Servius guffawed at that. “You will never conquer Rome, Cicero, if you cannot rule your wife.”
“Conquering Rome would be child’s play, Servius, believe me, compared with ruling my wife.”
And so the debate went on. Lucius favored an immediate approach to the tribunes, no matter what the consequences. Sthenius was too numb with misery and fear to have a coherent opinion on anything. At the very end, Cicero asked me what I thought. In other company, this might have caused surprise, a slave’s view not counting for much in most Romans’ eyes, but these men were used to the way that Cicero sometimes turned to me for advice. I replied cautiously that it seemed to me that Hortensius would not be happy to learn of Verres’s action, and that the prospect of the case becoming a public scandal might yet force him to put more pressure on his client to see sense: going to the tribunes was a risk, but on balance it was one worth taking. The answer pleased Cicero.
“Sometimes,” he said, summing up the discussion with an aphorism I have never forgotten, “if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight-start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through. Thank you, gentlemen.” And with that the meeting was adjourned.
THERE WAS NO TIME to waste, for if the news from Syracuse had already reached Rome, it was a fair assumption that Verres’s men were not far behind. Even while Cicero was talking, I had conceived an idea for a possible hiding place for Sthenius, and the moment the conference was over, I went in search of Terentia’s business manager, Philotimus. He was a plump and lascivious young man, generally to be found in the kitchen, pestering the maids to satisfy one or the other, or preferably both, of his vices. I asked him if there was a spare apartment available in one of his mistress’s tenement blocks, and when he replied that there was, I bullied him into giving me the key. I checked the street outside the house for suspicious loiterers, and when I was satisfied that it was safe, I persuaded Sthenius to follow me.
He was in a state of complete dejection, his dreams of returning to his homeland dashed, in hourly terror of being arrested. And I fear that when he first saw the squalid building in Subura in which I said he would now have to live, he must have felt that even we had abandoned him. The stairs were rickety and gloomy. There was evidence of a recent fire on the walls. His room, on the fifth floor, was barely more than a cell, with a straw mattress in the corner and a tiny window which offered no view, except across the street to another, similar apartment, close enough for Sthenius to reach out and shake hands with his neighbor. For a latrine he had a bucket. But if it didn’t offer him comfort, it at least offered him security-dropped, unknown, into this warren of slums, it would be almost impossible for him to be found. He asked me, in a plaintive tone, to sit with him awhile, but I had to get back and gather all the documents relating to his case, so that Cicero could present them to the tribunes. We were fighting time, I told him, and left at once.
The headquarters of the tribunes were next door to the Senate House, in the old Basilica Porcia. Although the tribunate was only a shell, from which all the flesh of power had been sucked, people still hung around its building. The angry, the dispossessed, the hungry, the militant-these were the denizens of the tribunes’ basilica. As Cicero and I walked across the Forum, we could see a sizable crowd jostling on its steps to get a view of what was happening inside. I was carrying a document case, but still I cleared a way for the senator as best I could, receiving some kicks and curses for my pains, as these were not citizens with any great love for a purple-bordered toga.
There were ten tribunes, elected annually by the people, and they always sat on the same long wooden bench, beneath a mural depicting the defeat of the Carthaginians. It was not a large building, but packed, noisy, and warm, despite the December cold outside. A young man, bizarrely barefoot, was haranguing the mob as we entered. He was an ugly, raw-faced youth with a brutal, grating voice. There were always plenty of cranks in the Basilica Porcia, and I took him at first to be just another, as his entire speech seemed to be devoted to arguing why one particular pillar should not, on any account, be demolished, or even moved one inch, to give the tribunes more room. And yet for some curious reason, he compelled attention. Cicero began listening to him very carefully, and after a while he realized-from the constant references to “my ancestor”-that this peculiar creature was none other than the great-grandson of the famous Marcus Porcius Cato, who had originally built the basilica and given it his name.
I mention this here because young Cato-he was then twenty-three-was to become such an important figure, both in the life of Cicero and the death of the republic. Not that one would have guessed it at the time. He looked destined for nowhere more significant than the asylum. He finished his speech, and as he went by, wild-eyed and unseeing, he knocked into me. What remains in my mind is the animal stink of him, his hair matted with damp, and the patches of sweat the size of dinner plates spreading under the armpits of his tunic. But he had won his point, and that pillar stayed absolutely in its place for as long as the building stood-which was not, alas, to be many years longer.
However, returning to my story, the tribunes were a poor lot on the whole, but there was one among them who stood out for his talent and his energy, and that was Lollius Palicanus. He was a proud man, but of low birth, from Picenum in the Italian northeast, the power base of Pompey the Great. It had been assumed that when Pompey returned from Spain he would use his influence to try to gain his fellow-countryman a praetorship, and Cicero had been as surprised as everybody else earlier in the summer when Palicanus had suddenly announced his candidacy for the tribunate. But on this particular morning he looked happy enough with his lot. The fresh crop of tribunes always began their term of office on the tenth day of December, so he must have been very new in the job. “ Cicero!” he bellowed the moment he saw us. “I had been wondering when you would show up!”
He told us that he had already heard the news from Syracuse, and he wanted to talk about Verres. But he wanted to talk in private, for there was more at stake, he said mysteriously, than the fate of one man. He proposed meeting us at his house on the Aventine Hill in an hour, to which Cicero agreed, whereupon Palicanus immediately ordered one of his attendants to guide us, saying he would follow separately.
It turned out to be a rough and unpretentious place, in keeping with the man, close to the Lavernal Gate, just outside the city wall. The thing I remember most clearly was the larger-than-life-size bust of Pompey, posed in the headgear and armor of Alexander the Great, which dominated the atrium. “Well,” said Cicero after he had contemplated it for a while, “I suppose it makes a change from the Three Graces.” This was exactly the sort of droll but inappropriate comment which used to get repeated around the town, and which invariably found its way back to its victim. Luckily, only I was present on this occasion, but I took the opportunity to pass on what the consul’s clerk had said regarding his joke about Gellius mediating between the philosophers. Cicero pretended to be sheepish and promised to be more circumspect in the future-he knew, he said, that people liked their statesmen to be dull-but naturally he soon forgot his resolution.
“That was a good speech you made the other week,” said Palicanus the moment he arrived. “You have the stuff in you, Cicero, you really have, if I may say so. But those blue-blooded bastards screwed you over, and now you are in the shit. So what exactly are you planning to do about it?” (This was more or less how he spoke-rough words in a rough accent-and the aristocrats used to have some sport with him over his elocution.)
I opened my case and handed the documents to Cicero, and he quickly laid out the situation regarding Sthenius. When he had finished he asked what chance there was of receiving any help from the tribunes.
“That depends,” said Palicanus, with a quick lick of his lips and a grin. “Come and sit down and let us see what is to be done.”
He took us through into another room, small and completely overwhelmed by a huge wall painting of a laureled Pompey, this time dressed as Jupiter, complete with lightning bolts shooting from his fingers.
“Do you like it?” asked Palicanus.
“It is remarkable,” said Cicero.
“Yes, it is,” he said, with some satisfaction. “
“What I am about to tell you, Cicero, is not to be repeated outside this house. Pompey the Great”-Palicanus nodded to the painting, in case we were in any doubt as to whom he meant-“will soon be returning to Rome for the first time in six years. He will come with his army, so there can be no fancy double-dealing from our noble friends. He will seek the consulship. And he will get the consulship. And he will get it unopposed.”
He leaned forward eagerly, expecting shock or surprise, but Cicero received this sensational intelligence as coolly as if he were being told the weather.
“So in return for your helping me over Sthenius, I am to support you over Pompey?”
“You are a canny one, Cicero, you have the stuff in you. What do you think?”
Cicero rested his chin in his hand and gazed at Palicanus. “Quintus Metellus will not be happy, for a start. You know the old poem-‘In Rome Metalliare, ’tis fate, / Elected to the consulate.’ He has been scheduled since birth to have his turn next summer.”
“Has he indeed? Well he can kiss my backside. How many legions did Quintus Metellus have behind him the last time you looked?”
“Crassus has legions,” Cicero pointed out. “So has Lucullus.”
“Lucullus is too far away, and besides, he has his hands full. As for Crassus-well, it is true that Crassus hates Pompey’s guts. But the thing about Crassus is that he is not a proper soldier. He is a businessman, and that type always cuts a deal.”
“And then there is the little matter of its being completely unconstitutional. You have to be forty-two at the time of the consular election, and Pompey is how old?”
“Just thirty-four.”
“Indeed. Almost a year younger than me. And a consul is also required to have been elected to the Senate and to have served as praetor, neither of which has Pompey achieved. He has never made a political speech in his life. To put the matter simply, Palicanus, seldom has a man been less qualified for the post.”
Palicanus made a dismissive gesture. “All that may be true, but let us face facts-Pompey has run whole countries for years, and done it with proconsular authority to boot. He
“I appreciate his feelings, but you ask my opinion, and I am giving it to you, and I tell you the aristocrats will not stand for it. All right, perhaps if he has ten thousand men outside the city, they will have no choice but to let him become consul, but sooner or later his army will go home and then how will he…Ha!” Cicero suddenly threw back his head and started laughing. “That is very clever.”
“You have seen it?” said Palicanus, with a grin.
“I have seen it.” Cicero nodded appreciatively. “Very good.”
“Well, I am offering you the chance to be a part of it. And Pompey the Great does not forget his friends.”
At the time I had not the least idea of what they were talking about. Only when we were walking home afterwards did Cicero explain everything to me. Pompey was planning to seek the consulship on the platform of a full restoration of tribunician power. Hence Palicanus’s surprising move in becoming a tribune. The strategy was not born of some altruistic desire on Pompey’s part to give the Roman people greater liberty-although I suppose it is just possible he was occasionally pleased to lie in his bath in Spain and fancy himself a champion of citizens’ rights-no: it was purely a matter of self-interest. Pompey, as a good general, saw that by advocating such a program he would trap the aristocrats in a pincer movement, between his soldiers encamped beyond the walls of Rome and the common people on the city’s streets. Hortensius, Catulus, Metellus, and the rest would have no choice but to concede both Pompey’s consulship and the tribunes’ restoration, or risk annihilation. And once they did, Pompey could send his army home, and if necessary rule by circumventing the Senate and appealing directly to the people. He would be unassailable. It was, as Cicero described it to me, a brilliant stroke, and he had seen it in that flash of insight as he sat on Palicanus’s couch.
“What exactly would be in it for me?” asked Cicero.
“A reprieve for your client.”
“And nothing else?”
“That would depend on how good you were. I cannot make specific promises. That will have to wait until Pompey himself gets back.”
“That is a rather weak offer, if I may say so, my dear Palicanus.”
“Well, you are in a rather weak position, if I may say so, my dear Cicero.”
Cicero stood. I could see he was put out. “I can always walk away,” he said.
“And leave your client to die in agony on one of Verres’s crosses?” Palicanus also stood. “I doubt it, Cicero. I doubt you are that hard.” He took us out then, past Pompey as Jupiter, past Pompey as Alexander. “I shall see you and your client at the basilica tomorrow morning,” he said, shaking hands with Cicero on the doorstep. “After that you will be in our debt, and we shall be watching.” The door closed with a confident slam.
Cicero turned on his heel and stepped into the street. “If that is the kind of art he puts on public display,” he said, “what do you suppose he keeps in the latrine? And do not warn me to guard my tongue, Tiro, because I do not care who hears it.”
He walked on ahead of me through the city gate, his hands clasped behind his back, his head hunched forward, brooding. Of course, Palicanus was right. He had no choice. He could not abandon his client. But I am sure he must have been weighing the political risks of moving beyond a simple appeal to the tribunes to a full-blooded campaign for their restoration. It would cost him the support of the moderates, such as Servius.
“Well,” he said with a wry smile when we reached his house, “I wanted to get into a fight, and it seems I have succeeded.”
He asked Eros, the steward, where Terentia was, and looked relieved when he learned she was still in her room. At least that saved him from having to tell her the news for a few more hours. We went into his study, and he had just started dictating to me his speech to the tribunes-“Gentlemen, it is an honor to stand before you for the first time”-when we heard shouts and a thump from the entrance. Cicero, who always liked to think on his feet and was pacing around, ran to find out what was happening. I hurried after him. Six rough-looking fellows were crowded in the vestibule, all wielding sticks. Eros was rolling on the ground, clutching his stomach, with blood pouring from a split lip. A seventh stranger, armed with an official-looking document, stepped up to Cicero and announced that he had the authority to search the house.
“The authority of whom?” Cicero was calm-calmer than I would have been in his shoes.
“Gaius Verres, pro-praetor of Sicily, issued this warrant in Syracuse on the first day of December.” He held it up before Cicero ’s face for an insultingly short time. “I am searching for the traitor Sthenius.”