Imperium

me to need to whisper a name in his ear, for he knew his voters far better than I.
    I do not know how it is these days, but at that time there were six or seven law courts in almost permanent session, each set up in a different part of the Forum, so that at the hour when they all opened one could barely move for advocates and legal officers hurrying about. To make it worse, the praetor of each court would always arrive from his house preceded by half a dozen lictors to clear his path, and, as luck would have it, our little entourage debouched into the Forum at exactly the moment when Hortensius—at this time a praetor himself—went parading by toward the Senate House. We were all held back by his guards to let the great man pass, and to this day I do not think it was his intention to cut Cicero dead, for he was a man of refined, almost effeminate, manners: he simply did not see him. But the consequence was that the so-called second-best advocate in Rome, his cordial greeting dead on his lips, was left staring at the retreating back of the so-called best with such an intensity of loathing I was surprised Hortensius did not start rubbing at the skin between his shoulder blades.
    Our business that morning was in the central criminal court, convened outside the Basilica Aemilia, where the fifteen-year-old Caius Popillius Laenas was on trial accused of stabbing his father to death through the eye with a metal stylus. I could already see a big crowd waiting around the tribunal. Cicero was due to make the closing speech for the defense. That was attraction enough. But if he failed to convince the jury, Popillius, as a convicted parricide, would be stripped naked, flayed till he bled, then sewn up in a sack together with a dog, a cock, and a viper, and thrown into the River Tiber. There was a whiff of bloodlust in the air, and as the onlookers parted to let us through, I caught a glimpse of Popillius himself, a notoriously violent youth, whose eyebrows merged to form a continuous thick black line. He was seated next to his uncle on the bench reserved for the defense, scowling defiantly, spitting at anyone who came too close. “We really must secure an acquittal,” observed Cicero, “if only to spare the dog, the cock, and the viper the ordeal of being sewn up in a sack with Popillius.” He always maintained that it was no business of the advocate to worry whether his client was guilty or not: that was for the court. He undertook only to do his best, and in return the Popillii Laeni, who could boast four consuls in their family tree, would be obliged to support him whenever he ran for office.
    Sositheus and Laurea set down the boxes of evidence, and I was just bending to unfasten the nearest when Cicero told me to leave it. “Save yourself the trouble,” he said, tapping the side of his head. “I have the speech up here well enough.” He bowed politely to his client—“Good day, Popillius: we shall soon have this settled, I trust”—then continued to me, in a quieter voice: “I have a more important task for you. Give me your notebook. I want you to go to the Senate House, find the chief clerk, and see if there is a chance of having this put on the order paper this afternoon.” He was writing rapidly. “Say nothing to our Sicilian friend just yet. There is great danger. We must take this carefully, one step at a time.”
    It was not until I had left the tribunal and was halfway across the Forum to the Senate House that I risked taking a look at what he had written: “That in the opinion of this House the prosecution of persons in their absence on capital charges should be prohibited in the provinces.” I felt a tightening in my chest, for I saw at once what it meant. Cleverly, tentatively, obliquely, Cicero was preparing at last to challenge his great rival. I was carrying a declaration of war.

    GELLIUS PUBLICOLA WAS THE PRESIDING consul for November. He was a blunt, delightfully stupid military commander of the old school. It was said, or at any rate it was said by Cicero, that when Gellius had passed through Athens with his army twenty years before, he had offered to mediate between the warring schools of philosophy: he would convene a conference at which they could thrash out the meaning of life once and for all, thus sparing themselves further pointless argument. I knew Gellius’s secretary fairly well, and as the afternoon’s agenda was unusually light, with nothing scheduled apart from a report on