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. Picking up where he left off in Imperium, the first instalment of his trilogy, Harris gives us a Cicero who has just won election to the consulship, the Republic’s supreme magistracy. Right from the very first sentence, we are plunged into a world of menace and violence: Cicero’s year-long tenure is marked by conspiracy, counter-conspiracy, and ultimately, as it reaches its wintry climax, state-sanctioned bloodshed. The second half of the novel, which traces the repercussions of the actions taken by Cicero during his consulship to preserve the Republic, cranks up the action to even more spectacular effect. Incest, cross-dressing and gangsterism: all serve to season the escalating tension, as Cicero struggles with increasing desperation not to be swept to a ruin as devastating as his consulship had previously been glorious.
‘There are no lasting victories in politics,’ Tiro observes balefully at one point, ‘there is only the remorseless grinding forward of events.’ Remorseless it may be; but it is also, as one would expect of Harris, thrillingly paced and narrated. The excitements of a classic thriller, however, are almost the least of the novel’s virtues: virtues which derive, in large part, from Cicero himself. What grips most about Lustrum is the seriousness with which the political issues at stake are taken, and the vividness of the characterisation: both of which, in large part, reflect the closeness of Harris’s reading of his hero’s speeches and correspondence. The hilarious portrait of Pompey owes everthing to the scabrousness of Cicero’s own pen; the terrifying portrait of Caesar, cool, feline, and devastatingly immoral, is powerfully informed by the sense of horror felt by the ever constitutionally-minded Cicero at the threat posed to the Republic by the power-hunger of the future dictator. Here, one feels, Harris is consciously exploring the prehistory of the horrors that provided the backdrop to Fatherland and Archangel. Ancient history it may be; but not merely ancient history.
Seen in that light, the vain, tremulous and snobbish figure of Cicero himself does indeed end up attaining what is evidently Harris’s ambition for him: a quality of authentic heroism. ‘Cedant arma togae’ (Give peace a chance): Cicero’s achievements are hardly those of a Pompey or a Caesar, of a warlord prepared to slaughter thousands upon thousands in the cause of boosting his own career, but rather of a man who vomits with terror before giving a speech, and who counts as his chiefest glory that he spared the Republic bloodshed. Wrong-headed though he often is, yet it is hard not to share in the respect felt by Tiro for ‘that quality I admired the most about him — his reluctant, nervous resolution in the end to do the right thing’.
Against that, Antony, whom we meet fleetingly as a pimply and thuggish teenager, has nothing attractive to put into the balance. By the end of the novel, he has joined a paramilitary gang, shouting menaces at the Senate House: the equivalent of the Brownshirts, perhaps, who so alarmed the respectable bourgeois of Munich. Finishing Harris’s thrilling and thought-provoking novel, it is hard not to mutter, ‘Cicero was worth twenty hundred of you, you bastard.’
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