Imperium

money-lending type, short and furtive, who seemed to regard his son as an investment which was failing to show an adequate yield. “He needs to be beaten regularly,” he announced, just before he brought him in to meet Cicero. “He is clever enough, but wayward and dissolute. You have my permission to whip him as much as you like.” Cicero looked askance at this, having never whipped anyone in his life, but fortunately, as it turned out, he got on very well with young Caelius, who was as dissimilar to his father as it was possible to imagine. He was tall and handsome and quick-witted, with an indifference toward money and business which Cicero found amusing; I less so, for it generally fell to me to do all the humdrum tasks which were Caelius’s responsibility, and which he shirked. But still, I must concede, looking back, that he had charm.
    I shall not dwell on the details of Cicero’s praetorship. This is not a textbook about the law, and I can sense your eagerness for me to get on to the climax of my story—the election for the consulship itself. Suffice it to say that Cicero was considered a fair and honest judge, and that the work was easily within his competence. If he encountered a particularly awkward point of jurisprudence and needed a second opinion, he would either consult his old friend and fellow pupil of Molon, Servius Sulpicius, or go over to see the distinguished praetor of the election court, Aquilius Gallus, in his mansion on the Viminal Hill. The biggest case over which he had to preside was that of Caius Licinius Macer, a kinsman and supporter of Crassus, who was impeached for his actions as governor of Macedonia. The hearing dragged on for weeks, and at the end of it Cicero summed up very fairly, except that he could not resist one joke. The nub of the prosecution case was that Macer had taken half a million in illegal payments. Macer at first denied it. The prosecution then produced proof that the exact same sum had been paid into a money-lending company which he controlled. Macer abruptly changed his story and claimed that, yes, he remembered the payments, but thought that they were legal. “Now, it may be,” said Cicero to the jury, as he was directing them on points of evidence, “that the defendant believed this.” He left a pause just long enough for some of them to start laughing, whereupon he put on a mock-stern face. “No, no, he may have believed it. In which case”—another pause—“you may reasonably conclude perhaps that he was too stupid to be a Roman governor.” I had sat in sufficient courts by then to know from the gale of laughter that Cicero had just convicted the man as surely as if he had been the prosecuting counsel. But Macer—who was not stupid at all; on the contrary, he was very clever, so clever that he thought everyone else a fool—did not see the danger, and actually left the tribunal while the jury was balloting in order to go home and change and have a haircut, in anticipation of his victory celebration that night. While he was absent, the jury convicted him, and as he was leaving his house to return to the court, Crassus intercepted him on his doorstep and told him what had happened. Some say he dropped dead on the spot from shock, others that he went back indoors and killed himself to spare his son the humiliation of his exile. Either way, he died, and Crassus—as if he needed one—had a whole new reason for hating Cicero.

    THE GAMES OF APOLLO on the sixth day of July traditionally marked the start of the election season, although in truth it always seemed to be election season in those days. No sooner had one campaign come to an end than the candidates began anticipating the start of the next. Cicero joked that the business of governing the state was merely something to occupy the time between polling days. And perhaps this is one of the things that killed the republic: it gorged itself to death on votes. At any rate, the responsibility for honoring Apollo with a program of public entertainment always fell to the urban praetor, which in this particular year was Antonius Hybrida.
    Nobody had been expecting much, or indeed anything at all, for Hybrida was known to have drunk and gambled away all his money. So it was a vast surprise when he staged not only a series of wonderful theatrical productions but also lavish spectacles in the Circus Maximus, with a full program of twelve chariot races, athletic competitions, and a wild-beast hunt