Imperium

Roll 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 a

“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 honor 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 back with Cicero and we lurched off down the hill. But instead of turning south toward the Palatine, as we had expected, we headed north, toward 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 traveling 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 begi

FOR YEARS THEREAFTER, whenever I smelled fresh cement and wet paint, I would think of Lucullus and that echoing mausoleum he had built for himself beyond the walls of Rome. What a brilliant, melancholy figure he was-perhaps the greatest general the aristocrats had produced for fifty years, yet robbed of ultimate victory in the East by the arrival of Pompey, and doomed by the political intrigues of his enemies, among them Cicero, to linger outside Rome for years, unhonored and unable even to attend the Senate, for by crossing the city’s boundaries he would forfeit his right to a triumph. Because he still retained military imperium, there were sentries in the grounds, and lictors with their bundles of rods and axes waited sullenly in the hall-so many lictors, in fact, that Cicero calculated that a second general on active service must be on the premises. “Do you think it’s possible that Quintus Metellus is here as well?” he whispered, as we followed the steward into the cavernous interior. “Dear gods, I think he must be!”

We passed through various rooms stuffed with loot from the war until at last we reached the great chamber known as the Room of Apollo, where a group of six were talking beneath a mural of the deity shooting a fiery arrow from his golden bow. At the sound of our footsteps on the marble floor, the conversation ceased and there was a loud silence. Quintus Metellus was indeed among them-stouter, grayer, and more weather-beaten following his years of command in Crete, but still very much the same man who had attempted to intimidate the Sicilians into dropping their case against Verres. On one side of Metellus was his old courtroom ally Hortensius, whose bland and handsome face was expressionless, and on the other, Catulus, as thin and sharp as a blade. Isauricus, the grand old man of the Senate, was also present-seventy years old he must have been on that July evening, but he did not look it (he was one of those types who never look it: he was to live to be ninety, and would attend the funerals of almost everyone else in the room); I noticed he was holding the transcript I had delivered to Hortensius. The two Lucullus brothers completed the sextet. Marcus, the younger, I knew as a familiar figure from the Senate front bench. Lucius, the famous general, paradoxically I did not recognize at all, for he had been away fighting for eighteen out of the past twenty-three years. He was in his middle fifties, and I quickly saw why Pompey was so passionately jealous of him-why they had literally come to blows when they met in Galatia to effect the handover in the Eastern command-for Lucius had a chilly grandeur which made even Catulus seem slightly common.

It was Hortensius who ended the embarrassment, and who stepped forward to introduce Cicero to Lucius Lucullus. Cicero extended his hand, and for a moment I thought Lucullus might refuse to shake it, for he would only have known Cicero as a partisan of Pompey, and as one of those populist politicians who had helped engineer his dismissal. But finally he took it, very gingerly, as one might pick up a soiled sponge in a latrine. “Imperator,” said Cicero, bowing politely. He nodded to Metellus as well: “Imperator.”

“And who is that?” demanded Isauricus, pointing at me.

“That is my secretary, Tiro,” said Cicero, “who recorded the meeting at the house of Crassus.”

“Well, I for one do not believe a word of it,” replied Isauricus, brandishing the transcript at me. “No one could have written down all of this as it was uttered. It is beyond human capacity.”

“Tiro has developed his own system of stenography,” explained Cicero. “Let him show you the actual records he made last night.”

I pulled out the notebooks from my pocket and handed them around.

“Remarkable,” said Hortensius, examining my script intently. “So these symbols substitute for sounds, do they? Or for entire words?”

“Words mostly,” I replied, “and common phrases.”

“Prove it,” said Catulus belligerently. “Take down what I say.” And giving me barely a moment to open a fresh notebook and take up my stylus, he went on rapidly, “If what I have read here is true, the state is threatened with civil war as a result of a criminal conspiracy. If what I have read is false, it is the wickedest forgery in our history. For my own part, I do not believe it is true, because I do not believe such a record could have been produced by a living hand. That Catilina is a hothead, we all know well enough, but he is a true and noble Roman, not a devious and ambitious outsider, and I will take his word over that of a new man-always! What is it you want from us, Cicero? You ca

“Nothing,” replied Cicero pleasantly. “I came across some information which I thought might be of interest to you. I passed it along to Hortensius, that is all. You brought me out here, remember? I did not ask to come. I might more appropriately ask: What do you gentlemen want? Do you want to be trapped between Pompey and his armies in the East, and Crassus and Caesar and the urban mob in Italy, and gradually have the life squeezed out of you? Do you want to rely for your protection on the two men you are backing for consul-the one stupid, the other insane-who ca