Lustrum

declared angrily, and he vowed that now he was consul it would be different. Also ranged against Caesar were no fewer than three tribunes: Ancharius, Calvinus and Fannius, each of whom wielded a veto. But Caesar was determined to get his way, whatever the price, and now began his deliberate destruction of the Roman constitution – an act for which I trust he will be cursed by humanity until the end of time.
    First, he inserted into the bill a clause requiring every senator to swear an oath – on pain of death – that they would never try to repeal the law once it was on the statute book. Then he called a public assembly at which both Crassus and Pompey appeared. Cicero stood with the other senators and watched as Pompey, for the first time in his long career, was prevailed upon to issue a direct threat. 'This bill is just,' he declared. 'My men have shed their blood for Roman soil, and it is only right that when they return they should be given a share of that soil as their reward.'
    'And what,' Caesar asked him disingenuously, 'if those who oppose this bill resort to violence?'
    'If anyone comes with the sword, I shall bring my shield,' responded Pompey, before adding with menacing emphasis, 'and I shall also bring a sword of my own.'
    The crowd roared in delight. Cicero could not bear to watch any more. He turned and pushed his way past his fellow senators and out of the public assembly.
    Pompey's words were effectively a call to arms. Within days Rome began to fill with his veterans. He paid for them to come from all over Italy, and he put them up in tents outside the city, or in cheap lodgings around the town. They smuggled in illegal weapons, which they kept concealed, in anticipation of the last day in January, when the law was to be voted upon by the people. Senators who were known to oppose the legislation were jeered at in the street and their houses stoned.
    The man who organised this intimidation on behalf of the Beast with Three Heads was the tribune P. Vatinius, who was known as the ugliest man in Rome. He had contracted scrofula as a boy, and his face and neck were covered in pendulous purplish-blue lumps. His hair was sparse and his legs were rickety, so that he walked with his knees wide apart, as if he had just dismounted after a long ride, or had soiled himself. Curiously, he also had great charm, and did not care at all what anyone said about him: he would always cap an enemy's joke about his appearance with a funnier one of his own. Pompey's men were devoted to him, and so were the plebs. He called many public meetings in support of Caesar's law, and on one occasion summoned the consul Bibulus to be cross-examined on the tribunes' platform. Bibulus was bad-tempered at the best of times, and Vatinius, knowing this, got his followers to lashtogether some wooden benches and run a bridge from the tribunes' platform straight up to the Carcer. When in due course under questioning Bibulus denounced the land bill in violent language – 'You will not have your law this year, not even if you all want it!' – Vatinius arrested him and had him paraded along the bridge to the jail, like a prisoner of the pirates being made to walk the plank.
    Cicero watched much of this from his garden, huddled in a cloak against the January chill. He felt very wretched and tried to keep out of it. Besides, he soon had more pressing problems of his own.
    One morning in the midst of these tumultuous events, I opened the door to find Antonius Hybrida waiting outside in the street. It was more than three years since I had last set eyes on him, and at first I did not recognise him. He had grown very stout on the meats and vines of Macedonia, and even more florid, as if he had been coated in an extra layer of mottled red fat. When I took him into the library, Cicero jumped as if he had seen a ghost, which in a sense he had, for this was his past come back to haunt him – and with a vengeance. At the start of his consulship, when the two men had concluded their deal, Cicero had given a written undertaking to Hybrida that if he was ever prosecuted, he would appear as his advocate: now his former colleague had come to collect on that promise. He had brought a slave with him who carried the indictment, and Hybrida passed it across to Cicero with a hand that trembled so violently, I thought he was having a seizure. Cicero took it over to the light to study it.
    'When was this served?'
    'Today.'
    'You realise what this is, don't