Dictator

by Robert Harris

  I said that I would do it. After I had composed myself, I found Cicero in his library. He had taken down some books but had made no attempt to unroll them. He was sitting, staring straight ahead at nothing. He didn’t even turn to look at me. He said, “She’s dying, isn’t she?”

  “I’m afraid she is.”

  “Does she know it?”

  “The doctor hasn’t told her, but I think she’s too clever not to realise, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “That was why she was so keen to come here, where her memories are happiest. This is where she wants to die.” He rubbed his eyes. “I think I shall go and sit with her now.”

  I waited in the Lyceum and watched the sun sink behind the hills of Rome. Some hours later, when it was entirely dark, one of her maids came to fetch me, and conducted me by candlelight to Tullia’s room. She was unconscious, lying in bed with her hair unpinned and spread across her pillow. Cicero sat on one side, holding her hand. On her other side, her baby lay asleep. Her breathing was very shallow and rapid. There were people in the room—her maids, the baby’s nurse, the doctor—but they were in the shadows and I have no memory of their faces.

  Cicero saw me and beckoned me closer. I leaned over and kissed her damp forehead, then retreated to join the others in the semi-darkness. Soon afterwards her breathing began to slow. The intervals between each breath became longer, and I kept imagining she must have died, but then she would take another gasp of air. The end when it came was different and unmistakable—a long sigh, accompanied by a slight tremor along the length of her body, and then a profound stillness as she passed into eternity.

  The funeral was in Rome. Only one good thing came out of it: Cicero’s brother, Quintus, from whom he had been estranged ever since that terrible scene in Patrae, came round to offer his condolences the moment we got back, and the two men sat beside the coffin, wordless, holding hands. As a mark of their reconciliation, Cicero asked Quintus to deliver the eulogy: he doubted he would be able to get through it himself.

  That apart, it was one of the most melancholy occasions I have ever witnessed—the long procession out on to the Esquiline Field in the freezing winter dusk; the wail of the musicians’ dirges mingled with the cawing of the crows in the sacred grove of Libitina; the small enshrouded figure lying on its bier; the racked face of Terentia, like Niobe’s seemingly turned to stone by grief; Atticus supporting Cicero as he put the torch to the pyre; and finally the great sheet of flame that suddenly shot up, illuminating us all in its scorching red glow, our rigid expressions set like masks in a Greek tragedy.

  The following day, Publilia turned up on the doorstep with her mother and uncle, sulky that she had not been invited to the funeral and determined to move back into the house. She made a little speech that had obviously been written out for her and that she had memorised: “Husband, I know that your daughter found my presence difficult, but now that this impediment has been removed, I hope that we can resume our married life together and that I may help you to forget your grief.”

  But Cicero didn’t want to forget his grief. He wished to be enveloped by it, consumed by it. Without telling Publilia where he was going, he fled the house that same day, carrying the urn containing Tullia’s ashes. He moved in to Atticus’s place on the Quirinal, where he locked himself away in the library for days on end, seeing no one and compiling a great handbook of all that has ever been written by the philosophers and poets on how to cope with grief and dying. He called it his Consolation. He told me that while he worked, he could hear Atticus’s five-year-old daughter playing in her nursery next door, exactly as Tullia had done when he was a young advocate: “The sound was as sharp to my heart as a red-hot needle; that kept me at my task.”

  When Publilia discovered where he was, she began to pester Atticus for admittance, so Cicero fled again, to the newest and most isolated of all his properties—a villa on the tiny island of Astura, at the mouth of a river, only a hundred yards or so from the shore of the Bay of Antium. The island was entirely deserted and covered with trees and groves, cut into shady walks. In this lonely place he shunned all human company. Early in the day he would hide himself away in the thick, thorny wood, with nothing to disturb his meditations but the cries of the birds, and would not emerge till evening. What is the soul? he asks in his Consolation. It is not moist or airy or fiery or compounded of the earth. There is nothing in these elements that accounts for the power of memory, mind or thought, that recalls the past, foresees the future or comprehends the present. Rather the soul must be counted as a fifth element—divine and therefore eternal.

  I remained in Rome and handled all his affairs—financial, domestic, literary and even marital, as now it fell to me to fend off the hapless Publilia and her relatives by pretending I had no idea where he was. As the weeks passed, his absence became increasingly difficult to explain, not just to his wife but to his clients and friends, and I was aware that his reputation was suffering, it being considered unmanly to surrender to grief so completely. Many letters of condolence arrived, including a line from Caesar in Spain, and these I forwarded to Cicero.

  Eventually Publilia discovered his hiding place and wrote to him announcing her intention of visiting him in the company of her mother. To escape such a fraught confrontation, he abandoned the island, ashes in hand, and finally nerved himself to write a letter to his wife setting out his desire for a divorce. No doubt it was cowardly of him not to do it face to face. But he felt that her lack of sympathy over Tullia’s death had made their ill-conceived relationship entirely untenable. He left Atticus to sort out the financial details, which entailed selling one of his houses, and then he invited me to join him in Tusculum, saying he had a project he wished to discuss.

  By the time I arrived, it was the middle of May. I had not seen him for more than three months. He was seated in his Academy reading when he heard my approach, and turned to look at me with a sad smile. His appearance shocked me. He was much gaunter, especially around the neck. His hair was greyer, longer and unkempt. But the real change was beneath the surface. There was a kind of resignation about him. It showed in the slowness of his movements and the gentleness of his manner—as if he had been broken and remade.

  Over dinner I asked him if he had found it painful to return to a place where he had spent so much time with Tullia.

  He replied: “I dreaded the prospect of coming, naturally, but when I arrived it was not so bad. One deals with grief, I have come to believe, either by never thinking of it or by thinking of it all the time. I chose the latter path, and here at least I am surrounded by memories of her, and her ashes are interred in the garden. Friends have been very kind, especially those who have suffered similar losses. Did you see the letter Sulpicius wrote me?”

  He passed it to me over the table:

  I want to tell you of something which has brought me no slight comfort, in the hope that perhaps it may have some power to lighten your sorrow too. As I was on my way back from Asia, sailing from Aegina towards Megara, I began to gaze at the landscape around me. There behind me was Aegina, in front of me Megara, to the right Piraeus, to the left Corinth; once flourishing towns, now lying low in ruins before one’s eyes. I began to think to myself: “Ah! How can we manikins wax indignant if one of us dies or is killed, ephemeral creatures as we are, when the corpses of so many towns lie abandoned in a single spot? Check yourself, Servius, and remember that you were born a mortal man.” That thought, I do assure you, strengthened me not a little. Can you really be so greatly moved by the loss of one poor little woman’s frail spirit? If her end had not come now, she must none the less have died in a few years’ time, for she was mortal.

  “I never thought Sulpicius could be so eloquent,” I remarked.

  “Nor I. You see how all of us poor creatures strive to make sense of death, even dry old jurists such as him? It’s given me an idea. Suppose we were to compose a work of philosophy that helped relieve men of their fear of death.”

  “That would b
e an achievement.”

  “The Consolation seeks to reconcile us to the deaths of those we love. Now let us try to reconcile ourselves to our own deaths. If we were to succeed—well, tell me, what could bring humanity greater relief from terror than that?”

  I had no answer. His proposition was irresistible. I was curious to see how he would manage it. And so was born what is now known as the Tusculan Disputations, upon which we started work the following day. From the outset, Cicero conceived it as five books:

  1. On the fear of death

  2. On the endurance of pain

  3. On the alleviation of distress

  4. On the remaining disorders of the soul

  5. On the sufficiency of virtue for a happy life

  Once again we assumed our old routine of composition. Like his hero Demosthenes, who hated to be beaten to the dawn by a diligent workman, Cicero would rise in the darkness and read in his library by lamplight until the day had broken; later in the morning he would describe to me what was in his mind and I would probe his logic with questions; in the afternoon while he napped I would write up my shorthand notes into a draft, which he would then correct; we would discuss and revise the day’s work over dinner in the evening, and finally before retiring we would decide the topics for the following morning.

  The summer days were long and our progress swift, mostly because Cicero decided to cast the work in the form of a dialogue between a philosopher and a student. Usually I played the student and he was the philosopher, but occasionally it was the other way round. These Disputations of ours are still widely available, so it is unnecessary, I hope, for me to describe them in detail. They are the summation of all that Cicero had come to believe after the battering of recent years: namely, that the soul possesses a divine animation different to the body’s and therefore is eternal; that even if the soul is not eternal and ahead of us lies only oblivion, such a state is not to be feared as there will be no sensation and therefore no pain or misery (the dead are not wretched, the living are wretched); that we should think about death constantly and so acclimatise ourselves to its inevitable arrival (the whole life of a philosopher, as Socrates said, is a preparation for death); and that if we are determined enough, we can teach ourselves to scorn death and pain, just as professional fighters do:

  What even average gladiator has ever uttered a groan or changed expression? Which has ever disgraced himself after a fall by drawing in his neck when ordered to suffer the fatal stroke? Such is the force of training, practice and habit. Shall a gladiator be capable of this while a man who is born to fame proves so weak in his soul that he cannot strengthen it by systematic preparation?

  In the fifth book, Cicero offered his practical prescriptions. A human being can only train for death by leading a life that is morally good; that is—to desire nothing too much; to be content with what one has; to be entirely self-sufficient within oneself, so that whatever one loses, one will still be able to carry on regardless; to do none harm; to realise that it is better to suffer an injury than to inflict one; to accept that life is a loan given by Nature without a due date and that repayment may be demanded at any time; that the most tragic character in the world is a tyrant who has broken all these precepts.

  Such were the lessons Cicero had learned and desired to impart to the world in the sixty-second summer of his life.

  —

  About a month after we started work on the Disputations, in the middle of June, Dolabella came to visit. He was on his way back to Rome from Spain, where he had once again been fighting alongside Caesar. The Dictator had been victorious; the remnants of Pompey’s forces were smashed. But Dolabella had been wounded in the battle of Munda. There was a slash from his ear to his collarbone and he walked with a limp: his horse had been killed beneath him by a javelin, throwing him to the ground and rolling on him. Still, he was as full of animal spirits as ever. He wanted particularly to see his son, who was living with Cicero at this time, and also to pay his respects at the place where Tullia’s ashes were buried.

  Baby Lentulus at four months old was a large and rosy specimen, as healthy-looking as his mother had been frail. It was almost as if he had sucked all the life out of her, and I am sure that was the reason why I never saw Cicero hold him or pay him much attention—he could not quite forgive him for being alive when she was dead. Dolabella took the baby from the nurse and turned him around and examined him as if he were a vase, before announcing that he would like to take him back to Rome. Cicero did not object. “I have made provision for him in my will. If you wish to discuss his upbringing, come and see me any time.”

  They strolled together to view the spot where Tullia’s ashes were resting, beside her favourite fountain in a sunny spot in the Academy. Cicero told me later that Dolabella knelt and placed some flowers on the grave, and wept. “When I saw his tears I ceased to feel angry with him. As she always said, she knew the type of man she was marrying. And if her first husband was more of a school friend to her than anything, and her second just a convenient way of escaping her mother, at least her third was someone she loved passionately, and I am glad she experienced that before she died.”

  Over dinner Dolabella, who was unable to recline because of his wound but had to eat sitting up in a chair like a barbarian, described the campaign in Spain, and confided to us that it had been a near-disaster: that at one point the army’s line had broken and Caesar himself had been obliged to dismount, seize a shield and rally his fleeing legionaries. “He said to us when it was over, ‘Today for the first time I fought for my life.’ We killed thirty thousand of the enemy, no prisoners taken. Gnaeus Pompey’s head was stuck on a pole and publicly displayed on Caesar’s orders. It was grim work, I can tell you, and I fear you and your friends will not find him as amenable as before when he gets home.”

  “As long as he leaves me alone to write my books, he’ll get no trouble from me.”

  “My dear Cicero, you of all men have no need to worry. Caesar loves you. He always says that you and he are the last two left.”

  Late in the summer Caesar returned to Italy, and all the ambitious men in Rome flocked to welcome him. Cicero and I stayed in the country, working. We finished the Disputations and Cicero sent it to Atticus so that his team of slaves could copy it and distribute it—he particularly asked for one to be sent to Caesar—and then he began composing two new treatises, On the Nature of the Gods and On Divination. Occasionally the barbs of grief still pierced him and he would withdraw for hours into some remote part of the grounds. But increasingly he was contented: “What a lot of trouble one avoids if one refuses to have anything to do with the common herd! To have no job, to devote one’s time to literature, is the most wonderful thing in the world.”

  Even in Tusculum, however, we were aware, as if it were a storm in the distance, of the Dictator’s return. Dolabella had spoken correctly. The Caesar who came back from Spain was different from the Caesar who had gone out. It was not simply his intolerance of dissent; it was as if his grasp on reality, once so terrifyingly secure, had at last begun to loosen. First he circulated a riposte to Cicero’s eulogy of Cato, which he called his Anti-Cato, full of vulgar gibes that Cato was a drunkard and a crank. As nearly every Roman had at least a grudging respect for Cato, and most revered him, the pettiness of the pamphlet did the Dictator’s reputation far more harm than it did Cato’s. (“What is this restless desire of his to dominate everyone?” Cicero wondered aloud when he read it. “That requires him to trample even on the dust of the dead?”) Then there was his decision to hold yet another triumph, this time to celebrate his victory in Spain: it seemed to most people that the annihilation of thousands of fellow Romans, including the son of Pompey, was not a thing to glory in. There was also his continuing infatuation with Cleopatra: it was bad enough that he installed her in a grand house with a park beside the Tiber, but when he had a golden statue of his foreign mistress erected in the Temple of Venus, he offended the pious and the patriotic alike. He even had himse
lf declared a god—“the Divine Julius”—with his own priesthood, temple and images, and like a god began to interfere in all aspects of daily life: restricting overseas travel for senators and banning elaborate meals and luxurious goods—to the extent of stationing spies in the marketplaces who would burst into citizens’ homes in the middle of dinner to search, confiscate and arrest.

  Finally, as if his ambition had not caused enough bloodshed in recent years, he announced that in the spring he would be off to war again at the head of an immense army of thirty-six legions, to eliminate Parthia first of all, in revenge for the death of Crassus, and then to wheel around the far side of the Black Sea in a vast swathe of conquest that would encompass Hyrcania, the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus, Scythia, all the countries bordering on Germany and finally Germany itself, before returning to Italy by way of Gaul. He would be away three years. Over none of this did the Senate have any say. Like the men who built the pyramids for the pharaohs, they were mere slaves to their master’s grand design.

  In December, Cicero proposed that we should transfer our labours to a warmer climate. A wealthy client of his on the Bay of Naples, M. Cluvius, had died recently, leaving him a substantial property at Puteoli, and it was to this that we headed, taking a week over the journey and arriving on the eve of Saturnalia. The villa was large and luxurious, built on the seashore, and even more beautiful than Cicero’s nearby house at Cumae. The estate came with a substantial portfolio of commercial properties located inside the town and a farm just outside it. Cicero was as delighted as a child with his new possession, and the moment we arrived he took off his shoes, hoisted his toga and walked down the beach to the sea to bathe his feet.