Imperium

party.”
    Cicero was not the only pupil at Molon’s academy that spring and summer. In time we were joined by Cicero’s younger brother, Quintus, and his cousin, Lucius, and also by two friends of his: Servius, a fussy lawyer who wished to become a judge, and Atticus—the dapper, charming Atticus—who had no interest in oratory, for he lived in Athens, and certainly had no intention of making a career in politics, but who loved spending time with Cicero. All marveled at the change which had been wrought in his health and appearance, and on their final evening together—for now it was autumn, and the time had come to return to Rome—they gathered to hear the effects which Molon had produced on his oratory.
    I wish I could recall what it was that Cicero spoke about that night after dinner, but I fear I am the living proof of Demosthenes’s cynical assertion that content counts for nothing beside delivery. I stood discreetly out of sight, among the shadows, and all I can picture now are the moths whirling like flakes of ash around the torches, the wash of stars above the courtyard, and the enraptured faces of the young men, flushed in the firelight, turned toward Cicero. But I do remember Molon’s words afterwards, when his protégé, with a final bow of his head toward the imaginary jury, sat down. After a long silence, he got to his feet and said, in a hoarse voice: “Cicero, I congratulate you and I am amazed at you. It is Greece and her fate that I am sorry for. The only glory that was left to us was the supremacy of our eloquence, and now you have taken that as well. Go back,” he said, and gestured with those three outstretched fingers, across the lamp-lit terrace to the dark and distant sea, “go back, my boy, and conquer Rome .”

    VERY WELL, THEN. Easy enough to say. But how do you do this? How do you “conquer Rome” with no weapon other than your voice?
    The first step is obvious: you must become a senator.
    To gain entry to the Senate at that time it was necessary to be at least thirty-one years old and a millionaire. To be exact, assets of one million sesterces had to be shown to the authorities simply to qualify to be a candidate at the annual elections in July, when twenty new senators were elected to replace those who had died in the previous year or had become too poor to keep their seats. But where was Cicero to get a million? His father certainly did not have that kind of money: the family estate was small and heavily mortgaged. He faced, therefore, the three traditional options. But making it would take too long, and stealing it would be too risky. Accordingly, soon after our return from Rhodes, he married it. Terentia was seventeen, boyishly flat-chested, with a head of short, tight, black curls. Her half sister was a vestal virgin, proof of her family’s social status. More important, she was the owner of two slum apartment blocks in Rome, some woodlands in the suburbs, and a farm; total value: one and a quarter million. (Ah, Terentia: plain, grand, and rich—what a piece of work you were! I saw her only a few months ago, being carried on an open litter along the coastal road to Naples, screeching at her bearers to make a better speed: white-haired and walnut-skinned but otherwise quite unchanged.)
    So Cicero, in due course, became a senator—in fact, he topped the poll, being generally now regarded as the second-best advocate in Rome, after Hortensius—and then was sent off for the obligatory year of government service, in his case to the province of Sicily, before being allowed to take his seat. His official title was quaestor, the most junior of the magistracies. Wives were not permitted to accompany their husbands on these tours of duty, so Terentia—I am sure to his deep relief—stayed at home. But I went with him, for by this time I had become a kind of extension of himself, to be used unthinkingly, like an extra hand or a foot. Part of the reason for my indispensability was that I had devised a method of taking down his words as fast as he could utter them. From small beginnings—I can modestly claim to be the man who invented the ampersand—my system eventually swelled to a handbook of some four thousand symbols. I found, for example, that Cicero was fond of repeating certain phrases, and these I learned to reduce to a line, or even a few dots—thus proving what most people already know, that politicians essentially say the same thing over and over again. He dictated