Imperium (8 page)

“I hereby dedicate,” he said, in the booming voice of a trained orator, “at the same time as Pompey’s games—on the same day as Pompey’s games—one tenth of my fortune—one tenth of my
entire
fortune—to providing free food to the people of Rome—free food for every one of you, for
three months
—and a great banquet in the streets—a banquet for every citizen—a banquet in honor of Hercules!”

The crowd went into fresh ecstasies. “The villain,” said Cicero admiringly. “A tenth of his fortune is a bribe of twenty million! But cheap at the price. See how he turns a weak position into a strong one? I bet you were not expecting
that,
” he called out to Palicanus, who was struggling toward us from the tribunal. “He has made himself look Pompey’s equal. You should never have allowed him a platform.”

“Come and meet the imperator,” urged Palicanus. “He wants to thank you in person.” I could see Cicero was of two minds, but Palicanus tugged at his sleeve, and I suppose he thought he ought to try to salvage something from the day.

“Is he going to make a speech?” shouted Cicero as we followed Palicanus toward the tribunal.

“He does not really make speeches,” replied Palicanus over his shoulder. “Not yet, anyway.”

“That is a mistake. They will expect him to say something.”

“Well, they will just have to be disappointed.”

“What a waste,” Cicero muttered to me in disgust. “What I would not give to have an audience such as this! How often do you see so many voters in one place?”

But Pompey had little experience in public oratory, and besides he was accustomed to commanding men, not pandering to them. With a final wave to the crowd he clambered down from the platform. Crassus followed suit, and the applause slowly died away. There was a palpable sense of anticlimax, as people stood around, wondering what they should do next. “What a waste,” repeated Cicero. “
I
would have given them a show.”

Behind the tribunal was a small, enclosed area, where it was the custom for the magistrates to wait before going up to officiate on election day. Palicanus conducted us into it, past the guards, and here, a moment or two later, Pompey himself appeared. A young black slave handed him a cloth, and he dabbed at his sweating face and wiped the back of his neck. A dozen senators waited to greet him, and Palicanus thrust Cicero into the middle of the line, then drew back with Quintus, Lucius, and me to watch. Pompey was moving down the queue, shaking hands with each of the senators in turn, Afranius at his back to tell him who was who. “Good to meet you,” said Pompey. “Good to meet you. Good to meet you.” As he came closer I had a better opportunity to study him. He had a noble face, no question of it, but there was also a disagreeable vanity in those fleshy features, and his grand, distracted manner only emphasized his obvious boredom at meeting all these tedious civilians. He reached Cicero very quickly.

“This is Marcus Cicero, Imperator,” said Afranius.

“Good to meet you.”

He was about to move on, but Afranius took his elbow and whispered, “Cicero is considered one of the city’s foremost advocates, and was very useful to us in the Senate.”

“Was he? Well, then—keep up the good work.”

“I shall,” said Cicero quickly, “for I hope next year to be aedile.”

“Aedile?” Pompey scoffed at the very idea. “No, no, I do not think
aedile
. I have other plans in that direction. But I’m sure we can always find a use for a clever lawyer.”

And with that he really did move on—“Good to meet you…Good to meet you…”—leaving Cicero staring straight ahead and swallowing hard.

Roll V

THAT NIGHT, for the first and last time in all my years in his service, Cicero drank too much. I could hear him arguing over dinner with Terentia—not one of their normal, witty, icily courteous disputes, but a row which echoed throughout the small house, as she berated him for his stupidity in ever trusting such a dishonorable gang: Piceneans, all of them, not even proper Romans! “But then of course, you are not a proper Roman, either”—a dig at Cicero’s lowly provincial origins which invariably got under his skin. Ominously, I did not hear what he said back to her—it was delivered in such a quiet, malevolent tone—but whatever it was, it must have been devastating, for Terentia, who was not a woman easily shaken, ran from the dining room in tears and disappeared upstairs.

I thought it best to leave him well alone. But an hour later I heard a crash, and when I went in Cicero was on his feet and swaying slightly, staring at a broken plate. The front of his tunic was stained with wine. “I really do not feel well,” he said.

I got him up to his room by hooking his arm over my shoulder—not an easy procedure, as he was heavier than I—laid him on his bed, and unlaced his shoes. “Divorce,” he muttered into his pillow, “that is the answer, Tiro—divorce, and if I have to leave the Senate because I can’t afford it—well, so what? Nobody would miss me. Just another ‘new man’ who came to nothing. Oh, dear, Tiro!” I managed to get his chamber pot in front of him just before he was sick. Head down, he addressed his own vomit. “We shall go to Athens, my dear fellow, and live with Atticus and study philosophy and no one here will miss us—” these last few words ran together into a self-pitying burble of slurred syllables which no shorthand symbol of mine could ever have reconstructed. I set the pot beside him and blew out the lamp. He was snoring even before I reached the door, but I confess I went to bed that night with a troubled heart.

And yet, the next morning, I was woken at exactly the usual predawn hour by the sound of him going through his exercises—a little more slowly than usual, perhaps, but then it was awfully early, for this was the height of summer, and he can hardly have had more than a few hours’ sleep. Such was the nature of the man. Failure was the fuel of his ambition. Each time he suffered a humiliation—be it as an advocate in his early days when his constitution failed him, or on his return from Sicily, or now, with Pompey’s offhand treatment—the fire in him was temporarily banked, but only that it might flare up again even more fiercely. “It is perseverance,” he used to say, “and not genius that takes a man to the top. Rome is full of unrecognized geniuses. Only perseverance enables you to move forward in the world.” I heard him preparing for another day of struggle in the Roman Forum and felt the old, familiar rhythm of the house reassert itself.

I dressed. I lit the lamps. I told the porter to open the front door. I checked the callers. Then I went into Cicero’s study and gave him his list of clients. No mention was ever made, either then or in the future, of what had happened the previous night, and I suspect this helped draw us even closer. To be sure, he looked a little green, and he had to screw up his eyes to focus on the names, but otherwise he was entirely normal. “Sthenius!” he groaned, when he saw who was waiting, as usual, in the tablinum. “May the gods have mercy upon us!”

“He is not alone,” I warned him. “He has brought two more Sicilians with him.”

“You mean to say he is multiplying?” He coughed to clear his throat. “Right. Let us have him in first and get rid of him once and for all.”

As in some curious recurring dream from which one cannot wake, I found myself yet again conducting Sthenius of Thermae into Cicero’s presence. His companions he introduced as Heraclius of Syracuse and Epicrates of Bidis. Both were old men, dressed, like Sthenius, in the dark garb of mourning, with uncut hair and beards.

“Now listen, Sthenius,” said Cicero sternly, after he had shaken hands with the grim-looking trio, “this has got to stop.”

But Sthenius was in his own strange and private kingdom, into which outside sounds seldom penetrated: the land of the obsessive litigant. “I am most grateful to you, senator. Firstly, now that I have obtained the court records from Syracuse,” he said, pulling a piece of paper from his leather bag and thrusting it into Cicero’s hands, “you can see what the monster has done. This is what was written before the verdict of the tribunes. And this,” he said, giving him another, “is what was written afterwards.”

With a sigh, Cicero held the two documents side by side and squinted at them. “So what is this? This is the official record of your trial for treason, in which I see it is written that you were present during the hearing. Well, we know that is nonsense. And here”—his words began to slow as he realized the implications—“…here it says that you were
not
present.” He looked up, his bleary eyes starting to clear. “So Verres is falsifying the proceedings of his own court, and then he is falsifying his own falsification?”

“Exactly!” said Sthenius. “When he realized you had produced me before the tribunes, and that all of Rome knew I could hardly have been in Syracuse on the first day of December, he had to obliterate the record of his lie. But the first document was already on its way to me.”

“Well, well,” said Cicero, continuing to scrutinize the papers, “perhaps he is more worried than we thought. And I see it also says here that you had a defense attorney representing you that day: ‘Gaius Claudius, son of Gaius Claudius, of the Palatine tribe.’ You are a fortunate man, to have your very own Roman lawyer. Who is he?”

“He is Verres’s business manager.”

Cicero studied Sthenius for a moment or two. “What else do you have in that bag of yours?” he said.

Out it all came then, tipped over the study floor on that hot summer’s morning: letters, names, scraps of official records, scribbled notes of gossip and rumors—seven months’ angry labor by three desperate men, for it transpired that Heraclius and Epicrates had also been swindled by Verres out of their estates, one worth sixty thousand, the other thirty. In both cases, Verres had abused his office to bring false accusations and secure illegal verdicts. Both had been robbed at around the same time as Sthenius. Both had been, until then, the leading men in their communities. Both had been obliged to flee the island penniless and seek refuge in Rome. Hearing of Sthenius’s appearance before the tribunes, they had sought him out and proposed cooperation.

“As single victims, they were weak,” said Cicero years later, reminiscing about the case, “but when they joined in common cause, they found they had a network of contacts which spread across the entire island: Thermae in the north, Bidis in the south, Syracuse in the east. These were men sagacious by nature, shrewd by experience, accomplished by education, and their fellow-countrymen had opened up the secrets of their suffering to them, as they would never have done to a Roman senator.”

Outwardly Cicero still seemed the calm advocate. But as the sun grew stronger and I blew out the lamps, and as he picked up one document after another, I could sense his gathering excitement. Here was the sworn affidavit of Dio of Halaesa, from whom Verres had first demanded a bribe of ten thousand to bring in a not-guilty verdict, and then had stolen all his horses, tapestries, and gold and silver plate. Here were the written testimonies of priests whose temples had been robbed—a bronze Apollo, signed in silver by the sculptor Myron, and presented by Scipio a century and a half earlier, stolen from the shrine of Aesculapius at Agrigentum; a statue of Ceres carried away from Catina, and of Victory from Henna; the sacking of the ancient shrine of Juno in Melita. Here was the evidence of farmers in Herbita and Agyrium, threatened with being flogged to death unless they paid protection money to Verres’s agents. Here was the story of the wretched Sopater of Tyndaris, seized in midwinter by Verres’s lictors and bound naked to an equestrian statue in full view of the entire community, until he and his fellow citizens agreed to hand over a valuable municipal bronze of Mercury that stood in the local gymnasium. “It is not a province Verres is running down there,” murmured Cicero in wonder, “it is a fully fledged criminal state.” There were a dozen more of these grim stories.

With the agreement of the three Sicilians, I bundled the papers together and locked them in the senator’s strongbox. “It is vital, gentlemen, that not a word of this leaks out,” Cicero told them. “By all means continue to collect statements and witnesses, but please do it discreetly. Verres has used violence and intimidation many times before, and you can be sure he will use them again to protect himself. We need to take the rascal unawares.”

“Does that mean,” asked Sthenius, hardly daring to hope, “that you will help us?”

Cicero looked at him but did not answer.

LATER THAT DAY, when he returned from the law courts, the senator made up his quarrel with his wife. He dispatched young Sositheus down to the old flower market in the Forum Boarium, in front of the Temple of Portunus, to buy a bouquet of fragrant summer blooms. These he then gave to little Tullia, telling her solemnly that he had a vital task for her. She was to take them in to her mother and announce they had come for her from a rough provincial admirer. (“Have you got that, Tulliola? ‘A rough provincial admirer.’”) She disappeared very self-importantly into Terentia’s chamber, and I guess they must have done the trick, for that evening, when—at Cicero’s insistence—the couches were carried up to the roof and the family dined beneath the summer stars, the flowers had a place of honor at the center of the table.

I know this because, as the meal was ending, I was unexpectedly sent for by Cicero. It was a still night, without a flicker of wind to disturb the candles, and the nighttime sounds of Rome down in the valley mingled with the scent of the flowers in the warm June air—snatches of music, voices, the call of the watchmen along the Argiletum, the distant barking of the guard dogs set loose in the precincts of the Capitoline Triad. Lucius and Quintus were still laughing at some joke of Cicero’s, and even Terentia could not quite hide her amusement as she flicked her napkin at her husband and scolded him that that was quite enough. (Pomponia, thankfully, was away visiting her brother in Athens.)

“Ah,” said Cicero, looking around, “now here is Tiro, the master politician of us all, which means I can proceed to make my little declaration. I thought it appropriate that he should be present to hear this as well. I have decided to stand for election as aedile.”

“Oh, very good!” said Quintus, who thought it was all still part of Cicero’s joke. Then he stopped laughing and said in a puzzled way, “But that is not funny.”

“It will be if I win.”

“But you cannot win. You heard what Pompey said. He doesn’t want you to be a candidate.”

“It is not for Pompey to decide who is to be a candidate. We are free citizens, free to make our own choices. I choose to run for aedile.”

“There is no sense in running and losing, Marcus. That is the sort of pointlessly heroic gesture Lucius here believes in.”

“Let us drink to pointless heroism,” said Lucius, raising his glass.

“But we cannot win against Pompey’s opposition,” persisted Quintus. “And what is the point of incurring Pompey’s enmity?”

To which Terentia retorted: “After yesterday, one might better ask, What is the point of incurring Pompey’s friendship?”

“Terentia is right,” said Cicero. “Yesterday has taught me a lesson. Let us say I wait a year or two, hanging on Pompey’s every word in the hope of favor, running errands for him. We have all seen men like that in the Senate—growing older, waiting for half promises to be fulfilled. They are hollowed out by it. And before they even know it, their moment has passed and they have nothing left with which to bargain. I would sooner clear out of politics right now than let that happen to me. If you want power, there is a time when you have to seize it. This is my time.”

“But how is this to be accomplished?”

“By prosecuting Gaius Verres for extortion.”

So there it was. I had known he would do it since early morning, and so, I am sure, had he, but he had wanted to take his time about it—to try on the decision, as it were, and see how it fitted him. And it fitted him very well. I had never seen him more determined. He looked like a man who believed he had the force of history running through him. Nobody spoke.

“Come on!” he said with a smile. “Why the long faces? I have not lost yet! And I do not believe I shall lose, either. I had a visit from the Sicilians this morning. They have gathered the most damning testimony against Verres, have they not, Tiro? We have it under lock and key downstairs. And when we do win—think of it! I defeat Hortensius in open court, and all this ‘second-best advocate’ nonsense is finished forever. I assume the rank of the man I convict, according to the traditional rights of the victorious prosecutor, which means I become a praetorian overnight—so no more jumping up and down on the bank benches in the Senate, hoping to be called. And I place myself so firmly before the gaze of the Roman people that my election as aedile is assured. But the best thing of all is that
I
do it—I, Cicero—and I do it without owing favors to anyone, least of all Pompey the Great.”

“But what if we lose?” said Quintus, finding his voice at last. “We are defense attorneys. We never prosecute. You have said it yourself a hundred times: defenders win friends; prosecutors just make enemies. If you don’t bring Verres down, there is a good chance he will eventually be elected consul. Then he will never rest until you are destroyed.”

“That is true,” conceded Cicero. “If you are going to kill a dangerous animal, you had better make sure you do it with the first thrust. But then—do you not see? This way I can win everything as well. Rank, fame, office, dignity, authority, independence, a base of clients in Rome and Sicily. It opens my way clear through to becoming consul.”

This was the first time I had heard him mention his great ambition, and it was a measure of his renewed confidence that he felt able to utter the word at last.
Consul
. For every man in public life, this was the apotheosis. The very years themselves were distinguished from one another on all official documents and foundation stones by the names of the presiding consuls. It was the nearest thing below heaven to immortality. How many nights and days must he have thought of it, dreamed of it, nursed it, since his gawky adolescence? Sometimes it is foolish to articulate an ambition too early—exposing it prematurely to the laughter and skepticism of the world can destroy it before it is even properly born. But sometimes the opposite occurs, and the very act of mentioning a thing makes it suddenly seem possible, even plausible. That was how it was that night. When Cicero pronounced the word
consul,
he planted it in the ground like a standard for us all to admire. And for a moment we glimpsed the brilliant, starry future through his eyes, and saw that he was right: that if he took down Verres, he had a chance; that he might just—with luck—go all the way to the summit.