Imperium

dust and scrub I felt as thrilled as a child. The afternoon was cloudless and balmy, a straggler left behind by a distant summer which had long since retreated. On impulse, Cicero ordered that the wagons be halted so that we could all walk on the beach. How odd the things which do lodge in one’s mind, for although I cannot now recall much of the serious politics, I can still remember every detail of that hour-long interlude—the smell of the seaweed and the taste of salt spray on my lips, the warmth of the sun on my cheeks, the rattle of the shingle as the waves broke and the hiss as they receded, and Cicero laughing as he tried to demonstrate how Demosthenes was supposed to have improved his elocution by rehearsing his speeches with a mouth full of pebbles.
    A few days later, at Ariminum, we picked up the Aemilian Way and swung west, away from the sea, and into the province of Nearer Gaul. Here we could feel the nip of winter coming on. The black and purple mountains of the Apenninus rose sheer to our left, while to our right, the Po delta stretched gray and flat to the horizon. I had a curious sensation that we were mere insects, creeping along the foot of a wall at the edge of some great room. The passionate political issue in Nearer Gaul at that time was the franchise. Those who lived to the south of the River Po had been given the vote; those who lived to the north had not. The populists, led by Pompey and Caesar, favored extending citizenship across the river, all the way to the Alps; the aristocrats, whose spokesman was Catulus, suspected a plot to further dilute their power, and opposed it. Cicero, naturally, was in favor of widening the franchise to the greatest extent possible, and this was the issue he campaigned on.
    They had never seen a consular candidate up here before, and in every little town crowds of several hundred would turn out to listen to him. Cicero usually spoke from the back of one of the wagons, and gave the same speech at every stop, so that after a while I could move my lips in synchronicity with his. He denounced as nonsense the logic which said that a man who lived on one side of a stretch of water was a Roman and that his cousin on the other was a barbarian, even though they both spoke Latin. “Rome is not merely a matter of geography,” he would proclaim. “Rome is not defined by rivers, or mountains, or even seas; Rome is not a question of blood, or race, or religion; Rome is an ideal. Rome is the highest embodiment of liberty and law that mankind has yet achieved in the ten thousand years since our ancestors came down from those mountains and learned how to live as communities under the rule of law.” So if his listeners had the vote, he would conclude, they must be sure to use it on behalf of those who had not, for that was their fragment of civilization, their special gift, as precious as the secret of fire. Every man should see Rome once before he died. They should go next summer, when the traveling was easy, and cast their ballots on the Field of Mars, and if anyone asked them why they had come so far, “you can tell them Marcus Cicero sent you!” Then he would jump down and pass among the crowd while they were still applauding, doling out handfuls of chickpeas from a sack carried by one of his attendants, and I would make sure I was just behind him, to catch his instructions and write down names.
    I learned much about Cicero while he was out campaigning. Indeed, I would say that despite all the years we had spent together I never really knew him until I saw him in one of those small towns south of the Po—Faventia, say, or Claterna—with the late autumn light just starting to fade, and a cold wind blowing off the mountains, and the lamps being lit in the little shops along the main street, and the upturned faces of the local farmers gazing in awe at this famous senator on the back of his wagon, with his three fingers outstretched, pointing toward the glory of Rome. I realized then that, for all his sophistication, he was really still one of them—a man from a small provincial town with an idealized dream of the republic and what it meant to be a citizen, which burned all the fiercer within him because he, too, was an outsider.
    For the next two months Cicero devoted himself entirely to the electors of Nearer Gaul, especially those around the provincial capital of Placentia, which actually lies on the banks of the Po and where whole families were divided by the