The Dictator

by Robert Harris

  It was all horribly effective, and when the door was unlocked and we were released into the light, I dreaded having to return to Cicero and read it back to him. However, he insisted on hearing it word for word. Whenever I tried to miss out a passage or a phrase, he spotted it at once and made me go back and put it in. At the end he looked quite crumpled. “Well, that’s politics,” he said, and tried to shrug it off. But I could tell he was shaken. He knew he would have to retaliate in kind or retire humiliated. Trying to do so in person in the Senate, controlled as it was by Antony and Dolabella, would be too dangerous. Therefore his counter-charge would have to be made in writing, and once it was published there could be no going back. Against such a wild man as Antony, it was a duel to the death.

  Early in October, Antony left Rome for Brundisium, in order to secure the loyalty of the legions he had brought over from Macedonia, and which were now bivouacked just outside the town. With Antony gone, Cicero also decided to retire from Rome for a few weeks and devote himself to composing his riposte, which he was already calling his Second Philippic. He headed off to the Bay of Naples and left me behind to look after his interests.

  It was a melancholy season. As always in late autumn, the skies above Rome were darkened by countless thousands of starlings arriving from the north, and their chattering shrieks seemed to warn of some imminent calamity. They would nestle in the trees beside the Tiber only to rise in huge black flags that would unfurl overhead and sweep back and forth as if in panic. The days became chilly; the nights longer; winter approached and with it the certainty of war. Octavian was in Campania, very close to where Cicero was staying, recruiting troops in Casilinum and Calatia from among Caesar’s veterans. Antony was trying to bribe the soldiers in Brundisium. Decimus had raised a new legion in Nearer Gaul. Lepidus and Plancus were waiting with their forces beyond the Alps. Brutus and Cassius had hoisted their standards in Macedonia and in Syria. That made a total of seven armies, formed or forming. It was merely a question of who would strike first.

  In the event, that honour, if honour is the word, fell to Octavian. He had mustered the best part of a legion by promising the veterans a staggering bounty of two thousand sesterces a head—Balbus had guaranteed the money—and now he wrote to Cicero begging his advice. Cicero sent the sensational news to me to pass on to Atticus.

  His object is plain: war with Antony and himself as commander-in-chief. So it looks to me as though in a few days’ time we shall be in arms. But who are we to follow? Consider his name; consider his age. He wanted my advice as to whether he should proceed to Rome with three thousand veterans or hold Capua and block Antony’s route or go to join the three Macedonian legions now marching along the Adriatic coast, which he hopes to have on his side. They refused to take a bounty from Antony, so he says, booed him savagely, and left him standing as he tried to harangue them. In short, he proffers himself as our leader and expects me to back him up. For my part I have recommended him to go to Rome. I imagine he will have the city rabble behind him, and the honest men too if he convinces them of his sincerity.

  Octavian followed Cicero’s recommendation and entered Rome on the tenth day of November. His soldiers occupied the Forum. I watched as they deployed across the centre of the city, securing the temples and the public buildings. They remained in position throughout that night and the whole of the following day while Octavian set up his headquarters in Balbus’s house and tried to arrange a meeting of the Senate. But the senior magistrates were all gone: Antony was trying to win over the Macedonian legions; Dolabella had left for Syria; half the praetors, including Brutus and Cassius, had fled Italy—the city was leaderless. I could see why Octavian was pleading with Cicero to join him on his adventure, writing to him once and sometimes twice a day: Cicero alone might have had the moral authority to rally the Senate. But he had no intention of putting himself under the command of a mere boy leading an armed insurrection with precarious chances of success; prudently he stayed away.

  In my role as Cicero’s eyes and ears in Rome, I went down to the Forum on the twelfth to hear Octavian speak. By this time he had abandoned his attempts to summon the Senate and instead had persuaded a sympathetic tribune, Ti. Cannutius, to convene a public assembly. He stood on the rostra under a grey sky waiting to be called—slender as a reed, blond, pale, nervous; it was, as I wrote to Cicero, “a scene both ridiculous and yet oddly compelling, like an episode from a legend.” He was not a bad speaker, either, once he got started, and Cicero was delighted by his denunciation of Antony (“this forger of decrees, this subverter of laws, this thief of rightful inheritances, this traitor who is even now seeking to make war upon the entire state…”). But he was less pleased when I reported how Octavian had pointed to the statue of Caesar that had been set up on the rostra and praised him as “the greatest Roman of all time, whose murder I shall avenge and whose hopes in me I swear to you by all the gods I shall fulfil.” With that he came down from the platform to loud applause and soon afterwards left the city, taking his soldiers with him, alarmed at reports that Antony was approaching with a much larger force.

  Events now moved with great rapidity. Antony halted his army—which included Caesar’s famous Fifth Legion, “the Larks”—a mere twelve miles from Rome at Tibur and entered the city with a bodyguard of a thousand men. He summoned the Senate for the twenty-fourth and let it be known that he expected them to declare Octavian a public enemy. Failure to attend would be regarded as condoning Octavian’s treason and punishable by death. Antony’s army was ready to move into the city if his will was thwarted. Rome was gripped by the certainty of a massacre.

  The twenty-fourth arrived, the Senate met—but Antony himself did not appear. One of the Macedonian legions that had booed him, the Martian, encamped sixty miles away at Alba Fucens, had suddenly declared itself for Octavian, in return for a bounty five times the size of that Antony had offered them. He raced off to try to win them back, but they mocked him openly for his stinginess. He returned to Rome, summoning the Senate for the twenty-eighth, this time to meet in an emergency session at night. Never before in living memory had the Senate gathered in darkness: it was contrary to all custom and the sacred laws. When I went down to the Forum intending to make my report for Cicero, I found it full of legionaries drawn up in the torchlight. The sight was so sinister I lost my nerve and did not dare to enter the temple, but instead stood around with the crowd outside. I saw Antony arrive, hotfoot from Alba Fucens, accompanied by his brother Lucius, an even wilder-looking character than him, who had fought as a gladiator in Asia and slit a friend’s throat. And I was still there an hour later to see them both leave in a hurry. Never will I forget the rolling-eyed look of panic on Antony’s face as he rushed down the temple steps. He had just been told that another legion, the Fourth, had followed the example of the Martian and had also declared for Octavian. Now he was the one who risked being outnumbered. Antony fled the city that same night and went to Tibur to rally his army and raise fresh recruits.

  —

  While all this was going on, Cicero finished his so-called Second Philippic and sent it to me with instructions to borrow twenty scribes from Atticus and ensure it was copied and circulated as soon as possible. It took the form of a long speech—had it been delivered, it would have lasted a good two hours—and therefore rather than set each man to work making a single copy, I divided the roll into twenty parts and shared the pieces between them. In this way, once their completed sections were glued together, we were able to turn out four or five copies a day. These we sent to friends and allies with a request that they either make copies themselves or at least hold meetings at which the speech could be read aloud.

  News of it soon spread. On the day after Antony withdrew from the city, it was posted in the Forum. Everyone wanted to read it, not least because it was filled with the most venomous gossip, for example that Antony had been a homosexual prostitute in his youth and was always falling down drunk and had kept a nude actress as his mistress. But
I ascribe its phenomenal popularity more to the fact that it was also full of detailed information no one had dared disclose before—that Antony had stolen seven hundred million sesterces from the Temple of Ops and had used part of it to pay off personal debts of forty million; that he and Fulvia had forged Caesar’s decrees to extort ten million sesterces from the king of Galatia; that the pair had seized jewels, furniture, villas, farms and cash and had divided it all up among themselves and their entourage of actors, gladiators, soothsayers and quacks.

  On the ninth day of December, Cicero finally returned to Rome. I had not been expecting him. I heard the watchdog barking and went out into the passage to discover the master of the house standing there with Atticus. He had been away for nearly two months and looked to be in exceptionally good health and spirits. Without even taking off his cloak and hat he handed me a letter he had received the previous day from Octavian:

  I have read your new Philippic and think it quite magnificent—worthy of Demosthenes himself. I only wish I could see the face of our latter-day Philip when he reads it. I learn he has decided against attacking me here, no doubt nervous that his men would refuse to take the field against Caesar’s son, and instead is marching his army rapidly to Nearer Gaul with the intention of wresting that province from your friend Decimus.

  My dear Cicero, you must agree my position is stronger than we ever could have dreamed of when we met at your house in Puteoli. I am here now in Etruria seeking fresh recruits. They are flocking to me. And yet as ever I am in sore need of your wise advice. Can we not contrive a meeting? There is no man in all the world I would sooner speak with.

  “Well,” said Cicero with a grin, “what do you think?”

  I replied, “It’s very gratifying.”

  “Gratifying? Come now—use your imagination! It’s more than that! I’ve been thinking about it ever since I got it.”

  After a slave had helped him out of his outdoor clothes, he beckoned me and Atticus to follow him into his study and asked me to close the door.

  “Here is the situation as I see it. Were it not for Octavian, Antony would have taken Rome and our cause would be finished by now. But fear of Octavian forced the wolf to drop his prey at the last moment and now he’s slinking north to devour Nearer Gaul instead. If he defeats Decimus this winter and takes the province—which he probably will—he will have the financial base and the forces to return to Rome in the spring and finish us off. All that stands between us and him is Octavian.”

  Atticus said sceptically, “You really think Octavian has raised an army in order to defend what’s left of the republic?”

  “No, but equally is it in his interests to allow Antony to take control of Rome? Of course not. Antony at this juncture is his real enemy—the one who has stolen his inheritance and denies his claims. If I can persuade Octavian to see that, we may yet save ourselves from disaster.”

  “Possibly—but only to deliver the republic from the clutches of one tyrant into those of another; and a tyrant who calls himself Caesar at that.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if the lad is a tyrant—I think I may be able to use my influence to keep him on the side of virtue, at least until Antony is disposed of.”

  “His letter certainly seems to suggest he would listen to you,” I said.

  “Exactly. Believe me, Atticus, I could show you thirty such letters if I could be bothered to find them, going all the way back to April. Why is he so eager for my counsel? The truth is the boy lacks a father figure—his natural father is dead; his stepfather is a goose; and his adopted father has left him the greatest legacy in history but no guidance on how to gain hold of it. Somehow I seem to have stepped into the paternal role, which is a blessing—not so much for me as for the republic.”

  Atticus said, “So what are you going to do?”

  “I shall go and see him.”

  “In Etruria, in the middle of winter, at your age? It’s a hundred miles away. You must be mad.”

  I said, “But you can hardly expect Octavian to come to Rome.”

  Cicero waved away these objections. “Then we’ll meet halfway. That villa you bought the other year, Atticus, on Lake Volsinii—that would suit the purpose admirably. Is it occupied?”

  “No, but I can’t vouch for its comfort.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Tiro, draft a letter from me to Octavian proposing a meeting in Volsinii as soon as he can manage it.”

  Atticus said, “But what about the Senate? What about the consuls-designate? You have no power to negotiate on behalf of the republic with anyone, let alone with a man at the head of a rebel army.”

  “Nobody is wielding power in the republic any more. That’s the point. It’s lying in the dust waiting for whoever dares to pick it up. Why shouldn’t I be the one to seize it?”

  Atticus had no answer to that and Cicero’s invitation went off to Octavian within the hour. After three days of anxious waiting Cicero received his reply: Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see you again. I shall meet you in Volsinii on the sixteenth as you propose unless I hear that that has become inconvenient. I suggest we keep our rendezvous secret.

  —

  To ensure that no one would guess what he was up to, Cicero insisted we leave in the darkness long before dawn on the morning of the fourteenth of December. I had to bribe the sentries to open the Fontinalian Gate especially for us.

  We knew we would be venturing into lawless country, full of roaming bands of armed men, and so we travelled in a closed carriage escorted by a large retinue of guards and attendants. Once across the Mulvian Bridge we turned left along the bank of the Tiber and joined the Via Cassia, a road I had never travelled before. By noon we were climbing into hilly country. Atticus had promised me spectacular views. But the dismal weather Italy had endured ever since Caesar’s assassination continued to curse us, and the distant peaks of the pine-covered mountains were draped in mist. For the entire two days we were on the road it barely seemed to get light.

  Cicero’s earlier ebullience had faded. He was uncharacteristically quiet, conscious no doubt that the future of the republic might depend on the coming meeting. On the afternoon of the second day, as we reached the edge of the great lake and our destination came into view, he began to complain of feeling cold. He shivered and blew on his hands, but when I tried to cover his knees with a blanket, he threw it off like an irritable child and said that although he might be ancient, he was not an invalid.

  Atticus had bought his property as an investment and had only visited it once; still, he never forgot a thing when it came to money and he quickly remembered where to find it. Large and dilapidated—parts of it dated back to Etruscan times—the villa stood just outside the city walls of Volsinii, right on the edge of the water. The iron gates were open. Drifts of dead leaves had rotted in the damp courtyard; black lichen and moss covered the terracotta roofs. Only a thin curl of smoke rising from the chimney gave any sign it was inhabited. We assumed from the deserted grounds that Octavian had not yet arrived. But as we descended from the carriage, the steward hurried forward and said that a young man was waiting inside.

  He was sitting in the tablinum with his friend Agrippa and he rose as we entered. I looked to see if the spectacular change in his fortunes was reflected at all in his manner or person, but he seemed exactly as before: quiet, modest, watchful, with the same unstylish haircut and youthful acne. He had come without any escort, he said, apart from two chariot drivers, who had taken their teams to be fed and watered in the town. (“No one knows what I look like, so I prefer not to draw attention to myself; it is better to hide in plain sight, don’t you think?”) He clasped hands very warmly with Cicero. After the introductions were over, Cicero said, “I thought Tiro here could make a note of anything we agree on and then we could each have a copy.”

  Octavian said, “So you’re empowered to negotiate?”

  “No, but it would be useful to have something to show to the leaders of the Senate.”

 
“Personally, if you don’t mind, I would prefer it if nothing were written down. That way we can talk more freely.”

  There is therefore no verbatim record of their conference, although I wrote up an account immediately afterwards for Cicero’s personal use. First Octavian gave a summary of the military situation as he understood it. He had, or would have shortly, four legions at his disposal: the veterans from Campania, the levies he was raising in Etruria, the Martian and the Fourth. Antony had three legions, including the Larks, but also another entirely inexperienced, and was closing in on Decimus, whom he understood from his agents had retreated to the city of Mutina, where he was slaughtering and salting cattle and preparing for a long siege. Cicero said that the Senate had eleven legions in Further Gaul: seven under Lepidus and four under Plancus.

  Octavian said, “Yes, but they are the wrong side of the Alps and are needed to hold down Gaul. Besides, we both know the commanders are not necessarily reliable, especially Lepidus.”

  “I shan’t argue with you,” said Cicero. “The position boils down to this: you have the soldiers but no legitimacy; we have the legitimacy but no soldiers. What we do both have, however, is a common enemy—Antony. And it seems to me that somewhere in that mixture must be the basis for an agreement.”

  Agrippa said, “An agreement you’ve just told us you have no authority to make.”

  “Young man, take it from me, if you want to make a deal with the Senate, I am your best hope. And let me tell you something else—it will be no easy task to convince them, even for me. There’ll be plenty who’ll say, ‘We didn’t get rid of one Caesar to ally ourselves with another.’ ”

  “Yes,” retorted Agrippa, “and plenty on our side who’ll say, ‘Why should we fight to protect the men who murdered Caesar? This is just a trick to buy us off until they’re strong enough to destroy us.’ ”