“I know several men with great legal expertise who live in Sicily -one, indeed, in Syracuse. I shall write to him today and urge him, as a particular favor to me, to accept your case. I shall even give him my opinion as to what he should do. He should apply to the court to have the forthcoming prosecution declared invalid, on the grounds that you are not present to answer. If that fails, and Verres goes ahead, your advocate should come to Rome and argue that the conviction is unsound.”
But the Sicilian was shaking his head. “If it was just a lawyer in Syracuse I needed, senator, I would not have come all the way to Rome.”
I could see Cicero did not like where this was leading. Such a case could tie up his practice for days, and Sicilians, as I had reminded him, did not have votes. Pro bono indeed!
“Listen,” he said reassuringly, “your case is strong. Verres is obviously corrupt. He abuses hospitality. He steals. He brings false charges. He plots judicial murder. His position is indefensible. It can easily be handled by an advocate in Syracuse -really, I promise you. Now, if you will excuse me, I have many clients to see, and I am due in court in less than an hour.”
He nodded to me, and I stepped forward, putting a hand on Sthenius’s arm to guide him out. The Sicilian shook it off. “But I need you,” he persisted.
“Why?”
“Because my only hope of justice lies here, not in Sicily, where Verres controls the courts. And everyone here tells me Marcus Cicero is the second-best lawyer in Rome.”
“Do they indeed?” Cicero ’s tone took on an edge of sarcasm: he hated that epithet. “Well then, why settle for second best? Why not go straight to Hortensius?”
“I thought of that,” said his visitor, artlessly, “but he turned me down. He is representing Verres.”
I SHOWED THE SICILIAN out and returned to find Cicero alone in his study, tilted back in his chair, tossing the leather ball from one hand to the other. Legal textbooks cluttered his desk. Precedents in Pleading by Hostilius was one which he had open; Manilius’s Conditions of Sale was another.
“Do you remember that red-haired drunk on the quayside at Puteoli, the day we came back from Sicily? ‘Ooooh! My good fellow! He’s returning from his province…’”
I nodded.
“That was Verres.” The ball went back and forth, back and forth. “The fellow gives corruption a bad name.”
“I am surprised at Hortensius for getting involved with him.”
“Are you? I am not.” He stopped tossing the ball and contemplated it on his outstretched palm. “The Dancing Master and the Boar…” He brooded for a while. “A man in my position would have to be mad to tangle with Hortensius and Verres combined, and all for the sake of some Sicilian who is not even a Roman citizen.”
“True.”
“True,” he repeated, although there was an odd hesitancy in the way he said it which sometimes makes me wonder if he had not just then glimpsed the whole thing-the whole extraordinary set of possibilities and consequences, laid out like a mosaic in his mind. But if he had, I never knew, for at that moment his daughter, Tullia, ran in, still wearing her nightdress, with some childish drawing to show him, and suddenly his attention switched entirely onto her-scooping her up and settling her on his knee. “Did you do this? Did you really do this all by yourself…?”
I left him to it and slipped away, back into the tablinum, to announce that we were running late and that the senator was about to leave for court. Sthenius was still moping around and asked me when he could expect an answer, to which I could only reply that he would have to fall in with the rest. Soon after that, Cicero himself appeared, hand in hand with Tullia, nodding good morning to everyone, greeting each by name (“the first rule in politics, Tiro: never forget a face”). He was beautifully turned out, as always, his hair pomaded and slicked back, his skin scented, his toga freshly laundered, his red leather shoes spotless and shiny, his face bronzed by years of pleading in the open air; groomed, lean, fit: he glowed. They followed him into the vestibule, where he hoisted the beaming little girl into the air, showed her off to the assembled company, then turned her face to his and gave her a resounding kiss on the lips. There was a drawn-out “Ahh!” and some isolated applause. It was not wholly put on for show-he would have done it even if no one had been present, for he loved his darling Tulliola more than he ever loved anyone in his entire life-but he knew the Roman electorate were a sentimental lot, and that if word of his paternal devotion got around, it would do him no harm.
And so we stepped out into the bright promise of that November morning, into the gathering noise of the city-Cicero striding ahead, with me beside him, notebook at the ready; Sositheus and Laurea tucked in behind, carrying the document cases with the evidence he needed for his appearance in court; and, on either side of us, trying to catch the senator’s attention, yet proud merely to be in his aura, two dozen assorted petitioners and hangers-on, including Sthenius-down the hill from the leafy, respectable heights of the Esquiline and into the stink and smoke and racket of Subura. Here the height of the tenements shut out the sunlight and the packed crowds squeezed our phalanx of supporters into a broken thread that still somehow determinedly trailed along after us. Cicero was a well-known figure here, a hero to the shopkeepers and merchants whose interests he had represented, and who had watched him walking past for years. Without once breaking his rapid step, his sharp blue eyes registered every bowed head, every wave of greeting, and it was rare for me to need to whisper a name in his ear, for he knew his voters far better than I.
I do not know how it is these days, but at that time there were six or seven law courts in almost permanent session, each set up in a different part of the Forum, so that at the hour when they all opened one could barely move for advocates and legal officers hurrying about. To make it worse, the praetor of each court would always arrive from his house preceded by half a dozen lictors to clear his path, and, as luck would have it, our little entourage debouched into the Forum at exactly the moment when Hortensius-at this time a praetor himself-went parading by toward the Senate House. We were all held back by his guards to let the great man pass, and to this day I do not think it was his intention to cut Cicero dead, for he was a man of refined, almost effeminate, manners: he simply did not see him. But the consequence was that the so-called second-best advocate in Rome, his cordial greeting dead on his lips, was left staring at the retreating back of the so-called best with such an intensity of loathing I was surprised Hortensius did not start rubbing at the skin between his shoulder blades.
Our business that morning was in the central criminal court, convened outside the Basilica Aemilia, where the fifteen-year-old Caius Popillius Laenas was on trial accused of stabbing his father to death through the eye with a metal stylus. I could already see a big crowd waiting around the tribunal. Cicero was due to make the closing speech for the defense. That was attraction enough. But if he failed to convince the jury, Popillius, as a convicted parricide, would be stripped naked, flayed till he bled, then sewn up in a sack together with a dog, a cock, and a viper, and thrown into the River Tiber. There was a whiff of bloodlust in the air, and as the onlookers parted to let us through, I caught a glimpse of Popillius himself, a notoriously violent youth, whose eyebrows merged to form a continuous thick black line. He was seated next to his uncle on the bench reserved for the defense, scowling defiantly, spitting at anyone who came too close. “We really must secure an acquittal,” observed Cicero, “if only to spare the dog, the cock, and the viper the ordeal of being sewn up in a sack with Popillius.” He always maintained that it was no business of the advocate to worry whether his client was guilty or not: that was for the court. He undertook only to do his best, and in return the Popillii Laeni, who could boast four consuls in their family tree, would be obliged to support him whenever he ran for office.
Sositheus and Laurea set down the boxes of evidence, and I was just bending to unfasten the nearest when Cicero told me to leave it. “Save yourself the trouble,” he said, tapping the side of his head. “I have the speech up here well enough.” He bowed politely to his client-“Good day, Popillius: we shall soon have this settled, I trust”-then continued to me, in a quieter voice: “I have a more important task for you. Give me your notebook. I want you to go to the Senate House, find the chief clerk, and see if there is a chance of having this put on the order paper this afternoon.” He was writing rapidly. “Say nothing to our Sicilian friend just yet. There is great danger. We must take this carefully, one step at a time.”