Imperium (15 page)

Like all those before it, Cicero’s century backed the official slate—Hortensius and Quintus Metellus for consul; Marcus Metellus and Palicanus for praetor—and now it was merely a question of going on until an absolute majority was reached. The poorer men must have known they could not affect the outcome, but such was the dignity conveyed by the franchise that they stood all afternoon in the heat, waiting their turn to collect their ballots and shuffle over the bridge. Cicero and I went up and down the lines as he canvassed support for the aedileship, and it was marvelous how many he knew personally—not just the voters’ names, but their wives’ names and the numbers of their children, and the nature of their employment: all done without any prompting from me. At the eleventh hour, when the sun was just starting to dip toward the Janiculum, a halt was called at last and Pompey proclaimed the winners. Hortensius had topped the poll for consul, with Quintus Metellus second; Marcus Metellus had won most votes for praetor. Their jubilant supporters crowded around them, and now for the first time we saw the red-headed figure of Gaius Verres slip into the front rank—“The puppet-master comes to take his bow,” observed Cicero—and one would have thought that
he
had won the consulship by the way the aristocrats shook his hand and pounded him on the back. One of them, a former consul, Scribonius Curio, embraced Verres and said, loud enough for all to hear, “I hereby inform you that today’s election means your acquittal!”

There are few forces in politics harder to resist than a feeling that something is inevitable, for humans move as a flock, and will always rush like sheep toward the safety of a winner. On every side now, one heard the same opinion: Cicero was done for, Cicero was finished, the aristocrats were back in charge, no jury would ever convict Gaius Verres. Aemilius Alba, who fancied himself a wit, told everyone he met that he was in despair: the bottom had dropped out of the market for Verres’s jurors, and he couldn’t sell himself for more than three thousand. Attention now switched to the forthcoming elections for aedile, and it was not long before Cicero detected Verres’s hand at work behind the scenes here as well. A professional election agent, Ranunculus, who was well disposed toward Cicero and was afterwards employed by him, came to warn the senator that Verres had called a nighttime meeting at his own house of all the leading bribery merchants and had offered five thousand to every man who could persuade his tribe not to vote for Cicero. I could see that both Cicero and his brother were worried. Worse was to follow. A few days later, on the eve of the actual election, the Senate met with Crassus in the chair, to witness the praetors-elect draw lots to determine which courts they would preside over when they took office in January. I was not present, but Cicero was in the chamber, and he returned home afterwards looking white and limp. The unbelievable had happened: Marcus Metellus, already a juror in the Verres case, had drawn the extortion court!

Even in his darkest imaginings, Cicero had never contemplated such an outcome. He was so shocked he had almost lost his voice. “You should have heard the uproar in the house,” he whispered to Quintus. “Crassus must have rigged the draw. Everyone believes he did it, but nobody knows
how
he did it. That man will not rest until I am broken, bankrupt, and in exile.” He shuffled into his study and collapsed into his chair. It was a stiflingly hot day, the third of August, and there was hardly room to move among all the accumulated material from the Verres case: the piles of tax records and affidavits and witness statements, roasting and dusty in the heat. (And these were only a fraction of the total: most were locked in boxes in the cellar.) His draft speech—his immense opening speech, which kept on growing and growing, like some proliferating madness—was stacked in tottering piles across his desk. I had long since given up trying to keep track of it. Only he knew how it might come together. It was all in his head, the sides of which he now began massaging with the tips of his fingers. He asked in a croaking voice for a cup of water. I turned away to fetch it, heard a sigh and then a thump, and when I looked around he had slumped forward, knocking his skull against the edge of his desk. Quintus and I rushed to either side of him and pulled him up. His cheeks were dead gray, with a livid streak of bright red blood trickling from his nose; his mouth hung slack and open.

Quintus was in a panic. “Fetch Terentia!” he shouted. “Quickly!”

I ran upstairs to her room and told her the master was ill. She came down at once and was magnificent in the way she took command. Cicero by now was feebly conscious, his head between his knees. She knelt beside him, called for water, pulled a fan from her sleeve, and starting waving it vigorously to cool his cheeks. Quintus, in the meantime, still wringing his hands, had dispatched the two junior secretaries to fetch whatever doctors were in the neighborhood, and each soon returned with a Greek medic in tow. The wretched quacks immediately began arguing between themselves about whether it was best to purge or bleed. Terentia sent both packing. She also refused to allow Cicero to be carried up to bed, warning Quintus that word of this would quickly get around, and the widespread belief that her husband was finished would then become an accomplished fact. She made him rise unsteadily to his feet and, holding his arm, took him out into the atrium, where the air was fresher. Quintus and I followed. “You are not finished!” I could hear her saying sternly to him. “You have your case—now make it!” Cicero mumbled something in reply.

Quintus burst out: “That is all very well, Terentia, but you do not understand what has just happened.” And he told her about Metellus’s appointment as the new president of the extortion court, and its implications. There was no chance of a guilty verdict being returned once
he
was in the judge’s chair, which meant that their only hope was to have the hearing concluded by December. But that was impossible, given Hortensius’s ability to spin it out. There was simply too much evidence for the time available: only ten days in court before Pompey’s games, and Cicero’s opening statement alone would take up most of it. No sooner would he have finished outlining his case than the court would be in recess for the best part of a month, and by the time they came back the jury would have forgotten his brilliant points. “Not that it matters,” Quintus concluded gloomily, “as most of them are in the pay of Verres already.”

“It is true, Terentia,” said Cicero. He looked around him distractedly, as if he had only just woken up and realized where he was. “I must pull out of the election for aedile,” he muttered. “It would be humiliating to lose, but even more humiliating to win and not be able to discharge the duties of the office.”

“Pathetic,” replied Terentia, and she angrily pulled her arm free of his. “You do not deserve to be elected if this is how you surrender at the first setback, without putting up a fight!”

“My dear,” said Cicero beseechingly, pressing his hand to his forehead, “if you will tell me how I am supposed to defeat time itself, then I will fight it bravely. But what am I to do if I have only ten days to set out my prosecution before the court goes into recess for weeks on end?”

Terentia leaned in so that her face was only inches from his and hissed, “Make your speech shorter!”

AFTER HIS WIFE HAD RETIRED to her corner of the house, Cicero, still not fully recovered from his fit of nerves, retreated to his study and sat there for a long time, staring at the wall. We left him alone. Sthenius came by just before sunset to report that Quintus Metellus had summoned all the Sicilian witnesses to his house, and that a few of the more timid souls had foolishly obeyed. From one of these, Sthenius had obtained a full report of how Metellus had tried to intimidate them into retracting their evidence. “I am consul-elect,” he had thundered at them. “One of my brothers is governing Sicily, the other is going to preside over the extortion court. Many steps have been taken to ensure that no harm can befall Verres. We shall not forget those who go against us.” I took down the exact quotation and tentatively went in to see Cicero. He had not moved in several hours. I read out Metellus’s words, but he gave no sign of having heard.

By this stage I was becoming seriously concerned, and would have fetched his brother or his wife again, if his mind had not suddenly reemerged from wherever it had been wandering. Staring straight ahead, he said in a grim tone: “Go and make an appointment for me to see Pompey this evening.” When I hesitated, wondering if this was another symptom of his malady, he glared at me. “Go!”

It was only a short distance to Pompey’s house, which was in the same district of the Esquiline Hill as Cicero’s. The sun had just gone down but it was still light, and swelteringly hot, with a torpid breeze wafting gently from the east—the worst possible combination at the height of summer, because it carried into the neighborhood the stench of the putrefying corpses in the great common graves beyond the city wall. I believe the problem is not so acute these days, but sixty years ago the Esquiline Gate was the place where everything dead and not worth a proper funeral was taken to be dumped—the bodies of dogs and cats, horses, donkeys, slaves, paupers, and stillborn babies, all mixed up and rotting together, along with the household refuse. The stink always drew great flocks of crying gulls, and I remember that on this particular evening it was especially acute, a rancid and pervasive smell, which one tasted on the tongue as much as one absorbed it through the nostrils.

Pompey’s house was much grander than Cicero’s, with a couple of lictors posted outside and a crowd of sightseers gathered opposite. There were also half a dozen canopied litters set down in the lee of the wall, their bearers squatting nearby playing bones—evidence that a big dinner party was in progress. I gave my message to the gatekeeper, who vanished inside and returned a little later with the praetor-elect, Palicanus, who was dabbing at his greasy chin with a napkin. He recognized me, asked what it was all about, and I repeated my message. “Right you are,” said Palicanus, in his blunt way. “You can tell him from me that the consul will see him immediately.”

Cicero must have known Pompey would agree to meet, for when I returned he had already changed into a fresh set of clothes and was ready to go out. He was still very pale. He exchanged a last look with Quintus, and then we set out. There was no conversation between us as we walked, because Cicero, who hated any reminder of death, kept his sleeve pressed to his mouth and nose to ward off the smell from the Esquiline field. “Wait here,” he said, when we reached Pompey’s house, and that was the last I saw of him for several hours. The daylight faded, the massy purple twilight ripened into darkness, and the stars began to appear in clusters. Occasionally, when the door was opened, the muffled sounds of voices and laughter reached the street, and I could smell meat and fish cooking, although on that foul night they all reeked of death to me, and I wondered how Cicero could possibly find the stomach for it, for by now it was clear that Pompey had asked him to join his dinner party.

I paced up and down, leaned against the wall, attempted to think up some new symbols for my great shorthand system, and generally tried to occupy myself as the night went on. Eventually Pompey’s guests started reeling out, half of them too drunk to stand properly, and it was the usual crew of Piceneans—Afranius, the former praetor and lover of the dance; Palicanus, of course; and Gabinius, Palicanus’s son in law, who also had a reputation for loving women and song—a real old soldiers’ reunion, it must have been, and I found it hard to imagine that Cicero could have enjoyed himself much. Only the austere and scholarly Varro—“the man who showed Pompey where the Senate House was,” in Cicero’s cutting phrase—would have been remotely congenial company, especially as he at least emerged sober. Cicero was the last to leave. He set off up the street and I hurried after him. There was a good yellow moon and I had no difficulty in making out his figure. He still kept his hand up to his nose, for neither the heat nor the smell had much diminished, and when he was a decent distance from Pompey’s house, he leaned against the corner of an alley and was violently sick.

I came up behind him and asked him if he needed assistance, at which he shook his head and responded, “It is done.” That was all he said to me, and all he said to Quintus, too, who was waiting up anxiously for him at the house when he got in: “It is done.”

AT DAWN THE FOLLOWING DAY we made the two-mile walk back to the Field of Mars for the second round of elections. Although these did not carry the same prestige as those for the consulship and the praetorship, they always had the advantage of being much more exciting. Thirty-four men had to be elected (twenty senators, ten tribunes, and four aediles), which meant there were simply too many candidates for the poll to be easily controlled: when an aristocrat’s vote carried no more weight than a pauper’s, anything could happen. Crassus, as junior consul, was the presiding officer at this supplementary election—“but presumably even he,” said Cicero darkly as he pulled on his red leather shoes, “cannot rig this ballot.”

He had woken in an edgy, preoccupied mood. Whatever he and Pompey had agreed to the previous night had obviously disturbed his rest and he snapped irritably at his valet that his shoes were not clean. He donned the same brilliant white toga he had worn on this day six years earlier, when he had first been elected to the Senate, and braced himself before the front door was opened, as if he were about to shoulder a great weight. Once again, Quintus had done a fine job, and a marvelous crowd was waiting to escort him out to the voting pens. When we reached the Field of Mars we found it was packed right down to the river’s edge, for there was a census in progress, and tens of thousands had come to the city to register. You can imagine the noisy roar of it. There must have been a hundred candidates for those thirty-four offices, and all across the vast open field one could see these gleaming figures passing to and fro, accompanied by their friends and supporters, trying to gather every last vote before polling opened. Verres’s red head was also conspicuous, darting all over the place, with his father, his son, and his freedman Timarchides—the man who had invaded our house—making extravagant promises to any who would vote against Cicero. The sight seemed to banish Cicero’s ill humor instantly, and he plunged into the canvass. I thought on several occasions that our groups might collide, but the crowd was so huge it never happened.