RUTHFULLY YOURS

Off With His Head Cicero saved the republic from conspirators in 63 B.C., only to lose his own life (and hands) as Rome slid into civil war and dictatorship. By Maxwell Carter

Posted By Ruth King on January 6th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/off-with-his-head-1452040077

‘The history of the world,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1841, “is but the biography of great men.” Libertarian polymath Herbert Spencer countered 30 years later: “Before [the great man] can remake his society, his society must make him.” With whom does the novelist Robert Harris’s Cicero Trilogy, which began with “Imperium” (2006) and “Conspirata” (2009) and ends now with “Dictator,” side? Cicero’s lifetime (106-43 B.C.) saw the ambitions, caprices and convictions of the Roman Republic’s leading figures (Marius, Sulla, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Cato, Octavian, Antony and Cicero himself) determine the fate of Western civilization. Were these truly great men or the bitter fruits of an intrinsically corrupting political system?

“Imperium” traces Cicero’s rapid ascent; “Conspirata,” the career-defining stand against Catiline; “Dictator,” his (and the Republic’s) downfall. The middle narrative has hooked many schoolboys, myself included. The year he served as consul (63 B.C.), Cicero inveighed against Catiline, an aristocratic malcontent, gleefully detailing his alleged plot to overthrow the state. Having forced Catiline from Rome and secured Cato’s decisive backing, Cicero pushed through the execution of five conspirators without trial. (Catiline offered battle in 62 B.C., dying, according to the historian Sallust, with conspicuous bravery.) Where Cicero’s consulship was compact and—as he would have it—morally unambiguous, the events that led to his proscription were drawn out and often bewildering.

The challenge for Mr. Harris of maintaining dramatic momentum through 15 years of shifting loyalties and shabby compromises is considerable. Yet as anyone who has read his previous novels, including the riveting alternate history “Fatherland” (1992) and the political thriller “The Ghost” (2007), knows, he is incapable of writing an unenjoyable book.

Told from the perspective of Cicero’s slave-amanuensis, Tiro, who reputedly invented shorthand, “Dictator” picks up the thread in 58 B.C., when fallout from the unlawful Catilinarian executions drove Cicero into exile. Tiro recounts his master’s role in the developments of the first and second triumvirates—the alliances whereby Caesar, Pompey and Crassus and, later, Octavian, Antony and Lepidus divvied up the empire—and ensuing civil wars. Tiro’s viewpoint is partisan but not unquestioning. In “Dictator,” Cicero, whom Tiro served off and on after his manumission in 53 B.C., can be weak and monstrously egotistical.

ENLARGE

Mr. Harris’s take on the principals will be mostly familiar. Pompey, however affable, is overmatched, being “idle, somnolent [and] uxorious” by nature. Crassus, Rome’s wealthiest citizen, is mean and grasping. Lepidus, the junior member of the second triumvirate, or Peter Lawford to Octavian’s Sinatra and Antony’s Dean Martin, is “a sort of genius of mediocrity.”

Historical fiction compels the author to make choices. The Caesar of “Dictator” has flesh, blood—everything but hair, per Suetonius’s remark that he “always [kept] his head carefully trimmed and shaved; and has been accused of having certain other hairy parts of his body depilated with tweezers.” It seems beside the point to argue the rumor’s doubtful merits when Mr. Harris deploys it to such fine effect in the “disconcerting” form that confronts Tiro at Mutina (modern-day Modena): “His body was glistening, well muscled, and plucked entirely hairless in every respect . . . [an] affectation which had the effect of emphasising his numerous scars and bruises, presumably picked up on the battlefield.”

The women fare less well. Cicero’s first wife is an exasperated shrew: “ ‘Books,’ said Terentia with great contempt. ‘Where is the money in books?’ ” Cleopatra is the eastern “slattern” of Augustan propaganda. Only Tullia, Cicero’s beloved daughter, is represented in the round. On these and other bits, Mr. Harris is faithful to his sources, which include Christian Meier’s scholarly biography “Caesar” (1982); Anthony Everitt’s conventional life “Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician” (2001); and Tom Holland’s superb history “Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic” (2003).

Occasionally, the Loeb Classical Library translations that Mr. Harris employs don’t quite land. For instance, Cicero’s tirade against Clodius, an Oswald Mosley-ish rabble-rouser who razed Cicero’s house on Rome’s Palatine Hill and attempted to have the site consecrated in order to prevent its rebuilding: “Oh, you abominable plague spot of the state.” This, from antiquity’s most accomplished speaker?

Nonetheless, Mr. Harris captures the senselessness of triumviral intrigue magnificently, not relenting as the players meet their gruesome ends. Crassus was slain at Carrhae in 53 B.C., Pompey on an Egyptian beachhead in 48 B.C., following his defeat at Pharsalus. Both were posthumously decapitated. Cato, having unsuccessfully attempted to take his life, tore the stitches from his wound, pulled out his intestines and bled himself to death at Utica in 46 B.C. Caesar was savagely murdered on the senate floor in 44 B.C. Cicero was proscribed by Octavian and Antony in 43 B.C., losing his hands and head soon after. Antony killed himself in 30 B.C., one year after the Battle of Actium.

Only Octavian (known as Augustus from 27 B.C.) survived, though the same bloody, tumultuous patterns resumed in succeeding generations, with increasingly unhinged Caesars assuming dictatorial powers. And for what? The chasm between Cicero’s belief that politics were man’s highest calling and the sordid on-the-spot reality of the late Republic will affect anyone who has been watching the U.S. presidential debates.

Does Mr. Harris see any light in the period’s “vast and darkening forest”? To the last, Cicero strove for immortality. Nearly 2,000 years on, Carlyle would promise that “no great man lives in vain.” Mr. Harris’s conclusion, as voiced by Tiro, is distinctly more restrained: “All that will remain of us is what is written down.”

Mr. Carter is an M.B.A. candidate at Columbia Business School.

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