Imperium

have to live with the consequences for years.” He looked up at me. “I am not sure, Tiro. Perhaps it would be better if you erased it.” But when I made a move toward the desk, he said quickly, “And then again perhaps not.” Instead, he told me to fetch Laurea and a couple of the other slaves and have them run around to all the senators in Pompey’s inner group, asking them to assemble after the close of official business that afternoon. “Not here,” he added quickly, “but in Pompey’s house.” Thereupon he sat down and began writing out, in his own hand, a dispatch to the general, which was sent off with a rider who had orders to wait and return with a reply. “If Crassus wants to summon up the ghost of Gracchus,” he said grimly when the letter had gone, “he shall have him!”
    Needless to say, the others were agog to hear why Cicero had summoned them, and once the courts and offices were shut for the day, everyone turned up at Pompey’s mansion, filling all the seats around the table, except for the absent owner’s great throne, which was left empty as a mark of respect. It may seem strange that such clever and learned men as Caesar and Varro were ignorant of the precise tactics which Gracchus had used as tribune, but remember that he had been dead by then for sixty-three years, that huge events had intervened, and that there was not yet the mania for contemporary history which was to develop over the coming decades. Even Cicero had forgotten it until Crassus’s threat dislodged some distant memory from the time when he was studying for the bar. There was a profound hush as he read out the extract from the Annals, and when he had finished, an excited hubbub. Only the white-haired Varro, who was the oldest present, and who remembered hearing from his father about the chaos of the Gracchus tribunate, expressed reservations. “You would create a precedent,” he said, “by which any demagogue could summon the people, and threaten to dispose of any of his colleagues whenever he felt he had a majority among the tribes. Indeed, why stop at a tribune? Why not remove a praetor, or a consul?”
    “ We would not create the precedent,” Caesar pointed out impatiently. “Gracchus created it for us.”
    “Exactly,” said Cicero. “Although the nobles may have murdered him, they did not declare his legislation illegal. I know what Varro means, and to a degree I share his unease. But we are in a desperate struggle, and obliged to take some risks.”
    There was a murmur of assent, but in the end the most decisive voices in favor were those of Gabinius and Cornelius, the men who would actually have to stand before the people and push the legislation through, and thus be chiefly subject to the nobles’ retaliation, both physical and legal.
    “The people overwhelmingly want this supreme command, and they want Pompey to be given it,” declared Gabinius. “The fact that Crassus’s purse is deep enough to buy two tribunes should not be allowed to frustrate their will.”
    Afranius wanted to know if Pompey had expressed an opinion.
    “This is the dispatch I sent to him this morning,” said Cicero, holding it up, “and here on the bottom is the reply he sent back instantly, and which reached me here at the same time as you all did.” Everyone could see what he had scrawled, in his large, bold script: the single word “Agreed.” That settled the matter. Afterwards, Cicero instructed me to burn the letter.

    THE MORNING OF THE ASSEMBLY was bitterly cold, with an icy wind whipping around the colonnades and temples of the Forum. But the chill did not deter a vast assembly from turning out. On major voting days, the tribunes transferred themselves from the rostra to the Temple of Castor, where there was more space to conduct the ballot, and workmen had been busy overnight, erecting the wooden gangways up which the citizens would file to cast their votes. Cicero arrived early and discreetly, with only myself and Quintus in attendance, for as he said as he walked down the hill, he was only the stage manager of this production and not one of its leading performers. He spent a little while conferring with a group of tribal officers, then retreated with me to the portico of the Basilica Aemilia, from where he would have a good view of the proceedings and could issue instructions as necessary.
    It was a dramatic sight, and I guess I must be one of the very few left alive who witnessed it—the ten tribunes