Imperium:

by Robert Harris

  All of this required money, and although Cicero’s legal practice was now bringing in some income – not in the form of direct payments, of course, which were forbidden, but in gifts and legacies from grateful clients – he had nothing like the amount of ready cash necessary to mount a proper prosecution. Most ambitious young men in his position would have gone to see Crassus, who always gave loans to rising politicians on generous terms. But just as Crassus liked to show that he rewarded support, so he also took care to let people see how he punished opposition. Ever since Cicero had declined to join his camp, he had gone out of his way to demonstrate his enmity. He cut him dead in public. He poor-mouthed him behind his back. Perhaps if Cicero had grovelled sufficiently, he would have condescended to change his mind: his principles were infinitely malleable. But, as I have already said, the two men found it difficult even to stand within ten feet of one another.

  So Cicero had no choice but to approach Terentia, and a painful scene ensued. I only became involved because Cicero, in a rather cowardly way, at first dispatched me to see her business manager, Philotimus, to enquire how difficult it would be to raise one hundred thousand from her estate. With characteristic malevolence, Philotimus immediately reported my approach to his mistress, who stormed down to find me in Cicero’s study, and demanded to know how I dared poke my nose into her affairs. Cicero came in while this was happening and was consequently obliged to explain why he needed the money.

  ‘And how is this sum to be repaid?’ demanded Terentia.

  ‘From the fine levied on Verres once he is found guilty,’ replied her husband.

  ‘And you are sure he will be found guilty?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why? What is your case? Let me hear it.’ And with that she sat down in his chair and folded her arms. Cicero hesitated, but knowing his wife and seeing she was not to be shifted, told me to open the strongbox and fetch out the Sicilians’ evidence. He took her through it, piece by piece, and at the end of it she regarded him with unfeigned dismay. ‘But that is not enough, Cicero! You have wagered everything on that? Do you really think a jury of senators will convict one of their own because he has rescued some important statues from provincial obscurity and brought them back to Rome – where they properly belong?’

  ‘You may be right, my dear,’ conceded Cicero. ‘That is why I need to go to Sicily.’

  Terentia regarded her husband – arguably the greatest orator and the cleverest senator in Rome at that time – with the sort of look a matron might reserve for a child who has made a puddle on the drawing room floor. She would have said something, I am sure, but she noticed I was still there, and thought the better of it. Silently, she rose and left the study.

  The following day, Philotimus sought me out and handed me a small money chest containing ten thousand in cash, with authorisation to draw a further forty thousand as necessary.

  ‘Exactly half of what I asked for,’ said Cicero, when I took it in to him. ‘That is a shrewd businesswoman’s assessment of my chances, Tiro – and who is to say she is wrong?’

  VII

  WE LEFT ROME on the Ides of January, on the last day of the Festival of the Nymphs, with Cicero riding in a covered wagon so that he could continue to work – although I found it a torment even attempting to read, let alone write, in that rattling, creaking, lurching carruca. It was a miserable journey, freezing cold, with flurries of snow across the higher ground. By this time, most of the crosses bearing the crucified rebel slaves had been removed from the Appian Way. But some still stood as a warning, stark against the whitened landscape, with a few rotted fragments of bodies attached. Gazing at them, I felt as if Crassus’s long arm had reached out after me from Rome and was once again pinching my cheek.

  Because we had departed in such a hurry, it had proved impossible to arrange places to stay all along our route, and on three or four nights when no inns were available we were reduced to sleeping by the roadside. I lay with the other slaves, huddled around the campfire, while Cicero, Lucius and young Frugi slept in the wagon. In the mountains I would wake at dawn to find my clothes starched with ice. When at last we reached the coast at Velia, Cicero decided it would be quicker to board a ship and hug the coast – this despite the risk of winter storms and pirates, and his own marked aversion to travelling by boat, for he had been warned by a sibyl that his death would somehow be connected with the sea.

  Velia was a health resort, with a well-known temple to Apollo Oulius, then a fashionable god of healing. But it was all shuttered up and out of season, and as we made our way down to the harbour front, where the grey sea battered against the wharf, Cicero remarked that he had seldom seen a less enticing holiday spot. Aside from the usual collection of fishing boats, the port contained one huge vessel, a cargo ship the size of a trireme, and while we were negotiating our journey with the local sailors, Cicero happened to ask to whom it belonged. It was, we were told, a gift from the citizens of the Sicilian port of Messana to their former governor, Gaius Verres, and had been moored here for a month.

  There was something infinitely sinister about that great ship, sitting low in the water, fully crewed and ready to move at a moment’s warning. Our appearance in the deserted harbour had clearly already been registered and was causing something of a panic. Even as Cicero led us cautiously towards the vessel, we heard three short blasts sounded on a trumpet, and saw it sprout oars, like some immense water beetle, and edge away from the quayside. It moved a short distance out to sea, and dropped anchor. As the ship turned into the wind, the lanterns at its prow and stern danced bright yellow in the gloomy afternoon, and figures deployed along its heaving decks. Cicero debated with Lucius and young Frugi what to do. In theory, his warrant from the extortion court gave him authority to board and search any vessel he suspected of connection with the case. In truth, we lacked the resources, and by the time reinforcements could be summoned, the ship would be long gone. What it showed beyond doubt was that Verres’s crimes were on a scale vastly bigger than anything even Cicero had imagined. He decided we should press on south at redoubled speed.

  I guess it must be a hundred and twenty miles from Velia down to Vibo, running straight along the shin bone to the toe of Italy. But with a favourable wind and strong rowing we did it in just two days. We kept always within sight of the shore, and put in for one night to sleep on the sandy beach, where we cut down a thicket of myrtle to make a campfire and used our oars and sail for a tent. From Vibo we took the coast road to Regium, and here we chartered a second boat to sail across the narrow straits to Sicily. It was a misty early morning when we set off, with a saturating drizzle falling. The distant island appeared on the horizon as a dreary black hump. Unfortunately, there was only one place to make for, especially in midwinter, and that was Verres’s stronghold of Messana. He had bought the loyalty of its inhabitants by exempting them from taxes throughout all his three years as governor, and alone of the towns on the island it had refused to offer Cicero any cooperation. We steered towards its lighthouse, and as we drew closer realised that what we had perceived as a large mast at the entrance to the harbour was not part of a ship at all, but a cross, facing directly across the straits to the mainland.

  ‘That is new,’ said Cicero, frowning as he wiped the rain from his eyes. ‘This was never a place of execution in our day.’

  We had no option but to sail straight past it, and the sight fell across our waterlogged spirits like a shadow.

  Despite the general hostility of the people of Messana towards the special prosecutor, two citizens of the town – Basiliscus and Percennius – had bravely agreed to offer him hospitality, and were waiting on the quayside to greet us. The moment he stepped ashore, Cicero queried them about the cross, but they begged to be excused from answering until they had transported us away from the wharf. Only when we were in the compound of Basiliscus’s house did they feel it safe to tell the story. Verres had spent his last days as governor living full-time in Messana, supervising the loadi
ng of his loot aboard the treasure ship which the grateful town had built for him. There had been a festival in his honour about a month ago, and almost it seemed as part of the entertainment, a Roman citizen had been dragged from the prison, stripped naked in the forum, publicly flogged, tortured, and finally crucified.

  ‘A Roman citizen?’ repeated Cicero incredulously. He gestured at me to begin making notes. ‘But it is illegal to execute a Roman citizen without a full trial. Are you sure that is what he was?’

  ‘He cried out that his name was Publius Gavius, that he was a merchant from Spain, and that he had done military service in the legions. Throughout his whipping he screamed, “I am a Roman citizen!” every time he received a blow.’

  ‘“I am a Roman citizen”,’ repeated Cicero, savouring the phrase. ‘“I am a Roman citizen …” But what was alleged to be his crime?’

  ‘Spying,’ replied our host. ‘He was on the point of boarding a ship for Italy. But he made the mistake of telling everyone he met that he had escaped from the Stone Quarries in Syracuse and was going straight to Rome to expose all Verres’s crimes. The elders of Messana had him arrested and held until Verres arrived. Then Verres ordered him to be scourged, tortured with hot irons and executed on a cross looking out across the straits to Regium, so that he could see the mainland throughout his final agonies. Imagine that – being only five miles from safety! The cross has been left standing by the followers of Verres as a warning to anyone else who feels tempted to talk too freely.’

  ‘There were witnesses to this crucifixion?’

  ‘Of course. Hundreds.’

  ‘Including Roman citizens?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could you identify any of them?’

  He hesitated. ‘Gaius Numitorius, a Roman knight from Puteoli. The Cottius brothers from Tauromenium. Lucceius – he is from Regium. There must have been others.’

  I took down their names. Afterwards, while Cicero was having a bath, we gathered beside his tub to discuss this development. Lucius said, ‘Perhaps this man Gavius really was a spy.’

  ‘I would be more inclined to believe that,’ replied Cicero, ‘if Verres had not brought exactly the same charge against Sthenius, who is no more a spy than you or I. No, this is the monster’s favoured method of operation: he arranges a trumped-up charge, then uses his position as supreme justice in the province to reach a verdict and pronounce sentence. The question is: why did he pick on Gavius?’

  Nobody had an answer; nor did we have the spare time to linger in Messana and try to find one. Early the following morning we had to leave for our first official engagement, in the northern coastal town of Tyndaris. This visit set the pattern for a score which followed. The council came out to greet Cicero with full honours. He was conducted into the municipal square. He was shown the standard-issue statue of Verres, which the citizens had been obliged to pay for, and which they had now pulled down and smashed. Cicero made a short speech about Roman justice. His chair was set up. He listened to the complaints of the locals. He then selected those which were most eye-catching or most easily proved – in Tyndaris it was the story of Sopater, bound naked to a statue until the town yielded up its bronze of Mercury – and finally either I or one of my two assistants moved in to take statements, which would be witnessed and signed.

  From Tyndaris we travelled on to Sthenius’s home city of Thermae, where we saw his wife in his empty house, who sobbed as Cicero delivered letters from her exiled husband, and then ended the week in the fortress port of Lilybaeum, on the extreme western tip of the island. Cicero knew this place well, having been based here when he was a junior magistrate. We stayed, as so often in the past, at the home of his old friend Pamphilius. Over dinner on the first night, Cicero noticed that the usual decorations of the table – a beautiful jug and goblets, all family heirlooms – were missing, and when he asked what had become of them, was told that Verres had seized them. It quickly transpired that all the other guests in the dining room had similar tales to tell. Young Gaius Cacurius had been obliged to give up all his furniture, and Lutatius a citrus-wood table at which Cicero had regularly eaten. Lyso had been robbed of his precious statue of Apollo, and Diodorus of a set of chased silver cups by Mentor. The list was endless, and I should know, for I was the one summoned to compile it. After taking statements from each of them, and subsequently from all their friends, I began to think that Cicero had gone a little mad – did he plan to catalogue every stolen spoon and cream jug on the island? – but of course he was being cleverer than I, as events were to show.

  We moved on a few days later, rattling down the unmade tracks from Lilybaeum to the temple city of Agrigentum, then up into the mountainous heart of the island. The winter was unusually harsh; the land and sky were iron. Cicero caught a bad cold and sat wrapped in his cloak in the back of our cart. At Henna, a town built precipitously into the cliffs and surrounded by lakes and woods, the ululating priests all came out to greet us, wearing their elaborate robes and carrying their sacred boughs, and took us to the shrine of Ceres, from which Verres had removed the goddess’s statue. And here for the first time our escort became involved in scuffles with the lictors of the new governor, Lucius Metellus. These brutes with their rods and axes stood to one side of the market square and shouted threats of dire penalties for any witness who dared to testify against Verres. Nevertheless, Cicero persuaded three prominent citizens of Henna – Theodorus, Numenius and Nicasio – to undertake to come to Rome and give their evidence.

  Finally, we turned south-east towards the sea again, into the fertile plains below Mount Aetna. This was state-owned land, administered on behalf of the Roman treasury by a revenue-collection company, which in turn awarded leases to local farmers. When Cicero had first been on the island, the plains of Leontini had been the granary of Rome. But now we drove past deserted farmhouses and grey, untended fields, punctuated by drifting columns of brown smoke, where the homeless former tenants now lived in the open. Verres and his friends in the tax company had fanned out across the region like a ravaging army, commandeering crops and livestock for a fraction of their true value, and raising rents far beyond what most could pay. One farmer who had dared to complain, Nymphodorus of Centuripae, had been seized by Verres’s tithe collector, Apronius, and hanged from an olive tree in the market place of Aetna. Such stories enraged Cicero, and drove him to fresh exertions. I still cherish the memory of this most urban of gentlemen, his toga hoisted around his knees, his fine red shoes in one hand, his warrant in the other, picking his way daintily across a muddy field in the pouring rain to take evidence from a farmer at his plough. By the time we came at last to Syracuse, after more than thirty days of arduous travels around the province, we had the statements of nearly two hundred witnesses.

  Syracuse is by far the largest and fairest of Sicily’s cities. It is four towns, really, which have merged into one. Three of these – Achradina, Tycha and Neapolis – have spread themselves around the harbour, and in the centre of this great natural bay sits the fourth settlement, known simply as the Island, the ancient royal seat, which is linked to the others by a bridge. This walled city-within-a-city, forbidden at night to Sicilians, is where the Roman governor has his palace, close by the great temples of Diana and Minerva. We had feared a hostile reception, given that Syracuse was said to be second only to Messana in its loyalty to Verres, and its senate had recently voted him a eulogy. In fact, the opposite was the case. News of Cicero’s honesty and diligence had preceded him, and we were escorted through the Agrigentine gate by a crowd of cheering citizens. (One reason for Cicero’s popularity was that, as a young magistrate, he had located in the overgrown municipal cemetery the one-hundred-and-thirty-year-old lost tomb of the mathematician Archimedes, the greatest man in the history of Syracuse. Typically, he had read somewhere that it was marked by a cylinder and a sphere, and once he had found the monument, he paid to have the weeds and brambles cleared away. He had then spent many hours beside it, pondering the transience of hum
an glory. His generosity and respect had not been forgotten by the local population.)

  But to resume. We were lodged in the home of a Roman knight, Lucius Flavius, an old friend of Cicero’s, who had plenty of stories of Verres’s corruption and cruelty to add to our already bulging stock. There was the tale of the pirate captain, Heracleo, who had been able to sail right into Syracuse at the head of a squadron of four small galleys, pillage the warehouses, and leave without encountering any resistance. Captured some weeks later, further up the coast at Megara, neither he nor his men had been paraded as prisoners, and there were rumours that Verres had exchanged him for a large ransom. Then there was the horrible business of the Roman banker from Spain, Lucius Herennius, who had been dragged into the forum of Syracuse one morning, summarily denounced as a spy and, on Verres’s orders, beheaded – this despite the pleadings of his friends and business associates, who had come running to the scene when they heard what was happening. The similarity of Herennius’s case to that of Gavius in Messana was striking: both Romans, both from Spain, both involved in commerce, both accused of spying, and both executed without a hearing or a proper trial.

  That night, after dinner, Cicero received a messenger from Rome. Immediately he had read the letter, he excused himself, and took Lucius, young Frugi and myself aside. The dispatch was from his brother Quintus, and it contained grave news. It seemed that Hortensius was up to his old tricks again. The extortion court had unexpectedly given permission for a prosecution to be brought against the former governor of Achaia. The prosecutor, Dasianus, a known associate of Verres, had undertaken to travel to Greece and back and present his evidence two days before the deadline set for Cicero’s return from Sicily. Quintus urged his brother to return to Rome as quickly as possible to retrieve the situation.