The Dictator

by Robert Harris

  I put the jar into a box in my room, and placed the box inside a locked chest, as if by hiding it away, death itself could be postponed.

  The next day, gangs of Octavian’s legionaries began to appear in the Forum. He had sent four hundred on ahead of his main army, with the aim of intimidating the Senate into granting him the consulship. Whenever they saw a senator, they surrounded him and jostled him and showed him their swords, although they never actually drew their weapons. Cornutus, as an old soldier, refused to be threatened. Determined to visit Cicero on the Palatine, the urban praetor pushed and shoved them back until they let him through. But he advised Cicero that on no account should he venture out himself unless he had a strong escort: “They hold you as much responsible for Caesar’s death as they do Decimus or Brutus.”

  “If only I had been responsible! Then we would have taken care of Antony at the same time and we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.”

  “Well, here is some better news for you: the African legions arrived last night, and we didn’t lose a single ship. Eight thousand men and a thousand cavalry are disembarking at Ostia even as I speak. That should be enough to hold off Octavian, at least until Brutus and Cassius send us help.”

  “But are they loyal?”

  “So their commanders assure me.”

  “Then bring them here as quickly as possible.”

  The legions were only a day’s march from Rome. As they approached the city, Octavian’s men slipped away into the surrounding countryside. When the vanguard reached the salt warehouses, Cornutus ordered the column to parade through the Trigemina Gate and across the Forum Boarium in full view of the crowds in order to steady civilian morale. Then they took up position on the Janiculum. From these strategic heights they controlled the western approaches to Rome and could deploy rapidly to block any invading force. Cornutus asked Cicero if he would come out and inspire the men with a rousing speech. Cicero agreed, and he was carried out of the city gates in a litter accompanied by fifty legionaries on foot. I rode on a mule.

  It was a hot, muggy day without a tremor of wind. We crossed the River Tiber over the Sublician Bridge and traipsed along a road of dried mud through the shanty towns that have for as long as I can remember filled the flat plain of the Vaticanum. It was notoriously malarial in the summer, and swarming with hostile insects. Cicero’s litter had the protection of a mosquito net but I did not, and the insects whined in my ears. The whole place stank of human filth. Children, pot-bellied with hunger, watched us listlessly from the doorways of tumbling shacks, while all around them, disregarded and pecking away at the rubbish, were hundreds of the crows that nest in the nearby sacred grove. We passed through the gates of the Janiculum and went up the hill. The place was teeming with soldiers. They had pitched their tents wherever they could find some space.

  On the flatter ground at the top of the slope Cornutus had drawn up four cohorts—almost two thousand men. They stood in lines in the heat. The light on their helmets dazzled as brightly as the sun, and I had to shield my eyes. When Cicero stepped out of his litter there was absolute silence. Cornutus conducted him to a low platform beside an altar. A sheep was sacrificed. Its guts were pulled out and examined by the haruspices and declared propitious: “There is no doubt of ultimate victory.” The crows circled overhead. A priest read a prayer. Then Cicero spoke.

  I cannot remember exactly what he said. All the usual words were there—liberty, ancestors, hearths and altars, laws and temples—but for once I listened without hearing. I was looking at the faces of the legionaries. They were sunburnt, lean, impassive. Some were chewing mastic. I saw the scene through their eyes. They had been recruited by Caesar to fight against King Juba and the army of Cato. They had slaughtered thousands and had been stuck in Africa ever since. They had travelled hundreds of miles crammed together in boats. They had been force-marched for a day. Now they were lined up in the heat in Rome and an old man was talking at them about liberty, ancestors, hearths and altars—and it meant nothing.

  Cicero finished speaking. There was silence. Cornutus ordered them to give three cheers. The silence continued. Cicero stepped off the platform and got back into his litter and we returned down the hill, past the saucer-eyed starving children.

  —

  Cornutus came to see Cicero the following morning and told him that the African legions had mutinied overnight. It seemed that Octavian’s men had crept back from the countryside in the darkness, infiltrated the camps and promised the soldiers twice as much money as the Senate could afford to pay them. Meanwhile Octavian’s main army was reported to be moving south along the Via Flaminia and was barely a day’s march away.

  “What will you do now?” Cicero asked him.

  “Kill myself,” came the reply, and he did, that same evening, pressing the tip of his sword to his stomach and falling upon it heavily rather than surrender.

  He was an honourable man and deserves to be remembered, not least because he was the only member of the Senate who took that course. When Octavian was close to the city, most of the leading patricians went out to meet him on the road to escort him into Rome. Cicero sat in his study with the shutters closed. The air was so close it was hard to breathe. I looked in from time to time but he did not seem to have moved. His noble head, staring straight ahead and silhouetted against the faint light from the window, was like a marble bust in a deserted temple. Finally he noticed me and asked where Octavian had set up his headquarters.

  I replied that he had moved into the home of his mother and stepfather on the Quirinal.

  “Perhaps you could send a message to Philippus and ask him what he suggests I should do.”

  I did as he requested and the courier returned with a scrawled reply that Cicero ought to go and talk to Octavian: “You will find him, I am sure, as I did, disposed to mercy.”

  Wearily Cicero got to his feet. The big house, usually thronged with visitors, was empty. It felt as if no one had lived in it for a long time. In the late summer afternoon sun the silent public rooms glowed as if made of gold and amber.

  We went together, in a pair of litters accompanied by a small escort, to the house of Philippus. Sentries guarded the street and the front door but they must have been given orders to let Cicero through, for they parted at once. As we crossed the threshold, Isauricus was just leaving. I had expected him, as Octavian’s future father-in-law, to give Cicero a smile of condescension or of triumph; instead he scowled at him and hurried past us.

  Through the heavy open door we could see Octavian standing in a corner of the tablinum dictating a letter to a secretary. He beckoned to us to enter. He seemed in no hurry to finish. He was wearing a simple military tunic. His body armour, helmet and sword lay scattered on a couch where he had flung them. He looked like a young recruit. Finally he ended his dictation and sent the secretary away.

  He scrutinised Cicero in an amused way that reminded me of his adopted father. “You are the last of my friends to greet me.”

  “Well, I imagined you would be busy.”

  “Ah, is that it?” Octavian laughed, revealing those terrible teeth of his. “I was presuming that you disapproved of my actions.”

  Cicero shrugged. “The world is as it is. I have given up the habit of approving and disapproving. What’s the point? Men do as they please, whatever I think.”

  “So what is it you want to do? Do you want to be consul?”

  For the merest fraction of a moment Cicero’s face seemed to flood with pleasure and relief, but then he understood that Octavian was joking and immediately the light went out of it again. He grunted, “Now you’re toying with me.”

  “I am. Forgive me. My colleague as consul will be Quintus Pedius, an obscure relative of mine of whom you will never have heard, which is the whole point of him.”

  “So not Isauricus?”

  “No. There seems to have been some misunderstanding there. I shan’t be marrying his daughter either. I shall spend some time here settling matters and the
n I must go and confront Antony and Lepidus. You can leave Rome too if you like.”

  “I can?”

  “Yes, you can leave Rome. You can write philosophy. You can go anywhere you please in Italy. However, you cannot return to Rome in my absence, nor can you attend the Senate. You cannot write your memoirs or anything political. You cannot leave the country and go to Brutus or Cassius. Is that acceptable? Will you give me your word? I can assure you my men would not be so generous.”

  Cicero bowed his head. “It is generous. It is acceptable. I give you my word. Thank you.”

  “In return I will guarantee your safety, in recognition of our past friendship.” He picked up a letter to signal that the audience was at an end. “One last thing,” he said as Cicero turned to leave. “It makes no difference, but I would like to know: was it a joke, or would you really have erased me?”

  “I believe I would have done exactly the same as you are doing now,” replied Cicero.

  After that, he seemed to become an old man very suddenly. He retired to Tusculum the next day and immediately started complaining about his eyesight. He refused to write or even read: he said it gave him a headache. He took no solace from his garden. He visited no one and no one visited him, apart from his brother. They would sit together for hours on a bench in the Lyceum, mostly in silence. The only subject Quintus could tempt him to discuss was the distant past—their shared memories of childhood and of growing up in Arpinum—and for the first time I heard Cicero talk at length about his father and mother. It was unnerving to see him, of all men, so disconnected from the world. Throughout his life he had demanded to know the latest news from Rome. Now, when I told him what I had heard was happening—that Octavius had set up a special court to try the assassins of Caesar, or even that he had left the city at the head of an army of eleven legions to fight Antony—he made no comment, save that he preferred not even to think about it. A few more weeks of this, I thought to myself, and he will die.

  People often ask me why he did not try to run away. After all, Octavian did not yet have any firm control of the country. The weather was still clement. The ports were not watched. Cicero could have slipped out of Italy to join his son in Macedonia: I am sure Brutus would have been only too pleased to offer him sanctuary. But the truth was he lacked the will to do anything so decisive. “I am finished with running,” he sighed to me. He couldn’t even summon the energy to go down to the Bay of Naples. Besides, Octavian had guaranteed his safety.

  I guess it must have been about a month after our retreat to Tusculum that he sought me out one morning and told me he would like to review his old letters: “This constant talk with Quintus about my early years has stirred the sediment of my memory.” I had preserved them all, however fragmentary, incoming and outgoing, over more than three decades, and had sorted them by correspondent and arranged them on rolls chronologically. I carried the cylinders into his library and he lay on the couch while one of his secretaries read them out. It was all there, an entire life, from his early struggles to gain election to the Senate, through the hundreds of legal cases he took to make his name famous and which culminated in the epic prosecution of Verres, his election to aedile and then to praetor and finally to consul, his struggles with Catilina and Clodius, his exile and return, his relations with Caesar and Pompey and Cato, the civil war, the assassination, his return to power, Tullia and Terentia…

  For more than a week he relived his life, and at the end he had recovered something of his old self. “What an adventure it has been,” he mused, stretching out on the couch. “It has all come back to me, the good and the bad, the noble and the base. I truly believe I can say, without being immodest, that these letters add up to the most complete record of an historical era ever assembled by a leading statesman. And what an era! No one else saw so much, and wrote about it while it was still fresh. This is history composed without any benefit of hindsight. Can you think of anything to compare with it?”

  “It will be of immense interest a thousand years from now,” I said, trying to encourage his new good mood.

  “Oh, it’s more than merely of interest! It’s the case for my defence. I may have lost the past and lost the present, but I wonder if with this I might not yet win the future.”

  Some of the letters showed him in a bad light—vain, duplicitous, greedy, wrong-headed—and I expected him to weed out the most egregious examples and order me to destroy them. But when I asked him which letters he wished me to discard, he replied, “We must keep them all. I can’t present myself to posterity as some improbable paragon—no one will believe it. If this archive is to have the necessary authenticity, I must stand before the muse of history as naked as a Greek statue. Let future generations mock me for my follies and pretensions however much they like—the important thing is that they will have to read me, and in that will lie my victory.”

  Of all the sayings associated with Cicero, the most famous and characteristic is: “While there is life there is hope.” He still had life—or the semblance of it, at least; and now he had the faintest gleam of hope.

  Beginning that day, he concentrated what remained of his strength on the task of ensuring his papers survived. Atticus eventually agreed to help, on condition he was allowed to retrieve every letter he had ever written to Cicero. Cicero rather despised him for his caution but in the end agreed: “If he wants to be a mere shadow in history, that’s his lookout.” With some reluctance I returned the correspondence I had carefully assembled over so many years and watched as Atticus lit a brazier and—not trusting the task to a servant—burnt with his own hand all the rolls on which his letters had been preserved. Then he put his scribes to work. Three complete sets of the collected letters were produced. Cicero kept one, Atticus another and I the third. I sent mine down to my farm along with locked boxes containing all my shorthand notes recording thousands of meetings, speeches, conversations, witticisms and barbed remarks, as well as the dictated drafts of his books. I told the overseer that it all should be hidden in one of the barns and that if anything happened to me he should give it to Agathe Licinia, the freedwoman who owned the baths of Venus Libertina at Baiae. Quite what she would do with it, I was not sure, but I sensed that I could trust her above all people in the world.

  At the end of November, Cicero asked me if I would go back to Rome to make sure the last of his papers had been removed from his study, and to carry out a final general inspection. The house was being sold on his behalf by Atticus, and much of the furniture had already gone. It was the start of winter. The morning was chilly, the light gloomy. I wandered between the empty rooms as if I were an invisible spirit, and in my imagination I re-peopled them. I saw the tablinum once again filled with statesmen discussing the future of the republic, heard Tullia’s laughter in the dining room, saw Cicero bent over his books of philosophy in the library attempting to explain why fear of death was illogical…My eyes were blurred with tears; my heart ached.

  Suddenly a dog began to howl—so loudly and frantically that my bittersweet fantasies vanished in an instant. I stopped to listen. Our old dog had gone. This had to be a neighbour’s. It was a most piteous wailing and it set off others. I went out on to the terrace. The sky was dark with swirls of starlings, and all across Rome dogs were howling like wolves. Indeed it was later said that at this very moment a wolf was seen darting across the Forum; that statues sweated blood and a newly born baby spoke. I heard the sound of running feet and looking down saw a group of men whooping with delight, racing towards the rostra and tossing to one another what I thought at first was a football but then realised was a human head. A woman started screaming in the street. Without thinking what I was doing I went out to see who it was and found the wife of our elderly neighbour, Caesetius Rufus, crawling on her knees in the gutter, while behind her the trunk of a corpse gushed blood from its neck across the threshold. Her steward, who I knew quite well, was running hopelessly to and fro. Panicking, I grabbed his arm and shook him until he told me what had
happened—Octavian, Antony and Lepidus had joined forces and had published a list of hundreds of senators and equestrians who were to be killed and their fortunes seized. There was a bounty of a hundred thousand sesterces for each head that was brought to them. Both of the Cicero brothers were named on the list, and Atticus.

  “That cannot be true,” I assured him. “We have a solemn promise.”

  “It’s true,” he cried. “I’ve seen it.”

  I ran back to the house, where the few remaining slaves were gathered, frightened, in the atrium. “Everyone must scatter,” I told them. “If they catch us they will torture us to try to make us reveal the whereabouts of the master. If it comes to it, say he is in Puteoli.” I scribbled out a message to Cicero: You and Quintus and Atticus are proscribed—Octavian has betrayed you—the death squads are looking for you—make at once for your house on the island—I will find you a boat. I gave it to the ostler and told him to take it by his fastest horse to Cicero in Tusculum. Then I went to the stables and found my carriage and driver and ordered him to set off for Astura.

  Even as we clattered down the hill, gangs of men armed with knives and staves were running up on to the Palatine, where the richest human pickings would be found, and I banged my head against the side of the carriage in my anguish that Cicero hadn’t made good his escape from Italy while he had the chance.

  I made that unfortunate driver whip his poor pair of horses until their flanks bled so that we could arrive in Astura before nightfall. We found the boatman in his hut, and even though the sea was beginning to get up and the light was dim, he rowed us the hundred yards over to the little island where Cicero’s villa stood secluded in the trees. It had not been visited by him for months, and the slaves were amazed to see me, and not a little resentful at having to light fires and heat the rooms. I lay down on my damp mattress and listened to the wind buffeting around the roof and rustling the trees. As the waves crashed against the rocky shore and the house creaked, I was full of terror, imagining that every sound might be the arrival of Cicero’s murderers. If I had brought that jar of hemlock, I almost think I might have taken it.