Dictator

Cicero, still lying in his litter, his chin in his hand, looked him up and down very calmly. ‘I know you,’ he said, ‘I’m sure of it. What’s your name?’

The military tribune, plainly taken aback, said, ‘My name, if you must know it, is Caius Popillius Laenas, and yes, we do know one another: not that it will save you.’

‘Popillius,’ murmured Cicero, ‘that’s it,’ and then he turned to me. ‘Do you remember this man, Tiro? He was our client – that fifteen-year-old who murdered his father, right at the beginning of my career. He’d have been condemned to death for parricide if I hadn’t got him off – on condition he went into the army.’ He laughed. ‘This is a kind of justice, I suppose.’

I looked at Popillius and indeed I did remember him.

Popillius said, ‘That’s enough talk. The verdict of the Constitutional Commission is that the death sentence should be carried out immediately.’ He gestured to his soldiers to drag Cicero from his litter.

‘Wait,’ said Cicero, ‘leave me where I am. I have it in mind to die this way,’ and he propped himself up on his elbows like a defeated gladiator, threw back his head and offered his throat to the sky.

‘If that’s what you want,’ said Popillius. He turned to his centurion. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

The centurion took up his position. He braced his legs. He swung his sword. The blade flashed, and in that instant for Cicero the mystery that had plagued him all his life was solved, and liberty was extinguished from the earth.

Afterwards they cut off his head and hands and put them in a sack. They made us sit down and watch them while they did it. Then they marched away. I was told that Antony was so delighted with these extra trophies that he gave Popillius a bonus of a million sesterces. It is also said that Fulvia pierced Cicero’s tongue with a needle. I do not know. What is certainly true is that on Antony’s orders the head that had delivered the Philippics and the hands that had written them were nailed up on the rostra, as a warning to others who might think of opposing the Triumvirate, and they stayed there for many years, until finally they rotted and fell away.

After the killers had gone, we carried Cicero’s body down to the beach and built a pyre, and at dusk we burned it. Then I made my way south to my farm on the Bay of Naples.

Little by little I learned more of what had happened.

Quintus was soon afterwards captured with his son and put to death.

Atticus emerged from hiding and was pardoned by Antony because of the help he had given Fulvia.

And much, much later, Antony committed suicide together with his mistress Cleopatra after Octavian defeated them in battle. The boy is now the Emperor Augustus.

But I have written enough.

Many years have passed since the episodes I have recounted. At first I thought I would never recover from Cicero’s death. But time wipes out everything, even grief. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that grief is almost entirely a question of perspective. For the first few years I used to sigh and think, ‘Well, he would still be in his sixties now,’ and then a decade later, with surprise, ‘My goodness, he would be seventy-five,’ but nowadays I think, ‘Well, he would be long since dead in any case, so what does it matter how he died in comparison with how he lived?’

My work is done. My book is finished. Soon I will die too.

In the summer evenings I sit on the terrace with Agathe, my wife. She sews while I look at the stars. Always at such moments I think of Scipio’s dream of where dead statesmen dwell in On the Republic:

I gazed in every direction and all appeared wonderfully beautiful. There were stars which we never see from earth, and they were all larger than we have ever imagined. The starry spheres were much greater than the earth; indeed the earth itself seemed to me so small that I was scornful of our empire, which covers only a single point, as it were, upon its surface.

‘If only you will look on high,’ the old statesman tells Scipio, ‘and contemplate this eternal home and resting place, you will no longer bother with the gossip of the common herd or put your trust in human reward for your exploits. Nor will any man’s reputation endure very long, for what men say dies with them and is blotted out with the forgetfulness of posterity.’

All that will remain of us is what is written down.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

AFRANIUS, LUCIUS an ally of Pompey’s from his home region of Picenum; one of Pompey’s army commanders in the war against Mithradates; consul in 60 BC

AGRIPPA, MARCUSVIPSANIUS Octavian’s closest associate, aged twenty