The Dictator (11 page)

“Thank you,” said Cicero. “It is generous of you, but I must decline. My priority now has to be my family—restoring us to our property, comforting my wife and children, revenging us on our enemies and trying to recover our fortune.”

“You’ll recover your fortune quicker in the grain business than any other, I assure you.”

“Even so, I must remain in Rome.”

The broad face fell. “I’m disappointed, I can’t pretend otherwise. I want the name of Cicero attached to this commission. It will add weight. What about you?” he said, turning to Quintus. “You could do it, I suppose.”

Poor Quintus! The last thing he wanted, having returned from two tours of duty in Asia, was to go abroad again and deal with farmers and grain merchants and shipping agents. He squirmed. He protested his unfitness for the office. He looked to Cicero for support. But Cicero could hardly deny Pompey a second request, and this time he said nothing.

“All right: it’s done.” Pompey clapped his hands on the armrests of his chair to signal that the matter was settled, and pushed himself up on to his feet. He grunted with the effort and I noticed he was getting rather stout. He was in his fiftieth year, the same age as Cicero. “Our republic is passing through the most strenuous times,” he said, putting his arms around the brothers’ shoulders. “But we shall come through them, as we always have, and I know that you will both play your part.” He clasped the two men tightly, squeezed them, and held them there, pinned on either side of his commodious chest.

Early the following morning, Cicero and I walked up the hill to inspect the ruins of his house. The palatial building in which he had invested so much of his wealth and prestige had been entirely pulled down; nine tenths of the huge plot was weeds and rubble; it was barely possible to discern the original layout of the walls through the tangled overgrowth. Cicero stooped to pick up one of the scorched bricks poking from the ground. “Until this place is restored to me, we shall be entirely at their mercy—no money, no dignity, no independence…Every time I step outdoors I shall have to look up here and be reminded of my humiliation.” The edges of the brick crumbled in his hands and the red dust trickled through his fingers like dried blood.

At the far end of the plot a statue of a young woman had been set up on top of a high plinth. Fresh offerings of flowers were piled around the base. By consecrating the site as a shrine to Liberty, Clodius believed he had made it inviolable and thus impossible for Cicero to reclaim. The marble figure was shapely in the morning light, with long tresses and a diaphanous dress slipping down to expose a naked breast. Cicero regarded her with his hands on his hips. Eventually he said, “Surely Liberty is always depicted as a matron with a cap?” I agreed. “So who, pray, is this hussy? Why, she is no more the embodiment of a goddess than I am!”

Until that moment he had been sombre, but now he started to laugh, and when we returned to Quintus’s house he set me the task of discovering where Clodius had acquired the statue. That same day he petitioned the College of Pontiffs to return his property to him on the grounds that the site had been improperly consecrated. A hearing was fixed for the end of the month, and Clodius was summoned to defend his actions.

When the day arrived, Cicero admitted he felt ill-prepared and out of practice. Because his library was still in storage, he had been unable to consult all the legal sources he needed. He was also, I am sure, nervous at the prospect of confronting Clodius face to face. To be beaten by his enemy in a street brawl was one thing; to lose to him in a legal dispute would be a calamity.

The headquarters of the pontifical college were then in the old Regia, said to be the most ancient building in the city. It stood like its modern successor at the point where the Via Sacra divides and enters the Forum, although the noise of that busy spot was entirely deadened by the thickness of its high and windowless walls. The candlelit gloom of the interior made one forget that outside it was bright and sunny. Even the chilly, tomblike air smelt sacred, as if it had been undisturbed for more than six hundred years.

Fourteen of the fifteen pontiffs were seated at the far end of the crowded chamber, waiting for us. The only absentee was their chief, Caesar: his chair, grander than the others, stood empty. Among the priests were several I knew well—Spinther, the consul; Marcus Lucullus, brother of the great general, Lucius, who was said to have lately lost his reason and to be confined to his palace outside Rome; and the two rising young aristocrats Q. Scipio Nasica and M. Aemilius Lepidus. And here at last I saw the third triumvir, Crassus. The curious conical hat of animal fur the pontiffs were required to wear robbed him of his most distinctive feature, his baldness. His crafty face was quite impassive.

Cicero took a seat facing them while I sat on a stool at his back, ready to pass any documents he required. Behind us was an audience of eminent citizens, including Pompey. Of Clodius there was no sign. Whispered conversations gradually ceased. The silence grew oppressive. Where was he? Perhaps he might not come. With Clodius one never knew. But then at last he swaggered in, and I felt myself turn cold at the sight of the man who had caused us so much anguish. “Little Miss Beauty,” Cicero used to call him, but in middle age he had outgrown the insult. His luxuriant blond curls were nowadays cut as tight to his skull as a golden helmet; his thick red lips had lost their pout. He appeared hard, lean, disdainful—a fallen Apollo. As is often the case with the bitterest of enemies, he had started out as a friend. But then he had outraged law and morality once too often, by disguising himself as a woman and defiling the sacred rite of the Good Goddess. Cicero had been obliged to give evidence against him, and from that day on Clodius had sworn vengeance. He sat on a chair barely three paces from Cicero, but Cicero continued to stare straight ahead, and the two men never once looked at one another.

The senior pontiff by age was Publius Albinovanus, who must have been eighty. In a quavering voice he read out the point at issue—“Was the shrine to Liberty, lately erected on the property claimed by M. Tullius Cicero, consecrated in accordance with the rites of the official religion or not?”—and invited Clodius to speak first.

Clodius left it just long enough to indicate his contempt for the whole proceeding, and then slowly got to his feet. “I am appalled, holy fathers,” he began in his slangy patrician drawl, “and dismayed, but not surprised, that the exiled murderer Cicero, having brazenly slaughtered Liberty during the time of his consulship, should now seek to compound the offence by tearing down her image…”

He brought up every slander that had ever been made against Cicero—his illegal killing of the Catiline conspirators (“the sanction of the Senate is no excuse for executing five citizens without a trial”), his vanity (“if he objects to this shrine, it is mostly out of jealousy since he regards himself as the only god worth worshipping”) and his political inconsistency (“this is the man whose return was supposed to mean the restoration of senatorial authority, and yet whose first act was to betray it by winning dictatorial powers for Pompey”). It was not without impact. It would have played well in the Forum. But it failed entirely to address the legal point at issue: was the shrine properly consecrated or not?

He argued for an hour, and then it was Cicero’s turn, and it was a measure of how effective Clodius had been that he was obliged to speak extempore to begin with, defending his support for Pompey’s grain commission. Only after he had answered that could he turn to making his main case: that the shrine could not be held to be consecrated because Clodius was not legally a tribune when he dedicated it. “Your transfer from patrician to pleb was sanctioned by no decree of this college, was entered upon in defiance of all pontifical regulations, and must be held to be null and void; and if that is invalid your entire tribunate falls to the ground.” This was dangerous territory: everyone knew it was Caesar who had organised Clodius’s adoption as a pleb. I saw Crassus lean forwards listening intently. Sensing the danger, and perhaps remembering his undertaking to Caesar, Cicero swerved away: “Does this mean I am saying that all Caesar’s laws were illegal? By no means; for none of them any longer affects my interests, apart from those aimed with hostile intent against my own person.”

He pressed on, switching to an attack on Clodius’s methods, and now his oratory took flight—his arm outstretched, his finger pointing at his enemy, the words almost tumbling from his mouth in his passion: “Oh, you abominable plague spot of the state, you public prostitute! What harm had you suffered at the hands of my unhappy wife that you harassed, plundered and tortured her so brutally? Or from my daughter, who lost her beloved husband? Or from my little son, who still lies awake weeping at night? But it was not just my family you attacked—you waged a bitter war against my very walls and doorposts!”

However his real coup was to reveal the origins of the statue Clodius had set up. I had tracked down the workmen who had erected it and learnt that the piece had been donated by Clodius’s brother Appius, who had carried it off from Tanagra, in Boeotia, where it had graced the tomb of a well-known local courtesan.

The whole room roared with laughter when Cicero revealed this fact. “So this is his idea of Liberty—a courtesan’s likeness, erected over a foreign tomb, stolen by a thief and set up again by a sacrilegious hand! And
she
is the one who drives me from my house? Holy fathers, this property cannot be lost to me without inflicting disgrace upon the state. If you believe that my return to Rome has been a source of pleasure to the immortal gods, to the Senate, to the Roman people and to all of Italy, then let it be your hands that reinstall me in my home.”

Cicero sat to loud murmurs of approval from the distinguished audience. I stole a look at Clodius. He was scowling at the floor. The pontiffs leaned in to confer. Crassus seemed to be doing most of the talking. We had expected a decision at once. But Albinovanus straightened and announced that the college would need more time to consider their verdict: it would be relayed to the Senate the following day. This was a blow. Clodius stood, bent down to Cicero as he passed and hissed, through a false smile, just loud enough for me to hear, “You will die before that place is rebuilt.” He left the chamber without another word. Cicero pretended nothing had happened. He lingered to chat with many old friends, with the result that we were among the last to leave the building.

Outside the chamber was a courtyard containing the famous white board on which the chief priest by tradition in those days published the state’s official news. This was where Caesar’s agents posted his
Commentaries,
and here was where we found Crassus standing—ostensibly reading the latest dispatch but in truth waiting to intercept Cicero. He had taken off his cap; here and there little wisps of brown fur still adhered to his high-domed skull.

“So, Cicero,” he said in his unsettlingly jovial manner, “you were pleased with the effect of your speech?”

“Reasonably, thank you. But my opinion has no value. It’s for you and your colleagues to decide.”

“Oh, I thought it effective enough. My only regret is that Caesar wasn’t present to hear it.”

“I shall send him a copy.”

“Yes, be sure that you do. Mind you, reading is all very well. But how would he
vote
on the issue? That’s what I have to decide.”

“And why do you have to decide that?”

“Because he wishes me to act as his proxy and cast his vote as I think fit. Many colleagues will follow my lead. It is important I get it right.”

He grinned, showing yellow teeth.

“I have no doubt you will. Good day to you, Crassus.”

“Good day, Cicero.”

We passed out of the gate, Cicero cursing under his breath, and had gone only a few paces when Crassus suddenly called out after him, and hurried to catch us up. “One last thing,” he said. “In view of these tremendous victories that Caesar has won in Gaul, I wondered if you would be good enough to support a proposal in the Senate for a period of public celebration in his honour.”

“Why does it matter if I support it?”

“Obviously it would add weight, given the history of your relations with Caesar. People would notice. And it would be a noble gesture on your part. I’m sure Caesar would appreciate it.”

“How long would this period of celebration last?”

“Oh…fifteen days should just about do it.”

“
Fifteen days?
That’s nearly twice as long as Pompey was voted for conquering Spain.”

“Yes, well one could argue that Caesar’s victories in Gaul are twice as important as Pompey’s in Spain.”

“I’m not sure Pompey would agree.”

“Pompey,” retorted Crassus with emphasis, “must learn that a triumvirate consists of three men, not one.”

Cicero gritted his teeth and bowed. “It would be an honour.”

Crassus bowed in return. “I knew you would do the patriotic thing.”

—

The following day, Spinther read out the pontiffs’ judgement to the Senate: unless Clodius could provide written proof that he had consecrated the shrine on instructions from the Roman people, “the site can be restored to Cicero without sacrilege.”