Imperium - Харрис Роберт - Страница 48

“I have already turned down an enormous sum from Crassus,” replied Cicero.

“Well, if ever there is a bidding war, be sure that I am included,” said Caesar in his rasping voice, coming up behind us. “I would dearly love to get my hands on Tiro.” But he said it in such a friendly way, accompanying it with a wink, that none of the others heard the menace in his words, while I felt almost faint with terror.

“The day that I am parted from Tiro,” said Cicero, prophetically as it turned out, “is the day that I quit public life.”

“Now I am doubly determined to buy him,” said Caesar, and Cicero joined in the general laughter.

After agreeing to keep secret everything that had been discussed, and to meet in Rome in a few days’ time, the group broke up. The moment we turned out of the gates and onto the road to Tusculum, Cicero let out a long, pent-up cry of frustration and struck the side of the carriage with the palm of his hand. “A criminal conspiracy!” he said, shaking his head in despair. “Worse-a stupid criminal conspiracy. This is the trouble, Tiro, when soldiers decide to play at politics. They imagine that all they need to do is issue an order, and everyone will obey. They never see that the very thing which makes them attractive in the first place-that they are supposedly these great patriots, above the squalor of politics-must ultimately defeat them, because either they do stay above politics, in which case they go nowhere, or they get down in the muck along with the rest of us and show themselves to be just as venal as everyone else.” He stared out at the lake, darkening now in the winter light. “What do you make of Caesar?” he said suddenly, to which I returned a noncommittal answer about his seeming very ambitious. “He certainly is that. So much so, there were times today when it occurred to me that this whole fantastic scheme is actually not Pompey’s at all, but Caesar’s. That, at least, would explain his presence.”

I pointed out that Pompey had described it as his own idea.

“And no doubt Pompey thinks it is. But that is the nature of the man. You make a remark to him, and then you find it being repeated back to you as if it were his own. ‘The central issue must be the defeat of the pirates, not the future of Pompey the Great.’ That is a typical example. Sometimes, just to amuse myself, I have argued against my own original assertion, and waited to see how long it was before I heard my rebuttal coming back at me, too.” He frowned and nodded. “I am sure I am right. Caesar is quite clever enough to have planted the seed and left it to flower on its own. I wonder how much time he has spent with Pompey. He seems very well bedded-in.”

It was on the tip of my tongue then to tell him what I had witnessed, but a combination of fear of Caesar, my own shyness, and a feeling that Cicero would not think the better of me for spying-that I would in some sense be contaminated myself by describing the whole sordid business-caused me to swallow my words. It was not until many years later-after Caesar’s death, in fact, when he could no longer harm me and I was altogether more confident-that I revealed my story. Cicero, then an old man, was silent for a long time. “I understand your discretion,” he said at last, “and in many ways I applaud it. But I have to say, my dear friend, that I wish you had informed me. Perhaps then things might have turned out differently. At least I would have realized earlier the kind of breathtakingly reckless man we were dealing with. But by the time I did understand, it was too late.”

THE ROME TO WHICH WE RETURNED a few days later was jittery and full of rumors. The burning of Ostia had been clearly visible to the whole city as a red glow in the western night sky. Such an attack on the capital was unprecedented, and when Gabinius and Cornelius took office as tribunes on the tenth day of December, they moved quickly to fan the sparks of public anxiety into the flames of panic. They caused extra sentries to be posted at the city’s gates. Wagons and pedestrians entering Rome were stopped and searched at random for weapons. The wharves and warehouses along the river were patrolled both day and night, and severe penalties were promulgated for citizens convicted of hoarding grain, with the inevitable result that the three great food markets of Rome in those days-the Emporium, the Macellum, and the Forum Boarium-immediately ran out of supplies. The vigorous new tribunes also dragged the outgoing consul, the hapless Marcius Rex, before a meeting of the people, and subjected him to a merciless cross-examination about the security lapses which had led to the fiasco at Ostia. Other witnesses were found to testify about the menace of the pirates, and that menace grew with every retelling. They had a thousand ships! They were not lone raiders at all, but an organized conspiracy! They had squadrons and admirals and fearsome weapons of poison-tipped arrows and Greek fire! Nobody in the Senate dared object to any of this, for fear of seeming complacent-not even when a chain of beacons was built all along the road to the sea, to be lit if pirate vessels were seen heading for the mouth of the Tiber. “This is absurd,” Cicero said to me on the morning we went out to inspect these most visible symbols of the national peril. “As if any sane pirate would dream of sailing twenty miles up an open river to attack a defended city!” He shook his head in dismay at the ease with which a timorous population can be molded by unscrupulous politicians. But what could he do? His closeness to Pompey had trapped him into silence.

On the seventeenth day of December the Festival of Saturn began, and lasted for a week. It was not the most enjoyable of holidays, for obvious reasons, and although the Cicero family went through the normal rituals of exchanging gifts, even allowing us slaves to have the day off and sharing a meal with us, nobody’s heart was in it. Lucius used to be the life and soul of these events, and he was gone. Terentia, I believe, had hoped she was pregnant, but had discovered she was not, and was becoming seriously worried that she would never bear a son. Pomponia nagged away at Quintus about his inadequacies as a husband. Even little Tullia could not cheer the mood.

As for Cicero, he spent much of Saturnalia in his study, brooding on Pompey’s insatiable ambition, and the implications it had for the country and for his own political prospects. The elections for the praetorship were barely eight months away, and he and Quintus had already compiled a list of likely candidates. From whichever of these men was eventually elected, he could probably expect to find his rivals for the consulship. The two brothers spent many hours discussing the permutations, and it seemed to me, although I kept it to myself, that they missed the wisdom of their cousin. For although Cicero used to joke that if he wanted to know what was politically shrewd, he would ask Lucius his opinion and then do precisely the opposite, nevertheless Lucius had offered a fixed star to steer by. Without him, the Ciceros had only each other, and despite their mutual devotion, it was not always the wisest of relationships.

It was in this atmosphere, around the eighth or ninth day of January, when the Latin Festival was over and serious politics resumed, that Gabinius finally mounted the rostra to demand a new supreme commander. I am talking here, I should explain, about the old republican rostra, which was very different from the wretched ornamental footstool we have today. This ancient structure, now destroyed, was the heart of Rome’s democracy: a long, curved platform, twelve feet high, covered with the statues of the heroes of antiquity, from which the tribunes and the consuls addressed the people. Its back was to the Senate House, and it faced out boldly across the widest expanse of the Forum, with six ships’ battering rams, or “beaks”-those rostra, which gave the platform its name-thrusting from its heavy masonry (the beaks had been captured from the Carthaginians in a sea battle nearly three centuries earlier). The whole of its rear was a flight of steps, if you can imagine what I am saying, so that a magistrate might leave the Senate House or the tribunes’ headquarters, walk fifty paces, ascend the steps, and find himself on top of the rostra, facing a crowd of thousands, with the tiered facades of the two great basilicas on either side of him and the Temple of Castor straight ahead. This was where Gabinius stood on that January morning and declared, in his smooth and confident way, that what Rome needed was a strong man to take control of the war against the pirates.