The Dictator (5 page)

Since then, things have gone from bad to worse for the Pharaoh. The other day, when he was in the Forum attending the trial of one of his supporters (Clodius is prosecuting them left, right and centre), Clodius called together a gang of his criminals and started a chant. “What’s the name of the lecherous imperator? What’s the name of the man who is trying to find a man? Who is it who scratches his head with one finger?” After each question he made a sign by shaking the folds of his toga—in that way the Pharaoh does—and the mob, like a circus chorus, all roared out the answer: “Pompey!”

No one in the Senate lifts a finger to help him, as they all think his harassment is eminently deserved for the way he abandoned you…

But if Atticus thought such news would bring comfort to Cicero, he was wrong. On the contrary, it served only to make him feel more isolated and helpless. With Cato gone, Pompey cowed, the Senate impotent, the voters bribed and Clodius’s mob in control of all law-making, Cicero despaired of ever having his exile rescinded. He chafed against the conditions in which we were obliged to exist. Thessalonica may be nice enough for a short stay in the springtime. But as the months passed, summer came—and Thessalonica in the summer becomes a hell of humidity and mosquitoes. No breath of a breeze stirs the brittle vegetation. The air is suffocating. And because the walls of the town retain the heat, the nights can be even more sweltering than the days. I slept in the room next to Cicero’s—or rather, I tried to sleep. Lying in my tiny cubicle, I felt as if I were a roasting pig in a brick oven, and that the sweat pooling beneath my back was my melted flesh. Often after midnight I would hear Cicero stumbling around in the dark, his door opening, his bare feet slapping across the mosaic tiles. Then I would slip out after him and watch from a distance to make sure he was all right. He would sit in the courtyard on the edge of the dried-up pool with its dust-clogged fountain, and stare up at the brilliant stars, as if he could read in their alignment some clue as to why his good fortune had so spectacularly deserted him.

The next morning he would often summon me to his room. “Tiro,” he would whisper, his fingers gripping my arm tightly, “I’ve got to get out of this shithole. I’m losing all sense of myself.” But where could we go? He dreamed of Athens, or possibly Rhodes. But Plancius would not hear of it: the danger of assassination, he insisted, was, if anything, even greater than before, as rumours of Cicero’s presence in the region spread. After a while I began to suspect that he quite enjoyed having such a famous figure in his power and was reluctant to let us leave. I voiced my suspicions to Cicero, who said: “He’s young and ambitious. Perhaps he’s calculating that the situation in Rome will change and he might eventually get some political credit for shielding me. If so, he deludes himself.”

And then late one afternoon, when the ferocity of the day’s heat had subsided a little, I happened to go into town with a packet of letters for dispatch to Rome. It was hard to persuade Cicero even to raise the energy to reply to his correspondence, and when he did so, it was mostly a list of complaints.
I am still stuck here with no one to talk to and nothing to think about. There could be no less suitable spot in which to bear calamity in such a state of grief as I am in.
But write he did, and to supplement the occasional trusted traveller who would carry our letters, I had arranged to hire couriers provided by a local Macedonian merchant named Epiphanes, who ran an import/export business with Rome.

He was an inveterate lazy crook, of course, as are most people in that part of the world. But I reckoned the bribes I paid him ought to have been enough to buy his discretion. He had a warehouse up the slope from the harbour, on the higher ground close to the Egnatian Gate, where a haze of red-grey dust hung permanently over the clustered roofs, thrown up by the traffic from Rome to Byzantium. To reach his office one had to cross a yard where his wagons were loaded and unloaded. And there, that afternoon—with its shafts resting on blocks and its horses unhitched and drinking noisily from a water trough—was a chariot. It was so unlike the usual ox carts that the sight of it brought me up short and I went over to give it a closer look. Obviously it had been ridden hard: it was so filthy from the road it was impossible to tell its original colour. But it was fast and strong and built for fighting—a war chariot—and when I found Epiphanes upstairs I asked him whose it was.

He gave me a crafty look. “The driver did not say his name. He just asked me to look after it.”

“A Roman?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Alone?”

“No, he had a companion—a gladiator, perhaps: both young men, strong.”

“When did they arrive?”

“An hour ago.”

“And where are they now?”

“Who can say?” He shrugged and bared his yellow teeth.

A terrible realisation gripped me. “Have you been opening my letters? Have you had me followed?”

“Sir, I am shocked. Really…” He spread his hands to show his innocence and glanced around as if in silent appeal to some invisible jury. “How could such a thing even be suggested?”

Epiphanes! For a man who made his living by lying, he was remarkably bad at it. I turned and ran out of that room and down those steps and didn’t stop running until I was within sight of our villa, where a pair of rough-looking villains were loitering in the street. My footsteps slowed as the two strangers turned to look at me and I knew in my bones they had been sent to kill Cicero. One had a puckered scar that split the side of his face from his eyebrow to his jaw (Epiphanes was right: he was a fighter straight from the gladiator barracks), while the other could have been a blacksmith—given his swagger, he could have been Vulcan himself—with bulging sunburnt calves and forearms and a face as black as a Negro’s. He called out to me, “We’re looking for the house where Cicero is living!” And when I started to plead ignorance, he cut me off and added, “Tell him Titus Annius Milo has come to pay his compliments, all the way from Rome.”

—

Cicero’s room was dark, his candle expiring for want of air. He lay on his side, facing the wall.

“Milo?” he repeated in a monotone. “What sort of a name is that? Is he Greek, or what?” But then he rolled over on to his back and raised himself up on his elbows. “Wait—hasn’t a candidate of that name just been elected tribune?”

“It’s the same man. He’s here.”

“But if he’s a tribune-elect, why isn’t he in Rome? His term of office begins in three months.”

“He says he wants to talk to you.”

“It’s a long way to come just for a chat. What do we know of him?”

“Nothing.”

“Maybe he’s come to kill me?”

“Maybe—he has a gladiator with him.”

“That doesn’t inspire confidence.” Cicero lay back and thought it over. “Well, what does it matter? I might as well be dead in any case.”

He had skulked in his room so long that when I opened the door, the daylight blinded him and he had to put up his hand to protect his eyes. Stiff limbed and waxen, half starved, with straggling grey hair and beard, he looked like a corpse freshly risen from its tomb. It was scarcely surprising that when he first came into the room, supported on my arm, Milo failed to recognise him. It was only when he heard that familiar voice bidding him good day that our visitor gasped, pressed his hand to his heart, bowed his head and declared this to be the greatest moment and the greatest honour of his life, that he had heard Cicero speak countless times in the law courts and from the rostra but had never thought to meet him, the Father of the Nation, in person, let alone be in a position (he dared to hope) to render him some service…

There was a lot more in this vein, and eventually it elicited from Cicero something I had not seen from him in months: laughter. “Yes, very well, young man, that’s enough. I understand: you’re pleased to see me! Come.” And with that he stepped forward, arms open, and the two men embraced.

In later years, Cicero was to be much criticised for his friendship with Milo. And it is true that the young tribune-elect was headstrong, violent and reckless, but there are times when these traits are more to be prized than prudence, calmness and caution—and these were such times. Besides, Cicero was touched that Milo should have come so far to see him; it made him feel he was not entirely finished. He invited him to stay for dinner and to save whatever he had to say until then. He even tidied himself up a little for the occasion, combing his hair and changing into less funereal garb.

Plancius was away upcountry in Tauriana, judging the local assizes, so therefore only the three of us gathered to eat. (Milo’s gladiator, a murmillo named Birria, took his meal in the kitchen; even a man as easy-going as Cicero, who had been known occasionally to tolerate the presence of an actor at his dinner table, drew the line at a gladiator.) We lay in the garden in a kind of fine-mesh tent designed to keep out the mosquitoes, and over the next few hours we learned something of Milo, and why he had made such an arduous journey of seven hundred miles. He came, he said, of a noble but hard-up family. He had been adopted by his maternal grandfather. Even so, there was little money and he had been obliged to earn a living as the owner of a gladiator school in Campania, supplying fighters for funeral games in Rome. (“No wonder we’ve never heard of him,” Cicero remarked to me afterwards.) His work brought him often to the city. He had been appalled, he claimed, by the violence and intimidation unleashed by Clodius. He had wept to see Cicero harried and pilloried and eventually driven from Rome. Given his occupation, he fancied himself to be in a unique position to help restore order, and through intermediaries he had approached Pompey with an offer.

“What I am about to disclose is in the strictest confidence,” he said, with a sideways glance at me. “No word of it must go beyond us three.”

“Who am I to tell?” retorted Cicero. “The slave who empties my chamber pot? The cook who brings my meals? I assure you I see no one else.”

“Very well,” said Milo, and then he told us what he had offered Pompey: to place at his disposal one hundred pairs of highly trained fighting men to recapture the centre of Rome and end Clodius’s control of the legislative assembly. In return he had asked for a certain sum to cover expenses, and also Pompey’s support in the elections for tribune: “I couldn’t just do this as a private citizen, you understand—I’d be prosecuted. I told him I needed the inviolability of the office.”

Cicero was studying him closely. He had barely touched his food. “And what did Pompey say to that?”

“At first he brushed me off. He said he’d think about it. But then came the business with the Prince of Armenia, when Papirius was killed by Clodius’s men. Did you hear about that?”

“We heard something of it.”

“Well, the killing of his friend seemed to make Pompey do that bit of extra thinking, because the day after Papirius was put on the pyre, he called me to his house. ‘That idea of your becoming tribune—you’ve got yourself a deal.’ ”

“And how has Clodius reacted to your election? He must know what you have in mind.”

“Well, that’s why I’m here. And this you won’t have heard about, because I left Rome straight after it happened, and no messenger could have got here quicker than I.” He stopped and held out his cup for more wine. He had come a long way to tell his story; he was obviously a raconteur; he meant to do it in his own time. “It was about two weeks ago, not long after the elections. Pompey was doing a little business in the Forum when he ran into a gang of Clodius’s men. There was some pushing and shoving, and one of them dropped a dagger. A lot of people saw it, and a great shout went up that they were going to murder Pompey. His attendants hustled him out of there fast, and back to his house, and barricaded him in—and that’s where he is still, as far as I know, with only the Lady Julia for company.”

Cicero said in astonishment, “Pompey the Great is barricaded in his own house?”

“I don’t blame you if you find it funny. Who wouldn’t? There’s rough justice in it, and Pompey knows it. In fact he said to me that the greatest mistake of his life was letting Clodius drive you out of the city.”

“Pompey said that?”

“That’s why I’ve raced across three countries, barely stopping to eat or sleep—to give you the news that he’s going to do everything he can to get your exile overturned. His blood is up. He wants you back in Rome, you and me and him, fighting side by side, to save the republic from Clodius and his gang! What do you say to that?”

He was like a dog that has just laid a kill at its master’s feet; if he’d had a tail, it would have been thumping against the fabric of the couch. But if Milo had expected either delight or gratitude, he was to be disappointed. Depressed in spirit and ragged in appearance though he might be, Cicero had nevertheless seen straight through to the heart of the matter. He swilled his wine around in his cup, frowning before he spoke.

“And does Caesar agree to this?”

“Ah now,” said Milo, shifting slightly on his couch, “that’s for you to settle with him. Pompey will play his part, but you must play yours. It would be hard for him to campaign to bring you back if Caesar were to object very strongly.”

“So he wants me to reconcile with him?”

“His word was to
reassure
him.”

It had grown dark while we were talking. The household slaves had lit lamps around the perimeter of the garden; their gleams were clouded with moths. But no light was on the table, so I couldn’t properly make out Cicero’s expression. He was silent for a long while. It was terrifically hot as usual, and I was conscious of the night sounds of Macedonia—the cicadas and the mosquitoes, the occasional dog bark, the voices of local people in the street, speaking in their strange, harsh foreign tongue. I wondered if Cicero was thinking the same as I was—that another year in such a place as this would kill him. Perhaps he was, because eventually he let out a sigh of resignation and said, “And in what terms am I supposed to ‘reassure’ him?”

“That’s up to you. If any man can find the right words, it’s you. But Caesar has made it clear to Pompey that he needs something in writing before he’ll even think of reconsidering his position.”