The first opportunity for British book-buyers to study the life of Marcus
Tullius Cicero came when the librarian of Cambridge University, Conyers
Middleton, published his bestselling, three-volume biography in 1741. The
work was dedicated to a politician whose personal life was never far from
scandal, the Right Honourable John, Lord Hervey, a flamboyant courtier in
the circle of George II and an intimate adviser both to the King’s wife,
Queen Caroline, and to his Prime Minister, Robert Walpole. One of Hervey’s
many skills was in bouncing back from disfavour, and Middleton seems to have
pondered hard before offering his study of Cicero, “one of the most shining
examples of human perfection”, to a Lord Privy Seal satirized by Alexander
Pope as Lord Fanny. In a lengthy preface, Middleton steered carefully
between the risks of ridicule for himself and offence to his patron. If the
book’s dedicatee seemed to lack the glory of its subject, the fault lay in
their different times, not in themselves: in the modern world “a great
genius has seldom either room or invitation to stretch itself to its full
size”, whereas in the Roman age there was scope for “a race of nobles
superior even to kings”. If Middleton ever appeared to be depreciating his
friend’s abilities instead of extolling them, his book was history, “and it
would ill become me, in front of such a work, to expose my veracity to any
hazard”.
More than 250 years and as a many miles of scholarly analysis later, a new
opportunity for readers to learn about Cicero comes from the novelist,
critic and political commentator Robert Harris. His own three-volume version
has now reached its second part, Lustrum, and Harris too has made a
significant dedication, shorter than Middleton’s, closer to the “classical
simplicity” that the Cambridge librarian might have preferred if he could
have got away with it, one which reads simply “to Peter”. Peter who? His
long-time friend, Peter Mandelson, currently Lord President of the Council
and the most powerful figure in the Labour government of Gordon Brown,
previously the scandal-scarred adviser and admirer of the Princess of Wales
in the time of Tony Blair, bouncer in and out of ministerial office and the
butt of satirists quite as savage as Pope and considerably more numerous.
Harris is a playful writer who likes to tease his readers with connections
between past and present. After an early life close to the New Labour
project, he became estranged from its later forms (not least because of Tony
Blair’s twin sackings of Lord Mandelson) and still takes time away from
writing internationally successful novels to comment on politics. Critics
have often been divided on how successfully he makes the links between the
two, but there is always a frisson in how he does so. Lustrum is a serious
piece of storytelling, enormously enjoyable to read, with an insider’s
political tone which makes the dedication much more than a matter of
convention or duty.
Harris’s first volume, Imperium (reviewed in the TLS, September 1, 2006)
includes the events discussed by Mary Beard this week (pages 3–4) and ends
with Cicero’s election to the consulship for 63 BC, a notable achievement
for a provincial whose ancestors had never reached such heights before. This
New Man had won his prize not by force of arms or family history but by
advocacy in the law courts, the skilful building of alliances and the errors
of his more conservative opponents. A leading aristocratic candidate in the
consular election for that year had been Lucius Sergius Catilina, a man too
obviously prepared to steal what he could not acquire by legal means and
thus a greater perceived threat to the establishment than was a mere lawyer.
Lustrum follows events over the next five years, the revolutionary
conspiracy and military defeat of Catiline, the election of the young Julius
Caesar to the unlikely position of Chief Priest, the return of Pompey the
Great from the East, and the early manoeuvrings of the rivals who in the
third volume, we can confidently predict, will bring the state to civil war.
This has been a pivotal period for as long as writers have used Roman history
to illuminate their own. The year 60 BC, when Caesar, Pompey and the
financier Marcus Crassus formed the “first triumvirate”, their “principum
amicitias”, to suppress the ambitions of their peers was the one chosen by
the period’s first historian, Gaius Asinius Pollio, to mark the passing of
an era. Pollio inspired many followers. What had really happened to the
mighty Roman Republic, the constitution whose traditions were for the
express purpose of diffusing power? Cicero and his fellow consul, like their
predecessors, held the reins for only for one month at at time. At extreme
times, the consular authority was passed back and forth every other day.
There had been cabals before “the Beast with the Three Heads” of 60 BC,
other dictatorships before the supremacy of Julius Caesar: but an
approximation to the old ways had always afterwards been restored, until
suddenly, towards the end of the first century BC, for reasons that could
always profitably be discussed by any political elite, they were not.
For Conyers Middleton, and many successors, Cicero was the hero who struggled
nobly to serve good balanced government against the pressures of the greedy,
the violent and the tyrannical. The orator, writer and politician was the
perfect subject. Not only had he lived at a critical time; he had also left
behind unprecedented (and in the classical era never repeated) explanations
of his tactics. In speeches and letters, some of them edited carefully to
show his best intent, others less so, he took his readers into his thoughts.
Like all politicians, he had made errors and enemies, putting too much faith
in Pompey and underestimating Caesar. The most senior of the Catilinarian
conspirators, strangled by the public executioner while Cicero was consul,
was the father-in-law of his eventual nemesis, Mark Antony. Cicero also
sometimes lied, but hated himself when he did so and was overall a “shining
example” for a client to put before a patron like Lord Hervey: “in a nation
like ours, which, from the natural effect of freedom, is divided into
opposite parties, friendships with certain men will sometimes draw the best
citizens into measures of a subordinate kind which they cannot wholly
approve”. The good statesman should never fear: “whatever envy your Lordship
may incur on that account, you will be found, on all occasions of trial, a
true friend to our constitution”.
While Harris too sees virtues in his subject and opportunities to discuss some
unchanging truths of political life, the twenty-first-century novelist is a
tougher judge than the eighteenth-century historian. He chooses as his
narrator Cicero’s own personal and political adviser, Tiro, a slave who is
the addressee of various of his master’s letters, and, at least in this
fictional role, the kind of figure that every successful politician needs
close by: devoted, intelligent, absolutely loyal, willing to do anything
from running errands to ensuring his master’s clean and correct dress, all
the while taking a careful written note of everything that might be later of
use. But no man can be a hero to his valet, or not for long, and especially
not when his time at the top is over. Like the denizens of New Labour’s
Downing Street, the first century Tiro wrote a memoir after his master’s
demise, a multi-volume effort like its successors – one that, as Harris
records in his preface, survived as an entertainment for the curious until
the Roman Empire followed the republic into ruin. Tiro’s text, like so many
others, totally disappeared. Lustrum is part of the re-creation of what it
might have been.
The novel begins in thriller style, as probably Tiro’s would not have, with
the discovery of a human sacrifice, a slave boy who, as we quickly learn,
has been killed by Catiline to sanctify an oath between patrician
malcontents plotting Cicero’s death and the overthrow of the Roman state.
Harris writes in his introduction that, wherever the demands of fiction and
fact have clashed, he has “unhesitatingly plumped for the former”. Although
the main events are more reliably recorded than the reader of historical
novels may expect, there is high fictional skill on display throughout, most
powerfully in Harris’s pacing of the narrative, most alluringly in the
highlights and grace notes that he introduces from the politics that we have
all witnessed, at different degrees of proximity, over the past decade.
An early knowing moment sets the tone. The New Man and newly self-styled
“people’s Consul” is addressing his Treasury officials for the first time,
telling them that they must in future take an order from the secretary,
Tiro, as though it were an order from the Consul, Cicero, himself: “all
business that is to be discussed with me may also be raised with him”. Tony
Blair memorably gave the same instruction to senior civil servants in 1997,
raising his personal aides above the level of public officials in a policy
that is often seen by critics as symptomatic and destructive of his time.
Cicero soon afterwards sends one of the state augurs, Quintus Metellus
Celer, on a vital errand to stop a trial: asked by a soldier why he should
comply with a patently bogus request, Metellus retorts “because I’m a
fucking augur, that’s why”, a response that, thanks to television and film
portraits of Blair’s Downing Street, now instantly conjures up that era of
politics.
Harris takes a comic approach to another recognizably modern Roman whose
high-minded rigour, opposition to Julius Caesar and suicide after the
Pompeians’ defeat brought him lasting fame. Cato the Younger, the young
idealist of the Forum, keeps his own pet philosopher and is determined to
make decisions according to systematic “maxims and precepts”. He is standing
for election as a Tribune in 63 BC and announces: “it is my intention to be
a politician entirely different to anyone who has gone before”.
“‘I’m sure you will be’, replied Cicero, glancing over the young man’s
shoulder at me, and giving me the very slightest wink.” Cicero declares that
“skill and study” may help a politician ride out the storms and reach
“survival”, but that a manual written by a philosopher never can. “‘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’.”
Tiro’s way is a weary realism, impatient with those outside his master’s
project who simply do not understand how difficult politics can be. “Events”
have always been the problem, and they never come one by one as they do in
the history books, but all at the same time, complicating and tumbling over
each other. Fixed precepts are fine only for university teachers and keepers
of chickens. Bad men must be defended for fear of worse, a practice that “to
be pursued successfully demands the most extraordinary reserves of
self-discipline, a quality that the naive often mistake for hypocrisy”.
Flattery may look absurd in a written account of a political ploy, but in
practice there are few more powerful weapons.
Eventually, however, Tiro’s weariness extends to his master too. Once Cicero
is out of office, he becomes a bore about his great achievements in saving
Rome from Catiline: “If someone interrupted him or tried to raise another
subject, he would wait impatiently for a gap in their conversation, give
them a hard look and then resume: ‘As I was saying’”. He covets a huge house
on “Victory Rise” that is beyond his means and happily pays the political as
well as financial price to get it. He tries to commission poets to give an
appropriately epic treatment to his triumphs. When his efforts fail, he
writes the poem himself: “Dear heavens, it was terrible stuff!”.
This tiny piece of literary criticism is probably the unfairest remark in the
book. It has been somewhat hard on Cicero’s poetic reputation that “O
fortunatam natam me consule Romam” is one of his lines that has survived: “O
fortunate the Roman state, born in my great consulate”. In most of his
surviving poetry, written before Catullus and Lucretius, early in Latin’s
literary history, he shows himself a decent exponent of techniques that
greater artists would take further. In other respects, the judgements of the
disillusioned adviser seem flawless, with many an echo of Harris’s novel,
The Ghost (reviewed in the TLS, October 12, 2007), about an aide helping a
recently retired British Prime Minister to write his memoirs. Cicero
continues his political career after a suitable pause, but falls into traps
that in his youth he would have “spotted a mile off”. “There is in all men
who achieve their life’s ambition”, notes Tiro, “only a narrow line between
dignity and vanity, confidence and delusion, glory and self-destruction.”
Robert Harris
LUSTRUM
464pp. Hutchinson. £18.99.
978 0 09 180100 7
Peter Stothard is Editor of the TLS. His book On the Spartacus Road
will be published in January.
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