Lustrum

campaigning: keep your speeches short, remember names, tell jokes, put on a show; above all, render an issue, however complex, into a story anyone can grasp. Clodius's tale was the simplest possible: he was the lone citizen unjustly persecuted by the oligarchs. 'Take care, my friends!' he would cry. 'If it can happen to me, a patrician, it could happen to any one of you!' Soon he was holding daily public meetings at which order was kept by his friends from the taverns and the gambling dens, many of whom had been supporters of Catilina.
    Clodius attacked Lucullus, Hortensius and Catulus repeatedly by name, but when it came to Cicero he confined himself merely to repeating the old joke that the former consul had kept himself 'fully informed'. Cicero was often tempted to respond, and Terentia urged him to do so, yet he was mindful of his promise to Clodia and managed to keep his temper in check. However, the controversy kept on swelling regardless of his silence. I was with him on the day the senate's bill to set up the special court was laid before the people in a popular assembly. Clodius's gangs of toughs took control of the meeting, occupying the gangways and seizing the ballot boxes. Their clamour so unnerved the consul, Pupius, that he actually spoke against his own bill – inparticular the clause that allowed the urban praetor to select the jury. Many senators turned to Cicero, expecting him to take control of the situation, but he remained on his bench, glowering with anger and embarrassment, and it was left to Cato to deliver a lashing attack on the consul. The meeting was abandoned. The senators promptly trooped back to their chamber and voted by 400 votes to 15 to press on with the bill despite the dangers of civil unrest. Fufius, a tribune who was sympathetic to Clodius, promptly announced that he would veto the legislation. The affair was now seriously out of hand, and Cicero hurried out of the chamber and up to his house, crimson in the face.
    The turning point came when Fufius decided to convene a public assembly outside the city walls so that Pompey could be summoned and asked his views on the affair. Grumbling mightily at this intrusion on his time and dignity, the Warden of Land and Sea had no choice but to lumber over from the Alban Hills to the Flaminian Circus and submit himself to a series of insolent questions from the tribune, watched by a huge market-day crowd that temporarily set aside their bargaining and clustered round to gawp at him.
    'Are you aware of the so-called outrage committed against the Good Goddess?' asked Fufius.
    'I am.'
    'Do you support the senate's proposal that Clodius be prosecuted?'
    'I do.'
    'Do you believe he should be tried by a jury of senators selected by the urban praetor?'
    'I do.'
    'Even though the urban praetor will also be his judge?'
    'I suppose so, if that is the procedure the senate has settled on.'
    'And where is the justice in that?'
    Pompey glared at Fufius as if he were some buzzing insect that would not leave him alone. 'I hold the senate's authority in the highest respect,' he declared, and proceeded to deliver a lecture on the Roman constitution that might have been written for him by a fourteen-year-old. I was standing with Cicero at the front of the huge throng and could sense the audience behind us losing interest as he droned on. Soon they started shuffling about and talking. The vendors of hot sausages and pastries on the edge of the crowd began doing a busy trade. Pompey was a boring speaker at the best of times, but standing on that platform he must have felt as if he were in a bad dream. All those visions of a triumphant homecoming he had entertained as he lay at night in his tent beneath the burning stars of Arabia – and in the end what had he returned to? A senate and people obsessed not with his achievements but with a young man dressed in women's clothes!
    When the public assembly was mercifully over, Cicero conducted Pompey across the Flaminian Circus to the Temple of Bellona, where the senate had convened specially to greet him. The ovation he received was respectful, and he sat down next to Cicero on the front bench and waited for the praise to begin. Instead, he found himself once again cross-examined from the chair about his views on the sacrilege issue. He repeated what he had just said outside, and when he resumed his place I saw him turn and mutter something irritably to Cicero. (His actual words, Cicero told me afterwards, were,