Imperium

Imperium Read Free

Book: Imperium Read Free
Author: Robert Harris
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mortgaged. He faced, therefore, the three traditional options. But making it would take too long, and stealing it would be too risky. Accordingly, soon after our return from Rhodes, he married it. Terentia was seventeen, boyishly flat-chested, with a head of short, tight, black curls. Her half sister was a vestal virgin, proof of her family’s social status. More important, she was the owner of two slum apartment blocks in Rome, some woodlands in the suburbs, and a farm; total value: one and a quarter million. (Ah, Terentia: plain, grand, and rich—what a piece of work you were! I saw her only a few months ago, being carried on an open litter along the coastal road to Naples, screeching at her bearers to make a better speed: white-haired and walnut-skinned but otherwise quite unchanged.)
    So Cicero, in due course, became a senator—in fact, he topped the poll, being generally now regarded as the second-best advocate in Rome, after Hortensius—and then was sent off for the obligatory year of government service, in his case to the province of Sicily, before being allowed to take his seat. His official title was quaestor, the most junior of the magistracies. Wives were not permitted to accompany their husbands on these tours of duty, so Terentia—I am sure to his deep relief—stayed at home. But I went with him, for by this time I had become a kind of extension of himself, to be used unthinkingly, like an extra hand or a foot. Part of the reason for my indispensability was that I had devised a method of taking down his words as fast as he could utter them. From small beginnings—I can modestly claim to be the man who invented the ampersand—my system eventually swelled to a handbook of some four thousand symbols. I found, for example, that Cicero was fond of repeating certain phrases, and these I learned to reduce to a line, or even a few dots—thus proving what most people already know, that politicians essentially say the same thing over and over again. He dictated to me from his bath and his couch, from inside swaying carriages and on country walks. He never ran short of words, and I never ran short of symbols to catch and hold them forever as they flew through the air. We were made for each other.
    But to return to Sicily. Do not be alarmed: I shall not describe our work in any detail. Like so much of politics, it was dreary even while it was happening, without revisiting it sixty-odd years later. What was memorable, and significant, was the journey home. Cicero purposely delayed this by a month, from March to April, to ensure he passed through Puteoli during the Senate recess, at exactly the moment when all the smart political set would be on the Bay of Naples, enjoying the mineral baths. I was ordered to hire the finest twelve-oared rowing boat I could find, so that he could enter the harbor in style, wearing for the first time the purple-edged toga of a senator of the Roman republic.
    For Cicero had convinced himself that he had been such a great success in Sicily, he must be the center of all attention back in Rome. In a hundred stifling market squares, in the shade of a thousand dusty, wasp-infested Sicilian plane trees, he had dispensed Rome’s justice, impartially and with dignity. He had purchased a record amount of grain to feed the electors back in the capital, and had dispatched it at a record cheap price. His speeches at government ceremonies had been masterpieces of tact. He had even feigned interest in the conversation of the locals. He knew he had done well, and in a stream of official reports to the Senate he boasted of his achievements. I must confess that occasionally I toned these down before I gave them to the official messenger, and tried to hint to him that perhaps Sicily was not entirely the center of the world. He took no notice.
    I can see him now, standing in the prow, straining his eyes at Puteoli’s quayside, as we returned to Italy. What was he expecting? I wonder. A band to pipe him

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