Imperium

out that I needed to borrow some money.
    He squinted at me in disbelief. “What for?”
    “There is a girl,” I replied helplessly, simply because it was the sort of thing he used to say to me when he wanted money and I had not the wit to come up with anything else. I tried to steer him along the street a little way, anxious that Crassus might come out and see us together. But he shook me off and stood swaying in the gutter.
    “A girl?” he repeated incredulously. “You?” And then he began to laugh, but that obviously hurt his head, so he stopped and put his fingers gently to his temple. “If I had any money, Tiro, I should give it to you willingly—it would be a gift, bestowed simply for the pleasure of seeing you with any living person other than Cicero. But that could never happen. You are not the type for girls. Poor Tiro—you are not any kind of type, that I can see.” He peered at me closely. “What do you really need it for?” I could smell the stale wine hot on his breath and could not prevent myself flinching, which he mistook for an admission of guilt. “You are lying,” he said, and then a grin spread slowly across his stubbled face. “Cicero sent you to find out something.”
    I pleaded with him to move away from the house, and this time he did. But the motion of walking evidently did not agree with him. He halted again, turned very white, and held up a warning finger. Then his eyes and throat bulged, he gave an alarming groan, and out came such a heavy gush of vomit it reminded me of a chambermaid emptying a bucket out of an upstairs window into the street. (Forgive these details, but the scene just came entirely back into my mind after an absence of sixty years, and I could not help but laugh at the memory.) Anyway, this seemed to act as a purge; his color returned and he became much brighter. He asked me what it was that Cicero wanted to know.
    “What do you think?” I replied, a little impatiently.
    “I wish I could help you, Tiro,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You know I would if I could. It is not nearly as pleasant living with Crassus as it was with Cicero. Old Baldhead is the most awful shit—worse even than my father. He has me learning accountancy all day, and a duller business was never invented, except for commercial law, which was last month’s torture. As for politics, which does amuse me, he is careful to keep me away from all that side of things.”
    I tried asking him a few more questions, for instance about Caesar’s visit that morning, but it quickly became clear that he was genuinely ignorant of Crassus’s plans. (I suppose he might have been lying, but given his habitual garrulity, I doubted it.) When I thanked him anyway and turned to leave, he grabbed my elbow. “Cicero must be really desperate,” he said, with an expression of unaccustomed seriousness, “to ask for help from me. Tell him I am sorry to hear it. He is worth a dozen of Crassus and my father put together.”

    I DID NOT EXPECT to be seeing Caelius again for a while, and banished him from my mind for the remainder of the day, which was entirely given over to the vote on the bribery bill. Cicero was very active among the tribes in the Forum, going from one to another with his entourage and urging the merits of Figula’s proposal. He was especially pleased to find, under the standard marked VETURIA, several hundred citizens from Nearer Gaul who had responded to his campaign and turned out to vote for the first time. He talked to them for a long while about the importance of stamping out bribery, and as he turned away he had the glint of tears in his eyes. “Poor people,” he muttered, “to have come so far, only to be mocked by Crassus’s money. But if we can get this bill through, I may yet have a weapon to bring the villain down.”
    My impression was that his canvassing was proving effective, and that when it came to a vote the lex Figula would pass, for the majority were not corrupt. But simply because a measure is honest and sensible, there is no guarantee that it will be adopted; rather the opposite, in my experience. Early in the afternoon, the populist tribune, Mucius Orestinus—he, you may remember, who had formerly been a client of Cicero’s on a charge of robbery—came to the front of the rostra and denounced the measure as an attack by the aristocrats on the integrity of the plebs. He actually singled out Cicero by name as a man “unfit to be