Imperium

his opinion and then do precisely the opposite, nevertheless Lucius had offered a fixed star to steer by. Without him, the Ciceros had only each other, and despite their mutual devotion, it was not always the wisest of relationships.
    It was in this atmosphere, around the eighth or ninth day of January, when the Latin Festival was over and serious politics resumed, that Gabinius finally mounted the rostra to demand a new supreme commander. I am talking here, I should explain, about the old republican rostra, which was very different from the wretched ornamental footstool we have today. This ancient structure, now destroyed, was the heart of Rome’s democracy: a long, curved platform, twelve feet high, covered with the statues of the heroes of antiquity, from which the tribunes and the consuls addressed the people. Its back was to the Senate House, and it faced out boldly across the widest expanse of the Forum, with six ships’ battering rams, or “beaks”—those rostra, which gave the platform its name—thrusting from its heavy masonry (the beaks had been captured from the Carthaginians in a sea battle nearly three centuries earlier). The whole of its rear was a flight of steps, if you can imagine what I am saying, so that a magistrate might leave the Senate House or the tribunes’ headquarters, walk fifty paces, ascend the steps, and find himself on top of the rostra, facing a crowd of thousands, with the tiered façades of the two great basilicas on either side of him and the Temple of Castor straight ahead. This was where Gabinius stood on that January morning and declared, in his smooth and confident way, that what Rome needed was a strong man to take control of the war against the pirates.
    Cicero, despite his misgivings, had done his best, with the help of Quintus, to turn out a good-size crowd, and the Piceneans could always be relied upon to drum up a couple of hundred veterans. Add to these the regulars who hung about the Basilica Porcia, and those citizens going about their normal business in the Forum, and I should say that close on a thousand were present to hear Gabinius spell out what was needed if the pirates were to be beaten—a supreme commander of consular rank with imperium lasting for three years over all territory up to fifty miles from the sea, fifteen legates of praetorian rank to assist him, free access to the treasury of Rome, five hundred warships, and the right to levy up to one hundred and twenty thousand infantry and five thousand cavalry. These were staggering numbers and the demand caused a sensation. By the time Gabinius had finished the first reading of his bill and had handed it to a clerk to be pinned up outside the tribunes’ basilica, both Catulus and Hortensius had come hurrying into the Forum to find out what was going on. Pompey, needless to say, was nowhere to be seen, and the other members of the group of seven (as the senators around Pompey had taken to calling themselves) took care to stand apart from one another, to avoid any suggestion of collusion. But the aristocrats were not fooled. “If this is your doing,” Catulus snarled at Cicero, “you can tell your master he will have a fight on his hands.”
    The violence of their reaction was to prove even worse than Cicero had predicted. Once a bill had been given its first reading, three weekly market days had to pass before it could be voted on by the people (this was to enable country dwellers to come into the city and study what was proposed). So the aristocrats had until the beginning of February to organize against it, and they did not waste a moment. Two days later, the Senate was summoned to debate the lex Gabinia, as it would be called, and despite Cicero’s advice that he should stay away, Pompey felt that he was honor-bound to attend and stake his claim to the job. He wanted a good-size escort down to the Senate House, and because there no longer seemed much point in secrecy, the seven senators formed an honor guard around him. Quintus also joined them, in his brand-new senatorial toga; this was only his third or fourth visit to the chamber. As usual, I stayed close to Cicero. “We should have known we were in trouble,” he lamented afterwards, “when no other senator turned up.”
    The walk down the Esquiline Hill and into the Forum went well enough. The precinct bosses had played their part, delivering plenty of enthusiasm on the streets, with people calling out to Pompey to save them from the