Dictator:

by Robert Harris

  And so we drifted towards calamity. At times, Cicero was shrewd enough to see it. ‘Can a constitution devised centuries ago to replace a monarchy, and based upon a citizens’ militia, possibly hope to run an empire whose scope is beyond anything ever dreamed of by its framers? Or must the existence of standing armies and the influx of inconceivable wealth inevitably destroy our democratic system?’

  And then at other times he would dismiss such apocalyptic talk as excessively gloomy and argue that the republic had endured all manner of disasters in the past – invasions, revolutions, civil wars – and had always somehow survived them: why should this time be any different?

  But it was.

  The elections that year were dominated by two men. Clodius sought to be praetor. Milo ran for the consulship. The violence and the bribery of the campaign were beyond anything the city had ever seen, and yet again polling day had to be postponed repeatedly. It was now more than a year since the republic had elected legitimate consuls. The Senate was presided over by an interrex, often a nonentity, on a rolling five-day mandate; the fasces of the consuls were placed symbolically in the Temple of Libitina, goddess of the dead. Hurry back to Rome, Cicero wrote to Atticus, who was on another of his business trips. Come and look at the empty husks of the real old Roman Republic we used to know.

  It was a measure of how desperate things were becoming that Cicero vested all his hopes in Milo, even though Milo was entirely his opposite: crude and brutal, lacking in eloquence or indeed any political skill apart from the staging of gladiatorial games to enthuse the voters, the costs of which had left him bankrupt. Milo had outlived his usefulness to Pompey, who would have nothing more to do with him, and who was supporting his opponents, Scipio Nasica and Plautius Hypsaeus. But Cicero still needed him. I have firmly concentrated all my efforts, all my time, care, diligence and thought, my whole mind in short, on winning the consulship for Milo. He saw him as the best bulwark against the eventuality he dreaded most: Clodius’s election to the consulship.

  Cicero often asked me to perform small services for Milo during that campaign. For example, I went back through our files and prepared lists of our old supporters for him to canvass. I also set up meetings between him and Cicero’s clients in the various tribal headquarters. I even took him bags of money that Cicero had raised from wealthy donors.

  One day in the new year, Cicero asked me, as a favour, if I would spend a short time observing Milo’s campaign at first hand. ‘To put the matter bluntly, I’m worried he’s going to lose. You know elections as well as I do. Watch him with the voters. See if anything can be done to improve his prospects. If he loses and Clodius wins, I don’t need to tell you it will be a disaster for me.’

  I cannot pretend that I was delighted with the assignment, but I did as I was asked, and on the eighteenth day of January I turned up at Milo’s house, which was on the steepest part of the Palatine, behind the Temple of Saturn. A listless crowd was gathered outside, but of the would-be consul himself there was no sign. I knew then that Milo’s candidacy was in trouble. If a man is standing for election and feels himself to have a chance of winning, he works every hour of the day. But Milo did not emerge until the middle of the morning, and when he did, he took me to one side to complain about Pompey, who he said was entertaining Clodius that very morning at his country house in the Alban Hills.

  ‘The man’s ingratitude is unbelievable! Do you remember how he used to be so frightened of Clodius and his gang that he daren’t even set foot out of doors until I brought in my gladiators to clear the streets? And now he has taken that snake under his roof, yet he won’t even bid me good morning!’

  I sympathised – we all knew what Pompey was like: a great man, but entirely preoccupied with himself – and then tried tactfully to steer the conversation back to Milo’s campaign. There was not long until polling day. Where did he plan to spend these precious final hours?

  ‘Today,’ he announced, ‘I am going to Lanuvium, my adopted grandfather’s ancestral home.’

  I could scarcely believe it. ‘You’re leaving Rome, this close to the actual vote?’

  ‘It’s only twenty miles. A new priest is to be nominated for the Temple of Juno the Saviour. She is the municipal deity, which means that the ceremony will be huge – you’ll see, hundreds of voters will be there.’

  ‘Even so, surely these voters are already committed to you, given your family connection to the town? Wouldn’t your time be better spent pursuing voters who are undecided?’

  But Milo refused to discuss it further. Indeed his refusal was so absolute that now, when I look back on it, I wonder if he hadn’t already given up hope of winning the election in the voting pens and decided to go looking for trouble instead. After all, Lanuvium is also in the Alban Hills, and the road to it would take us practically past Pompey’s gates. He must have calculated there was a good chance we would meet Clodius on the way. It would have been just the sort of opportunity for a fight he relished.

  By the time we set out that afternoon he had gathered together a considerable wagon train of luggage and servants, protected by his usual small private army of slaves and gladiators armed with swords and javelins. Milo rode in a carriage at the head of this menacing column together with his wife, Fausta. He invited me to join them but I preferred the discomfort of horseback to sharing a carriage with those two, whose tempestuous relationship was notorious. We clattered off down the Via Appia, arrogantly forcing all the other traffic out of our way – again, I noted, poor electoral tactics – and had been going for about two hours when of course, on the outskirts of Bovillae, we duly encountered Clodius heading in the opposite direction, back to Rome.

  Clodius was on horseback with perhaps thirty attendants – less well armed than Milo’s, and far less numerous. I was in the middle of our column. As he passed, he caught my eye. He knew me pretty well as Cicero’s secretary. He certainly gave me a foul look.

  The rest of his party followed him. I averted my gaze. I wanted no trouble. But moments later, from behind me, there was a shout and then the clash of steel hitting steel. I turned and saw that a fight had broken out between our gladiators, who were bringing up the rear, and some of Clodius’s men. Clodius himself had already gone a little way further along the road. He drew up his horse and turned, and at that moment Birria, the gladiator who had sometimes acted as a bodyguard to Cicero, hurled a javelin at him. It did not hit him full on, but rather in his side as he was in the act of turning, and the force of it almost knocked him from his saddle. The barbed tip buried itself deep in his flesh. He looked at it in astonishment, and screamed and clutched at the shaft with both hands, his whitened toga turning crimson with blood.

  His bodyguards spurred their horses and surrounded him. Our convoy halted. I noticed we were close to a tavern – the same place, by bizarre coincidence, where we had stopped to pick up our horses on the night Cicero fled Rome. Milo jumped out of his carriage with his sword drawn and walked down the side of the road to see what was going on. All along the column men were dismounting. By now Clodius’s attendants had pulled the javelin from his ribs and were helping him towards the tavern. He was sufficiently conscious to be able to half walk supported on the arms of his companions. Meanwhile small groups of men were fighting hand-to-hand along the road and in the fields next to it – desperate, hacking struggles, some on horseback, some on foot – such a confused melee that I could not at first distinguish our men from theirs. But gradually I perceived that ours were winning, for we outnumbered them three to one. I saw several of Clodius’s men, despairing of victory, fling up their arms in surrender or fall to their knees. Others simply threw aside their weapons, turned and ran, or galloped off. No one bothered to pursue them.

  The struggle over, Milo, with his arms akimbo, surveyed the carnage, then gestured to Birria and a few others to go and fetch Clodius from the tavern.

  I got down from my horse. I had no idea what would happen next. I walked towards Milo. Just then there was a s
hout, or rather a scream from the tavern, and Clodius was carried out by four gladiators, each holding an arm or a leg. Milo had a calculation to make: would he let Clodius live and take the consequences, or kill him and have done with it? They laid him on the road at his feet. Milo took a javelin from the man standing next to him, checked the tip with his thumb, placed it in the centre of Clodius’s chest, grasped the shaft and plunged it in with all his force. Clodius’s mouth fountained blood. After that, they all took turns in slashing at the corpse, but I could not bring myself to watch.

  I was no horseman, yet I believe I galloped back to Rome at a speed a cavalryman would have been proud of. I urged my exhausted mount up to the Palatine, and for the second time in half a year I found myself blurting out to Cicero the news that one of his enemies – the greatest of them all – was dead.

  He gave no sign of pleasure. He was ice-cold, calculating. He drummed his fingers and then said, ‘Where is Milo now?’

  ‘I believe he carried on to Lanuvium for the ceremony as planned.’

  ‘And Clodius’s body?’

  ‘The last time I saw it, it was still by the roadside.’

  ‘Milo made no attempt to conceal it?’

  ‘No, he said there was no point – there were too many witnesses.’

  ‘That’s probably true – it’s a busy spot. Were you seen by many people?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Clodius recognised me, but not the others.’

  He gave a hard smile. ‘Clodius at least we no longer have to worry about.’ He thought it over and nodded. ‘That’s good – good that you weren’t seen. I think it would be better if we agree you were here with me all afternoon.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be wise for me to be implicated in this business, even indirectly.’

  ‘You anticipate this will cause you trouble?’

  ‘Oh, I am quite certain of it. The question is: how much?’

  We settled down to wait for word of what had happened to reach Rome. In the fading light of the afternoon I found it difficult to banish from my mind the image of Clodius dying like a stuck pig. I had witnessed death before, but that was the first time I had seen a man killed in front of me.

  About an hour before darkness, a woman’s piercing shriek arose from some place nearby. It went on and on – a frightening, other-worldly ululation.

  Cicero walked over and opened the door to his terrace and listened. ‘The Lady Fulvia,’ he said judiciously, ‘if I am not mistaken, has just learned she is a widow.’

  He sent a servant up the hill to find out what was happening. The man came back and reported that Clodius’s body had arrived in Rome on a litter belonging to the senator Sextus Tedius, who had discovered it beside the Via Appia. The corpse had been conveyed to Clodius’s house and received by Fulvia. In her grief and fury she had stripped it naked, apart from its sandals, propped it up, and was now sitting beside it in the street beneath flaming torches, crying out that everyone should come and see what had been done to her husband.

  Cicero said, ‘She means to whip up the mob.’ He ordered the guard on the house to be doubled overnight.

  The following morning it was judged far too dangerous for Cicero or any other prominent senator to venture out. We watched from the terrace as a huge crowd led by Fulvia escorted the body on its bier down to the Forum and placed it on the rostra, and then we listened as Clodius’s lieutenants worked the plebs up to a fury. At the end of the bitter eulogies the mourners broke into the Senate house and carried Clodius’s corpse inside, then went back across the Forum to the Argiletum and started dragging out benches and tables and chests full of volumes from the booksellers’ shops. To our horror we realised they were constructing a funeral pyre.

  Around midday, smoke began to issue from the small windows set high up in the walls of the Senate chamber. Sheets of orange flame and scraps of burning books whirled against the sky, while from inside came a terrifying and uninterrupted roar, as if a vent had been opened to the underworld. An hour later the roof split from end to end; thousands of tiles and spars of fiery timber plunged soundlessly from view; there was a strange interval of silence; and then the noise of the crash passed over us like a hot wind.

  The fountain of smoke and dust and ashes lingered above the centre of Rome in a pall for several days, until the rain washed it away; and in this manner the last mortal vestiges of Publius Clodius Pulcher and the ancient assembly building he had reviled all his life vanished together from the face of the earth.

  VIII

  THE DESTRUCTION OF the Senate house had a powerful effect on Cicero. He went down the next day under heavy guard, grasping a stout stick, and clambered around the smouldering ruins. The blackened brickwork was still warm to the touch. The wind howled through the gaping holes, and from time to time from above our heads some piece of debris would dislodge and fall with a soft thump into the drifts of ash. Six hundred years that temple had stood there – a witness to the greatest moments in Rome’s existence, and his own – and now it had gone in less than half an afternoon.

  Everyone, including Cicero, assumed that Milo would now go into voluntary exile, or at any rate that he would keep well clear of Rome. But that was to underrate the bravado of the man. Far from lying low, he put himself at the head of an even larger force of gladiators and re-entered the city that same afternoon, barricading himself in his house. The grieving supporters of Clodius immediately laid siege to it. But they were easily driven off by arrows. They then went in search of a less formidable fortress on which to vent their anger, and found one in the home of the interrex, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.

  Although he was only thirty-six, and not yet even praetor, Lepidus was a member of the College of Pontiffs, and in the absence of any elected consuls that was enough to make him temporary chief magistrate. The damage inflicted on his property was slight – his wife’s nuptial couch was broken up and her weaving destroyed – but the assault created a sense of outrage and panic in the Senate.

  Lepidus, ever conscious of his dignity, played up the incident for all it was worth; indeed, this was the beginning of his rise to prominence. (Cicero used to say that Lepidus was the luckiest politician he knew: every time he made a mess of something he was showered with rewards – ‘He is a sort of genius of mediocrity.’) The young interrex summoned a meeting of the Senate to be held outside the city walls, on the Field of Mars, in Pompey’s new theatre – a large chamber within the complex had to be specially consecrated for the occasion – and he invited Pompey to attend.

  This was three days after the burning of the Senate house.

  Pompey duly obliged, sweeping down the hill from his palace surrounded by two hundred legionaries in full battle array – an entirely legal display of force, as he held military imperium as governor of Spain. But still – nothing like it had been seen since the days of Sulla. He left them picketed in the portico of the theatre while he went inside and listened modestly as his supporters demanded that he be appointed dictator for six months so that he could take the steps necessary to restore order: call up all the military reservists in Italy, put Rome under curfew, suspend the imminent elections and bring the killers of Clodius to justice.

  Cicero saw the danger at once and rose to speak. ‘No one has greater respect for Pompey than I,’ he began, ‘but we must be careful not to do our enemies’ work for them. To argue that to preserve our freedoms we must suspend our freedoms, that to safeguard elections we must cancel elections, that to defend ourselves from dictatorship we must appoint a dictator – what logic is this? We have elections scheduled. We have candidates on the ballot. The canvass is completed. The best way for us to show confidence in our institutions is to allow them to function normally and to elect our magistrates as our ancestors taught us in the olden time.’

  Pompey nodded, as if he could not have put the issue better himself, and at the end of the session he made an elaborate show of congratulating Cicero on his staunch defence of the constitution. But
Cicero was not fooled. He saw exactly what Pompey was up to.

  That night, Milo came to visit him for a council of war. Also present was Caelius Rufus, now a tribune and a long-term supporter and close friend of Milo. From down in the valley came the sound of scuffling, of dogs barking and occasional shouts and cries. A group of men carrying flaming torches ran across the Forum. But most citizens were too afraid to venture out and stayed in their houses behind barred doors. Milo seemed to think he had the election in the bag. After all, he had rid the state of Clodius, for which most decent people were grateful, and the burning-down of the Senate house and the violence in the streets had appalled the majority of voters.

  Cicero said, ‘I agree that if there were a ballot tomorrow, Milo, you would probably win it. But there is not going to be a ballot. Pompey will see to that.’

  ‘How can he?’

  ‘He’ll use the campaign as a cover to manufacture an atmosphere of hysteria so that the Senate and the people will be forced to turn to him to abort the elections.’

  Rufus said, ‘He’s bluffing. He doesn’t have the power.’

  ‘Oh, he has the power, and he knows it. All he has to do is sit tight and wait for things to come to him.’

  Milo and Rufus both dismissed Cicero’s fears as the nervousness of an old man, and the next day resumed campaigning with fresh energy. But Cicero was right: the mood in Rome was too jittery for normal electioneering and Milo walked straight into Pompey’s trap. One morning soon after their meeting Cicero received an urgent summons to see Pompey. He found the great man’s house ringed with soldiers and Pompey himself in an elevated part of the garden with double his normal bodyguard. Seated in the portico with him was a man Pompey introduced as Licinius, the owner of an eating house near the Circus Maximus. Pompey ordered Licinius to repeat his tale to Cicero, and Licinius duly described how he had overheard a group of Milo’s gladiators plotting at his counter to murder Pompey, and how, when they realised he was listening, they had tried to silence him by stabbing him: as proof he showed Cicero a minor flesh wound just beneath his ribs.