Give peace a chance

Time was, back in the Renaissance, when barely a book would be published which did not feature some lavish hero-worship of Cicero. Machiavelli, Erasmus, Thomas More: they all regularly name-checked ‘Tully’. The same could hardly be said of authors today. Even those who do deign to mention Rome’s greatest orator have rarely tended to feel much admiration for him. Typical was Kingsley Amis. In Take a Girl Like You, the raffish schoolteacher, Patrick Standish, finds himself drilling his pupils in the Phillipics, the speeches which Cicero, with immense courage, delivered against Mark Antony, at the eventual cost of his life. To Standish, however, they convey, not the heroism of an active and dutiful citizenship, but only ‘boredom’ and ‘nasty silliness’. Drifting off into a daydream, he hails Cicero’s shade. ‘Antony was worth twenty of you, you bastard.’

Robert Harris would passionately disagree. His new novel, Lustrum, is the second in a trilogy of books devoted to Cicero’s career — and it is a reasonable bet that Cicero himself, who was always looking for people to write up his achievements, would have enjoyed it very much. No man is a hero to his valet, it has been said; but in Lustrum, Cicero is most definitely a hero to his secretary. Harris’s mouthpiece is Tiro, the slave and amaneunsis of the great orator, and a type that will be familiar to readers of Enigma or The Ghost: the writer who is both an outsider and an intimate of the dangerous and the powerful. Tiro is always there at Cicero’s side, as invisible as he is observant: a man at the very heart of the storm.

And what a storm it is. The five-year period covered by the novel, the ‘lustrum’ of its title, has some claim to be the most thrilling in the entire span of classical history.