Imperium

annually by the people, and they always sat on the same long wooden bench, beneath a mural depicting the defeat of the Carthaginians. It was not a large building, but packed, noisy, and warm, despite the December cold outside. A young man, bizarrely barefoot, was haranguing the mob as we entered. He was an ugly, raw-faced youth with a brutal, grating voice. There were always plenty of cranks in the Basilica Porcia, and I took him at first to be just another, as his entire speech seemed to be devoted to arguing why one particular pillar should not, on any account, be demolished, or even moved one inch, to give the tribunes more room. And yet for some curious reason, he compelled attention. Cicero began listening to him very carefully, and after a while he realized—from the constant references to “my ancestor”—that this peculiar creature was none other than the great-grandson of the famous Marcus Porcius Cato, who had originally built the basilica and given it his name.
    I mention this here because young Cato—he was then twenty-three—was to become such an important figure, both in the life of Cicero and the death of the republic. Not that one would have guessed it at the time. He looked destined for nowhere more significant than the asylum. He finished his speech, and as he went by, wild-eyed and unseeing, he knocked into me. What remains in my mind is the animal stink of him, his hair matted with damp, and the patches of sweat the size of dinner plates spreading under the armpits of his tunic. But he had won his point, and that pillar stayed absolutely in its place for as long as the building stood—which was not, alas, to be many years longer.
    However, returning to my story, the tribunes were a poor lot on the whole, but there was one among them who stood out for his talent and his energy, and that was Lollius Palicanus. He was a proud man, but of low birth, from Picenum in the Italian northeast, the power base of Pompey the Great. It had been assumed that when Pompey returned from Spain he would use his influence to try to gain his fellow-countryman a praetorship, and Cicero had been as surprised as everybody else earlier in the summer when Palicanus had suddenly announced his candidacy for the tribunate. But on this particular morning he looked happy enough with his lot. The fresh crop of tribunes always began their term of office on the tenth day of December, so he must have been very new in the job. “Cicero!” he bellowed the moment he saw us. “I had been wondering when you would show up!”
    He told us that he had already heard the news from Syracuse, and he wanted to talk about Verres. But he wanted to talk in private, for there was more at stake, he said mysteriously, than the fate of one man. He proposed meeting us at his house on the Aventine Hill in an hour, to which Cicero agreed, whereupon Palicanus immediately ordered one of his attendants to guide us, saying he would follow separately.
    It turned out to be a rough and unpretentious place, in keeping with the man, close to the Lavernal Gate, just outside the city wall. The thing I remember most clearly was the larger-than-life-size bust of Pompey, posed in the headgear and armor of Alexander the Great, which dominated the atrium. “Well,” said Cicero after he had contemplated it for a while, “I suppose it makes a change from the Three Graces.” This was exactly the sort of droll but inappropriate comment which used to get repeated around the town, and which invariably found its way back to its victim. Luckily, only I was present on this occasion, but I took the opportunity to pass on what the consul’s clerk had said regarding his joke about Gellius mediating between the philosophers. Cicero pretended to be sheepish and promised to be more circumspect in the future—he knew, he said, that people liked their statesmen to be dull—but naturally he soon forgot his resolution.
    “That was a good speech you made the other week,” said Palicanus the moment he arrived. “You have the stuff in you, Cicero, you really have, if I may say so. But those blue-blooded bastards screwed you over, and now you are in the shit. So what exactly are you planning to do about it?” (This was more or less how he spoke—rough words in a rough accent—and the aristocrats used to have some sport with him over his elocution.)
    I opened my case and handed the documents to Cicero, and he quickly laid out the situation regarding Sthenius. When he had