The Dictator (21 page)

His bodyguards spurred their horses and surrounded him. Our convoy halted. I noticed we were close to a tavern—the same place, by bizarre coincidence, where we had stopped to pick up our horses on the night Cicero fled Rome. Milo jumped out of his carriage with his sword drawn and walked down the side of the road to see what was going on. All along the column men were dismounting. By now Clodius’s attendants had pulled the javelin from his ribs and were helping him towards the tavern. He was sufficiently conscious to be able to half walk supported on the arms of his companions. Meanwhile small groups of men were fighting hand-to-hand along the road and in the fields next to it—desperate, hacking struggles, some on horseback, some on foot—such a confused melee that I could not at first distinguish our men from theirs. But gradually I perceived that ours were winning, for we outnumbered them three to one. I saw several of Clodius’s men, despairing of victory, fling up their arms in surrender or fall to their knees. Others simply threw aside their weapons, turned and ran, or galloped off. No one bothered to pursue them.

The struggle over, Milo, with his arms akimbo, surveyed the carnage, then gestured to Birria and a few others to go and fetch Clodius from the tavern.

I got down from my horse. I had no idea what would happen next. I walked towards Milo. Just then there was a shout, or rather a scream from the tavern, and Clodius was carried out by four gladiators, each holding an arm or a leg. Milo had a calculation to make: would he let Clodius live and take the consequences, or kill him and have done with it? They laid him on the road at his feet. Milo took a javelin from the man standing next to him, checked the tip with his thumb, placed it in the centre of Clodius’s chest, grasped the shaft and plunged it in with all his force. Clodius’s mouth fountained blood. After that, they all took turns in slashing at the corpse, but I could not bring myself to watch.

—

I was no horseman, yet I believe I galloped back to Rome at a speed a cavalryman would have been proud of. I urged my exhausted mount up to the Palatine, and for the second time in half a year I found myself blurting out to Cicero the news that one of his enemies—the greatest of them all—was dead.

He gave no sign of pleasure. He was ice-cold, calculating. He drummed his fingers and then said, “Where is Milo now?”

“I believe he carried on to Lanuvium for the ceremony as planned.”

“And Clodius’s body?”

“The last time I saw it, it was still by the roadside.”

“Milo made no attempt to conceal it?”

“No, he said there was no point—there were too many witnesses.”

“That’s probably true—it’s a busy spot. Were
you
seen by many people?”

“I don’t think so. Clodius recognised me, but not the others.”

He gave a hard smile. “Clodius at least we no longer have to worry about.” He thought it over and nodded. “That’s good—good that you weren’t seen. I think it would be better if we agree you were here with me all afternoon.”

“Why?”

“It wouldn’t be wise for me to be implicated in this business, even indirectly.”

“You anticipate this will cause you trouble?”

“Oh, I am quite certain of it. The question is: how much?”

We settled down to wait for word of what had happened to reach Rome. In the fading light of the afternoon I found it difficult to banish from my mind the image of Clodius dying like a stuck pig. I had witnessed death before, but that was the first time I had seen a man killed in front of me.

About an hour before darkness, a woman’s piercing shriek arose from some place nearby. It went on and on—a frightening, other-worldly ululation.

Cicero walked over and opened the door to his terrace and listened. “The Lady Fulvia,” he said judiciously, “if I am not mistaken, has just learned she is a widow.”

He sent a servant up the hill to find out what was happening. The man came back and reported that Clodius’s body had arrived in Rome on a litter belonging to the senator Sextus Tedius, who had discovered it beside the Via Appia. The corpse had been conveyed to Clodius’s house and received by Fulvia. In her grief and fury she had stripped it naked, apart from its sandals, propped it up, and was now sitting beside it in the street beneath flaming torches, crying out that everyone should come and see what had been done to her husband.

Cicero said, “She means to whip up the mob.” He ordered the guard on the house to be doubled overnight.

The following morning it was judged far too dangerous for Cicero or any other prominent senator to venture out. We watched from the terrace as a huge crowd led by Fulvia escorted the body on its bier down to the Forum and placed it on the rostra, and then we listened as Clodius’s lieutenants worked the plebs up to a fury. At the end of the bitter eulogies the mourners broke into the Senate house and carried Clodius’s corpse inside, then went back across the Forum to the Argiletum and started dragging out benches and tables and chests full of volumes from the booksellers’ shops. To our horror we realised they were constructing a funeral pyre.

Around midday, smoke began to issue from the small windows set high up in the walls of the Senate chamber. Sheets of orange flame and scraps of burning books whirled against the sky, while from inside came a terrifying and uninterrupted roar, as if a vent had been opened to the underworld. An hour later the roof split from end to end; thousands of tiles and spars of fiery timber plunged soundlessly from view; there was a strange interval of silence; and then the noise of the crash passed over us like a hot wind.

The fountain of smoke and dust and ashes lingered above the centre of Rome in a pall for several days, until the rain washed it away; and in this manner the last mortal vestiges of Publius Clodius Pulcher and the ancient assembly building he had reviled all his life vanished together from the face of the earth.

The destruction of the Senate house had a powerful effect on Cicero. He went down the next day under heavy guard, grasping a stout stick, and clambered around the smouldering ruins. The blackened brickwork was still warm to the touch. The wind howled through the gaping holes, and from time to time from above our heads some piece of debris would dislodge and fall with a soft thump into the drifts of ash. Six hundred years that temple had stood there—a witness to the greatest moments in Rome’s existence, and his own—and now it had gone in less than half an afternoon.

Everyone, including Cicero, assumed that Milo would now go into voluntary exile, or at any rate that he would keep well clear of Rome. But that was to underrate the bravado of the man. Far from lying low, he put himself at the head of an even larger force of gladiators and re-entered the city that same afternoon, barricading himself in his house. The grieving supporters of Clodius immediately laid siege to it. But they were easily driven off by arrows. They then went in search of a less formidable fortress on which to vent their anger, and found one in the home of the interrex, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.

Although he was only thirty-six, and not yet even praetor, Lepidus was a member of the College of Pontiffs, and in the absence of any elected consuls that was enough to make him temporary chief magistrate. The damage inflicted on his property was slight—his wife’s nuptial couch was broken up and her weaving destroyed—but the assault created a sense of outrage and panic in the Senate.

Lepidus, ever conscious of his dignity, played up the incident for all it was worth; indeed, this was the beginning of his rise to prominence. (Cicero used to say that Lepidus was the luckiest politician he knew: every time he made a mess of something he was showered with rewards—“He is a sort of genius of mediocrity.”) The young interrex summoned a meeting of the Senate to be held outside the city walls, on the Field of Mars, in Pompey’s new theatre—a large chamber within the complex had to be specially consecrated for the occasion—and he invited Pompey to attend.

This was three days after the burning of the Senate house.

Pompey duly obliged, sweeping down the hill from his palace surrounded by two hundred legionaries in full battle array—an entirely legal display of force, as he held military imperium as governor of Spain. But still—nothing like it had been seen since the days of Sulla. He left them picketed in the portico of the theatre while he went inside and listened modestly as his supporters demanded that he be appointed dictator for six months so that he could take the steps necessary to restore order: call up all the military reservists in Italy, put Rome under curfew, suspend the imminent elections and bring the killers of Clodius to justice.

Cicero saw the danger at once and rose to speak. “No one has greater respect for Pompey than I,” he began, “but we must be careful not to do our enemies’ work for them. To argue that to preserve our freedoms we must suspend our freedoms, that to safeguard elections we must cancel elections, that to defend ourselves from dictatorship we must appoint a dictator—what logic is this? We have elections scheduled. We have candidates on the ballot. The canvass is completed. The best way for us to show confidence in our institutions is to allow them to function normally and to elect our magistrates as our ancestors taught us in the olden time.”

Pompey nodded, as if he could not have put the issue better himself, and at the end of the session he made an elaborate show of congratulating Cicero on his staunch defence of the constitution. But Cicero was not fooled. He saw exactly what Pompey was up to.

That night, Milo came to visit him for a council of war. Also present was Caelius Rufus, now a tribune and a long-term supporter and close friend of Milo. From down in the valley came the sound of scuffling, of dogs barking and occasional shouts and cries. A group of men carrying flaming torches ran across the Forum. But most citizens were too afraid to venture out and stayed in their houses behind barred doors. Milo seemed to think he had the election in the bag. After all, he had rid the state of Clodius, for which most decent people were grateful, and the burning-down of the Senate house and the violence in the streets had appalled the majority of voters.

Cicero said, “I agree that if there were a ballot tomorrow, Milo, you would probably win it. But there is not going to be a ballot. Pompey will see to that.”

“How can he?”

“He’ll use the campaign as a cover to manufacture an atmosphere of hysteria so that the Senate and the people will be forced to turn to him to abort the elections.”

Rufus said, “He’s bluffing. He doesn’t have the power.”

“Oh, he has the power, and he knows it. All he has to do is sit tight and wait for things to come to him.”

Milo and Rufus both dismissed Cicero’s fears as the nervousness of an old man, and the next day resumed campaigning with fresh energy. But Cicero was right: the mood in Rome was too jittery for normal electioneering and Milo walked straight into Pompey’s trap. One morning soon after their meeting Cicero received an urgent summons to see Pompey. He found the great man’s house ringed with soldiers and Pompey himself in an elevated part of the garden with double his normal bodyguard. Seated in the portico with him was a man Pompey introduced as Licinius, the owner of an eating house near the Circus Maximus. Pompey ordered Licinius to repeat his tale to Cicero, and Licinius duly described how he had overheard a group of Milo’s gladiators plotting at his counter to murder Pompey, and how, when they realised he was listening, they had tried to silence him by stabbing him: as proof he showed Cicero a minor flesh wound just beneath his ribs.

Of course, as Cicero said to me afterwards, the whole story was absurd. “For a start, whoever heard of such feeble gladiators? If that kind of man wishes to silence you, you are silenced.” But it didn’t matter. The eating-house plot, as it became known, joined all the other rumours now circulating about Milo—that he had turned his house into an arsenal filled with swords, shields and javelins; that he had stocks of brands hidden throughout the city in order to burn it down; that he had shipped arms along the Tiber to his villa at Ocriculum; that the assassins who had murdered Clodius would be turned loose on his opponents in the election…

The next time the Senate met, no less a figure than Marcus Bibulus, Caesar’s former consular colleague and passionate lifelong enemy, rose to propose that Pompey should hold office by emergency decree as sole consul. This was remarkable enough; what no one had anticipated was the reaction of Cato. A hush fell over the chamber as he got to his feet. “I would not have proposed this motion myself,” he said, “but seeing as it has been laid before us, I propose we accept it as a sensible compromise. Some government is better than no government; a sole consulship is better than a dictatorship; and Pompey is more likely to rule wisely than anyone else.”

Coming from Cato, this was almost unbelievable—he had used the word “compromise” for the first time in his life—and no one looked more stunned than Pompey. Afterwards, so the story went, he invited Cato back to his house to thank him personally and to ask him in future to be his private adviser in all matters of state. “You have no need to thank me,” replied Cato, “for I only did what I believed to be in the best interests of the republic. If you wish to talk to me alone I shall certainly be at your disposal. But I shall say nothing to you in private that I wouldn’t say anywhere else, and I shall never hold my tongue in public to please you.”