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Politics
I liked Robert
Harris’ Pompeii
enough to jump right into his new novel, Imperium. The protagonist of Imperium is Marcus Tullius
Cicero, and Harris presents a fictional version of Cicero’s early political life, from his
early days as a lawyer to his election as consul. Readers can hope there will
be a sequel that presents the rest of Cicero’s
life. In Imperium, Harris uses Cicero’s longtime secretary, the slave Tiro, as narrator. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning
of the chapter titled, “Roll IV,” pp. 47-51:
Another of Cicero’s maxims was that
if you must do something unpopular, you might as well do it wholeheartedly,
for in politics there is no credit to be won by timidity. Thus, although he
had never previously expressed an opinion about Pompey or the tribunes,
neither cause now had a more devoted adherent. And the Pompeians
were delighted to welcome such a brilliant recruit to their ranks.
That winter was long and
cold in the city, and for no one, I suspect, more than Terentia.
Her personal code of honor required her to support her husband against the
enemies who had invaded her home. But having sat among the smelly poor~, and
listened to Cicero haranguing her own class, she now found her drawing room
and dining room invaded at all hours by his new political cronies: men from
the uncouth north, who spoke with ugly accents and who liked to put their
feet up on her furniture and plot late into the night. Palicanus
was the chief of these, and on his second visit to the house in January he
brought with him one of the new praetors, Lucius Afranius, a fellow senator from Pompey’s homeland of Picenum. Cicero
went out of his way to be charming, and in earlier years, Terentia,
too, would have felt it an honor to have a praetor in her house. But Afranius had no decent family or breeding of any sort. He
actually had the nerve to ask her if she liked dancing, and, when she drew
back in horror, declared that personally he loved nothing more. He pulled up
his toga and showed her his legs and demanded to know if she had ever seen a
finer pair of calves.
These men were Pompey’s
representatives in Rome
and they carried with them something of the smell and manners of the army
camp. They were blunt to the point of brutality—but then, perhaps they had to
be, given what they were planning. Palicanus’s
daughter, Lollia—a blowsy young piece, very much
not to Terentia’s taste— occasionally joined the menfolk, for she was married to Aulus
Gabinius, another of Pompey’s Picenean
lieutenants, currently serving with the general in Spain. Gabinius was a link with the legionary commanders, who
in turn provided intelligence on the loyalty of the centuries—an important
consideration, for, as Afranius put it, there was
no point in bringing the army to Rome to restore the powers of the tribunes,
only to find that the legions would happily go over to the aristocrats if
they were offered a big enough bribe.
At the end of January, Gabinius sent word that the final rebel strongholds of Uxama and Calagurris had been
taken, and that Pompey was ready to march his legions home. Cicero had been active among the pedarii for weeks, drawing senators aside as
they waited for debaes, convincing them that the
rebel slaves in the Italian north posed a gathering threat to their
businesses and trade. He had lobbied well. When the issue came up for
discussion in the Senate, despite the intense opposition of the aristocrats
and the supporters of Crassus, the house voted
narrowly to let Pompey keep his Spanish army intact and bring it back to the
mother country to crush Spartacus’s northern recruits. From that point on,
the consulship was as good as his, and on the day the motion passed, Cicero came home
smiling. True, he had been snubbed by the aristocrats, who now loathed him
more than any other man in Rome,
and the presiding consul, the super-snobbish Publius
Cornelius Lentulus Sura,
had refused to recognize him when he tried to speak. But what did that
matter? He was in the inner circle of Pompey the Great, and, as every fool
knows, the quickest way to get ahead in politics is to get yourself
close to the man at the top.
Throughout these busy
months, I am ashamed to say, we neglected Sthenius
of Thermae. He would often turn up in the mornings
and hang around the senator for the entire day in the hope of securing an
interview. He was still living in Terentia’s
squalid tenement block. He had little money. He was unable to venture beyond
the walls of the city, as his immunity ended at the boundaries of Rome. He had not shaved
his beard nor cut his hair, nor, by the smell of him, changed his clothes
since October. He reeked, not of madness exactly, but of obsession, forever
producing small scraps of paper, which he would fumble with and drop in the
street.
Cicero kept making excuses not to see him.
Doubtless he felt he had discharged his obligation. But that was not the sole
explanation. The truth is that politics is a country idiot, and capable of
concentrating on only one thing at a time, and poor
Sthenius had become simply yesterday’s topic. All
anyone could talk about now was the coming confrontation between Crassus and Pompey; the plight of the Sicilian was a
bore.
In the late spring, Crassus had finally defeated the main force of Spartacus’s
rebels in the heel of Italy,
killing Spartacus and taking six thousand prisoners. He had started marching
toward Rome.
Very soon afterwards, Pompey crossed the Alps
and wiped out the slave rebellion in the north. He sent a letter to the consuls which was read out in the Senate, giving only the
faintest credit to Crassus for his achievement,
instead proclaiming that it was really he who had finished off the slave war
“utterly and entirely.” The signal to his supporters could not have been
clearer: only one general would be triumphing that year, and it would not be
Marcus Crassus. Finally, lest there be any
remaining doubt, at the end of his dispatch Pompey announced that he, too,
was moving on Rome.
Little wonder that amid these stirring historical events, Sthenius was forgotten.
Sometime in May, it must
have been, or possibly early June—I cannot find the exact date—a messenger
arrived at Cicero’s
house bearing a letter. With some reluctance the man let me take it, but
refused to leave the premises until he had received a reply: those, he said,
were his orders. Although he was wearing civilian clothes, I could tell he
was in the army. I carried the message into the study and watched Cicero’s expression
darken as he read it. He handed it to me, and when I saw the opening—”From
Marcus Licinius Grassus,
Imperator, to Marcus Tullius Cicero: Greetings”—I
understood the reason for his frown. Not that there was anything threatening
in the letter. It was simply an invitation to meet the victorious general
the next morning on the road to Rome, close to
the town of Lanuvium,
at the eighteenth milestone.
“Can I refuse?” asked Cicero, but then he
answered his own question. “No, I can’t. That would be interpreted as a
mortal insult.”
“Presumably he is going to
ask for your support.”
“Really?” said Cicero sarcastically.
“What makes you think that?”
“Could you not offer him
some limited encouragement, as long as it does not clash with your
undertakings to Pompey?”
“No. That is the trouble.
Pompey has made that very clear. He expects absolute loyalty. So Crassus will pose the question: Are you for me or against
me? and then I shall face the politician’s
nightmare: the requirement to give a straight answer.” He sighed. “But we
shall have to go of course.”
We left soon after dawn the
following morning, in a two-wheeled open carriage, with Cicero’s valet doubling as coachman for the
occasion. It was the most perfect time of day at the most perfect time of
year, already hot enough for people to be bathing in the public pool beside
the Capena Gate, but cool enough for the air to be
refreshing. There was none of the usual dust thrown up from the road. The
leaves of the olive trees were a glossy, fresh green. Even the tombs that
line the Appian Way
so thickly along that particular stretch just beyond the wall gleamed bright
and cheerful in the first hour of the sun. Normally Cicero liked to draw my
attention to some particular monument and give me a lecture on it—the statue
of Scipio Africanus, perhaps, or the tomb of Horatia, murdered by her brother for displaying excessive
grief at the death of her lover. But on this morning his usual good spirits
had deserted him. He was too preoccupied with Crassus.
“Half of Rome belongs to him—these tombs as well, I
should not wonder. You could house an entire family in one of these! Why not?
Crassus would! Have you ever seen him in operation?
Let us say he hears there is a fire raging and spreading through a particular
neighborhood: he sends a team of slaves around all the apartments, offering
to buy out the owners for next to nothing. When the poor fellows have agreed,
he sends another team equipped with water carts to put the fires out! That is
just one of his tricks. Do you know what Sicinnius
calls him—always bearing in mind, by the way, that Sicinnius
is afraid of no one? He calls Crassus ‘the most
dangerous bull in the herd.’”
His chin sank onto his
chest and that was all he said until we had passed the eighth milestone and were deep into open country, not far from Bovillae. That was when he drew my attention to something
odd: military pickets guarding what looked like small timber yards. We had
already passed four or five, spaced out at regular half-mile intervals, and
the farther down the road we went, the greater the activity seemed—hammering,
sawing, digging. It was Cicero who eventually supplied the answer. The
legionnaires were making crosses. Soon afterwards, we encountered a column of
Crassus’s infantry tramping toward us, heading for
Rome, and we
had to pull over to the far side of the road to let them pass. Behind the legionnaires
came a stumbling procession of prisoners, hundreds of them, vanquished rebel
slaves, their arms pinioned behind their backs—a terrible, emaciated, gray
army of ghosts, heading for a fate which we had seen being prepared for them,
but of which they were presumably ignorant. Our driver muttered a spell to
ward off evil and flicked his whip over the flanks of the horses, and we
jolted forward. A mile or so later, the killing started, in little huddles
off on either side of the road, where the prisoners were being nailed to the
crosses. I try not to remember it, but it comes back to me occasionally in
my dreams, especially, for some reason, the crosses with their impaled and
shrieking victims being pulled upright by soldiers heaving on ropes, each
wooden upright dropping with a thud into the deep hole that had been dug for
it. That I remember and also the moment when we passed over the crest of a
hill and saw a long avenue of crosses running straight ahead for mile after
mile, shimmering in the mid-morning heat, the air seeming to tremble with
the moans of the dying, the buzz of the flies, the screams of the circling
crows.
“So this is why he dragged
me out of Rome,” murmured Cicero, “to intimidate me by showing me
these poor wretches.” He had gone very white, for he was squeamish about pain
and death, even when inflicted on animals, and for that reason tried to avoid
attending the games. I suppose this also explains his aversion to all matters
military. He had done the bare minimum of army service in his youth, and he
was quite incapable of wielding a sword or hurling a javelin; throughout his
career he had to put up with the taunt of being a draft dodger.
Latin scholars may take exception to
Harris’ portrayal of Cicero,
but most readers will find Imperium to be a lively political story that grips
interest from beginning to end.
Steve Hopkins,
November 20, 2006
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