The Dictator (55 page)

BOOK: The Dictator

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tribes
the Roman people were divided into thirty-five tribes for the purposes of voting on legislation and to elect the tribunes; unlike the system of voting by
century
, the votes of rich and poor when cast in a tribe had equal weight

tribune
a representative of the ordinary citizens—the plebeians—ten of whom were elected annually each summer and took office in December, with the power to propose and veto legislation, and to summon assemblies of the people; it was forbidden for anyone other than a plebeian to hold the office

triumph
an elaborate public celebration of homecoming, granted by the Senate to honour a victorious general, to qualify for which it was necessary for him to retain his military imperium—and as it was forbidden to enter Rome whilst still possessing military authority, generals wishing to triumph had to wait outside the city until the Senate granted them a triumph

urban praetor
the head of the justice system, senior of all the praetors, third in rank in the republic after the two consuls

My greatest debt over the twelve years it has taken to write this novel and its two predecessors is to the Loeb edition of Cicero’s collected speeches, letters and writings, published by Harvard University Press. I have been obliged to edit and compress Cicero’s words, but wherever possible I have tried to let his voice come through. Loeb has been my Bible.

I have also made constant use of the great nineteenth-century works of reference edited by William Smith: his
Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology
(three volumes) and
Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography
(two volumes); these are now freely available online.
The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, Volume II, 99
BC
—31
BC
by T. Robert S. Broughton was also invaluable, as was
The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World,
edited by Richard J. A. Talbert. Again, wherever possible I have followed the facts and descriptions offered in the original sources—Plutarch, Appian, Sallust, Caesar—and I thank all those scholars and translators who have made them accessible and whose words I have used.

Biographies of, and books about, Cicero, which have given me numberless insights and ideas, include
Cicero: A Turbulent Life
by Anthony Everitt,
Cicero: A Portrait
by Elizabeth Rawson,
Cicero
by D. R. Shackleton Bailey,
Cicero and His Friends
by Gaston Bossier,
Cicero: The Secrets of His Correspondence
by Jérôme Carcopino,
Cicero: A Political Biography
by David Stockton,
Cicero: Politics and Persuasion in Ancient Rome
by Kathryn Tempest,
Cicero as Evidence
by Andrew Lintott,
The Hand of Cicero
by Shane Butler,
Terentia, Tullia and Publia: The Women of Cicero’s Family
by Susan Treggiari,
The Cambridge Companion to Cicero
edited by Catherine Steel, and—still thoroughly readable and useful—
The History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero,
published in 1741 by Conyers Middleton (1683–1750).

Biographies of Cicero’s contemporaries which I have found particularly useful include
Caesar
by Christian Meier,
Caesar
by Adrian Goldsworthy,
The Death of Caesar
by Barry Strauss,
Pompey
by Robin Seager,
Marcus Crassus and the Late Roman Republic
by Allen Ward,
Marcus Crassus, Millionaire
by Frank Adcock,
The Patrician Tribune: Publius Clodius Pulcher
by W. Jeffrey Tatum and
Catullus: A Poet in the Rome of Julius Caesar
by Aubrey Burl.

For the general ambience of Rome—its culture, society and political structure—I have drawn on three works by the incomparable Peter Wiseman—
New Men in the Roman Senate, Catullus and His World
and
Cinna the Poet and Other Roman Essays.
To these I must also add
The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic
by Fergus Millar, which analyses how politics might have operated in Cicero’s Rome. Also valuable were
Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic
by Elizabeth Rawson,
The Constitution of the Roman Republic
by Andrew Lintott,
The Roman Forum
by Michael Grant,
Roman Aristocratic Parties and Families
by Friedrich Münzer (translated by Thérèse Ridley) and (of course)
The Roman Revolution
by Ronald Syme and Theodore Mommsen’s
History of Rome.

For the physical recreation of Republican Rome I relied on the scholarship of
A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome
by L. Richardson Jr.,
A Topographical Dictionary of Rome
by Samuel Ball Platner, the
Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome
(two volumes) by Ernest Nash and
Mapping Augustan Rome,
the
Journal of Roman Archaeology
project directed by Lothar Haselberger.

A special word of thanks should go to Tom Holland whose wonderful
Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic
(2003) first gave me the idea of writing a fictional account of the friendships, rivalries and enmities between Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, Cato, Crassus and the rest.

Dictator
is my fourth foray into the ancient world, a series of journeys that began with
Pompeii
(2003). One of the great pleasures of these years has been meeting scholars of Roman history who have been without exception encouraging, even to the extent of electing me a proud if notably undistinguished President of the Classical Association in 2008. For various offers of encouragement and advice over the years I would like to thank in particular Mary Beard, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Jasper Griffin, Tom Holland, Bob Fowler, Peter Wiseman and Andrea Carandini. I apologise to those I have forgotten, and naturally absolve all those listed above of any responsibility for what I have written.

The two publishers who first commissioned me to write about Cicero were Sue Freestone in London and David Rosenthal in New York. Like the Roman Empire, they have both moved on, but I would like to thank them for their original enthusiasm and continued friendship. Their successors, Jocasta Hamilton and Sonny Mehta, have stepped into the breach and skilfully steered the project to its conclusion. Thanks also to Gail Rebuck and to Susan Sandon, for gallantly staying the course. My agent, Pat Kavanagh, to my great sadness and that of all her authors, did not live to see the work which she represented completed; I hope she would have enjoyed it. My thanks go to my other agents, Michael Carlisle of Inkwell Management in New York, and to Nicki Kennedy and Sam Edenborough of ILA in London. The estimable Wolfgang Müller, my German translator, once again acted as an unofficial copy-editor. Joy Terekiev and Cristiana Moroni of Mondadori in Italy have shared the journey literally to Tusculum and Formiae.

Finally—
finally
—I would like to thank, as always, my wife, Gill, and also our children, Holly, Charlie, Matilda and Sam, half of whose lives have been lived in the shadow of Cicero. Despite this, or perhaps even because of it, Holly took a degree in classics and now knows far more about the ancient world than her old dad, so it is to her that this book is dedicated.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Harris is the author of nine bestselling novels:
Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium, The Ghost Writer, Conspirata, The Fear Index,
and
An Officer and a Spy.
Several of his books have been adapted to film, most recently
The Ghost Writer,
directed by Roman Polanski. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. He lives in the village of Kintbury, England, with his wife, Gill Hornby.