Dictator

Cicero said, ‘They must be well aware you’re coming. Aren’t you worried you will lack the element of surprise?’

Crassus scoffed, ‘I have no need of the element of surprise. I prefer the element of certainty. Let them tremble as we approach.’

He had his eye on various rich pickings along the way – he cited the temples of the goddess Derceto at Hierapolis and of Jehovah at Jerusalem, the jewelled effigy of Apollo at Tigraocerta, the golden Zeus of Nicephorium and the treasure houses of Seleucia. Cicero joked that it sounded less a military campaign than a shopping expedition, but Crassus was too deaf to hear.

At the end of the evening the two old enemies shook hands warmly and expressed profound satisfaction that any slight misunderstandings that might have arisen between them had been put to rest at last. ‘These are mere figments of the imagination,’ declared Cicero, with a twirl of his fingers. ‘Let them be utterly eradicated from our memories. Between two such men as you and I, whose lot has fallen on the same political ground, I would hope that alliance and friendship will continue to the credit of both. In all matters affecting you during your absence, my devoted and indefatigable service and any influence I command are absolutely and unreservedly at your disposal.’

‘What an utter villain that fellow is,’ said Cicero as we settled into the carriage to drive home.

A day or so later – and a full two months before the expiry of his term as consul, so eager was he to be off – Crassus left Rome wearing the red cloak and full uniform of a general on active service. Pompey, his fellow consul, came out of the Senate house to see him off. The tribune Ateius Capito attempted to arrest him in the Forum for his illegal war-making, and when he was knocked aside by Crassus’s lieutenants he ran ahead to the city gate and set up a brazier. As Crassus passed by he threw incense and libations on to the flames and called down curses on him and upon his expedition, mingling his incantations with the names of strange and terrible deities. The superstitious people of Rome were appalled and cried out to Crassus not to go. But he laughed at them, and with a final jaunty wave turned his back on the city and spurred his horse.

Such was Cicero’s life at this period, walking on tiptoe between the three great men in the state, endeavouring to keep on good terms with all of them, doing their bidding, privately despairing of the future of the republic, but waiting and hoping for better times.

He sought refuge in his books, especially philosophy and history, and one day, soon after Quintus had gone off to join Caesar in Gaul, he announced to me that he had decided to produce a work of his own. It was too dangerous, he said, to write an open attack on the current state of politics in Rome. But he could approach it in a different way, by updating Plato’s Republic and setting out what an ideal state might look like: ‘Who could object to that?’ The answer, I thought, was a large number of people, but I kept my opinion to myself.

I look back on the writing of that work, which took us in the end almost three years, as one of the most satisfying periods of my life. Like most literary compositions, it entailed much heartbreak and many false starts. Originally he planned to write it in nine rolls, but then reduced that to six. He decided to cast it in the form of an imagined conversation between a group of historical characters – chief among them one of his heroes, Scipio Aemilianus, the conqueror of Carthage – who gather in a villa on a religious holiday to discuss the nature of politics and how societies should be organised. He reasoned that no one would mind if dangerous notions were placed in the mouths of the legendary figures of Roman history.

He started dictating it in his new villa in Cumae during the senatorial recess. He consulted all the ancient texts, and on one particularly memorable day we rode over to the villa of Faustus Cornelius Sulla, the son of the former dictator, who lived a little way along the coast. Cicero’s ally Milo, who was rising in politics, had just married Sulla’s twin sister Fausta, and at the wedding breakfast, which Cicero attended, Sulla had invited him to use his library whenever he liked. It was one of the most valuable collections in Italy. The volumes had been carted back by Sulla the Dictator from Athens almost thirty years earlier, and amazingly included most of the original manuscripts of Aristotle, written in his own hand three centuries earlier. I shall never forget as long as I live the sensation of unrolling each of the eight books of Aristotle’s Politics: tiny cylinders of minute Greek characters, the edges slightly damaged by damp from the caves in Asia Minor where they had been hidden for many years. It was like reaching back through time and touching the face of a god.