Lustrum c-2

by Robert Harris

  The first senator on his feet was Lucullus, and what a sweet moment this must have been for him as, with great solemnity, he declared that his former brother-in-law had besmirched the traditions of the republic and had risked bringing the wrath of the gods down upon the city. 'Their anger can only be appeased,' he said, 'by the sternest punishment of the offender,' and he formally proposed that Clodius be charged with violating the sanctity of the Vestal Virgins – an offence for which the penalty was to be beaten to death. Cato seconded the motion. The two patrician leaders, Hortensius and Catulus, both rose in support, and it was clear that the mood of the house was strongly with them. They demanded that the most powerful magistrate in Rome after the consuls, the urban praetor, should convene a special court, appoint a hand-picked jury drawn from the senate, and try the case as speedily as possible. With such men in control, the result would be pre-ordained. Pupius agreed reluctantly to draw up a bill to this effect and by the time the session was over, Clodius looked to be a dead man.

  Late that night, when I heard someone knock on the front door, I was sure in my bones that it must be Clodius. Despite Cicero's snub on the day after the Good Goddess fiasco, the young man had continued to make regular return visits to the house in the hope of a meeting. But I was under strict instructions to refuse him admittance: much to his irritation, he had never got further than the atrium. Now, as I crossed the hall, I braced myself for another unpleasant scene. But to my astonishment, when I unlocked the door, the person I found standing on the step was Clodia. Normally she voyaged around the city amid a flotilla of maids, but on this night she was unescorted. She asked in a very cool voice if my master was in, and I replied that I would check. I showed her into the hall and invited her to wait and then almost ran into the library, where Cicero was working. When I announced who had come to see him, he laid down his pen and thought for a moment or two.

  'Has Terentia gone up to her room?'

  'I believe so.'

  'Then show her in.' I was amazed that he should take such a risk, and he must have realised the dangers himself, for just as I was leaving, he said, 'Make sure you don't leave us alone together.'

  I went and fetched her. The moment she entered the library she crossed to where Cicero was standing and quickly knelt at his feet. 'I have come to plead for your support,' she said, bowing her head. 'My poor boy is beside himself with fear and remorse, yet he is too proud to try to ask you for help again, so I am here alone.' She took the hem of his toga in her hands and kissed it. 'My dear friend, it takes a great deal for a Claudian to kneel, but I am begging for your help.'

  'Get up off the floor, Clodia,' replied Cicero, glancing anxiously at the door. 'Someone may see you, and the story will be all over Rome.' When she did not respond, he added, more gently, 'I won't even talk to you unless you get on your feet!' Clodia rose, her head still bowed. 'Now listen to me,' said Cicero. 'I'll say this once and then you must leave. You want me to help your brother, yes?' Clodia nodded. 'Then tell him he must do precisely what I say. He must write letters to every one of those women whose honour he has outraged. He must tell them he is sorry, it was a fit of madness, he is no longer worthy to breathe the same air as them and their daughters, and so on and so forth – believe me, he cannot be too obsequious. Then he must renounce his quaestorship. Leave Rome. Go into exile. Stay away from the city for a few years. When things calm down, he can come back and start again. It's the best advice I can offer. Goodbye.'

  He began to turn away from her, but she grabbed his arm.

  'Leaving Rome will kill him!'

  'No, madam, staying in Rome will kill him. There is bound to be a trial and he is bound to be found guilty. Lucullus will see to that. But Lucullus is old and lazy, and your brother is young and energetic. Time is his greatest ally. Tell him I said that, and that I wish him well, and tell him to go tomorrow.'

  'If he stays in Rome, will you join in the attacks on him?'

  'I will do my best to keep out of it.'

  'And if it comes to a trial,' she said, still holding his arm, 'will you defend him?'

  'No, that is completely impossible.'

  'Why?'

  'Why?' Cicero gave an incredulous laugh. 'Any one of a thousand reasons.'

  'Is it because you believe he is guilty?'

  'My dear Clodia, the whole world knows he is guilty!'

  'But you defended Cornelius Sulla, and the whole world knew he was guilty, too.'

  'But this is different.'

  'Why?'

  'My wife, for one thing,' said Cicero softly, with another glance at the door. 'My wife was present. She witnessed the entire episode.'

  'You are saying your wife would divorce you if you defended my brother?'

  'Yes, I believe she would.'

  'Then take another wife,' said Clodia, and stepping back but still staring at him she quickly untied her cloak and let it fall from her shoulders. Beneath it she was naked. The dark smoothness of her oiled skin glistened in the candlelight. I was standing almost directly behind her. She knew I was watching, yet she no more minded my presence than if I had been a table or a footstool. The air seemed to thicken. Cicero stood perfectly still. Thinking back on it, I am reminded of that moment in the senate, in the chaos after the debate on the conspirators, when a single word or gesture of assent from him would have led to Caesar's death, and the world – our world – would have been entirely different. So it was now. After a long pause he gave the very slightest shake of his head, and, stooping, he retrieved her cloak and held it out to her.

  'Put it back on,' he said quietly.

  She ignored it. Instead she put her hands on her hips. 'You really prefer that pious old broomstick to me?'

  'Yes.' He sounded surprised by his own answer. 'When it comes to it, I believe I do.'

  'Then what a fool you are,' she said, and turned around so that Cicero could drape the cloak across her shoulders. The gesture was as casual as if she were going home after a dinner party. She caught me looking at her and her eyes flashed me such a look that I quickly dropped my gaze. 'You will think back on this moment,' she said, briskly fastening her cloak, 'and regret it for the rest of your life.'

  'No I won't, because I shall put it out of my mind, and I suggest you do the same.'

  'Why should I want to forget it?' She smiled and shook her head. 'How my brother will laugh when he hears about it.'

  'You'll tell him?'

  'Of course. It was his idea.'

  'Not a word,' said Cicero after Clodia had gone. He held up a warning hand. He did not want to discuss it, and we never did. Rumours that something had occurred between them circulated for many years, but I always refused to comment on the gossip. I have kept this secret for half a century.

  Ambition and lust are often intertwined. In some men, such as Caesar and Clodius, they are as tightly plaited as a rope. With Cicero it was the opposite case. I believe he had a passionate nature, but it frightened him. Like his stutter or his youthful illnesses or his unsteady nerves, he viewed passion as a handicap, to be overcome by discipline. He therefore learned to separate this strand in his nature, and to avoid it. But the gods are implacable, and despite his resolution not to have anything to do with Clodia and her brother, he soon found himself being sucked into the quickening whirlpool of the scandal.

  It is hard to comprehend at this great distance how completely the Good Goddess affair gripped public life in Rome, so that eventually all government business came to a halt. On the surface, Clodius's cause seemed hopeless. Plainly he had committed this ludicrous offence, and almost the whole of the senate was set on his punishment. But sometimes in politics a great weakness can be turned into a strength, and from the moment that Lucullus's motion was passed, the Roman people began to mutter against it. What was the young man guilty of, after all, except an excess of high spirits? Was a fellow to be beaten to death merely because of a lark? When Clodius ventured into the forum, he found that citizens, rather than wanting to pelt him with ordure, ac
tually wished to shake his hand.

  There were still thousands of plebeians in Rome who were disaffected with the renewed authority of the senate and who looked back with nostalgia to the days when Catilina ruled the streets. Clodius attracted these people by the score. They would gather around him in crowds. He took to jumping up on to a nearby cart or trader's stall and inveighing against the senate. He had learned well from Cicero the tricks of political campaigning: keep your speeches short, remember names, tell jokes, put on a show; above all, render an issue, however complex, into a story anyone can grasp. Clodius's tale was the simplest possible: he was the lone citizen unjustly persecuted by the oligarchs. 'Take care, my friends!' he would cry. 'If it can happen to me, a patrician, it could happen to any one of you!' Soon he was holding daily public meetings at which order was kept by his friends from the taverns and the gambling dens, many of whom had been supporters of Catilina.

  Clodius attacked Lucullus, Hortensius and Catulus repeatedly by name, but when it came to Cicero he confined himself merely to repeating the old joke that the former consul had kept himself 'fully informed'. Cicero was often tempted to respond, and Terentia urged him to do so, yet he was mindful of his promise to Clodia and managed to keep his temper in check. However, the controversy kept on swelling regardless of his silence. I was with him on the day the senate's bill to set up the special court was laid before the people in a popular assembly. Clodius's gangs of toughs took control of the meeting, occupying the gangways and seizing the ballot boxes. Their clamour so unnerved the consul, Pupius, that he actually spoke against his own bill – in particular the clause that allowed the urban praetor to select the jury. Many senators turned to Cicero, expecting him to take control of the situation, but he remained on his bench, glowering with anger and embarrassment, and it was left to Cato to deliver a lashing attack on the consul. The meeting was abandoned. The senators promptly trooped back to their chamber and voted by 400 votes to 15 to press on with the bill despite the dangers of civil unrest. Fufius, a tribune who was sympathetic to Clodius, promptly announced that he would veto the legislation. The affair was now seriously out of hand, and Cicero hurried out of the chamber and up to his house, crimson in the face.

  The turning point came when Fufius decided to convene a public assembly outside the city walls so that Pompey could be summoned and asked his views on the affair. Grumbling mightily at this intrusion on his time and dignity, the Warden of Land and Sea had no choice but to lumber over from the Alban Hills to the Flaminian Circus and submit himself to a series of insolent questions from the tribune, watched by a huge market-day crowd that temporarily set aside their bargaining and clustered round to gawp at him.

  'Are you aware of the so-called outrage committed against the Good Goddess?' asked Fufius.

  'I am.'

  'Do you support the senate's proposal that Clodius be prosecuted?'

  'I do.'

  'Do you believe he should be tried by a jury of senators selected by the urban praetor?'

  'I do.'

  'Even though the urban praetor will also be his judge?'

  'I suppose so, if that is the procedure the senate has settled on.'

  'And where is the justice in that?'

  Pompey glared at Fufius as if he were some buzzing insect that would not leave him alone. 'I hold the senate's authority in the highest respect,' he declared, and proceeded to deliver a lecture on the Roman constitution that might have been written for him by a fourteen-year-old. I was standing with Cicero at the front of the huge throng and could sense the audience behind us losing interest as he droned on. Soon they started shuffling about and talking. The vendors of hot sausages and pastries on the edge of the crowd began doing a busy trade. Pompey was a boring speaker at the best of times, but standing on that platform he must have felt as if he were in a bad dream. All those visions of a triumphant homecoming he had entertained as he lay at night in his tent beneath the burning stars of Arabia – and in the end what had he returned to? A senate and people obsessed not with his achievements but with a young man dressed in women's clothes!

  When the public assembly was mercifully over, Cicero conducted Pompey across the Flaminian Circus to the Temple of Bellona, where the senate had convened specially to greet him. The ovation he received was respectful, and he sat down next to Cicero on the front bench and waited for the praise to begin. Instead, he found himself once again cross-examined from the chair about his views on the sacrilege issue. He repeated what he had just said outside, and when he resumed his place I saw him turn and mutter something irritably to Cicero. (His actual words, Cicero told me afterwards, were, 'I hope we can now talk about something else.') I had been keeping an eye throughout all this on Crassus, who was sitting on the edge of his bench, ready to jump up the moment he got a chance. There was something about his determination to speak, and a kind of happy craftiness in his expression, for which I did not much care.

  'How wonderful it is, gentlemen,' he said, when at last he was called, 'to have with us beneath this sacred roof the man who has expanded our empire, and sitting next to him the man who has saved our republic. May the gods be blessed who have brought this to pass. Pompey I know stood ready with his army to come to the aid of the fatherland if it was necessary – but praise the heavens he was spared the task by the wisdom and foresight of our consul at that time. I hope I take nothing away from Pompey when I say that it is to Cicero that I feel I owe my status as a senator and a citizen; to him I owe my freedom and my life. Whenever I look upon my wife and my house, or upon the city of my birth, what I see is a gift that was granted me by Cicero…'

  There was a time when Cicero would have spotted such an obvious trap a mile off. But I fear there is in all men who achieve their life's ambition only a narrow line between dignity and vanity, confidence and delusion, glory and self-destruction. Instead of staying in his seat and modestly disavowing such praise, Cicero rose and made a long speech agreeing with Crassus's every word, whilst beside him Pompey gently cooked in a stew of jealousy and resentment. Watching from the door, I wanted to run forward and cry out to Cicero to stop, especially when Crassus stood and asked him if, as the Father of the Nation, he recognised in Clodius a second Catilina.

  'How can I not,' responded Cicero, unable to resist this opportunity to rekindle the glory days of his leadership of the senate in front of Pompey, 'when the same debauched men who followed the one now flock to the other, and when the same tactics are daily employed? Unity, gentlemen, is our only hope of salvation, now as it was then – unity between this senate and the Order of Knights; unity between all classes; unity across Italy. As long as we remember that glorious concord that existed under my consulship, we need have no fear, for the spirit that saw off Sergius Catilina will most assuredly see off his bastard son!'

  The senate cheered and Crassus sat back on his bench, beaming at a job well done, because of course the news of what Cicero had said spread across Rome immediately and quickly reached the ears of Clodius. At the end of the session, when Cicero walked back home with his entourage, Clodius was waiting in the forum surrounded by a gang of his own supporters. They blocked our path and I was sure some heads were going to be broken, but Cicero remained calm. He halted his procession. 'Offer them no provocation!' he called out. 'Give them no excuse to start a riot.' And turning to Clodius he said, 'You would have done well to have heeded my advice and gone into exile. The road you have started down can only end in one place.'

  'And where is that?' sneered Clodius.

  'Up there,' said Cicero, pointing at the Carcer, 'at the end of a rope.'

  'Not so,' responded Clodius, and he gestured in the other direction, to the rostra, with its ranks of life-sized statues. 'One day I shall be up there, among the heroes of the Roman people.'

  'Really? And tell me, will you be sculpted wearing women's clothing and carrying a lyre?' We all started to laugh. 'P. Clodius Pulcher: the first hero of the Order of Transvestites? I rather doubt it. Get out of my way.'
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  'Willingly,' said Clodius, with a smile. But as he stood aside to let Cicero pass, I was struck by how much he had changed. It was not merely that he seemed physically bigger and stronger: there was a glint of resolution in his eyes that had not been there before. He was feeding on his notoriety, I realised: drawing energy from the mob. 'Caesar's wife was one of the best I ever had,' he said softly, as Cicero went by. 'Almost as good as Clodia.' He seized his elbow and added loudly, 'I was willing to be your friend. You should have been mine.'

  'Claudians make unreliable friends,' replied Cicero, pulling himself free.

  'Yes, but we make very reliable enemies.'

  He proved to be as good as his word. From that day on, whenever he spoke in the forum he would always gesture to Cicero's new house, sitting on the Palatine high above the heads of the crowd, as a perfect symbol of dictatorship. 'Look how mightily the tyrant who butchered citizens without a proper trial has prospered by his handiwork – no wonder he is thirsty for fresh blood!' Cicero responded in kind. The mutual insults grew more and more deadly. Sometimes Cicero and I used to stand on the terrace and watch the tyro demagogue at work, and although we were too far away to hear exactly what he said, the applause of the crowd was audible and I recognised what we were seeing: the monster Cicero had thought he had slain had begun to twitch back into life.

  XIV

  Around the middle of March, Hortensius came to see Cicero. He trailed Catulus after him, and when the old patrician shuffled in, he looked more than ever like a tortoise without its shell. Catulus had recently had the last of his teeth removed, and the trauma of the extraction, the long months of agony that had preceded it and the distortion of his mouth that had resulted all combined to make him look every one of his sixty years. He seemed unable to stop drooling and carried a large handkerchief that was sodden and yellowish. He reminded me of someone: I could not think who at first, and then I remembered – Rabirius. Cicero sprang up to help him to a chair, but Catulus waved him away, mumbling that he was perfectly all right.