he responded by turning his back on Roscius and ordering the bill to be put regardless.

“That’s it,” said Cicero to me as the voting clerks sprang to their stations. “It’s done. Run up to Pompey’s house and tell them to send a message to the general immediately. Write this down: ‘The bill is passed. The command is yours. You must set out for Rome at once. Be sure to arrive tonight. Your presence is required to secure the situation. Signed, Cicero.’” I checked I had his words correctly, then hurried off on my errand, while Cicero plunged back into the crowded Forum to practice his art-cajoling, flattering, sympathizing, even occasionally threatening-for there was nothing, according to his philosophy, that could not be made or undone or repaired by words.

THUS WAS PASSED, by a unanimous vote of all the tribes, the lex Gabinia, a measure which was to have immense consequences-for all those personally concerned, for Rome, and for the world.

As night fell, the Forum emptied and the combatants retired to their respective headquarters-the aristocratic die-hards to the home of Catulus, on the brow of the Palatine; the adherents of Crassus to his own, more modest dwelling, lower down the same hill; and the victorious Pompeians to the mansion of their chief, on the Esquiline. Success had worked its usual fecund magic, and I should think that at least twenty senators crammed themselves into Pompey’s tablinum to drink his wine and await his victorious return. The room was brilliantly illuminated by candelabra, and there was that thick atmosphere of drink and sweat and the noisy racket of masculine conversation which often follows the release of tension. Caesar, Afranius, Palicanus, Varro, Gabinius, and Cornelius were all present, but the newcomers outnumbered them. I cannot remember all their names. Lucius Torquatus and his cousin, Aulus, were certainly present, along with another notable young pair of blue bloods, Metellus Nepos and Lentulus Marcellinus. Cornelius Sisenna (who had been one of Verres’s most enthusiastic supporters) made himself thoroughly at home, putting his feet up on the furniture, as did the two ex-consuls, Lentulus Clodianus and Gellius Publicola (the same Gellius who was still smarting from Cicero’s joke about the philosophy conference). As for Cicero, he sat apart in an adjoining chamber, composing an acceptance speech for Pompey to deliver the next day. At the time, I could not understand his curious quietness, but in hindsight I believe he may have had an intuition that something had just cracked in the commonwealth which it would be hard even for his words to repair. From time to time he sent me out to the vestibule to check on Pompey’s whereabouts.

Shortly before midnight, a messenger arrived to say that Pompey was approaching the city along the Via Latina. A score of his veterans had been stationed at the Capena Gate to escort him home by torchlight, in case his enemies resorted to desperate tactics, but Quintus-who had spent much of the night touring the city with the precinct bosses-reported to his brother that the streets were quiet. Eventually, cheering outside announced the great man’s arrival, and suddenly there he was among us, bigger than ever, grinning, shaking hands, clapping backs; even I received a friendly punch on the shoulder. The senators clamored for Pompey to make a speech, at which Cicero remarked, a touch too loudly, “He cannot speak yet: I have not written what he should say.” Just for a moment I saw a shadow flash across Pompey’s face, but yet again Caesar came to Cicero’s rescue, howling with laughter, and when Pompey suddenly grinned and wagged his finger in mock-reproach, the atmosphere relaxed into the joshing humor of an officers’ mess, where the triumphant commander expects to be ribbed.

Whenever I picture the word imperium it is always Pompey who comes into my mind-Pompey that night, hovering over his map of the Mediterranean, distributing dominion over land and sea as casually as he dispensed his wine (“Marcellinus, you can have the Libyan sea, while you, Torquatus, shall have eastern Spain…”), and Pompey the following morning, when he went down into the Forum to claim his prize. The annalists later reckoned that twenty thousand crammed into the center of Rome to see him anointed world commander. It was such a throng that even Catulus and Hortensius dared not commit some last act of resistance, although I am sure they would have liked to, but were instead obliged to stand with the other senators, putting the best face on it they could; Crassus, typically, could not even manage that and stayed away altogether. Pompey did not say much, a few protestations of humble gratitude, crafted by Cicero, and an appeal for national unity. But then he did not have to say anything: his presence alone had caused the price of grain in the markets to halve, such was the confidence he inspired. And he finished with the most wonderful theatrical flourish, which can only have come from Cicero: “I shall now put on again that uniform once so dear and so familiar to me, the sacred red cloak of a Roman commander in the field, and I shall not take it off again until victory in this war is won-or I shall not survive the outcome!” He raised his hand in salute and left the platform-was wafted from the platform, would be a better way of putting it, on a wind of acclamation. The applause was still going on when suddenly, beyond the rostra, he came into view again-steadily climbing the steps of the Capitol, now wearing the paludamentum, that bright scarlet cloak which is the mark of every Roman proconsul on active service. As the people went wild with enthusiasm, I glanced across to where Cicero was standing next to Caesar. Cicero’s expression was one of amused distaste, but Caesar’s was enraptured, as if he were already glimpsing his own future. Pompey carried on into the precincts of the Capitoline Triad, where he sacrificed a bull to Jupiter, and left the city immediately afterwards, without saying good-bye to Cicero or to anyone else. It was to be six years before he returned.