What Book to Read?

This is the second in Harris’s experiment in biographical fiction – the life Tiro might have written of his master, Cicero. It’s not imperative to have read the first volume, Imperium, but I think it helps if you have.

Harris says in the introduction that ‘This is a novel, not a work of history: wherever the demands of the two have clashed, I have unhesitatingly given in to the former.’ This may be true – I don’t know enough about Cicero or Roman politics to tell. But even broadly following the events of Cicero’s life leads the novelist into some trouble. The climax of the story is over less than two thirds of the way through, and after that, it’s really down hill all the way for Cicero. Harris has a hard time making the last section of the story gripping – though he has done his best to give it drama and (possibly fictional) coherence.

The book is in two parts, the first, covering 63BC, the year of Cicero’s consulship, and the second the following four years 62-58BC, a lustrum being (among other things) a five year period. Cicero, having clawed his way to the top, finds that his problems have if anything increased, and having no real faction behind him, he needs his wits – and luck – more than ever. Once his year as consul is over, decisions he made in office come back to haunt him, though given the ambition, venality and double dealing of his colleagues, it is hard to see he could have acted differently. Harris concentrates at the personal level on friendships and betrayals, but underlying them the fragile nature of the Republic is evident, with the law and the constitution at the mercy of rampant bribery and corruption, urban violence and threats of armed intervention. The social and economic conditions that allow the voice of the people to become the howl of the mob are there if you are alert to them.

The narrator Tiro is by this time rather more cynical about politics in general; he notes, for example, that two qualities which often go together in politics are ‘great ambition and boundless stupidity’. He is in part reflecting the growing disenchantment of Cicero, who wonders why ‘some ineradicable impulse of the human mind always impels us to foul our own nest?’ But he’s more cynical about Cicero too, noting that he ‘looked like nothing so much as a crafty carpet salesman’ as he set about ‘squaring the right senators’. He even writes that after his consulship, Cicero became ‘a bore’. ‘I fear’, he notes ‘there is in all men who achieve their life’s ambition only a narrow line between dignity and vanity, confidence and delusion, glory and self-destruction.’ When Cicero, like everyone else, does deal and favours, changes allegiances and makes alliances of convenience, Tiro notes dryly that politics ‘demands the most extraordinary reserves of self discipline, a quality that the naive often mistake for hypocrisy’. But Cicero earns Tiro’s admiration by resisting the temptation to be bought off, by ‘his reluctant, nervous resolution in the end to do the right thing’. This may, of course, be the novelist rather than the historian speaking.

Harris writes in direct, modern prose. How does Celer conveniently know there are (nonexistent) enemies coming when no one else can see them? ‘Because I’m a fucking auger, that’s why’. Cicero almost never uses bad language, but after ‘many mutual protestations of friendship, trust and regard’ with one of his enemies, he is driven to exclaim: ’What a complete and utter lying shit that bastard is!’ Cicero’s actual words are again used to great advantage.

As with the earlier book, Harris almost certainly expects readers to make comparisons with modern day politics, and it is impossible to read Lustrum without thinking of the machinations surrounding political decision making today. That alone makes it worth reading. Have a look at this review.