Imperium

By this stage I was becoming seriously concerned, and would have fetched his brother or his wife again, if his mind had not suddenly reemerged from wherever it had been wandering. Staring straight ahead, he said in a grim tone: “Go and make an appointment for me to see Pompey this evening.” When I hesitated, wondering if this was another symptom of his malady, he glared at me. “Go!”

It was only a short distance to Pompey’s house, which was in the same district of the Esquiline Hill as Cicero’s. The sun had just gone down but it was still light, and swelteringly hot, with a torpid breeze wafting gently from the east-the worst possible combination at the height of summer, because it carried into the neighborhood the stench of the putrefying corpses in the great common graves beyond the city wall. I believe the problem is not so acute these days, but sixty years ago the Esquiline Gate was the place where everything dead and not worth a proper funeral was taken to be dumped-the bodies of dogs and cats, horses, donkeys, slaves, paupers, and stillborn babies, all mixed up and rotting together, along with the household refuse. The stink always drew great flocks of crying gulls, and I remember that on this particular evening it was especially acute, a rancid and pervasive smell, which one tasted on the tongue as much as one absorbed it through the nostrils.

Pompey’s house was much grander than Cicero’s, with a couple of lictors posted outside and a crowd of sightseers gathered opposite. There were also half a dozen canopied litters set down in the lee of the wall, their bearers squatting nearby playing bones-evidence that a big di

Cicero must have known Pompey would agree to meet, for when I returned he had already changed into a fresh set of clothes and was ready to go out. He was still very pale. He exchanged a last look with Quintus, and then we set out. There was no conversation between us as we walked, because Cicero, who hated any reminder of death, kept his sleeve pressed to his mouth and nose to ward off the smell from the Esquiline field. “Wait here,” he said, when we reached Pompey’s house, and that was the last I saw of him for several hours. The daylight faded, the massy purple twilight ripened into darkness, and the stars began to appear in clusters. Occasionally, when the door was opened, the muffled sounds of voices and laughter reached the street, and I could smell meat and fish cooking, although on that foul night they all reeked of death to me, and I wondered how Cicero could possibly find the stomach for it, for by now it was clear that Pompey had asked him to join his di

I paced up and down, leaned against the wall, attempted to think up some new symbols for my great shorthand system, and generally tried to occupy myself as the night went on. Eventually Pompey’s guests started reeling out, half of them too drunk to stand properly, and it was the usual crew of Piceneans-Afranius, the former praetor and lover of the dance; Palicanus, of course; and Gabinius, Palicanus’s son in law, who also had a reputation for loving women and song-a real old soldiers’ reunion, it must have been, and I found it hard to imagine that Cicero could have enjoyed himself much. Only the austere and scholarly Varro-“the man who showed Pompey where the Senate House was,” in Cicero’s cutting phrase-would have been remotely congenial company, especially as he at least emerged sober. Cicero was the last to leave. He set off up the street and I hurried after him. There was a good yellow moon and I had no difficulty in making out his figure. He still kept his hand up to his nose, for neither the heat nor the smell had much diminished, and when he was a decent distance from Pompey’s house, he leaned against the corner of an alley and was violently sick.

I came up behind him and asked him if he needed assistance, at which he shook his head and responded, “It is done.” That was all he said to me, and all he said to Quintus, too, who was waiting up anxiously for him at the house when he got in: “It is done.”

AT DAWN THE FOLLOWING DAY we made the two-mile walk back to the Field of Mars for the second round of elections. Although these did not carry the same prestige as those for the consulship and the praetorship, they always had the advantage of being much more exciting. Thirty-four men had to be elected (twenty senators, ten tribunes, and four aediles), which meant there were simply too many candidates for the poll to be easily controlled: when an aristocrat’s vote carried no more weight than a pauper’s, anything could happen. Crassus, as junior consul, was the presiding officer at this supplementary election-“but presumably even he,” said Cicero darkly as he pulled on his red leather shoes, “ca

He had woken in an edgy, preoccupied mood. Whatever he and Pompey had agreed to the previous night had obviously disturbed his rest and he snapped irritably at his valet that his shoes were not clean. He do

When the augur pronounced himself satisfied, Crassus came out of the sacred tent and the candidates gathered at the base of his tribunal. Among them, I should record, making his first attempt to enter the Senate, was Julius Caesar, who stood beside Cicero and engaged him in friendly conversation. They had known each other a long time, and indeed it was on Cicero’s recommendation that the younger man had gone to Rhodes to study rhetoric under Apollonius Molon. Much hagiography now clusters around Caesar’s early years, to the extent that you would think he had been marked out by his contemporaries as a genius ever since the cradle. Not so, and anyone who saw him in his whitened toga that morning, nervously fiddling with his thi