Lustrum

Cicero turned up and sat on the bench reserved for the defence, the prosecuting counsel, Torquatus – an old ally of Cicero – could hardly contain his fury and disappointment. In the course of his summing-up he made a bitter attack on Cicero, accusing him ofbeing a tyrant, of setting himself up as judge and jury, of having been the third foreign-born king of Rome, after Tarquin and Numa. It was painful to hear, and worse, it drew some applause from the spectators in the forum. This expression of popular opinion penetrated even Cicero's carapace of self-regard, and when the time came for him to deliver the closing speech he did venture a kind of apology. 'Yes,' he said, 'I suppose my achievements have made me too proud and bred in me a sort of arrogance. But of those glorious and deathless achievements, I can say only this: I shall be amply rewarded for saving this city and the lives of its citizens if no danger falls upon my person for this great service to all mankind. The forum is full of those men whom I have driven from your throats, gentlemen, but have not removed from mine.'
    The speech was effective and Sulla was duly acquitted. But Cicero would have done well to heed these signals of a coming storm. Instead, such was his delight at raising most of the money he needed to buy his new house, he quickly shrugged off the incident. He was now only one and a half million short of the full sum, and for this he turned to the moneylenders. They required security, and therefore he told at least two of them, in confidence, of his agreement with Hybrida and his expectation of a share of the revenues from Macedonia. It was good enough to clinch the deal, and towards the end of the year we moved in to Victory Rise.
    The house was as grand inside as out. Its dining room had a panelled ceiling with gilded rafters. In the hall were golden statues of young men, whose outstretched hands were designed to hold flaming torches. Cicero swapped his cramped study, where we had spent so many memorable hours, for a fine library. Even I had a larger room, which, though it was below ground, was not at all damp, and had a small barred window through which Icould smell the flowers in the garden and hear the birdsong early in the morning. I would have preferred to have had my freedom, of course, and a place of my own, but Cicero had never mentioned it, and I was too bashful – and in a curious way, too proud – to ask.
    After I had laid out my few belongings and found a hiding place for my life savings, I went and joined Cicero on a tour of the grounds. The colonnaded path took us past a fountain and a summer house, under a pergola and into a rose garden. The few blooms left were fleshy and faded; when Cicero reached out to pluck one, the petals came away. I felt that we were under inspection from the whole of the city: it made me uncomfortable, but that was the price one paid for the open view, which was indeed amazing. Beyond the Temple of Castor one could clearly see the rostra, and beyond that the senate house itself, and if one looked in the other direction one could just about make out the back of Caesar's official residence. 'I have done it at last,' said Cicero, gazing down at this with a slight smile. 'I have a better house than he has.'
    The ceremony of the Good Goddess fell as usual on the fourth day of December. It was exactly a year since the arrest of the conspirators and just a week after we had moved into our new quarters. Cicero had no appointments in court; the senate's order of business was dull. He told me that for once we would not be going down into the city. Instead we would spend the day working on his memoirs.
    He had decided to write one version of his autobiography in Latin, for the general reader, and another in Greek for more restricted circulation. He was also trying to persuade a poet toturn his consulship into a verse epic. His first choice, Archias, who had done a similar job for Lucullus, was reluctant to take it on; he said he was too old at sixty to do justice to such an immense theme. Cicero's preferred alternative, the fashionable Thyillus, replied humbly that his meagre skills as a versifier were simply not up to the task. 'Poets!' grumbled Cicero. 'I don't know what is the matter with them. The story of my consulship is an absolute gift to anyone with the slightest spark of imagination. It is beginning to look,' he continued darkly, in a phrase that struck fear into my heart, 'as though I shall