Lustrum (12 page)

Observing this, a great murmur of wonder and then alarm went round the chamber, for everyone knew that Celer's younger brother, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Nepos, was one of Pompey's legates in the war against King Mithradates, and his dramatic and dishevelled appearance, obviously fresh from the scene of war, might well mean that some terrible calamity had befallen the legions.

'Nepos!' cried Cicero. 'What is the meaning of this? Speak!'

Nepos disentangled himself from his brother. He was a haughty man, very proud of his handsome features and fine physique. (They say he preferred to lie with men rather than women, and certainly he never married or left issue; but that
is just gossip, and I should not repeat it.) He threw back his magnificent shoulders and turned to face the chamber. 'I come directly from the camp of Pompey the Great in Arabia!' he declared. 'I have travelled by the swiftest boats and the fastest horses to bring you great and joyful tidings. The tyrant and foremost enemy of the Roman people, Mithradates Eupator, in the sixty-eighth year of his life, is dead. The war in the East is won!'

There followed that peculiar instant of startled silence that always succeeds dramatic news, and then the whole of the chamber rose in thunderous acclamation. For a quarter of a century Rome had been fighting Mithradates. Some say he massacred eighty thousand Roman citizens in Asia; others allege one hundred and fifty thousand. Whichever is true, he was a figure of terror. For as long as most could remember, the name of Mithradates had been used by Roman mothers to frighten their children into good behaviour. And now he was gone! And the glory was Pompey's! It did not matter that Mithradates had actually committed suicide rather than been killed by Roman arms. (The old tyrant had taken poison, but because of all the precautionary antidotes he had swallowed over the years it had had no effect, and he had been obliged to call in a soldier to finish him off.) It did not matter either that most knowledgeable observers credited Lucius Lucullus, still waiting outside the gates for his triumph, as the strategist who had really brought Mithradates to his knees. What mattered was that Pompey was the hero of the hour, and Cicero knew what he had to do. The moment the clamour died down, he rose and proposed that in honour of Pompey's genius, there should be five days of national thanksgiving. This was warmly applauded. Then he called on Hybrida to utter a few inarticulate words of praise, and next he allowed Celer to laud his brother for travelling a thousand miles
to bring the glad tidings. That was when Caesar got up; Cicero gave him the floor in honour of his status as chief priest, assuming he was going to offer ritual thanks to the gods.

'With all due respect to our consul, surely we are being niggardly with our gratitude?' said Caesar silkily. 'I move an amendment to Cicero's motion. I propose the period of thanks-giving be doubled to ten full days, and that for the rest of his life Gnaeus Pompey be permitted to wear his triumphal robes at the Games, so that the Roman people even in their leisure will ever be reminded of the debt they owe him.'

I could almost hear Cicero's teeth grinding behind his fixed smile as he accepted the amendment and put it to the vote. He knew that Pompey would mark well that Caesar had been twice as generous as he. The motion passed with only one dissenting voice: that of young Marcus Cato, who declared in a furious voice that the senate was treating Pompey as if he were a king, crawling to him and flattering him in a way that would have sickened the founders of the republic. He was jeered, and a couple of senators sitting near to him tried to pull him down. But looking at the faces of Catulus and the other patricians, I could tell how uncomfortable his words had made them.

Of all these great figures from the past who roost like bats in my memory and flutter from their caves at night to disturb my dreams, Cato is the strangest. What a bizarre creature he was! He was not much more than thirty at this time, but his face was already that of an old man. He was very angular. His hair was unkempt. He never smiled, and rarely bathed: he gave off a ripe smell, I can tell you. Contrariness was his religion. Even though he was immensely rich, he never rode in a litter or a carriage
but went everywhere on foot, and frequently refused to wear shoes, or sometimes even a tunic – he desired, he said, to train himself to care nothing for the opinion of the world on any matter, trivial or great. The clerks at the treasury were terrified of him. He had served there as a junior magistrate for a year and they often told me how he had made them justify every item of expenditure, down to the tiniest sum. Even after he had left the department he always came into the senate chamber carrying a full set of treasury accounts, and there he would sit, in his regular place on the furthest back bench, hunched forward over the figures, gently rocking back and forth, oblivious to the laughter and talk of the men around him.

The day after the news about the defeat of Mithradates, Cato came to see Cicero. The consul groaned when I told him Cato was waiting. He knew him of old, having acted briefly as his advocate when Cato – in another of his other-worldly impulses – had resolved to sue his cousin, Lepida, in order to force her to marry him. Nevertheless, he ordered me to show him in.

'Pompey must be stripped of his command immediately,' announced Cato the moment he entered the study, 'and summoned home at once.'

'Good morning, Cato. That seems a little harsh, don't you think, given his recent victory?'

'The victory is precisely the trouble. Pompey is supposed to be the servant of the republic, but we are treating him as our master. He will return and take over the entire state if we're not careful. You must propose his dismissal tomorrow.'

'I most certainly will not! Pompey is the most successful general Rome has produced since Scipio. He deserves all the honours we can grant him. You're falling into the same error as your great-grandfather, who hounded Scipio out of office.'

'Well, if you won't stop him, I shall.'

'You?'

'I intend to put myself forward for election as tribune. I want your support.'

'Do you, indeed!'

'As tribune I shall veto any bill that may be introduced by one of Pompey's lackeys to further his designs. It is my intention to be a politician entirely different to any who has gone before.'

'I am sure you will be,' replied Cicero, glancing over the young man's shoulder at me, and giving me the very slightest wink.

'I propose to bring to public affairs for the first time the full rigour of a coherent philosophy, subjecting each issue as it arises to the maxims and precepts of stoicism. You know that I have living in my household none other than Athenodorus Cordylion – whom I think you will agree is the leading scholar of the stoics. He will be my permanent adviser. The republic is drifting, Cicero, that is how I see it – drifting towards disaster on the winds and currents of easy compromise. We should never have given Pompey his special commands.'

'I supported those commands.'

'I know, and shame on you! I saw him in Ephesus on my way back to Rome a year or two ago, all puffed up like some Eastern emperor. Where's his authorisation for all these cities he's founded and provinces he's occupied? Has the senate discussed it? Have the people voted?'

'He's the commander on the spot. He must be allowed a degree of autonomy. And having defeated the pirates, he needed to set up bases to secure our trade. Otherwise the brigands would simply have come back again when he left.'

'But we are meddling in places we know nothing about! Now we have occupied Syria. Syria! What business do we have in
Syria? Next it will be Egypt. This is going to require permanent legions stationed overseas. And whoever commands the legions needed to control this empire, be it Pompey or someone else, will ultimately control Rome, and whoever raises a voice against it will be condemned for his lack of patriotism. The republic will be finished. The consuls will simply manage the civilian side of things, on behalf of some generalissimo overseas.'

'No one doubts that there are dangers, Cato. But this is the business of politics – to surmount each challenge as it appears and be ready to deal with the next. The best analogy for statesmanship in my opinion is navigation – now you use the oars and now you sail, now you run before a wind and now you tack into it, now you catch a tide and now you ride it out. All this takes years of skill and study, not some manual written by Zeno.'

'And where does it take you, this voyage of yours?'

'A very pleasant destination called survival.'

'Ha!' Cato's laugh was as disconcerting as it was rare: a kind of harsh, humourless bark. 'Some of us hope to arrive at a more inspiring land than that! But it will require a different kind of seamanship to yours. These will be my precepts,' he said, and he proceeded to count them off on his long and bony fingers: 'Never be moved by favour. Never appease. Never forgive a wrong. Never differentiate between things that are wrong – what is wrong is wrong, whatever the size of the misdemeanour, and that is the end of the matter. And finally, never compromise on any of these principles. “The man who has the strength to follow them—”'

'“—is always handsome however misshapen, always rich however needy, always a king however much a slave.” I am familiar with the quotation, thank you, and if you want to go and live a quiet life in an academy somewhere, and apply your philosophy to your chickens and your fellow pupils, it might
possibly even work. But if you want to run this republic, you will need more books in your library than a single volume.'

'This is a waste of time. It is obvious you will never support me.'

'On the contrary, I shall certainly vote for you. Watching you as a tribune promises to be one of the most entertaining spectacles Rome will ever have seen.'

After Cato had gone, Cicero said to me, 'That man is at least half mad, and yet there is something to him.'

'Will he win?'

'Of course. A man with the name of Marcus Porcius Cato will always rise in Rome. And he has a point about Pompey. How do we contain him?' He thought for a while. 'Send a message to Nepos enquiring if he has recovered from his journey, and inviting him to attend a military council at the end of tomorrow's session of the senate.'

I did as commanded, and the message duly came back that Nepos was at the consul's disposal. So after the house was adjourned the following afternoon, Cicero asked a few senior ex-consuls with military experience to remain behind, in order to receive a more detailed report from Nepos of Pompey's plans. Crassus, who had tasted the delights both of the consulship and of the power that flows from great wealth, was increasingly obsessed with the one thing he had never had – military glory – and he was anxious to be included in this council of war. He even lingered around the consul's chair in the hope of an invitation. But Cicero despised him more than anyone except Catilina, and delighted in this opportunity to snub his old adversary. He ignored him so pointedly that eventually Crassus stamped off in a rage, leaving a dozen or so grey-headed senators gathered around Nepos. I stood discreetly to one side, taking notes.

It was shrewd of Cicero to include in this conclave men like Gaius Curio, who had won a triumph a decade earlier, and Marcus Lucullus, Lucius's younger brother, for my master's gravest weakness as a statesman was his ignorance of military affairs. In his youth, in delicate health, he had hated everything about military life – the raw discomfort, the boneheaded discipine, the dull camaraderie of the camp – and had retreated as soon as possible to his studies. Now he felt his inexperience keenly, and he had to leave it to the likes of Curio and Lucullus, Catulus and Isauricus, to question Nepos. They soon established that Pompey had a force of eight well-equipped legions, with his personal headquarters encamped – at any rate the last time Nepos had seen him – south of Judaea, a few hundred miles from the city of Petra. Cicero invited opinions.

'As I see it, there are two options for the remainder of the year,' said Curio, who had fought in the East under Sulla. 'One is to march north to the Cimmerian Bosphorus, aim for the port of Pantikapaion, and bring the Caucasus into the empire. The other, which personally I would favour, is to strike east and settle affairs with Parthia once and for all.'

'There is a third choice, don't forget,' added Isauricus. 'Egypt. It's ours for the taking, after Ptolemy left it to us in his will. I say he should go west.'

'Or south,' suggested M. Lucullus. 'What's wrong with pressing on to Petra? There's very fertile land beyond the city, down on that coast.'

'North, east, west or south,' summed up Cicero. 'It seems Pompey is spoilt for choice. Do you know which he favours, Nepos? I am sure the senate will ratify his decision, whatever it may be.'

'Actually, I understand he favours withdrawing,' said Nepos.

The deep silence that followed was broken by Isauricus. '
Withdrawing?
' he repeated in astonishment. 'What do you mean,
withdrawing
? He has forty thousand seasoned men at his disposal, with nothing to stop them in any direction.'

'“Seasoned” is your word for them. “Exhausted” would be more accurate. Some of them have been fighting and marching out there for more than a decade.'

There was another pause as the implications of this settled over the gathering.

Cicero said, 'Do you mean to tell us he wants to bring them all back to Italy?'

'Why not? It is their home, after all. And Pompey has signed some extremely effective treaties with the local rulers. His personal prestige is worth a dozen legions. Do you know what they now call him in the East?'

'Please tell us.'

'“The Warden of Land and Sea.”'

Cicero glanced around the faces of the former consuls. Most wore expressions of incredulity. 'I think I speak for all of us, Nepos, when I tell you that the senate would not be happy with a complete withdrawal.'

'Absolutely not,' said Catulus, and all the grey heads nodded in agreement.

'In which case, what I propose is this,' continued Cicero. 'That we send a message back with you to Pompey, conveying – obviously – our pride and delight and gratitude for his mighty feats of arms, but also our desire that he should leave the army in place for a fresh campaign. Of course, if he wants to lay down the burden of command, after so many years of service, the whole of Rome would understand, and warmly welcome home her most distinguished son—'