‘Well,’ he said, as I stood up, feeling guilty, ‘I never thought to see a representative of Marcus Cicero under the roof of my ancestors. What is all this about?’
He was wearing his full senatorial rig, but with slippers on his feet instead of shoes, and was obviously still getting ready to depart for the morning’s debate. It seemed strange to me, too, to see the old enemy unarmoured, as it were, outside the arena. I gave him Cicero’s letter, which he broke open and read in front of me. Immediately he saw the names it mentioned he gave me a sharp glance, and I could tell that he was hooked, although he was too well bred to show it.
‘Tell him I shall inspect it at my leisure,’ he said, taking the document from me, and strolled back the way he had come, as if nothing less interesting had ever been placed in his manicured hands – although I am sure that the moment he was out of sight he must have run to his library and broken open the seal. For myself, I went back out into the fresh air and descended to the city by the Caci Steps, partly because I had time to kill before the senate convened and could afford to take a long way round, and partly because the other route took me nearer to the house of Crassus than I cared to go. I came out into that district on the Etruscan road where all the perfume and incense shops are located, and the scented air and the weight of my tiredness combined to make me feel almost drugged. My mood was oddly separated from the real world and its concerns. By this time tomorrow, I remember thinking, the voting on the Field of Mars would be well underway, and we would probably know whether Cicero was to be consul or not, and in either event the sun would shine and in the autumn it would rain. I lingered in the Forum Boarium and watched the people buying their flowers and their fruit and all the rest of it, and wondered what it would be like not to have any interest in politics, but simply to live, as the poet has it, vita umbratilis, ‘a life in the shade’. That was what I planned to do when Cicero gave me my freedom and my farm. I would eat the fruit I grew and drink the milk of the goats I reared; I would shut my gate at night and never give a fig for another election. It was the closest to wisdom I have ever come.
By the time I eventually reached the forum, two hundred or more senators had assembled in the senaculum and were being watched by a crowd of curious gawpers – out-of-towners to judge by their rustic dress, who had come to Rome for the elections. Figulus was sitting on his consular chair in the doorway of the senate house, the augurs beside him, waiting for a quorum, and every so often there was a minor commotion as a candidate erupted into the forum with his corona of supporters. I saw Catilina arrive, with his curious mixture of young aristocrats and the dregs of the streets, and then Hybrida, whose rackety assemblage of debtors and gamblers, such as Sabidius and Panthera, seemed quite respectable by comparison. The senators began to file into the chamber, and I was just beginning to wonder if some mishap had befallen Cicero when, from the direction of the Argiletum, came the noise of drums and flutes and then two columns of young men rounded the corner into the forum, carrying freshly cut boughs above their heads, with children scampering excitedly all around them. These were followed by a mass of respectable Roman knights led by Atticus, and then came Quintus with a dozen or so backbench senators. Some maids were scattering rose petals. It was a vastly better show than any of its rivals had managed, and the crowd around me greeted it with applause. At the centre of all this whirling activity, as in the eye of a tornado, walked the candidate himself, clad in the gleaming toga candida which had already seen him through three victorious election campaigns. It was rare that I was able to watch him from a distance – usually I was tucked in behind him – and for the first time I appreciated what a natural actor he was, in that when he donned his costume he found his character. All those qualities which the traditional whiteness was supposed to symbolise – clarity, honesty, purity – seemed to be personified in his solid frame and steady gaze as he walked, unseeing, past me. I could tell by the way he moved, and his air of detachment, that he was heavy with a speech. I fell in at the back of the procession and heard the cheers from his supporters as he entered the chamber, and the answering cat-calls of his opponents.
We were kept back until the last of the senators had gone in, and then permitted to run to the bar of the house. I secured myself my usual decent vantage point beside the door jamb and was immediately aware of someone squeezing in beside me. It was Atticus, looking white with nerves. ‘How does he find it within himself to do this?’ he asked, but before I could say anything, Figulus got up to report on the failure of his bill at the popular assembly. He droned on for a while, and then called on Mucius to explain his conduct in vetoing a measure which had been adopted by the house. There was an oppressive, restless air in the chamber. I could see Catilina and Hybrida among the aristocrats, with Catulus seated just in front of them on the consular bench, and Crassus a few places along from him. Caesar was on the same side of the chamber, on the bench reserved for ex-aediles. Mucius got up and in a dignified way explained that his sacred office called on him to act in the interests of the people, and that the lex Figula, far from protecting those interests, was a threat to their safety and an insult to their honour.
‘Nonsense!’ shouted a voice from the opposite side of the aisle, which I recognised at once as Cicero’s. ‘You were bought!’
Atticus gripped my arm. ‘Here he goes!’ he whispered.
‘My conscience—’ continued Mucius.
‘Your conscience had nothing to do with it, you liar! You sold yourself like a whore!’
There came that low grumble of noise which is caused by several hundred men all muttering to one another at once, and suddenly Cicero was on his feet, his arm outstretched, demanding the floor. At that same moment I heard a voice behind me calling to be let through, and we shuffled out of the way to allow a late-arriving senator, who proved to be Hortensius, access to the chamber. He hurried down the aisle, bowed to the consul, and took his place next to Catulus, with whom he quickly struck up a whispered conversation. By this time Cicero’s supporters among the pedarii were bellowing that he should be allowed to speak, which, given that he was a praetorian, and outranked Mucius, he was undeniably entitled to do. Very reluctantly, Mucius allowed himself to be pulled down by the senators seated around him, whereupon Cicero pointed at him – his white-draped arm held out straight and rigid, like some statue of avenging Justice – and declared: ‘A whore you are, Mucius – yes, and a treacherous one at that, for only yesterday you declared to the popular assembly that I was not fit to be consul – I, the first man to whom you turned when you were prosecuted for robbery! Good enough to defend you, Mucius, but not good enough to defend the Roman people, is that it? But why should I care what you say about me, when the whole world knows you were paid to slander me?’
Mucius turned scarlet. He shook his fist and started shouting insults in return, but I could not make them out over the general tumult. Cicero regarded him with contempt, then held up his hand for silence. ‘But who is Mucius in any case?’ he said, spitting out the name and dismissing it with a flick of his fingers. ‘Mucius is just one solitary whore in a whole hired troupe of common prostitutes. Their master is a man of noble birth, bribery his chosen instrument – and believe me, gentlemen, he plays it like a flute! He is a briber of juries, a briber of voters and a briber of tribunes. Little wonder he loathed our bill against bribery, and that the method he used to stop it should have been – bribery!’ He paused and lowered his voice. ‘I should like to share some information with the house.’ The senate now went very quiet. ‘Last night, Antonius Hybrida and Sergius Catilina met, together with others, at the house of this man of noble birth—’
‘Name him!’ shouted someone, and for a moment I thought that Cicero might actually do so. He stared across the aisle at Crassus with such calculated intensity that he might as well have gone over and touched him on the shoulder, so clear was it whom he had in mind. Crassus sat up slightly in his seat and slowly leaned forward, never taking his eyes from Cicero: he must have wo
ndered what was coming. One could feel the entire chamber holding its breath. But Cicero had different quarry to chase, and with an almost palpable effort of will, he dragged his gaze away from Crassus.
‘This man, as I say, of noble birth, having bribed away the bribery bill, has a new scheme in mind. He intends now to bribe his way to the consulship, not for himself but for his two creatures, Hybrida and Catilina.’
Naturally, both men instantly jumped up to protest, as Cicero must have calculated they would. But as their rank was no higher than his, he was entitled to leave them standing. ‘Well, there they are,’ he said, turning to the benches behind him, ‘the best that money can buy!’ He let the laughter build and chose the perfect moment to add: ‘As we lawyers say – caveat emptor!’
Nothing is more injurious to a politician’s dignity and authority than to be mocked, and if it happens it is vitally important to appear entirely unconcerned. But Hybrida and Catilina, buffeted by gusts of merriment from every side, could not decide whether to remain defiantly standing or to sit and feign indifference. They ended up trying to do both, bobbing up and down like a pair of workmen at either end of a pump-handle, which only increased the general hilarity. Catilina in particular was obviously losing his temper, for like many arrogant men the one thing he could not abide was to be teased. Caesar tried to come to their rescue, rising to demand what point Cicero was trying to make, but Cicero refused to acknowledge his intervention and the consul, enjoying himself like everyone else, declined to call Cicero to order.
‘Let us take the lesser first,’ continued Cicero, after both his targets had finally sunk back in to their seats. ‘You, Hybrida, should never even have been elected praetor, and would not have been had I not taken pity on you, and recommended you to the centuries. You live openly with a courtesan, you cannot speak in public, you can barely remember your own name without the assistance of a nomenclator. You were a thief under Sulla, and a drunkard thereafter. You are, in short, a joke; but a joke of the worst sort – a joke that has gone on too long.’
The chamber was much quieter now, for these were insults which would oblige a man to be your enemy for life, and as Cicero turned towards Catilina, Atticus’s anxious grip on my arm tightened. ‘As for you, Catilina, is it not a prodigy and a portent of evil times that you should hope for, or even think of, the consulship? For from whom do you ask it? From the chiefs of the state, who, two years ago, refused even to allow you to stand for it? Do you ask it from the order of knights which you have slaughtered? Or from the people, who still remember the monstrous cruelty with which you butchered their leader – my kinsman – Gratidianus, and carried his still-breathing head through the streets to the Temple of Apollo? Do you ask it from the senators, who by their own authority had almost stripped you of all your honours, and surrendered you in chains to the Africans?’
‘I was acquitted!’ roared Catilina, leaping back to his feet.
‘Acquitted!’ mocked Cicero. ‘You? Acquitted? You – who disgraced yourself by every sort of sexual perversion and profligacy; who dyed your hands in the wickedest murder, who plundered the allies, who violated the laws and the courts of justice? You, who married in adultery the mother of the daughter you first debauched? Acquitted? Then I can only imagine that Roman knights must have been liars; that the documentary evidence of a most honourable city was false; that Quintus Metellus Pius told lies; that Africa told lies. Acquitted! O wretched man, not to see that you were not acquitted by that decision, but only reserved for some more severe tribunal, and some more fearful punishment!’
This would have been too much even for an equable man to sit through, but in Catilina it induced nothing short of murderous insanity. He gave an animal’s bellow of primitive rage and launched himself over the bench in front of him, crashing between Hortensius and Catulus, and diving across the aisle in an effort to reach his tormentor. But of course this was precisely the reaction Cicero had been trying to goad him into. He flinched but stood his ground as Quintus and a few other ex-soldiers scrambled to form a cordon around him – not that there was any need, for Catilina, big though he was, had been seized at once by the consul’s lictors. His friends, among them Crassus and Caesar, quickly had him by the arms and started dragging him back to his seat as he writhed and roared and kicked in fury. The whole of the senate was on its feet, trying to see what was happening, and Figulus had to suspend the session until order was restored.
When the sitting resumed, Hybrida and Catilina, as custom dictated, were given the opportunity to respond, and each man, quivering with outrage, tipped a bucketful of the usual insults over Cicero’s head – ambitious, untrustworthy, scheming, ‘new man’, foreigner, evader of military service, coward – while their supporters cheered them dutifully. But neither had Cicero’s flair for invective, and even their most dedicated partisans must have been dismayed by their failure to answer his central charge: that their candidacies were based on bribery by a mysterious third party. It was noticeable that Hortensius and even Catulus offered them only the most half-hearted applause. As for Cicero, he put on a professional mask and sat smiling and unconcerned throughout their shrill tirades, seemingly no more concerned than a duck in a rainstorm. Only afterwards – after Quintus and his military friends had escorted him rapidly out of the chamber to prevent a further assault by Catilina, and only after we had reached the safety of Atticus’s house on the Quirinal and the door had been locked and barred – only then did he appear to realise the enormity of what he had done.
XVIII
THERE WAS NOTHING left for Cicero now except to wait for the reaction of Hortensius. We passed the hours in the dry stillness of Atticus’s library, surrounded by all that ancient wisdom, under the gaze of the great philosophers, while beyond the terrace the day ripened and faded and the view over the city became yellower and dustier in the heat of the July afternoon. I should like to record that we took down the occasional volume and spent the time swapping the thoughts of Epicurus or Zeno or Aristotle, or that Cicero said something profound about democracy. But in truth no one was much in the mood for political theory, least of all Quintus, who had scheduled a campaign appearance in the busy Porticus Aemilia and fretted that his brother was losing valuable canvassing time. We relived the drama of Cicero’s speech – ‘You should have seen Crassus’s face when he thought I was about to name him!’ – and pondered the likely response of the aristocrats. If they did not take the bait, Cicero had placed himself in a highly dangerous position. Every so often, he would ask me if I was absolutely certain that Hortensius had read his letter, and yet again I would reply that I had no doubt, for he had done so right in front of me. ‘Then we shall give him another hour,’ Cicero would say, and resume his restless pacing, occasionally stopping to make some cutting remark to Atticus: ‘Are they always this punctual, these smart friends of yours?’ or ‘Tell me, is it considered a crime against good breeding to consult a clock?’
It was the tenth hour by Atticus’s exquisite sundial when at last one of his slaves came into the library to announce that Hortensius’s steward had arrived.
‘So now we are supposed to negotiate with his servants?’ muttered Cicero. But he was so anxious for news that he hurried out into the atrium himself, and we all went with him. Waiting there was the same bony, supercilious fellow whom I had encountered at Hortensius’s house that morning; he was not much more polite now. His message was that he had come in Hortensius’s two-seater carriage to collect Cicero and convey him to a meeting with his master.
‘But I must accompany him,’ protested Quintus.
‘My orders are simply to bring Senator Cicero,’ responded the steward. ‘The meeting is highly sensitive and confidential. Only one other person is required – that secretary of his, who has the quick way with words.’
I was not at all happy about this, and nor was Quintus – I out of a cowardly desire to avoid being cross-examined by Hortensius, he because it was a snub, and also perhaps (to be more charitable) because he was
worried for his brother’s safety. ‘What if it is a trap?’ he asked. ‘What if Catilina is there, or intercepts you on your journey?’
‘You will be under the protection of Senator Hortensius,’ said the steward stiffly. ‘I give you his word of honour in the presence of all these witnesses.’
‘It will be all right, Quintus,’ said Cicero, laying a reassuring hand on his brother’s arm. ‘It is not in Hortensius’s interests for any injury to befall me. Besides,’ he smiled, ‘I am a friend of Atticus here, and what better guarantee of safe passage is there than that? Come along, Tiro. Let us find out what he has to say.’
We left the relative safety of the library and went down into the street, where a smart carpentum was waiting, with Hortensius’s livery painted on its side. The steward sat up at the front next to the driver, while I sat in the back with Cicero and we lurched off down the hill. But instead of turning south towards the Palatine, as we had expected, we headed north, towards the Fontinalian Gate, joining the stream of traffic leaving the city at the end of the day. Cicero had pulled the folds of his white toga up over his head, ostensibly to shield himself from the clouds of dust thrown up by the wheels, but actually to avoid any of his voters seeing him travelling in a vehicle belonging to Hortensius. Once we were out of the city, however, he pulled his hood down. He was clearly not at all happy to be leaving the precincts of Rome, for despite his brave words he knew that a fatal accident out here would be very easy to arrange. The sun was big and low, just beginning to set behind those massive family tombs which line the road. The poplars threw elongated shadows which fell jet black across our path, like crevasses. For a while we were stuck behind a plodding bullock cart. But then the coachman cracked his whip and we raced forward, just narrowly managing to overtake it before a chariot rattled past us, heading towards the city. I guess we both must have realised by then where we were going, and Cicero pulled his hood up again and folded his arms, his head down. What thoughts must have been spinning through his mind! We turned off the road and began climbing a steep hillside, following a driveway freshly laid with gravel. It took us on a winding journey over gushing brooks and through gloomy, scented pine groves where pigeons called to one another in the dusk, until eventually we came to a huge pair of open gates, and beyond them an immense villa set in its own park, which I recognised from the model Gabinius had displayed to the jealous mob in the forum as the palace of Lucullus.