In recent years, ancient Rome has provided the setting for dozens of historical crime novels. In their pages, whole posses of classical private eyes prowl the city’s mean streets. Robert Harris’s Lustrum, the second, enthralling volume in what he promises will be a trilogy set in the last decades of the Roman republic, opens with a scene that suggests this might be just another one to add to the genre. A young slave has been found murdered and eviscerated, his body dumped in the Tiber. Consul-elect Marcus Tullius Cicero is called to the scene. When he learns that the boy has been killed as a human sacrifice, it seems that Cicero might be taking on the role of a toga-clad Philip Marlowe in tracking down the murderers.

Yet it soon becomes clear that Harris has no interest in that kind of story at all. His focus instead is firmly upon the dangers and temptations of politics. Over the course of the next 400 pages, the gritty and tortuous realities of power take precedence over the contrived puzzles of crime fiction.

It is not difficult to see why Harris was so drawn to the years between 63BC and 58BC when the novel is set (Lustrum means “five-year period” in Latin). The stakes then, in a period when the Roman republic was perpetually at risk of disintegration, were so much higher than they are now. Plunge to catastrophic defeat in modern British politics and the worst that awaits you is an early elevation to the House of Lords; failure in Roman politics could result in exile, assassination or an inescapable invitation to open your veins in a warm bath.

It is against this background of the ever­present potential for violence and death that Harris’s gripping narrative unfolds. Within a few chapters, readers learn who killed the slave and why. He was the victim of Catilina, one of Cicero’s beaten rivals for the consulship, who offered the boy up as the sacrificial seal on an oath taken by a group of decadent aristocrats to murder Cicero and take control of the state.

Catilina, though, is just the first of a sequence of political enemies that Cicero must face in the course of the novel. Once his conspiracy has been defeated and the consul granted the title of “father of the nation” by a grateful senate, Cicero is confronted by Clodius, the glamorous yet warped scion of one of Rome’s most distinguished families, who, in between bouts of incest with his three sisters and a scandalous incursion into a women-only religious ceremony, uses his popularity with the mob to attempt to gain power and destroy Cicero. Even more dangerous is the vaultingly ambitious — and, in Harris’s portrait, chillingly egotistical — Julius Caesar. It is Caesar, Cicero recognises, who represents the greatest threat both to himself and to the continued existence of the republic. “There’s a kind of divine recklessness about him,” he acknowledges at one point, “a contempt, if you like, for the world itself — as if he thinks it’s all a joke.”

All these struggles to bolster a state succumbing to the destructive ambitions of its powerful citizens are narrated not by Cicero himself, but his slave and trusted secretary, Tiro. It was an outstanding decision by Harris to choose Tiro, a real historical figure who wrote a multi-volume biography of Cicero (long since lost), as the person to tell his story. Through his eyes, readers are invited to sympathise with the consul and to understand the complex skein of ideas and emotions that motivate him. For generations of schoolboys, pressed into faltering translations of his Latin speeches, the great Roman orator and politician has always seemed something of a bore. Not the least of Harris’s achievements is that he brings him to life and transforms him into a hero whose situation at the end of the book becomes genuinely moving.

Some readers may be tempted to ransack Lustrum for parallels with contemporary British politics. Harris’s dedication of the novel, “To Peter”, reportedly Lord Mandelson, might encourage this. So might some of Tiro’s insights into the political character. When the narrator talks of politics as “an occupation that, if it is to be pursued successfully, demands the most extra-ordinary reserves of self-discipline, a quality that the naive often mistake for hypocrisy”,

it is difficult not to look for modern politicians to whom the words might apply. The temptation, though, should be resisted. Lustrum needs no supposed relevance to the present to support its evocation of the past. It stands on its own merits as a thoroughly engaging historical novel. Republican Rome, with all its grandeur and corruption, has rarely been made as vivid as it appears in Harris’s book. The allure of power and the perils that attend it have seldom been so brilliantly anatomised in a thriller.

Lustrum by Robert Harris
Hutchinson £18.99 pp464

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