The Dictator

by Robert Harris

  Around this time Caesar returned from Africa, and soon afterwards, at the height of summer, he staged finally four separate triumphs on successive days to commemorate his victories in Gaul, the Black Sea, Africa and on the Nile—such an epic of self-glorification as even Rome had never seen. Cicero moved back into his house on the Palatine in order to attend—not that he wanted to: In civil war, as he wrote to his old friend Sulpicius, victory is always insolent. There were five wild-beast hunts, a mock battle in the Circus Maximus that included elephants, a naval battle in a lake dug out near the Tiber, stage plays in every quarter of the city, athletics on the Field of Mars, chariot races, games in honour of the memory of the Dictator’s daughter Julia, a banquet for the entire city at which meat from the sacrifices was served, a distribution of money, a distribution of bread, endless parades of soldiers and treasure and prisoners coiling through the streets—that noble leader of the Gauls, Vercingetorix, after six years of imprisonment, was garrotted in the Carcer—and day after day we could hear the vulgar chanting of the legionaries even from the terrace:

  Home we bring our bald whoremonger,

  Romans, lock your wives away!

  All the bags of gold you lent him

  Went his Gallic tarts to pay!

  Yet despite their bombast, or perhaps because of it, Cato’s reproachful ghost seemed to haunt even these proceedings. When a float went by during the Africa triumph depicting him tearing out his entrails, the crowd let out a loud groan. It was said that Cato’s death had a particular religious meaning: that he had done it to bring down the wrath of the gods on Caesar’s head. When that same day the axle on the Dictator’s triumphal chariot broke and he was pitched to the ground, it was held to be a sign of divine displeasure, and Caesar took the crowd’s disquiet seriously enough to lay on the most extraordinary spectacle of all: at night, with forty elephants on either side of him ridden by men holding flaming torches, he mounted the slope of the Capitol on his knees to atone to Jupiter for his impiety.

  —

  Just as some particularly faithful dogs are said to lie by the graves of their masters, unable to accept that they are dead, so there were those in Rome who clung to the hope that the old republic might yet twitch back into life. Even Cicero fell briefly victim to this delusion. After the triumphs were over, he decided to attend a meeting of the Senate. He had no intention of speaking. He went partly for old times’ sake and partly because he knew that Caesar had appointed several hundred new senators and he was curious to see what they looked like.

  “It was a chamber full of strangers,” he said to me afterwards, “a few of them actually foreign, many not elected—and yet somehow it was still a Senate for all that.” It met on the Field of Mars, in the same room within Pompey’s theatre complex where it had assembled in emergency session after the old Senate house was burned down. Caesar had even allowed the large marble statue of Pompey to remain in its original position, and the image of the Dictator presiding from the dais with Pompey’s statue behind him gave Cicero hope for the future. The issue for debate was whether the ex-consul, M. Marcellus, one of the most intransigent of Caesar’s opponents, who had gone into exile after Pharsalus and was living on Lesbos, might be allowed to return to Rome. His brother Caius—the magistrate who had sanctioned my manumission—led the appeals for clemency, and he was just finishing his speech when a bird seemed to appear from nowhere, fluttered over the senators’ heads and swooped out of the door. Caesar’s father-in-law, L. Calpurnius Piso, immediately got up and declared it to be an omen: the gods were saying that Marcellus too should be given the freedom to fly home. Then the whole Senate, Cicero included, rose as one and approached Caesar to appeal for clemency; Caius Marcellus and Piso actually fell to their knees at his feet.

  Caesar gestured at them to return to their seats. He said, “The man for whom you all plead has heaped more deadly insults upon me than any other person living. And yet I am touched by your entreaties and the omen seems to me especially propitious. There is no need for me to place my dignity above the unanimous desire of this house: I have lived long enough for nature or for glory. Therefore let Marcellus come home and dwell in peace in the city of his distinguished ancestors.”

  This was received with loud applause, and several of the senators sitting around Cicero urged him to rise and make some expression of gratitude on behalf of them all. The scene so affected Cicero that he forgot his vow never to speak in Caesar’s illegitimate Senate and did as they asked, lauding the Dictator to his face in the most extravagant terms: “You seem to have vanquished Victory herself, now that you have surrendered to the vanquished all that Victory had gained. Truly you are invincible!”

  Suddenly it seemed possible to him that Caesar might rule as “first among equals” rather than as a tyrant. I thought I saw some semblance of reviving constitutional freedom, he wrote to Sulpicius. The next month he pleaded for the pardon of another exile, Quintus Ligarius—a senator almost as detestable to Caesar as Marcellus—and again Caesar listened and gave judgement in favour of clemency.

  But the notion that this amounted to a restoration of the republic was an illusion. A few days afterwards, the Dictator had to leave Rome in a hurry in order to return to Spain and deal with an uprising led by Pompey’s sons, Gnaeus and Sextus. Hirtius told Cicero that the Dictator was in a rage. Many of the rebels were men he had pardoned on condition they did not take up arms again; now they had betrayed his forgiving nature. There would be no further acts of clemency, Hirtius warned: no more gracious gestures. For his own sake Cicero would be well advised to stay away from the Senate, keep his head down and stick to philosophy: “This time it will be a fight to the death.”

  —

  Tullia was pregnant again by Dolabella—the result, she told me, of her husband’s visit to Tusculum. At first she was delighted by the discovery, believing it would save her marriage. Dolabella seemed happy too. But when she returned to Rome with Cicero to attend Caesar’s four triumphs, and when she went to the house she shared with Dolabella intending to surprise him, she discovered Metella asleep in her bed. It was a terrible shock and to this day I feel the most profound guilt that I failed to warn her of what I had seen when I went there earlier.

  She asked my advice and I urged her to divorce Dolabella without delay. The baby was due in four months. If she was still married when she gave birth, he would be entitled under the law to take the child; however if she were divorced, the situation would be much more complicated. Dolabella would have to take her to court to prove paternity, and at the very least, thanks to her father, she would have the best legal counsel available. She talked to Cicero and he agreed: the baby would be his sole grandchild and he had no intention of seeing it taken away from his daughter and entrusted to the care of Dolabella and the daughter of Clodia.

  Accordingly, on the morning that Dolabella was due to leave with Caesar for the war in Spain, Tullia went to his house, accompanied by Cicero, and informed him that the marriage was over but that she wished to look after the baby. Cicero told me Dolabella’s reaction: “The scoundrel merely shrugged, wished her well with the child, and said that of course it must remain with its mother. Then he drew me aside to say that there was no way at the moment that he could repay her dowry and he hoped this would not affect our relations! What could I say? I can hardly afford to make an enemy of one of Caesar’s closest lieutenants, and besides, I still can’t bring myself entirely to dislike him.”

  He was anguished and blamed himself for allowing the mess to develop. “I should have insisted that she divorce him the moment I heard of the way he was carrying on. Now what is she to do? An abandoned mother of thirty-one with a weak constitution and no dowry is hardly the most marriageable of prospects.”

  If there was any marrying to be done, he realised grimly, the person who would have to do it would be him. Nothing could have suited him less. He liked his new bachelor existence, preferred living with his books to the prospect of living with a wife. He was now
sixty, and although he still cut a handsome figure, sexual desire—never a strong part of his character even in his youth—was waning. It is true that he flirted more as he got older. He liked dinner parties where pretty young women were present—he even once attended the same table as Mark Antony’s mistress, the nude actress Volumnia Cytheris, a thing he would never have countenanced in the past. But murmured compliments on a dining couch and the occasional love poem sent round by a messenger the next morning were as far as things went.

  Unfortunately, he now needed to marry to raise some money. Terentia’s clandestine recovery of her dowry had crippled his finances; he knew Dolabella would never repay him; and although he had plenty of properties—including two new ones, at Astura on the coast near Antium and at Puteoli on the Bay of Naples—he could barely afford to run them. You might ask, “Well, why did he not sell some of them?” But that was never Cicero’s way. His motto was always “Income adjusts to meet expenditure, not the other way round.” Now that his income could no longer be expanded by legal practice the only realistic alternative was once again to take a rich wife.

  It is a sordid story. But I swore at the outset to tell the truth, and I shall do so. Three potential brides were available. One was Hirtia, the elder sister of Hirtius. Her brother was immensely rich from his time in Gaul, and to get this tiresome woman off his hands he was prepared to offer her to Cicero with a dowry of two million sesterces. But as Cicero put it in a letter to Atticus, she was quite remarkably ugly, and it struck him as absurd that the cost of keeping his beautiful houses should be to install in them a hideous wife.

  Then there was Pompeia, the daughter of Pompey. She had been the wife of Faustus Sulla, the owner of Aristotle’s manuscripts, recently killed fighting for the Senate’s cause in Africa. But if he married her, that would make Gnaeus—the man who had threatened to kill him at Corcyra—his brother-in-law. It was unthinkable. Besides, she bore a strong facial resemblance to her father. “Can you imagine,” he said to me with a shudder, “waking up beside Pompey every morning?”

  That left the least suitable match of all. Publilia was only fifteen years old. Her father, M. Publilius, a wealthy equestrian friend of Atticus, had died leaving his estate in trust for his daughter until she married. The principal trustee was Cicero. It was Atticus’s idea—“an elegant solution,” he called it—that Cicero should marry Publilia and so gain access to her fortune. There was nothing illegal about this. The girl’s mother and uncle were all for it, flattered by the prospect of forming a connection with such a distinguished man. And Publilia herself, when Cicero hesitantly broached the subject, declared that she would be honoured to be his wife.

  “Are you sure?” he asked her. “I am forty-five years older than you—old enough to be your grandfather. Do you not find that…unnatural?”

  She stared at him quite frankly. “No.”

  After she had gone, Cicero said, “Well, she seems to be telling the truth. I wouldn’t dream of it if she was repulsed by the very thought of me.” He sighed heavily and shook his head. “I suppose I had better go through with it. But people will be very disapproving.”

  I could not help remarking, “It isn’t people you have to worry about.”

  “What are you referring to?”

  “Well, Tullia, of course,” I replied, amazed that he hadn’t considered her. “How do you think she is going to feel?”

  He squinted at me in genuine puzzlement. “Why would Tullia be opposed? I’m doing this for her benefit as much as mine.”

  “Well,” I said mildly, “I think you’ll find she will mind.”

  And she did. Cicero said that when he told her of his intention she fainted, and for an hour or two he feared for her health and that of the baby. When she recovered, she wanted to know how he could possibly think of such a thing. Was she really expected to call this child her stepmother? Were they to live under the same roof? He was dismayed by the strength of her reaction. However, it was too late for him to back out. He had already borrowed from the moneylenders on the expectation of his new wife’s fortune. Neither of his children attended the wedding breakfast: Tullia moved to live with her mother for the final stages of her pregnancy, while Marcus asked his father for permission to go out and fight in Spain as part of Caesar’s army. Cicero managed to persuade him that such an action would be dishonourable to his former comrades, and instead he went to Athens on a very generous allowance to try to have some philosophy dinned into his thick skull.

  I did attend the wedding, which took place in the bride’s house. The only other guests from the groom’s side were Atticus and his wife, Pilia—who was herself, of course, thirty years her husband’s junior but who seemed quite matronly beside the slender figure of Publilia. The bride, dressed all in white, with her hair pinned up and wearing the sacred belt, looked like an exquisite doll. Perhaps some men could have carried the whole thing off—Pompey I am sure would have been entirely at ease—but Cicero was so obviously uncomfortable that when he came to recite the simple vow (“Where you are Gaia, I am Gaius”), he got the names the wrong way round, an ill omen.

  After a long celebratory banquet the wedding party walked to Cicero’s house in the fading daylight. He had hoped to keep the marriage secret and almost scuttled through the streets, avoiding the gaze of passers-by, gripping his wife’s hand firmly and seeming to drag her along. But a wedding procession always attracts attention, and his face was too famous for anonymity, so that by the time we reached the Palatine we must have been trailing a crowd of fifty or more. At least that number of applauding clients was waiting outside the house to throw flowers over the happy couple. I had worried that Cicero might injure his back if he tried to carry his bride over the threshold, but he hoisted her easily and swept her into the house, hissing at me over his shoulder to close the door behind us, quick. She went straight upstairs to Terentia’s old suite of rooms, where her maids had already unpacked her belongings, to prepare for her wedding night. Cicero tried to persuade me to stay up a little longer and take some wine with him, but I pleaded exhaustion and left him to it.

  —

  The marriage was a disaster from the start. Cicero had no idea how to treat his young wife. It was as if a friend’s child had come to stay. Sometimes he played the role of kindly uncle, delighting in her playing of the lyre or congratulating her on her embroidery. On other occasions he was her exasperated tutor, appalled at her ignorance of history and literature. But mostly he tried to keep out of her way. Once he confided to me that the only workable basis for such a relationship would have been lust, and that he simply did not feel. Poor Publilia—the more her famous husband ignored her, the more she clung to him, and the more irritated he became.

  Finally Cicero went to see Tullia to plead with her to move back in with him. She could have the baby at his house, he said—the birth was imminent—and he would send Publilia away, or rather he would get Atticus to send her away for him, as he found the situation too upsetting to deal with. Tullia, who was distressed to see her father in such a state, agreed, and the long-suffering Atticus duly found himself having to visit Publilia’s mother and uncle to explain why the young woman would have to return home after less than a month of married life. He held out the hope that once the baby was born the couple might be able to resume their relationship, but for now Tullia’s wishes took priority. They had little option but to agree.

  It was January when Tullia moved back into the house. She was brought to the door in a litter and had to be helped inside. I recall a cold winter’s day, everything very clear and bright and sharp. She moved with difficulty. Cicero fussed around her, telling the porter to close the door, ordering more wood for the fire, worrying that she would catch a chill. She said that she would like to go to her room to lie down. Cicero sent for a doctor to examine her. He came out soon afterwards and reported that she was in labour. Terentia was fetched, along with a midwife and her attendants, and they all disappeared into Tullia’s room.

  The scr
eams of pain that rang through the house did not sound like Tullia at all. They did not sound like any human being in fact. They were guttural, primordial—all trace of personality obliterated by pain. I wondered how they fitted in to Cicero’s philosophical scheme. Could happiness remotely be associated with such agony? Presumably it could. But he was unable to bear the shrieks and howls and went out into the garden, walking around and around it, for hour after hour, oblivious to the cold. Eventually there was silence and he came back in again. He looked at me. We waited. A long time seemed to pass, and then there were footsteps and Terentia appeared. Her face was drawn and pale but her voice was triumphant.

  “It’s a boy,” she said, “a healthy boy—and she is well.”

  —

  She was well. That was all that mattered to Cicero. The boy was robust and was named Publius Lentulus, after his father’s adopted patronymic. But Tullia could not feed the infant and the task was assigned to a wet nurse, and as the days passed following the trauma of the birth, she did not seem to get any stronger. Because it was so cold in Rome that winter, there was a lot of smoke, and the racket from the Forum disturbed her sleep. It was decided that she and Cicero should go back to Tusculum, scene of their happy year together, where she could recuperate in the tranquillity of the Frascati hills while he and I pressed on with his philosophical writings. We took a doctor with us. The baby travelled with his nurse, plus a whole retinue of slaves to look after him.

  Tullia found the journey difficult. She was breathless and flushed with fever, although her eyes were wide and calm and she said she felt contented: not ill, just tired. When we reached the villa, the doctor insisted she go straight to bed. Afterwards he took me to one side and said that he was fairly certain now that she was suffering from the final stages of consumption and she would not last the night: should he inform her father, or would it be better if I did it?