Imperium - Харрис Роберт - Страница 54

“I disagree. The people love him.”

“The people loved Tiberius Gracchus, but it did him no good in the end. That was a horrible fate for a patriotic Roman, which you might do well to remember.” Crassus stood. “Look to your own interests, Cicero. Surely you can see that Pompey is leading you to political oblivion? No man ever became consul with the aristocracy united against him.” Cicero also rose and warily took Crassus’s proffered hand. The older man grasped it hard and pulled him close. “On two occasions,” he said in a very soft voice, “I have offered the hand of friendship to you, Marcus Tullius Cicero. There will not be a third.”

With that, he strode out of the house, and at such a pace I could not get in front of him to show him out, or even open the door. I returned to the study to find Cicero standing exactly where I had left him, frowning at his hand. “It is like touching the skin of a snake,” he said. “Tell me-did I mishear him, or is he suggesting that Pompey and I might suffer the same fate as Tiberius Gracchus?”

“Yes: ‘a horrible fate for a patriotic Roman,’” I read from my notes. “What was the fate of Tiberius Gracchus?”

“Cornered like a rat in a temple and murdered by the nobles, while he was still tribune, and therefore supposedly inviolable. That must have been sixty years ago, at least. Tiberius Gracchus!” He clenched his hand into a fist. “You know, for a moment, Tiro, he almost had me believing him, but I swear to you, I would sooner never be consul than feel that I had only achieved it because of Crassus.”

“I believe you, senator. Pompey is worth ten of him.”

“A hundred, more like-for all his absurdities.”

I busied myself with a few things, straightening the desk and collecting the morning’s list of callers from the tablinum, while Cicero remained motionless in the study. When I returned again, a curious expression had come over his face. I gave him the list and reminded him that he still had a houseful of clients to receive, including a senator. Absentmindedly he selected a couple of names, among them Hybrida’s, but then he suddenly said, “Leave things here to Sositheus. I have a different task for you to perform. Go to the National Archive and consult the Annals for the consular year of Mucius Scaevola and Calpurnius Piso Frugi. Copy down everything relating to the tribuneship of Tiberius Gracchus and his agrarian bill. Tell nobody what you are doing. If anyone asks you, make something up. Well?” He smiled for the first time in a week and made a shooing gesture, flicking his fingers at me. “Go on, man. Go!”

After so many years in his service I had become used to these bewildering and peremptory commands, and once I had wrapped myself up against the cold and wet I set off down the hill. Never had I known the city so grim and hard-pressed-in the depths of winter, under a dark sky, freezing, short of food, with beggars on every corner, and even the occasional corpse in the gutter of some poor wretch who had died in the night. I moved quickly through the dreary streets, across the Forum and up the steps to the archive. This was the same building in which I had discovered the meager official records of Gaius Verres, and I had been back on many errands since, especially when Cicero was aedile, so my face was familiar to the clerks. They gave me the volume I needed without asking any questions. I took it over to a reading desk beside the window and unrolled it with my mittened fingers. The morning light was weak, it was very drafty, and I was not at all sure what I was looking for. The Annals, at least in those days before Caesar got his hands on them, gave a very straight and full account of what had happened in each year: the names of the magistrates, the laws passed, the wars fought, the famines endured, the eclipses, and the other natural phenomena observed. They were drawn from the official register that was written up each year by the pontifex maximus, and posted on the white board outside the headquarters of the college of priests.

History has always fascinated me. As Cicero himself once wrote: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?” I quickly forgot the cold and could have spent all day happily unwinding that roll, poring over the events of more than sixty years before. I discovered that in this particular year, Rome’s six hundred and twenty-first, King Attalus III of Pergamon had died, bequeathing his country to Rome; that Scipio Africanus Minor had destroyed the Spanish city of Numantia, slaughtering all of its five thousand inhabitants, apart from fifty whom he saved to walk in chains in his triumph; and that Tiberius Gracchus, the famous radical tribune, had introduced a law to share out the public land among the common people, who were then, as always, suffering great hardship. Nothing changes, I thought. Gracchus’s bill had infuriated the aristocrats in the Senate, who saw it as threatening their estates, and they had persuaded or suborned a tribune named Marcus Octavius to veto the law. But because the people were unanimous in their support for the bill, Gracchus had argued from the rostra that Octavius was failing in his sacred duty to uphold their interests and had called upon the people to begin voting Octavius out of office, tribe by tribe. When the first seventeen of the thirty-five tribes had voted overwhelmingly for Octavius’s removal, Gracchus had suspended the polling and appealed to him to withdraw his veto. Octavius had refused, whereupon Gracchus had “called upon the gods to witness that he did not willingly wish to remove his colleague,” had balloted the eighteenth tribe, and achieved a majority, and Octavius had been stripped of his tribuneship (“reduced to the rank of a private citizen, he departed unobserved”). The agrarian law had then been passed. But the nobles, as Crassus had reminded Cicero, had exacted their revenge a few months later, when Gracchus had been surrounded in the temple of Fides, beaten to death with sticks and clubs, and his body flung in the Tiber.

I unfastened the hinged notebook from my wrist and took out my stylus. I remember how I glanced around to make sure I was alone before I opened it and started copying the relevant passages from the Annals, for now I understood why Cicero had been so emphatic about the need for secrecy. My fingers were freezing and the wax was hard; the script I produced was atrocious. At one point, when Catulus himself, the patron of the archive, appeared in the doorway and stared straight at me, I felt as if my heart would shatter the bones of my breast. But the old man was nearsighted, and I doubt he would have known who I was in any case; he was not that sort of politician. After talking for a while with one of his freedmen, he left. I finished my transcription and almost ran out of that place, down the icy steps and back across the Forum toward Cicero’s house, carrying my wax tablet pressed close to me, sensing I had never done a more significant morning’s work in my life.

When I reached the house, Cicero was still ensconced with Antonius Hybrida, although as soon as he saw me waiting near the door, he drew their conversation to a close. Hybrida was one of those well-bred, fine-boned types, who had ruined himself and his looks with wine. I could smell his breath even from where I stood: it was like fruit rotting in a gutter. He had been thrown out of the Senate a few years previous for bankruptcy and loose morals-specifically, corruption, drunkenness, and buying a beautiful young slave girl at an auction and living openly with her as his mistress. But the people, in that peculiar way of theirs, rather loved him for his rakish ways, and now that he had served a year as their tribune, he had worked his way back into the Senate. I waited until he had gone before I gave Cicero my notes. “What did he want?” I asked.