Imperium

Crassus, his arms folded, did look sunk in a gloomy reverie.
    When Crassus had finished speaking, Cicero took advantage of the lull to enter the chamber. The day was hot, and the shafts of light from the high windows lit jeweled swirls of midges. He walked purposefully, head erect, watched by everyone, down the central aisle, past his old place in obscurity by the door, toward the consular dais. The praetorian bench seemed full, but Cicero stood patiently beside it, waiting to claim his rightful place, for he knew—and the house knew—that the ancient reward for a successful prosecutor was the assumption of the defeated man’s rank. I do not know how long the silence went on, but it seemed an awfully long time to me, during which the only sound came from the pigeons in the roof. It was Afranius who finally beckoned to him to sit beside him, and who cleared sufficient space by roughly shoving his neighbors along the wooden seat. Cicero picked his way across half a dozen pairs of outstretched legs and wedged himself defiantly into his place. He glanced around at his rivals, and he met and held the gaze of each. No one challenged him. Eventually someone rose to speak, and in a grudging voice congratulated Lucullus and his victorious legions—it might have been Pompey, now I come to think of it—and gradually the low drone of background conversation resumed. I close my eyes and I see their faces still in the golden light of that late summer afternoon—Cicero, Crassus, Pompey, Hortensius, Catulus, Catilina, the Metellus brothers—and it is hard for me to believe that they, and their ambitions, and even the very building they sat in, are now all so much dust.

Part Two
Praetorian
    68 B.C.–64 B.C.
    Nam eloquentiam quae admirationem non habet nullam iudico.
    “Eloquence which does not startle I don’t consider eloquence.”
    CICERO, LETTER TO BRUTUS, 48 B.C.

Roll X

    I PROPOSE TO RESUME MY ACCOUNT at a point more than two years after the last roll ended—an elision which I fear says much about human nature, for if you were to ask me: “Tiro, why do you choose to skip such a long period in Cicero’s life?” I should be obliged to reply: “Because, my friend, those were happy years, and few subjects make more tedious reading than happiness.”
    The senator’s aedileship turned out to be a great success. His chief responsibility was to keep the city supplied with cheap grain, and here his prosecution of Verres reaped him a great reward. To show their gratitude for his advocacy, the farmers and corn merchants of Sicily helped him by keeping their prices low: on one occasion they even gave him an entire shipment for nothing. Cicero was shrewd enough to ensure that others shared the credit. From the aediles’ headquarters in the Temple of Ceres, he passed this bounty on for distribution to the hundred or so precinct bosses who really ran Rome, and many, out of gratitude, became his clients. With their help, over the following months, he built an electoral machine second to none (Quintus used to boast that he could have a crowd of two hundred on the streets within an hour whenever he chose), and henceforth little occurred in the city which the Ciceros did not know about. If a shopkeeper or some builders, for example, needed a particular license, or wished to have their premises put on to the water supply, or were worried about the state of a local temple, sooner or later their problems were likely to come to the notice of the two brothers. It was this laborious attention to humdrum detail, as much as his soaring rhetoric, which made Cicero such a formidable politician. He even staged good games—or, rather, Quintus did, on his behalf—and at the climax of the Festival of Ceres, when, in accordance with tradition, foxes were released into the Circus Maximus with flaming torches tied to their backs, the entire crowd of two hundred thousand rose to acclaim him in the official box.
    “That so many people can derive so much pleasure from such a revolting spectacle,” he said to me when he returned home that night, “almost makes one doubt the very premise on which democracy is based.” But he was pleased nevertheless that the masses now thought of him as a good sport, as well as “the Scholar” and “the Greek.”
    Matters went equally well with his legal practice. Hortensius, after a typically smooth and untroubled year as consul, spent increasingly lengthy periods on the Bay of Naples, communing with his