Lustrum Read online

  'Tell no one else. Burn the remains as quickly as possible. Don't let anyone see them. Forbid anyone who has seen them from disclosing the details, on pain of imprisonment.'

  'And the crowd?'

  'You deal with the body. I'll deal with the crowd.'

  Octavius shrugged. 'As you wish.' He sounded unconcerned. He had only one day left in office – I should imagine he was glad to be rid of the problem.

  Cicero went over to the door and inhaled a few deep breaths, bringing some colour back to his cheeks. Then I saw him, as I had so often, square his shoulders and clamp a confident expression on his face. He stepped outside and clambered up on to a stack of timber to address the crowd.

  'People of Rome, I have satisfied myself that the dark rumours running through the city are false!' He had to bellow into that biting wind to make himself heard. 'Go home to your families and enjoy the rest of the festival.'

  'But I saw the body!' shouted a man. 'It was a human sacrifice, to call down a curse on the republic.'

  The cry was taken up by others: 'The city is cursed!' 'Your consulship is cursed!' 'Fetch the priests!'

  Cicero raised his hands. 'Yes, the corpse was in a dreadful state. But what do you expect? The poor lad had been in the water a long time. The fish are hungry. They take their food where they can. You really want me to bring a priest? To do what? To curse the fish? To bless the fish?' A few people began to laugh. 'Since when did Romans become frightened of fish? Go home. Enjoy yourselves. The day after tomorrow there will be a new year, with a new consul – one who you can be sure will always guard your welfare!'

  It was no great oration by his standards but it did what was required. There were even a few cheers. He jumped down. The legionaries cleared a path for us through the mob and we retreated quickly towards the city. As we neared the gate, I glanced back. At the fringes of the crowd people were already beginning to wander away in search of fresh diversions. I turned to Cicero to congratulate him on the effectiveness of his remarks, but he was leaning over the roadside ditch, vomiting.

  Such was the state of the city on the eve of Cicero's consulship – a vortex of hunger, rumour and anxiety; of crippled veterans and bankrupt farmers begging at every corner; of roistering bands of drunken young men terrorising shopkeepers; of women from good families openly prostituting themselves outside the taverns; of sudden conflagrations, violent tempests, moonless nights and scavenging dogs; of fanatics, soothsayers, beggars, fights. Pompey was still away commanding the legions in the East, and in his absence an uneasy, shifting mood swirled around the streets like river fog, giving everyone the jitters. There was a sense that some huge event was impending, but no clear idea what it might be. The new tribunes were said to be working with Caesar and Crassus on a vast and secret scheme for giving away public land to the urban poor. Cicero had tried to find out more about it but had been rebuffed. The patricians were certain to resist it, whatever it was. Goods were scarce, food hoarded, shops empty. Even the moneylenders had stopped making loans.

  As for Cicero's colleague as consul, Antonius Hybrida – Antonius the Half-Breed: Half-Man, Half-Beast – he was both wild and stupid, as befitted a candidate who had run for office on a joint ticket with Cicero's sworn enemy, Catilina. Nevertheless, knowing the perils they would face, and feeling the need for allies, Cicero had made strenuous efforts to get on good terms with him. Unfortunately his approaches had come to nothing, and I shall say why. It was the custom for the two consuls-elect to draw lots in October to decide which province each would govern after his year in office. Hybrida, who was steeped in debt, had set his heart on the rebellious but lucrative lands of Macedonia, where a vast fortune was waiting to be made. However to his dismay he drew instead the peaceful pastures of Nearer Gaul, where not even a field mouse was stirring. It was Cicero who drew Macedonia, and when the result was announced in the senate, Hybrida's face had assumed such a picture of childish resentment and surprise that the entire chamber had been convulsed by laughter. He and Cicero had not spoken since.

  Little wonder then that Cicero was finding it so hard to compose his inaugural address, and that when we returned to his house from the river and he tried to resume his dictation his voice kept on trailing off. He would stare into the distance with a look of abstraction on his face and repeatedly wonder aloud why the boy had been killed in such a manner, and of what significance it was that he belonged to Hybrida. He agreed with Octavius: the likeliest culprits were the Gauls. Human sacrifice was certainly one of their cults. He sent a message to a friend of his, Q. Fabius Sanga, who was the Gauls' principal patron in the senate, asking in confidence if he thought such an outrage was possible. But Sanga sent rather a huffy letter back within the hour saying of course not, and that the Gauls would be gravely offended if the consul-elect persisted in such damaging speculation. Cicero sighed, threw the letter aside, and attempted to pick up the threads of his thoughts. But he could not weave them together into anything coherent, and shortly before sunset he called again for his cloak and boots.

  I had assumed his intention was to take a turn in the public gardens not far from the house, where he often went when he was composing a speech. But as we reached the brow of the hill, instead of turning right he pressed on towards the Esquiline Gate, and I realised to my amazement that he intended to go outside the sacred boundary to the place where the corpses were burned – a spot he usually avoided at all costs. We passed the porters with their handcarts waiting for work just beyond the gate, and the squat official residence of the carnifex, who, as public executioner, was forbidden to live within the precincts of the city. Finally we entered the sacred grove of Libitina, filled with cawing crows, and approached the temple. In those days this was the headquarters of the undertakers' guild: the place where one could buy all that was needed for a funeral, from the utensils with which to anoint a body to the bed on which the corpse was cremated. Cicero asked me for some money and went ahead and spoke to a priest. He handed him the purse, and a couple of official mourners appeared. Cicero beckoned me over. 'We are just in time,' he said.

  What a curious party we must have made as we crossed the Esquiline Field in single file, the mourners first, carrying jars of incense, then the consul-elect, then me. All around us in the dusk were the dancing flames of funeral pyres, the cries of the bereaved, and the sickly smell of incense – strong, yet not quite strong enough to disguise the stink of burning death. The mourners led us to the public ustrina, where a pile of corpses on a handcart were waiting to be thrown on to the flames. Devoid of clothes and shoes, these unclaimed bodies were as destitute in death as they had been in life. Only the murdered boy's was covered: I recognised it by the sailcloth shroud into which it had now been tightly sewn. As a couple of attendants tossed it easily on to the metal grille, Cicero bowed his head and the hired mourners set up a particularly noisy lamentation, no doubt in the hope of a good tip. The flames roared and flattened in the wind, and very quickly that was it: he had gone to whatever fate awaits us all.

  It was a scene I have never forgotten.

  Surely the greatest mercy granted us by Providence is our ignorance of the future. Imagine if we knew the outcome of our hopes and plans, or could see the manner in which we are doomed to die – how ruined our lives would be! Instead we live on dumbly from day to day as happily as animals. But all things must come to dust eventually. No human being, no system, no age is impervious to this law; everything beneath the stars will perish; the hardest rock will be worn away. Nothing endures but words.

  And with this in mind, and in the renewed hope that I may live long enough to see the task through, I shall now relate the extraordinary story of Cicero's year in office as consul of the Roman republic, and what befell him in the four years afterwards – a span of time we mortals call a lustrum, but which to the gods is no more than the blinking of an eye.

  II

  The following day, inaugural eve, it snowed – a heavy fall, of the sort one normally sees only in the mountains
. It clad the temples of the Capitol in soft white marble and laid a shroud as thick as a man's hand across the whole of the city. I had never witnessed such a phenomenon before, and nor, despite my great age, have I heard of the like again. Snow in Rome? This surely had to be an omen. But of what?

  Cicero stayed firmly in his study, beside a small coal fire, and continued to work on his speech. He placed no faith in portents. When I burst in and told him of the snow, he merely shrugged, 'What of it?' and when tentatively I began to advance the argument of the stoics in defence of augury – that if there are gods, they must care for men, and that if they care for men, they must send us signs of their will – he cut me off with a laugh: 'Surely the gods, given their immortal powers, should be able to find more articulate means of communication than snowflakes. Why not send us a letter?' He turned back to his desk, shaking his head and chuckling at my credulity. 'Really, go and attend to your duties, Tiro, and make sure no one else bothers me.'

  Chastened, I went away and checked the arrangements for the inaugural procession, and then made a start on his correspondence. I had been his secretary for sixteen years by this time and there was no aspect of his life, public or private, with which I was not familiar. My habit in those days was to work at a folding table just outside his study, fending off unwanted visitors and keeping an ear open for his summons. It was from this position that I could hear the noises of the household that morning: Terentia marching in and out of the dining room, snapping at the maids that the winter flowers were not good enough for her husband's new status, and berating the cook about the quality of that night's menu; little Marcus, now well into his second year, toddling unsteadily after her, and shouting in delight at the snow; and darling Tullia, thirteen and due to be married in the autumn, practising her Greek hexameters with her tutor.

  Such was the extent of my work, it was not until after noon that I was able to put my head out of doors again. Despite the hour, the street for once was empty. The city felt muffled, ominous; as still as midnight. The sky was pale, the snowfall had stopped, and frost had formed a glittering white crust over the surface. Even now – for such are the peculiarities of memory in the very old – I can recall the sensation of breaking it with the tip of my shoe. I took a last breath of that freezing air and was just turning to go back in to the warmth when I heard, very faint in the hush, the crack of a whip and the sound of men crying and groaning. A few moments later a litter borne by four liveried slaves came swaying around the corner. An overseer trotting alongside waved his whip in my direction.

  'Hey, you!' he shouted. 'Is that Cicero's house?'

  When I replied that it was, he called over his shoulder – 'This is the street!' – and lashed out at the slave nearest him with such force the poor fellow nearly stumbled. To get through the snow he had to pull his knees up high to his waist, and in this way he floundered on towards me. Behind him a second litter appeared, then a third, and a fourth. They drew up outside the house, and the instant they had set down their burdens the porters all sank down in the snow, collapsing over the shafts like exhausted rowers at their oars. I did not care for the look of this at all.

  'It may be Cicero's house,' I protested, 'but he is not receiving visitors.'

  'He will receive us!' came a familiar voice from inside the first litter, and a bony hand clawed back the curtain to reveal the leader of the patrician faction in the senate, Q. Lutatius Catulus. He was wrapped in animal skins right up to his pointed chin, giving him the appearance of a large and malevolent weasel.

  'Senator,' I said, bowing, 'I shall tell him you're here.'

  'And not just I,' said Catulus.

  I looked along the street. Clambering stiffly out of the next litter, and cursing his old soldier's bones, was the conqueror of Olympus and father of the senate, Vatia Isauricus, while nearby stood Cicero's great rival in the law courts, the patricians' favourite advocate, Q. Hortensius. He in turn was holding out his hand to a fourth senator, whose shrivelled, nut-brown, toothless face I could not place. He looked very decrepit. I guessed he must have stopped attending debates a long while ago.

  'Distinguished gentlemen,' I said, in my most unctuous manner, 'please follow me and I shall inform the consul-elect.'

  I whispered to the porter to show them into the tablinum and hurried towards Cicero's study. As I drew close, I could hear his voice in full declamatory flow – 'To the Roman people I say, enough!' – and when I opened the door I found him standing with his back to me, addressing my two junior secretaries, Sositheus and Laurea, his hand outstretched, his thumb and middle finger formed into a circle. 'And to you, Tiro,' he continued, without turning round, 'I say: not another damned interruption! What sign have the gods sent us now? A shower of frogs?'

  The secretaries sniggered. On the brink of achieving his life's ambition, he had put the perturbations of the previous day out of his mind and was in a great good humour.

  'There's a delegation from the senate to see you.'

  'Now that's what I call an ominous portent. Who's in it?'

  'Catulus, Isauricus, Hortensius, and another I don't recognise.'

  'The cream of the aristocracy? Here?' He gave me a sharp look over his shoulder. 'And in this weather? It must be the smallest house they've ever set foot in! What do they want?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Well, be sure you make a thorough note.' He gathered his toga around him and stuck out his chin. 'How do I look?'

  'Consular,' I assured him.

  He stepped over the discarded drafts of his speech and made his way into the tablinum. The porter had fetched chairs for our visitors but only one was seated – the trembling old senator I did not recognise. The others stood together, each with his own attendant close at hand, clearly uncomfortable at finding themselves on the premises of this low-born 'new man' they had so reluctantly backed for consul. Hortensius actually had a handkerchief pressed to his nose, as if Cicero's lack of breeding might be catching.

  'Catulus,' said Cicero affably, as he came into the room. 'Isauricus. Hortensius. I'm honoured.' He nodded to each of the former consuls, but when he reached the fourth senator I could see even his prodigious memory temporarily fail him. 'Rabirius,' he concluded after a brief struggle. 'Gaius Rabirius, isn't it?' He held out his hand but the old man did not react and Cicero smoothly turned the gesture into a sweeping indication of the room. 'Welcome to my home. This is a pleasure.'

  'There's no pleasure in it,' said Catulus.

  'It's an outrage,' said Hortensius.

  'It's war,' asserted Isauricus, 'that's what it is.'

  'Well, I'm very sorry to hear it,' replied Cicero pleasantly. He did not always take them seriously. Like many rich old men they tended to regard the slightest personal inconvenience as proof of the end of the world.

  Hortensius clicked his fingers, and his attendant handed Cicero a legal document with a heavy seal. 'Yesterday the Board of Tribunes served this writ on Rabirius.'

  At the mention of his name, Rabirius looked up. 'Can I go home?' he asked plaintively.

  'Later,' said Hortensius in a stern voice, and the old man bowed his head.

  'A writ on Rabirius?' repeated Cicero, looking at him with bemusement. 'And what conceivable crime is he capable of ?' He read the writ aloud so I could make a note of it. '“The accused is herein charged with the murder of the tribune L. Saturninus and the violation of the sacred precincts of the senate house.”' He looked up in puzzlement. 'Saturninus? It must be – what? – forty years since he was killed.'

  'Thirty-six,' corrected Catulus.

  'And Catulus should know,' said Isauricus, 'because he was there. As was I.'

  Catulus spat out his name as if it were poison. 'Saturninus! What a rogue! Killing him wasn't a crime – it was a public service.' He gazed into the distance as if surveying some grand historical mural on the wall of a temple: The Murder of Saturninus in the Senate House. 'I see him as plainly as I see you, Cicero. A rabble-rousing tribune of the very worst kind. He murd
ered our candidate for consul and the senate declared him a public enemy. After that, even the plebs deserted him. But before we could lay our hands on him, he and some of his gang barricaded themselves up on the Capitol. So we blocked the water pipes! That was your idea, Vatia.'

  'It was.' The old general's eyes gleamed at the memory. 'I knew how to conduct a siege, even then.'

  'Of course they surrendered after a couple of days, and were lodged in the senate house till their trial. But we didn't trust them not to escape again, so we got up on the roof and tore off the tiles and pelted them. There was no hiding place. They ran to and fro squealing like rats in a ditch. By the time Saturninus stopped twitching, you could barely tell who he was.'

  'And Rabirius was with you both on the roof ?' asked Cicero. Glancing up from my notes at the old man – his expression vacant, his head trembling slightly – it was impossible to imagine him involved in such an action.

  'Oh yes, he was there,' confirmed Isauricus. 'There must have been about thirty of us. Those were the days,' he added, bunching his fingers into a gnarled fist, 'when we still had some juice in us!'

  'The crucial point,' said Hortensius wearily – he was younger than his companions and obviously bored of hearing the same old story – 'is not whether Rabirius was there or not. It's the crime with which he is being charged.'

  'Which is what? Murder?'

  'Perduellio.'

  I must confess I had never even heard of it, and Cicero had to spell it out for me. 'Perduellio,' he explained, 'is what the ancients called treason.' He turned to Hortensius. 'Why use such an obsolete law? Why not just prosecute him with treason, pure and simple, and have done with it?'

  'Because the sentence for treason is exile, whereas for perduellio it's death – and not by hanging, either.' Hortensius leaned forward to emphasise his words. 'If they find him guilty, Rabirius will be crucified.'

  'What is this place?' demanded Rabirius, getting to his feet. 'Where am I?'