The Republic Made Human

Robert Harris’s Cicero Trilogy is one of the finest works of historical fiction I have read. Not because it taught me the chronology of the late Roman Republic, which I broadly knew, but because it made me feel it.

Before reading Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator, Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Cato, Clodius, Antony and the rest already occupied their places in my understanding of Roman history. I knew their offices, alliances, wars, constitutional disputes and eventual fates. Harris somehow removes the marble from them. They cease to be names attached to events and become people one can admire, despise, forgive, mistrust and, unexpectedly, love.

The device that makes this possible is Tiro.

We see Cicero through the eyes of the man who records his words, manages his papers, accompanies him through triumph, humiliation, exile and fear, and gradually grows old beside him. It is an inspired choice. Political history is brought down from the abstraction of institutions into rooms, letters, dinners, journeys, whispered conversations and exhausted nights. Great speeches have to be drafted. Elections require calculations. Alliances involve people who dislike one another sitting together because they have no alternative. History happens while somebody is looking for a document or wondering whether a visitor at the door is a friend.

Imperium begins in a world that still feels recognisably republican.

Its great subject is Cicero’s ascent: the novus homo, lacking the ancestry, immense fortune and military glory that normally open Rome’s highest doors, attempting to reach the consulship through intellect, law, political instinct and extraordinary powers of speech.

The prosecution of Verres establishes both Cicero and the world in which he operates. Harris makes Roman law and forensic procedure genuinely exciting, because the legal contests are inseparable from questions of power. One of the most memorable passages comes when Cicero confronts the arbitrary execution of a man who claimed Roman citizenship. His outrage turns on the enormous significance contained in that simple assertion:

“You admit he said it! … the man claimed to be a Roman citizen, and you did nothing!”

The scene affected me because the words civis Romanus cease to be an academic formula. They become a claim about what Rome is supposed to mean. Citizenship is a protection against arbitrary power. Law is what separates a commonwealth from the whim of whoever happens to govern it.

And in Imperium one can still believe that.

The Republic is corrupt, certainly. Elections are manipulated, offices purchased, fortunes deployed politically, provincial government can become organised plunder, and extraordinary commands are already beginning to deform the constitutional order. Yet the machinery still functions. There are courts, elections, assemblies, magistracies and a Senate whose deliberations matter. Cicero believes that mastery of these institutions can lead him to the summit of Roman public life.

His rise therefore feels exhilarating.

But Harris has already planted the unease. Pompey’s extraordinary commands, Crassus’s money, Caesar’s almost preternatural political intelligence: each seems at first merely another element in Rome’s immense competitive energy. Gradually one senses that these men possess resources the traditional Republic was never designed to contain.

Then comes Lustrum.

If Imperium is the story of ascent, Lustrum is the book in which the ground begins to move beneath everyone’s feet.

Cicero has achieved the impossible. He is consul. For a moment he seems to stand at the summit of the Republic precisely through the republican path he had chosen. Then comes Catiline.

Harris’s treatment of the conspiracy is compelling because he refuses to make the political problem easy. Catiline is dangerous, charismatic and prepared for violence, but the question of how a republic should defend itself against men who would destroy it becomes inseparable from the question of whether it destroys itself by abandoning its own law.

The Senate’s debate over the conspirators is therefore one of the most powerful parts of the trilogy. Death is not merely a dramatic punishment. It is a constitutional decision whose consequences will follow Cicero for the rest of his life.

Even Catiline is permitted terrible dignity. Before his final battle Harris has him tell his followers:

“Men, we fight for our country, our freedom and our life.”

And suddenly even the enemy is human. That is something Harris does repeatedly and exceptionally well. Nobody remains conveniently two-dimensional for very long.

Cicero saves the state, is hailed as pater patriae, and at precisely that moment begins the sequence of decisions that will help destroy him.

This is where I began to experience the trilogy almost spatially, as though each hundred pages carried me one step farther away from a golden age.

Not a golden age in the naïve sense. Harris’s Republic was never clean or perfectly just. Its aristocracy is often vicious, its electoral politics corrupt, its empire brutal. But there remains an idea that no individual is Rome; that offices are temporary; that law survives the officeholder; that power must justify itself through institutions.

That idea grows weaker with every book.

In Lustrum, Caesar, Pompey and Crassus increasingly cease to behave like men competing within the Republic and begin to look like men dividing it between themselves. Clodius discovers how popular institutions can be converted into instruments of personal domination. Violence moves from the periphery towards the centre of politics. Constitutional forms remain everywhere, but their spirit becomes harder to locate.

Cicero’s tragedy is that he sees much of this happening and yet cannot escape it. He compromises, calculates, retreats, returns, misjudges people and occasionally behaves with magnificent courage. Harris allows him all his vanity and insecurity without making either quality ridiculous. His appetite for recognition is enormous. So is his love of the Republic. These facts are not mutually exclusive.

Then Dictator begins, and the atmosphere has changed completely.

The title itself tells us how far we have travelled.

The elections, prosecutions and senatorial manoeuvres of Imperium have given way to exile, armies, civil war, dictatorship and assassination. Politics increasingly happens not through persuasion but through the location of legions.

For me, this was the most melancholy volume.

There are still villas, books, philosophical arguments, friendships and letters. Cicero still writes. The Senate still meets. Magistrates continue to bear ancient titles. Romans continue speaking the language of the Republic.

But one increasingly feels that the world those words described has already disappeared.

Caesar is especially fascinating here because Harris makes it impossible simply to dismiss him as a crude tyrant. He is brilliant, cultivated, extraordinarily capable and frequently magnanimous. That makes the constitutional problem more disturbing, not less. The Republic does not succumb to a mediocrity. It encounters a man whose talents are so immense that ordinary institutions seem incapable of containing him.

And Cicero, deprived increasingly of meaningful political action, turns to philosophy.

I found these passages deeply moving. The politician who had spent his life trying to shape events begins instead trying to understand how one ought to live when events can no longer be controlled. Harris gives us the older Cicero reflecting that life is effectively a loan from Nature, repayable at an unknown date, and that the truly tragic man is the tyrant who has failed to understand how to live.

That movement from imperium to philosophy seems to me one of the deepest arcs of the trilogy.

The young Cicero wants power because he believes he can use it well.

The consul Cicero discovers the moral cost of exercising it.

The old Cicero discovers how little power ultimately belongs to anyone.

And then, after Caesar’s murder, one final possibility seems to open.

The Republic might return.

Of course I knew that it would not. I knew Antony. I knew Octavian. I knew the proscriptions. I knew exactly what would happen to Cicero.

Harris nevertheless made me hope.

That is the extraordinary achievement of the trilogy. Historical inevitability disappears while one is reading it. The future becomes uncertain again. Perhaps Pompey will act differently. Perhaps Cicero will make another choice. Perhaps Caesar will restrain himself. Perhaps the Senate will recover its authority. Perhaps the young Octavian really will defend the constitutional order. Perhaps one more speech, one more alliance, one more act of courage will be enough.

And with every failed possibility, Rome seems to move another pace away from something it can no longer recover.

By the end, that distance feels enormous.

The head and hands of the man whose entire power had consisted of thinking, writing and speaking are displayed on the rostra from which he had addressed the Roman people. It is difficult to imagine a more brutal image of the transformation that has taken place since Imperium. The Forum remains. The rostra remains. Rome remains.

But the political world in which Cicero believed words could govern power is gone.

Perhaps this is why the trilogy stayed with me so strongly. I did not finish it with the sensation of having read three novels about ancient Rome. I felt that I had accompanied people through the death of their political world.

And I mourned it with them.

I knew how the Roman Republic ended before I opened the first page of Imperium.

Robert Harris somehow made me wish, increasingly desperately, that history might change its mind.