Robert Harris combines historical fact and the drama of the day in his second novel featuring the peerless speaker and Roman statesman Cicero. Lustrum tells the story of his term as consul of the republic
Lustrum by Robert Harris (Hutchinson)
Lustrum is the third of Robert Harris’s Roman novels, and the second to have as its protagonist the great statesman, orator and writer Marcus Tullius Cicero.
Named “Father of the Nation” after he uncovered and crushed the Catiline conspiracy (essentially a coup attempt) in 63BC, he was for a time the most revered elected official in the late republic; he tangled with such colossal figures as Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar, as Lustrum and its predecessor, Imperium, relate.
A staunch defender of the republican ideal, which he believed was built on the compact of senate and people, Cicero lived just long enough to see it all but shattered, first by Caesar (whom he outlived by less than two years), then by Caesar’s successor, Octavian (later Augustus), who would go on meticulously to dismantle the republic and set up the hereditary principate that would characterise Rome until its final days as the world’s greatest empire for thousands of years.
Cicero was undoubtedly a great politician in a very difficult time, but his largest legacy to Western civilisation is in the realm of words — the words that Cicero said were his strongest, sometimes his only, weapons. Combining the subtleties of Greek thought and the architectural solidity of Latin, he forged a new kind of language in the furnace of legal and political battles.
Apart from his public orations (about 60 survive), he wrote on everything from law, politics and history to grief and the gods. He also wrote poetry (including a self-aggrandising autobiography in verse), which, despite its flaws, set new technical standards for the “Golden Age” Latin poets who came after him. His writing was hugely influential on church fathers such as Augustine 400 years later and his style was the template for the great writers of the Renaissance. A millennium and a half after he died, Voltaire said: “Cicero taught us how to think.”
Imperium tells the story of Cicero’s rise to power from relatively humble origins. He was said to have been descended from chickpea farmers, hence his name — “chickpea” in Latin. But he also took advantage of this onomastic curiosity, handing out chickpeas to potential voters to help them remember his name. As a “new man” — one with no distinguished genealogy — he was first seen as a populist and was opposed by the old aristocratic families and entrenched oligarchs; later he was forced by the Realpolitik of the day into various alliances with the upper classes.
Imperium ends with Cicero’s achieving the consulship, at the time the highest political office in Rome — technically, at least, for its reach was limited by the unofficial power that inevitably accrued to successful generals such as Pompey and Caesar and to plutocrats such as Crassus. Lustrum picks up at the point Cicero takes up his difficult and controversial consulship, but lasts beyond its one-year duration to cover a full “lustrum”, or cycle of five years.
The manipulations that underlay the late republic’s political system are made clear in these novels, shown in the way Cicero had to do some dirty deals to keep his footing and to protect Rome from the new breed of would-be dictators such as Caesar. That he ultimately failed was more because of the structural contradictions of the system and the gaps taken by the ruthless and power-hungry than his incapacities.
Not that Cicero himself was unambitious — or that he didn’t blur his own interests with those of the state. But that was also part of the system and Cicero was at least a staunch republican. Reading these novels inevitably makes one think about the politics of today: the conflict between the rule of law and the sleight of hand of “political solutions”; the tense relation between state policy and personal ambition; the interaction of legality, military power and populism. (As epigraph to Lustrum, Harris quotes JG Farrell: “We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us … but what if we’re only an afterglow of them?”)
Like Imperium, Lustrum is told in the voice of Cicero’s faithful slave and secretary, Tiro, who — historical fact — invented the first comprehensive form of shorthand. This not only made a difference in public life, where speakers now had to watch their words, but ensured that we have many of Cicero’s utterances verbatim. Obviously Harris has made extensive use of such documentation, so he has less need to put words in Cicero’s mouth than he would had he tackled almost any other figure from ancient history.
The result is a certain vividness of speech, including some of Cicero’s famous witticisms, which counteracts Harris’s often rather anonymously straightforward prose. Harris is very good with the rapid succession of events, which in turn counterbalances the need to fill in historical background at certain points — passages that have a rather fusty air. He does not linger over description, rendering some scenes a little bland, but he keeps the narrative swift and is always readable.
Cicero also features in Steven Saylor’s excellent series of Roma Sub Rosa detective novels, as does the slave Tiro (he’s more naive there than he is in Harris). In the first Saylor novel, Roman Blood, his Gordianus the Finder solves the mystery behind one of Cicero’s early defence cases, an apparent patricide. But such a storyline is obviously an invention, whereas Harris is concerned to shape his narrative to historical fact and make Cicero plausible and interesting, which he most certainly does.
Yet historical fact also means Harris has to end Lustrum on a rather depressing note, making it feel anticlimactic.
Presumably he intends to complete Cicero’s story in the third volume of what will then be a trilogy and there are indeed many exciting events still to cover — as well as the problem that a third Cicero novel will have to end on an even more depressing note than Lustrum does. O tempora, o mores.