Imperium

by Robert Harris

  I pointed out that Pompey had described it as his own idea.

  “And no doubt Pompey thinks it is. But that is the nature of the man. You make a remark to him, and then you find it being repeated back to you as if it were his own. ‘The central issue must be the defeat of the pirates, not the future of Pompey the Great.’ That is a typical example. Sometimes, just to amuse myself, I have argued against my own original assertion, and waited to see how long it was before I heard my rebuttal coming back at me, too.” He frowned and nodded. “I am sure I am right. Caesar is quite clever enough to have planted the seed and left it to flower on its own. I wonder how much time he has spent with Pompey. He seems very well bedded-in.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue then to tell him what I had witnessed, but a combination of fear of Caesar, my own shyness, and a feeling that Cicero would not think the better of me for spying—that I would in some sense be contaminated myself by describing the whole sordid business—caused me to swallow my words. It was not until many years later—after Caesar’s death, in fact, when he could no longer harm me and I was altogether more confident—that I revealed my story. Cicero, then an old man, was silent for a long time. “I understand your discretion,” he said at last, “and in many ways I applaud it. But I have to say, my dear friend, that I wish you had informed me. Perhaps then things might have turned out differently. At least I would have realized earlier the kind of breathtakingly reckless man we were dealing with. But by the time I did understand, it was too late.”

  THE ROME TO WHICH WE RETURNED a few days later was jittery and full of rumors. The burning of Ostia had been clearly visible to the whole city as a red glow in the western night sky. Such an attack on the capital was unprecedented, and when Gabinius and Cornelius took office as tribunes on the tenth day of December, they moved quickly to fan the sparks of public anxiety into the flames of panic. They caused extra sentries to be posted at the city’s gates. Wagons and pedestrians entering Rome were stopped and searched at random for weapons. The wharves and warehouses along the river were patrolled both day and night, and severe penalties were promulgated for citizens convicted of hoarding grain, with the inevitable result that the three great food markets of Rome in those days—the Emporium, the Macellum, and the Forum Boarium—immediately ran out of supplies. The vigorous new tribunes also dragged the outgoing consul, the hapless Marcius Rex, before a meeting of the people, and subjected him to a merciless cross-examination about the security lapses which had led to the fiasco at Ostia. Other witnesses were found to testify about the menace of the pirates, and that menace grew with every retelling. They had a thousand ships! They were not lone raiders at all, but an organized conspiracy! They had squadrons and admirals and fearsome weapons of poison-tipped arrows and Greek fire! Nobody in the Senate dared object to any of this, for fear of seeming complacent—not even when a chain of beacons was built all along the road to the sea, to be lit if pirate vessels were seen heading for the mouth of the Tiber. “This is absurd,” Cicero said to me on the morning we went out to inspect these most visible symbols of the national peril. “As if any sane pirate would dream of sailing twenty miles up an open river to attack a defended city!” He shook his head in dismay at the ease with which a timorous population can be molded by unscrupulous politicians. But what could he do? His closeness to Pompey had trapped him into silence.

  On the seventeenth day of December the Festival of Saturn began, and lasted for a week. It was not the most enjoyable of holidays, for obvious reasons, and although the Cicero family went through the normal rituals of exchanging gifts, even allowing us slaves to have the day off and sharing a meal with us, nobody’s heart was in it. Lucius used to be the life and soul of these events, and he was gone. Terentia, I believe, had hoped she was pregnant, but had discovered she was not, and was becoming seriously worried that she would never bear a son. Pomponia nagged away at Quintus about his inadequacies as a husband. Even little Tullia could not cheer the mood.

  As for Cicero, he spent much of Saturnalia in his study, brooding on Pompey’s insatiable ambition, and the implications it had for the country and for his own political prospects. The elections for the praetorship were barely eight months away, and he and Quintus had already compiled a list of likely candidates. From whichever of these men was eventually elected, he could probably expect to find his rivals for the consulship. The two brothers spent many hours discussing the permutations, and it seemed to me, although I kept it to myself, that they missed the wisdom of their cousin. For although Cicero used to joke that if he wanted to know what was politically shrewd, he would ask Lucius his opinion and then do precisely the opposite, nevertheless Lucius had offered a fixed star to steer by. Without him, the Ciceros had only each other, and despite their mutual devotion, it was not always the wisest of relationships.

  It was in this atmosphere, around the eighth or ninth day of January, when the Latin Festival was over and serious politics resumed, that Gabinius finally mounted the rostra to demand a new supreme commander. I am talking here, I should explain, about the old republican rostra, which was very different from the wretched ornamental footstool we have today. This ancient structure, now destroyed, was the heart of Rome’s democracy: a long, curved platform, twelve feet high, covered with the statues of the heroes of antiquity, from which the tribunes and the consuls addressed the people. Its back was to the Senate House, and it faced out boldly across the widest expanse of the Forum, with six ships’ battering rams, or “beaks”—those rostra, which gave the platform its name—thrusting from its heavy masonry (the beaks had been captured from the Carthaginians in a sea battle nearly three centuries earlier). The whole of its rear was a flight of steps, if you can imagine what I am saying, so that a magistrate might leave the Senate House or the tribunes’ headquarters, walk fifty paces, ascend the steps, and find himself on top of the rostra, facing a crowd of thousands, with the tiered façades of the two great basilicas on either side of him and the Temple of Castor straight ahead. This was where Gabinius stood on that January morning and declared, in his smooth and confident way, that what Rome needed was a strong man to take control of the war against the pirates.

  Cicero, despite his misgivings, had done his best, with the help of Quintus, to turn out a good-size crowd, and the Piceneans could always be relied upon to drum up a couple of hundred veterans. Add to these the regulars who hung about the Basilica Porcia, and those citizens going about their normal business in the Forum, and I should say that close on a thousand were present to hear Gabinius spell out what was needed if the pirates were to be beaten—a supreme commander of consular rank with imperium lasting for three years over all territory up to fifty miles from the sea, fifteen legates of praetorian rank to assist him, free access to the treasury of Rome, five hundred warships, and the right to levy up to one hundred and twenty thousand infantry and five thousand cavalry. These were staggering numbers and the demand caused a sensation. By the time Gabinius had finished the first reading of his bill and had handed it to a clerk to be pinned up outside the tribunes’ basilica, both Catulus and Hortensius had come hurrying into the Forum to find out what was going on. Pompey, needless to say, was nowhere to be seen, and the other members of the group of seven (as the senators around Pompey had taken to calling themselves) took care to stand apart from one another, to avoid any suggestion of collusion. But the aristocrats were not fooled. “If this is your doing,” Catulus snarled at Cicero, “you can tell your master he will have a fight on his hands.”

  The violence of their reaction was to prove even worse than Cicero had predicted. Once a bill had been given its first reading, three weekly market days had to pass before it could be voted on by the people (this was to enable country dwellers to come into the city and study what was proposed). So the aristocrats had until the beginning of February to organize against it, and they did not waste a moment. Two days later, the Senate was summoned to debate the lex Gabinia, as it would be called, and despite Cicero’s advice that he sh
ould stay away, Pompey felt that he was honor-bound to attend and stake his claim to the job. He wanted a good-size escort down to the Senate House, and because there no longer seemed much point in secrecy, the seven senators formed an honor guard around him. Quintus also joined them, in his brand-new senatorial toga; this was only his third or fourth visit to the chamber. As usual, I stayed close to Cicero. “We should have known we were in trouble,” he lamented afterwards, “when no other senator turned up.”

  The walk down the Esquiline Hill and into the Forum went well enough. The precinct bosses had played their part, delivering plenty of enthusiasm on the streets, with people calling out to Pompey to save them from the menace of the pirates. He waved to them like a landlord to his tenants. But the moment the group entered the Senate House they were met by jeers from all sides, and a piece of rotten fruit flew across the chamber and splattered onto Pompey’s shoulder, leaving a rich brown stain. Such a thing had never happened to the great general before, and he halted and looked around him in stupefaction. Afranius, Palicanus, and Gabinius quickly closed ranks to protect him, just as if they were back on the battlefield, and I saw Cicero stretch out his arms to hustle all four to their places, no doubt reasoning that the sooner they sat down, the sooner the demonstration would be over. I was standing at the entrance to the chamber, held back with the other spectators by the familiar cordon of rope slung between the two doorposts. Of course, we were all supporters of Pompey, so the more the senators inside jeered him, the more we outside roared our approval, and it was a while before the presiding consul could bring the house to order.

  The new consuls in that year were Pompey’s old friend Glabrio and the aristocratic Calpurnius Piso (not to be confused with the other senator of that name, who will feature later in this story, if the gods give me the strength to finish it). A sign of how desperate the situation was for Pompey in the Senate was that Glabrio had chosen to absent himself, rather than be seen in open disagreement with the man who had given him back his son. That left Piso in the chair. I could see Hortensius, Catulus, Isauricus, Marcus Lucullus—the brother of the commander of the Eastern legions—and all the rest of the patrician faction, poised to attack. The only ones no longer present to offer opposition were the three Metellus brothers: Quintus was abroad, serving as the governor of Crete, while the younger two, as if to prove the indifference of fate to the petty ambitions of men, had both died of the fever not long after the Verres trial. But what was most disturbing was that the pedarii—the unassuming, patient, plodding mass of the Senate, whom Cicero had taken so much trouble to cultivate—even they were hostile, or at best sullenly unresponsive to Pompey’s megalomania. As for Crassus, he was sprawled on the consular front bench opposite, with his arms folded and his legs casually outstretched, regarding Pompey with an expression of ominous calm. The reason for his sangfroid was obvious. Sitting directly behind him, placed there like a pair of prize animals just bought at auction, were two of that year’s tribunes, Roscius and Trebellius. This was Crassus’s way of telling the world that he had used his wealth to purchase not just one but two vetoes, and that the lex Gabinia, whatever Pompey and Cicero chose to do, would never be allowed to pass.

  Piso exercised his privilege of speaking first. “An orator of the stationary or quiet type,” was how Cicero condescendingly described him many years later, but there was nothing stationary or quiet about him that day. “We know what you are doing!” he shouted at Pompey as he came to the end of his harangue. “You are defying your colleagues in the Senate and setting yourself up as a second Romulus—slaying your brother so that you may rule alone! But you would do well to remember the fate of Romulus, who was murdered in his turn by his own senators, who cut up his body and carried the mangled pieces back to their homes!” That brought the aristocrats to their feet, and I could just make out Pompey’s massive profile, stock-still and staring straight ahead, obviously unable to believe what was happening.

  Catulus spoke next, and then Isauricus. The most damaging was Hortensius. For almost a year, since the end of his consulship, he had hardly been seen in the Forum. His son-in-law, Caepio, the beloved elder brother of Cato, had recently died on army service in the East, leaving Hortensius’s daughter a widow, and the word was that the Dancing Master no longer had the strength in his legs for the struggle. But Pompey’s overreaching ambition seemed to have brought him back into the arena revitalized, and listening to him reminded one of just how formidable he could be on a big set-piece occasion such as this. He never ranted or stooped to vulgarity, but eloquently restated the old republican case: that power must always be divided, hedged around with limitations, and renewed by annual votes, and that while he had nothing personally against Pompey—indeed, he felt that Pompey was more worthy of supreme command than any other man in the state—the lex Gabinia set a dangerous, un-Roman precedent, for ancient liberties were not to be flung aside merely because of some passing scare about pirates. Cicero was shifting in his place, and I could not help but reflect that this was exactly the speech which he would have made if he had been free to speak his mind.

  Hortensius had just about reached his peroration when the figure of Caesar rose from that obscure region at the back of the chamber, close to the door, which had once been occupied by Cicero, and asked Hortensius to give way. The respectful silence in which the great advocate had been heard fractured immediately, and one has to admit that it was brave of Caesar to take him on in such an atmosphere. He stood his ground until at last he could be heard, and then he started to speak, in his clear, compelling, remorseless way. There was nothing un-Roman, he said, about seeking to defeat pirates, who were the scum of the sea; what was un-Roman was to will the end of a thing but not the means. If the republic functioned as perfectly as Hortensius said it did, why had this menace been allowed to grow? And now that it had grown monstrous, how was it to be defeated? He had himself been captured by pirates a few years back when he was on his way to Rhodes, and held to ransom, and when at last he had been released, he had gone back and hunted down every last man of his kidnappers, and carried out the promise he had made to them when he was their prisoner—had seen to it that the scoundrels were crucified! “That, Hortensius, is the Roman way to deal with piracy—and that is what the lex Gabinia will enable us to do!”

  He finished to a round of boos and catcalls, and as he resumed his seat, with the most magnificent display of disdain, some kind of fight broke out at the other end of the chamber. I believe a senator threw a punch at Gabinius, who turned around and punched him back, and very quickly he was in difficulties, with bodies piling in on top of him. There was a scream and a crash as one of the benches toppled over. I lost sight of Cicero. A voice in the crowd behind me cried that Gabinius was being murdered, and there was such a surge of pressure forward that the rope was pulled from its fixings and we tumbled into the chamber. I was lucky to scramble to one side as several hundred of Pompey’s plebeian supporters (who were a rough-looking lot, I must admit) poured down the aisle toward the consular dais and dragged Piso from his curule chair. One brute had him by the neck, and for a few moments it looked as though murder would be done. But then Gabinius managed to struggle free and pull himself up onto a bench to show that, although he had been somewhat knocked about, he was still alive. He appealed to the demonstrators to let go of Piso, and after a short argument the consul was reluctantly released. Rubbing his throat, Piso declared hoarsely that the session was adjourned without a vote—and so, by the very narrowest of margins, for the moment at least, the commonwealth was saved from anarchy.

  SUCH VIOLENT SCENES had not been witnessed in the heart of Rome’s governing district for more than fourteen years, and they had a profound effect on Cicero, even though he had managed to escape the melee with barely a ruffle in his immaculate dress. Gabinius was streaming blood from his nose and lip, and Cicero had to help him from the chamber. They came out some distance after Pompey, who walked on, looking neither right nor left, with the measured tread of
a man at a funeral. What I remember most is the silence as the mingled crowd of senators and plebeians parted to let him through. It was as if both sides, at the very last moment, had realized that they were fighting on a cliff edge, had come to their senses and drawn back. We went out into the Forum, with Pompey still not saying anything, and when he turned into the Argiletum, in the direction of his house, his supporters all followed him, partly for want of anything else to do. Afranius, who was next to Pompey, passed the word back that the general wanted a meeting. I asked Cicero if there was anything he required and he replied, with a bitter smile, “Yes, that quiet life in Arpinum!”

  Quintus came up and said urgently, “Pompey must withdraw, or be humiliated!”

  “He already has been humiliated,” retorted Cicero, “and we with him. Soldiers!” he said to me in disgust. “What did I tell you? I would not dream of giving them orders on the battlefield. Why should they believe they know better than I about politics?”

  We climbed the hill to Pompey’s house and filed inside, leaving the muted crowd in the street. Ever since that first conference, I had been accepted as the minute-taker for the group, and when I settled into my usual place in the corner, no one gave me a second glance. The senators arranged themselves around a big table, Pompey at the head. The pride had entirely gone out of his massive frame. Slumped in his throne-like chair, he reminded me of some great beast that had been captured, shackled, baffled, and taunted in the arena by creatures smaller than himself. He was utterly defeatist and kept repeating that it was all over—the Senate would clearly never stand for his appointment, he had only the support of the dregs on the streets, Crassus’s tame tribunes would veto the bill in any case; there was nothing left for it but death or exile. Caesar took the opposite view—Pompey was still the most popular man in the republic, he should go out into Italy and begin recruiting the legions he needed, his old veterans would provide the backbone of his new army, the Senate would capitulate once he had sufficient force. “There is only one thing to do if you lose a throw of the dice: double your stake and throw again. Ignore the aristocrats, and if necessary rule through the people and the army.”