Imperium

enemies and shown you what they are like. But from you, Catulus, and from all of you, I want nothing, and if all you wish to do is insult me, I bid you a good evening.”
    He spun around and began walking toward the door, with me in tow, and I guess that must have felt to him like the longest walk he ever took, because we had almost reached the shadowy antechamber—and with it, surely, the black void of political oblivion—when a voice (it was that of Lucullus himself) shouted out, “Read it back!” Cicero halted, and we both turned around. “Read it back,” repeated Lucullus. “What Catulus said just now.”
    Cicero nodded at me, and I fumbled for my notebook. “‘If what I have read here is true,’” I began, reciting in that flat, strange way of stenography being read back, “‘the state is threatened with civil war as a result of a criminal conspiracy if what I have read is false it is the wickedest forgery in our history for my own part I do not believe it is true because I do not believe such a record could have been produced by a living hand—’”
    “He could have memorized that,” objected Catulus. “It is all just a cheap trick, of the sort you might see done by a conjurer in the Forum.”
    “And the latter part,” persisted Lucullus. “Read out the last thing your master said.”
    I ran my finger down my notation. “‘—never been any friends of mine I also believe I have demonstrated by my courage in the Senate today my willingness to stand up to these criminals no other candidate for consul has done it or will in the future I have made them my enemies and shown you what they are like but from you Catulus and from all of you I want nothing and if all you wish to do is insult me I bid you a good evening.’”
    Isauricus whistled. Hortensius nodded and said something like, “I told you” or “I warned you”—I cannot remember exactly—to which Metellus responded, “Yes, well, I have to say, that is proof enough for me.” Catulus merely glared at me.
    “Come back, Cicero,” said Lucullus, beckoning to him. “I am satisfied. The record is genuine. Let us put aside for the time being the question of who needs whom the most, and start from the premise that each of us needs the other.”
    “I am still not convinced,” grumbled Catulus.
    “Then let me convince you with a single word,” said Hortensius impatiently. “Caesar. Caesar—with Crassus’s gold, two consuls and ten tribunes behind him!”
    “So really, we must talk with such people?” Catulus sighed. “Well, Cicero perhaps,” he conceded. “But we certainly do not need you, ” he snapped, pointing at me, just as I was moving, as always, to follow my master. “I do not want that creature and his tricks within a mile of me, listening to what we say, and writing everything down in his damned untrustworthy way. If anything is to pass between us, it must never be divulged.”
    Cicero hesitated. “All right,” he said reluctantly, and he gave me an apologetic look. “Wait outside, Tiro.”
    I had no business to feel aggrieved. I was merely a slave, after all: an extra hand, a tool—a “creature,” as Catulus put it. But nevertheless I felt my humiliation keenly. I folded up my notebook and walked into the antechamber, and then kept on walking, through all those echoing, freshly stuccoed state rooms—Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter—as the slaves in their cushioned slippers moved silently with their glowing tapers among the gods, lighting the lamps and candelabra. I went out into the soft, warm dusk of the park, where the cicadas were singing, and for reasons which I cannot even now articulate I found that I was weeping, but I suppose I must have been very tired.

    IT WAS ALMOST DAWN when I awoke, stiff in my limbs and damp with cold from the dew. For a moment I had no idea where I was or how I had got there, but then I realized I was on a stone bench close to the front of the house, and that it was Cicero who had woken me. His face looming over me was grim. “We have finished here,” he said. “We must get back to the city quickly.” He glanced across to where the carriage was waiting and put his finger to his lips to warn me not to say anything in front of Hortensius’s steward. So it was in silence that we clambered into the carpentum, and as we left the park I remember turning for a final look at the great villa, the torches still burning along its terraces, but losing their sharpness now as the