The Dictator (7 page)

I said, “He writes of himself with wonderful detachment.”

“He does. That’s because he doesn’t want to sound boastful. It’s important to strike the right note.”

I asked if I might be allowed to copy some of it, and show it to Cicero. “He misses the regular news from Rome. What reaches us is sparse, and late.”

“Of course—it’s all public information. And I’ll make sure you get in to see Caesar. You’ll find he’s in a tremendously good mood.”

He left me alone and I settled to work.

Even allowing for a degree of exaggeration, it was plain from the
Commentaries
that Caesar had enjoyed an astonishing run of military successes. His original mission had been to halt the migration of the Helvetii and four other tribes who were trekking westwards across Gaul to the Atlantic in search of new territory. He had followed their immense column, which consisted both of fighting men and of the elderly and women and children, with a new army he had mostly raised himself of five legions. Finally he had lured them into battle at Bibracte. As a guarantee to his new legions that neither he nor his officers would abandon them if things went wrong, he had all their horses sent far away to the rear. They fought on foot with the infantry, and in the event Caesar, by his own account, did not merely halt the Helvetii—he slaughtered them. Afterwards a list giving the total strength of the migration had been discovered in the enemy’s abandoned camp:

Of these, according to Caesar, the total number who returned alive to their former homeland was 110,000.

Then—and this was what no one else surely would have dreamed of attempting—he had force-marched his weary legions back across Gaul to confront 120,000 Germans who had taken advantage of the Helvetii’s migration to cross into Roman-controlled territory. There had been another terrific battle, lasting seven hours, in which young Crassus had commanded the cavalry, and by the end of it the Germans had been entirely annihilated. Hardly any had been left alive to flee back across the Rhine, which for the first time became the natural frontier of the Roman Empire. Thus, if Caesar’s account was to be believed, almost one third of a million people had either died or disappeared in the space of a single summer. To round off the year, he had left his legions in their new winter camp, a full one hundred miles north of the old border of Further Gaul.

By the time I had finished my copying it was beginning to get dark, but the villa was still noisy with activity—soldiers and civilians wanting an appointment with the governor, messengers rushing in and out. As I could no longer see to write, I put away my tablet and stylus and sat in the gloom. I wondered what Cicero would have made of it all had he been in Rome. To have condemned the victories would have seemed unpatriotic; at the same time, such sweeping cleansing of populations and adjustments to the frontier, without the authorisation of the Senate, were illegal. I also pondered what Publius Crassus had said: that Caesar feared Cicero’s presence in Rome lest he be “recalled before his work here is complete.” What did “complete” mean in this context? The phrase seemed ominous.

My reverie was interrupted by the arrival of a young officer, barely more than thirty, with tight blond curls and an improbably immaculate uniform, who introduced himself as Caesar’s aide-de-camp, Aulus Hirtius. He said that he understood I had a letter for the governor from Cicero, and that if I would be so kind as to give it to him, he would see that he received it. I replied that I was under firm instructions to give it to Caesar personally. He said that was impossible. I said that in that case I would follow the governor from town to town until such time as I got the chance to speak to him. Hirtius scowled at me and tapped his neatly shod foot, then went away again. An hour passed before he reappeared and curtly asked me to follow him.

The public part of the house was still thronged with callers, even though it was now night-time. We went down a passage, through a stout door and into a warm, heavily scented, thickly carpeted room, brilliantly lit by a hundred candles, in the centre of which on a table lay Caesar, flat on his back and entirely naked, having oil worked into his skin by a Negro masseur. He glanced at me briefly and held out his hand. I gave Cicero’s letter to Hirtius, who broke the seal and handed it to Caesar. I directed my gaze to the floor as a mark of respect.

Caesar said, “How was your journey?”

I replied, “Good, Excellency, thank you.”

“And are you being looked after?”

“I am, thank you.”

I dared then to look at him properly for the first time. His body was glistening, well muscled, and plucked entirely hairless in every respect—a disconcerting affectation which had the effect of emphasising his numerous scars and bruises, presumably picked up on the battlefield. His face was undeniably striking—angular and lean, dominated by dark and penetrating eyes. The overall effect was one of great power, of both the intellect and the will. One could see why men and women alike fell easily under his spell. He was then in his forty-third year.

He turned on to his side towards me—there was no spare flesh, I noticed: his stomach was entirely hard—propped himself up on his elbow and gestured to Hirtius, who produced a portable inkstand and carried it over to him.

He said, “And how is Cicero’s health?”

“It’s very poor, I’m afraid.”

He laughed. “Oh no, I don’t believe a word of
that
! He’ll outlive us all—or me, at any rate.”

He dipped his pen in the inkpot, scrawled something on the letter, and gave it back to Hirtius, who sprinkled sand on the wet ink, blew away the residue, rolled the document up again, and returned it to me without expression.

Caesar said, “If you need anything during your stay, be sure to ask.” He lay on his back once more and the masseur resumed his kneading.

I hesitated. I had come such a long way. I felt there should be something more, if only by way of an anecdote for me to take back to Cicero. But Hirtius touched my arm and nodded towards the door.

As I reached it, Caesar called after me, “Do you still practise that shorthand of yours?”

“I do.”

He made no further comment. The door closed and I followed Hirtius back up the passage. My heart was pounding, as if I had survived a sudden fall. It wasn’t until I had been shown to the room where I was to sleep overnight that I thought to check what he had written on the letter. Two words only—either elegantly brief or typically contemptuous, depending on how you chose to interpret them:
Approved. Caesar.

—

When I rose the following morning, the house was silent; Caesar had already left with his entourage for the next town. My mission concluded, I too set off on my long return journey.

When I reached the harbour at Ancona, I found a letter from Cicero waiting for me: the first of Piso’s soldiers had just arrived in Thessalonica and therefore as a precaution he was departing immediately for Dyrrachium—which, as it lies in the province of Illyricum, was beyond Piso’s influence. He hoped to meet me there. Depending on Caesar’s answer and on developments in Rome, we would then decide where to go next:
Like Callisto, it seems we are doomed to wander throughout eternity.

I had to wait ten days for a favourable wind and did not reach Dyrrachium until the festival of Saturnalia. The City Fathers had placed at Cicero’s disposal a well-defended house up in the hills with a view across the sea, and this was where I found him, gazing at the Adriatic. He turned at my approach. I had forgotten how much exile had aged him. My dismay must have shown in my expression, because his own face fell the moment he saw me, and he said bitterly, “So I take it the answer was no?”

“On the contrary.”

I showed him his original letter with Caesar’s scrawl in the margin. He held it in his hands and studied it for a long while.

“ ‘Approved. Caesar,’ ” he said. “Will you look at that? ‘Approved. Caesar’! He’s doing something he doesn’t want to do and he’s as sulky about it as a child.”

He sat on a bench under an umbrella pine and made me recount my visit in every detail, and then he read the extracts I had copied from Caesar’s
Commentaries.
When he had finished, he said, “He writes very well in his brutal way. Such artlessness requires some art—it will add to his reputation. But where will his campaigning take him next, I wonder? He could grow strong—very strong. If Pompey is not careful, he will wake up to find a monster on his back.”

—

There was nothing we could do now but wait, and whenever I think of Cicero at this time, I always picture him in the same way: on that terrace, leaning over the balustrade, a letter bearing the latest news from Rome clenched in his hand, staring grimly at the horizon, as if somehow by sheer willpower he could see all the way to Italy and impose himself on events.

First we heard from Atticus of the swearing-in of the new tribunes, eight of whom were Cicero’s supporters and only two his declared enemies—but two was enough to impose a veto on any law repealing his exile. Then from Cicero’s brother, Quintus, we learned that Milo, as tribune, had brought a prosecution against Clodius for violence and intimidation, and that Clodius’s response had been to order his bullies to attack Milo’s house. On New Year’s Day the new consuls took office. One, Lentulus Spinther, was already a firm supporter of Cicero. The other, Metellus Nepos, had long been considered his enemy. But someone must have got at him, because in the inaugural debate of the new Senate, Nepos declared that while he still did not care for Cicero personally, he would not oppose his recall. Two days later, a motion to repeal Cicero’s exile, drawn up by Pompey, was laid by the Senate before the people.

At that moment it was possible to believe that Cicero’s banishment would soon be over, and I began to make discreet preparations for our departure to Italy. But Clodius was a resourceful and vindictive enemy. On the night before the people were due to meet, he and his supporters occupied the Forum, the comitium, the rostra—in sum, the whole legislative heart of the republic—and when Cicero’s friends and allies arrived to vote, they attacked them without mercy. Two tribunes, Fabricius and Cispius, were set upon and their attendants murdered and flung in the Tiber. When Quintus tried to get up on to the rostra, he was dragged off and beaten up so badly he only survived by pretending to be dead. Milo responded by unleashing his own squad of gladiators. Soon the centre of Rome was a battlefield, and the fighting went on for days. But although Clodius for the first time suffered severe punishment, he was not entirely driven out, and he still had the two tribunes with their vetoes. The law to bring Cicero home had to be abandoned.

When Cicero received Atticus’s account of what had happened, he fell into a despair almost as great as that which had gripped him in Thessalonica.
From your letter,
he wrote back,
and from the facts themselves I see that I am utterly finished. In matters where my family needs your help I beg you not to fail us in our misery.

However, there is always this to be said for politics: it is never static. If the good times do not last, neither do the bad. Like Nature, it follows a perpetual cycle of growth and decay, and no statesman, however cunning, is immune to this process. If Clodius had not been so arrogant, reckless and ambitious, he never would have achieved the heights he did. But being all those things, and subject to the laws of politics, he was bound to overreach and topple eventually.

In the spring, during the Festival of Flora, when Rome was crowded with visitors from all over Italy, Clodius’s mob found itself for once outnumbered by ordinary citizens who despised their bullying tactics. Clodius himself was actually jeered at the theatre. Unused to anything other than adulation from the people, according to Atticus he looked around him in astonishment at the slow handclapping, taunts, whistles and obscene gestures, and realised—almost too late—that he was in danger of being lynched. He retreated hastily, and that was the beginning of the end of his domination, for the Senate now recognised how he could be beaten: by appealing over the heads of the urban plebs to the population at large.

Spinther duly laid a motion calling for the entire citizenry of the republic to be summoned together in its most sovereign body, the electoral college of one hundred and ninety-three centuries, and for them to determine the fate of Cicero once and for all. The motion passed in the Senate by four hundred and thirteen votes to one, the one being Clodius. It was further agreed that the vote on Cicero’s recall should take place at the same time as the summer elections, when the centuries would already be assembled on the Field of Mars.

The moment he heard what had been decided, Cicero was so certain he was reprieved he arranged for a sacrifice to be made to the gods. Those tens of thousands of ordinary citizens from across Italy were the solid, sensible foundation on which he had built his career; he was sure they would not let him down. He sent word to his wife and family asking them to meet him in Brundisium, and rather than lingering in Illyricum to await the result, which would take two weeks to reach us, he decided to sail for home on the day the vote was held. “If there is a tide flowing in one’s direction, one must catch it early, and not allow it time to ebb. Besides, it will look good if I show confidence.”