There are plenty of things wrong with Dictator, the final volume of Robert Harris’s trilogy about the Roman philosopher-cum-politician Cicero. But before going through them, it is worth taking a moment to contemplate what Harris has achieved. The last words of this book make a decent epitaph for one of the great triumphs of contemporary historical literature: “All that will remain of us is what is written down.”
So much of the life of Cicero (106BC-43BC) was written down in his own hand that he is more alive, more admired, more despised, more deeply known today than possibly any other figure from classical antiquity. His squalid tergiversations, his masterly resolve, his variously storming and meandering rhetoric and his bouts of mewling sycophancy are there for all the world to see. Harris has taken all of these contradictions and made them whole in a way few Latin scholars have done. For most readers, his three novels — Dictator was preceded by Lustrum (2009) and Imperium (2006) — will constitute the definitive biography of Cicero.
The third and final of these books, covering the last 20 years of Cicero’s life and the disintegration of the 500-year-old Roman republic, is the toughest gig yet. The whole map of the Mediterranean is being carelessly shredded by the war machines of Pompey and Julius Caesar; the senate is packed with fools, puppets and angry old men; and Cicero himself is forced into exile for his attempts to halt Rome’s 20-year slide into bloodshed and monarchy. Pretty much anybody who is anybody is dead by the end of this book, including its protagonist, murdered by state assassins for defying Caesar’s successor, Mark Antony.
The main difficulty Harris faces here is what might be described as the Greek tragedian’s dilemma. The audience already knows roughly where things are going, even if they are a little sketchy on the details. The skill, the literary endeavour, lies in subverting those expectations and defying the awful gravity of the plot.
You find yourself wishing Harris had followed the example of the Greek dramatists and taken a few more risks. The novelist often seems to be overwhelmed by his reading. For most of his last two decades, Cicero was a prisoner of history. No longer the master of the republic or even of his own destiny, he has been eclipsed and outmanoeuvred by Caesar before Dictator even starts. He is a storm-benighted exile, a spectator on the margins of the battlefield, and by and large little more than a distinguished rubbernecker in the senate and the forum. Much of the resulting story is much like sitting in on one of those experiments where an unusually intelligent rat threads its way through a maze — or, if you prefer, watching a dancing bibliography.
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The letters, speeches and philosophical tracts are strung together as plausibly and as matter-of-factly as the bones on an anatomist’s skeleton. The reader longs for some deviation, some flicker of eccentricity, a crossbow, a sea serpent or, frankly, any hint of madness or anachronism that would divert the narrative from its grim itinerary. Harris, however, has an entirely faithful, conservative imagination. The majority of this novel is history-by-numbers — or, to borrow a phrase, just one damn thing after another.
There are other, less forced errors. Beside Cicero himself, the supporting cast are a convocation of cyphers, their personalities largely determined by their historical function. Caesar, by far the most important actor on the stage, is inscrutable; perhaps this is forgivable. Terentia and Tullia, Cicero’s wife and daughter, are matronly black boxes, existing as much and as long as they need to and no further. Emotions are not allowed to bleed out of the text by inference; they are pinned down and categorised like so many of Nabokov’s butterflies.
All these flaws; and yet the book works. More than that: at times, it sings. Thrillers are supposed to thrill, but few really do raise your heart rate and short-circuit your critical faculties. At all the moments when it matters, this one does. In spite of a middle section where even Harris’s powers of description and storycraft seem to have been defeated by the one-damn-thing-after-anotherness of history, Dictator delivers, and in its totality the book is as gripping as its predecessors.
The last few chapters leading up to Cicero’s assassination are exhilarating. In the darkest slough of despond shortly before the great man’s death, he sifts through his hundreds of letters with the narrator, his amanuensis Tiro, for publication. “[Your correspondence] will be of immense interest to future generations,” Tiro says. “Oh,” Cicero replies, “it’s more than merely of interest! It’s the case for my defence. I may have lost the past and lost the present, but I wonder if with this I might yet win the future.”
Harris has put the case for the defence and made this extraordinary hypocrite, vacillator and statesman live on for another generation. Given how much both writers have had to overcome to get here, this is a great achievement. This trilogy deserves the highest compliment that can be paid to a work of historical fiction: it is easily mistaken for history.
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Dictator by Robert Harris, Hutchinson, 464pp, £20. To buy this book for £17, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134