Imperium

it off. “But I need you,” he persisted.
    “Why?”
    “Because my only hope of justice lies here, not in Sicily, where Verres controls the courts. And everyone here tells me Marcus Cicero is the second-best lawyer in Rome.”
    “Do they indeed?” Cicero’s tone took on an edge of sarcasm: he hated that epithet. “Well then, why settle for second best? Why not go straight to Hortensius?”
    “I thought of that,” said his visitor, artlessly, “but he turned me down. He is representing Verres.”

    I SHOWED THE SICILIAN out and returned to find Cicero alone in his study, tilted back in his chair, tossing the leather ball from one hand to the other. Legal textbooks cluttered his desk. Precedents in Pleading by Hostilius was one which he had open; Manilius’s Conditions of Sale was another.
    “Do you remember that red-haired drunk on the quayside at Puteoli, the day we came back from Sicily? ‘Ooooh! My good fellow ! He’s returning from his province …’”
    I nodded.
    “That was Verres.” The ball went back and forth, back and forth. “The fellow gives corruption a bad name.”
    “I am surprised at Hortensius for getting involved with him.”
    “Are you? I am not.” He stopped tossing the ball and contemplated it on his outstretched palm. “The Dancing Master and the Boar…” He brooded for a while. “A man in my position would have to be mad to tangle with Hortensius and Verres combined, and all for the sake of some Sicilian who is not even a Roman citizen.”
    “True.”
    “True,” he repeated, although there was an odd hesitancy in the way he said it which sometimes makes me wonder if he had not just then glimpsed the whole thing—the whole extraordinary set of possibilities and consequences, laid out like a mosaic in his mind. But if he had, I never knew, for at that moment his daughter, Tullia, ran in, still wearing her nightdress, with some childish drawing to show him, and suddenly his attention switched entirely onto her—scooping her up and settling her on his knee. “Did you do this? Did you really do this all by yourself…?”
    I left him to it and slipped away, back into the tablinum, to announce that we were running late and that the senator was about to leave for court. Sthenius was still moping around and asked me when he could expect an answer, to which I could only reply that he would have to fall in with the rest. Soon after that, Cicero himself appeared, hand in hand with Tullia, nodding good morning to everyone, greeting each by name (“the first rule in politics, Tiro: never forget a face”). He was beautifully turned out, as always, his hair pomaded and slicked back, his skin scented, his toga freshly laundered, his red leather shoes spotless and shiny, his face bronzed by years of pleading in the open air; groomed, lean, fit: he glowed . They followed him into the vestibule, where he hoisted the beaming little girl into the air, showed her off to the assembled company, then turned her face to his and gave her a resounding kiss on the lips. There was a drawn-out “Ahh!” and some isolated applause. It was not wholly put on for show—he would have done it even if no one had been present, for he loved his darling Tulliola more than he ever loved anyone in his entire life—but he knew the Roman electorate were a sentimental lot, and that if word of his paternal devotion got around, it would do him no harm.
    And so we stepped out into the bright promise of that November morning, into the gathering noise of the city—Cicero striding ahead, with me beside him, notebook at the ready; Sositheus and Laurea tucked in behind, carrying the document cases with the evidence he needed for his appearance in court; and, on either side of us, trying to catch the senator’s attention, yet proud merely to be in his aura, two dozen assorted petitioners and hangers-on, including Sthenius—down the hill from the leafy, respectable heights of the Esquiline and into the stink and smoke and racket of Subura. Here the height of the tenements shut out the sunlight and the packed crowds squeezed our phalanx of supporters into a broken thread that still somehow determinedly trailed along after us. Cicero was a well-known figure here, a hero to the shopkeepers and merchants whose interests he had represented, and who had watched him walking past for years. Without once breaking his rapid step, his sharp blue eyes registered every bowed head, every wave of greeting, and it was rare for