The first politician

Shakespeare, contemptuously, gives him only nine lines in Julius Caesar. (When Cassius suggests involving Cicero in the plot to assassinate the dictator, Brutus briskly dismisses the idea: “He will never follow any thing / That other men begin.”) To the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen — who hero-worshiped Caesar as a Nietzschean superman — Cicero was “a weakling”: “a journalist in the worst sense of the word”. To Kingsley Amis, in Take a Girl Like You, he was simply a pain in the neck: “For a man so long and so thoroughly dead it was remarkable how much boredom, and also how precise an image of nasty silliness, Cicero could generate.” To scholars of ancient history Cicero may be a giant, but in the popular imagination he is merely a bit-player, not even as well known as such imperial psychopaths as Caligula and Nero.

And yet, having conceded all his flaws, there remains some bewitching quality about Cicero — a charm that dazzled his contemporaries and which one can still feel even now, across the chasm of 2,000 years. It is, I think, in part the charm of the consummate politicial operator, which might be defined as the ability to say things which both he and his audience know to be not quite the whole truth, and yet to say them so eloquently, and with such apparent sincerity, that all but the most hardened listeners are willing to suspend their disbelief in admiration of the performance.

Among contemporary politicians, Bill Clinton was a master of this talent, and so, until his touch began to desert him recently, was Tony Blair; David Cameron is already showing promising — or, depending on your point of view, alarming — signs of its presence. But Cicero had it before any of them. They are his heirs, so much so that when he writes breezily — as he did in 54BC — that “unchanging consistency of standpoint has never been considered a virtue in great statesmen . . . It is our aim, not our language, which must always be the same” — one hears the authentic voice of a Clinton, a Blair or a Cameron, exactly as they might have sounded five decades before the birth of Christ.

Cicero, in other words, was a recognisably modern political leader, gladhanding his way among the voters, ever alert to the shifting winds and tides of popular opinion. He made much of his undistinguished name — derived from cicer, meaning chickpea — which he recognised had the merit of being memorable, and he therefore had images of chickpeas engraved onto dishes, boasting that he would make it the most famous in Rome.

He is, if not exactly a hero for our times, a character astonishingly in tune with them.

ONE of the joys of studying the ancient world is to realise how little has changed. Read Catullus and you realise that the joys and agonies of love were experienced by men and women in exactly the same way. Study Caesar’s Gallic Wars — as soldiers still do — and you recognise that the basics of military tactics and strategy are unchanged. Write a novel about politics in republican Rome and you run up against the same types of politicians you still find in Washington or Westminster, all up to the same tricks and making the same mistakes as our contemporaries.

Cicero’s route to the top — as for so many politicians: one thinks again of Clinton and Blair — was the law. Born in 106BC in rough, mountainous country 80 miles southeast of Rome, he came from a respectable provincial family who lacked both great wealth and patrician blood. As a young man he was intensely ambitious but seems to have been something of a weakling, which closed off a proper military career: all his life he was pursued by rumours of the Roman equivalent of draft-dodging.

The law was his only way forward, yet even here he lacked the necessary stamina for the rough and tumble of the courts, six or seven of which were usually in session each day, crowded with spectators in the forum. Therefore, sometime around 78BC, on the verge of a physical and nervous breakdown, he travelled to the eastern Mediterranean in search of professional help, and come under the tutelage of a Greek teacher of rhetoric named Apollonius Molon.

Molon is one of those pivotal but shadowy figures in history of whom one would like to know more. A lawyer, from the town of Alabanda in modern-day Turkey, he was considered sufficiently brilliant an orator to be invited to address the Roman senate in Greek — an unheard-of honour for a foreigner. Retiring to the island of Rhodes around 80BC, he founded a school for the teaching of rhetoric. Among his pupils we know of at least four young men who went on to become consul — the supreme office in the Roman republic — including Cicero and Julius Caesar.

“He was distinguished not merely as a practical advocate and composer of speeches for others,” wrote Cicero many years later, “but was particularly skilful in criticising and correcting faults, and wise in his whole system of teaching. He made it his task to repress if possible the redundance and excess of my style, which was marked by a youthful impetuousness and lack of restraint, and to check it so to speak from overflowing its banks.”

Molon changed the way politicians spoke. Rejecting the long-winded type of oratory known as “Asiatic” — which had been dominant for generations and was exemplified by Cicero’s great rival at the Roman bar, Quintus Hortensius — Molon taught his clients the virtues of simplicity. Once a speaker had roused his audience to a pitch of emotion, he always advised him to sit down quickly, “for nothing”, he asserted, “dries more quickly than a tear”.

From Molon among others Cicero learnt the essential tricks of the political trade: how to memorise a two-hour speech and deliver it without notes, how to acquire the physical stamina to speak outdoors in all weathers, how to hold the body still and use the arms and hands to gesture with maximum effect, how to project one’s words for a full 80 yards — the maximum range of the speaking voice — and how to hold the attention of a restless audience of 3,000 or 4,000 in the Forum or 600 in the Senate. It was not what a man said that counted so much as the way that he said it. Cicero was fond of quoting the maxim of the Greek orator Demosthenes: only three things count in public speaking: “delivery, delivery, and again, delivery”.

According to Plutarch, Molon regarded Cicero as the greatest pupil he ever taught. After listening to the young man speak, he supposedly “sat for a long time lost in thought” before finally offering his verdict: “Cicero, I congratulate you and I am amazed at you. It is Greece and her fate that I am sorry for. The only glories that were left to us were our culture and our eloquence. Now I see that these too are going to be taken over in your person by Rome.”

Even allowing for a degree of exaggeration, it is clear that Cicero was an orator of astonishing power. Of the 106 set-piece speeches we know that he delivered either in the Senate or the law courts (there must have been many more) we still have 58. They combine something of the forensic brilliance of Enoch Powell with the passion and wit of Aneurin Bevan, and show why Cicero eventually eclipsed Hortenius to become the most sought-after advocate in Rome. His assault on the corrupt Roman governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, who had ordered the crucifixion of a Roman citizen named Gavius, despite his victim’s repeated cry of “I am a Roman citizen” (“Civis Romanus sum”), remains one of the most devastating courtroom attacks of all time:

"If you, Verres, had been made a prisoner in Persia or the remotest part of India, and were being dragged off to execution, what cry would you be uttering, except that you were a Roman citizen? What then of this man whom you were hurrying to his death? Could not that statement, that claim of citizenship, have saved him for an hour, for a day, while its truth was checked? No it could not — not with you in the judgment seat! And yet the poorest man, of humblest birth, in whatever savage land, has always until now had the confidence to know that the cry ‘I am a Roman citizen’ is his final defence and sanctuary. It was not Gavius, not one obscure man, whom you nailed upon that cross of agony: it was the universal principle that Romans are free men!”

IF MOLON was arguably the world’s first political image consultant, the Greek historian Plutarch describes Cicero as the world’s first professional politician. “Now that he was beginning to go in for politics more seriously, he came to the conclusion that it was a disgraceful thing that, while a craftsman who uses inanimate tools and materials still knows what each of these is called, where it can be found, and what it can do, the statesman, who uses men as his instruments for public action, should be slack and indifferent where knowledge of his fellow-citizens is concerned. He therefore trained himself not only to memorise names, but also to know in what part of the city every important person lived, where he had his country houses, who were his friends and who his neighbours. And so, whatever road in Italy Cicero happened to be travelling on, it was easy for him to name and to point out the estates and the villas of his friends.”

He had the dedicated single-minded drive to succeed that one encounters in all politicians who reach the very top, and which most normal men and women simply do not possess, or even comprehend. Elected a senator at the youngest possible age, 31, he spent a year as a magistrate in Sicily and returned to the Italian mainland expecting, as he wryly observed in a courtroom speech long afterwards, “that the Roman people would lay all their distinctions at his feet”. It was April, during the senate recess, and all the fashionable people were on the Bay of Naples when he landed. No one had even noticed he had been away, and he was humiliated.

“This experience, gentlemen, I am inclined to think was more valuable to me than if I had been hailed with salvoes of applause. From that day I took care that I should be seen personally every day. I lived in the public eye; I frequented the forum; neither my door-keeper nor sleep prevented anyone from getting in to see me. Not even when I had nothing to do did I do nothing. Those speeches, Cassius, which you tell us it is your custom to read in your hours of leisure, I have spent festivals and holidays in writing, and consequently absolute leisure was a thing I never knew.”

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By the time he stood for the consulship in the summer of 64BC at the age of 42 the size of the Roman electorate, which was all male, was close to a million. Cicero fought a surprisingly modern campaign, which included a three-month swing through the crucial towns of northern Italy. Although the great majority of these citizens never voted — a man was obliged to cast his vote in person on the Field of Mars, the vast open space just outside Rome’s walls, and most never bothered to make the journey — nevertheless much of the modern vocabulary of politics is derived from these campaigns, including senate, suffrage, rostrum and candidate. Even the word ambition originally comes from the Latin ambitio, or trailing around after votes, which eventually hardened into a more specific meaning: “desire for popularity, fame, display, pomp”.

The Roman senate in Cicero’s day consisted of 600 senators, the majority of whom had no hope of being elected to high office. These passed-over backbenchers were lobby-fodder, obliged to move to one side of the chamber or the other when a division was called to register their vote, and hence were known as pedarii: those who voted with their feet. And just as much of the business of modern politics is done outside the debating chamber — in the smoking room of the House of Commons, or the Senate cloakroom on Capitol Hill — so in Rome it was conducted in the senaculum, or “little senate”: a space beside the main building where the senators milled around waiting until they constituted a quorum.

This is where I imagine Cicero was to be found most days, constantly circulating in the manner of Lyndon Johnson when he was majority leader of the US Senate: a touch on the arm here, a word in the ear there, with this man a joke, with that a solemn word of condolence. And all around him, doing exactly the same lobbying, would have been the other great figures of the Roman republic: Marcus Porcius Cato, the original neoconservative, who believed that the rigid theories of stoic philosophy could be obliged to the chaos of politics (“He behaves as if he were living in Plato’s Republic,” Cicero once complained, “rather than Romulus’s shithole”); Marcus Licinius Crassus, the Roman equivalent of the American billionaires Ross Perot or Steve Forbes, who tried to use his money to buy supreme political power; Pompey the Great, the military hero turned inept politician, a General Colin Powell regularly outwitted by less glamorous but more cunning men; Publius Clodius Pulcher, the aristocratic proto-fascist, a kind of Sir Oswald Mosley with a gang of street thugs always ready to intimidate his enemies; and finally of course Julius Caesar, the restlesss, patrician womaniser who had something of John F Kennedy’s youthful glamour among the plebs of Rome.

Only rarely in history — in 18th-century America, perhaps, or 19th-century Britain — can there have been such a concentration of political brilliance within one elected assembly as these six men embodied: Cicero, Cato, Crassus, Pompey, Clodius and Caesar. They and their families all lived within a mile or so of one another. All knew one another and dined with one another. All were at various times friends and bitter enemies. All grasped for supreme power — imperium, as the Romans called it: the power of life and death — and all six died violently in its pursuit, dragging down with them the whole ancient structure of the Roman republic: a form of democracy, albeit flawed and biased towards the wealthy, which did not begin to emerge again in Europe for 1,600 years.

And they had something else in common — another characteristic that I have noted in contemporary politicians over the years: an absolute refusal to recognise when their time in the sun was over, and when it was in their best interest, and the nation’s, that they should retire. “Cicero, they say, would have had a better old age if he had taken in sail after his consulship,” wrote Plutarch. “For a political cycle, too, has a sort of natural termination, and political no less than athletic contests are absurd after the full vigour of life has departed.”

I doubt whether Tony Blair recognises the wisdom of that observation any more than his Roman predecessors did. Normal men and women can usually think of nothing better than retirement from the hurly burly of professional life; for men with the energy and appetite for power of Cicero it was a kind of death. He once advised a young friend (one needs to read it in Latin to experience the full energy of the sentence): “Urbem, urbem, mi Rufe, cole et in ista luce viva!” (“Rome! Stick to Rome, my dear fellow, and live in the limelight!”) Even into old age Cicero could never tear himself away from the excitement of politics in Rome. He survived banishment, assassination attempts, intimidation, humiliation and civil war, and still — at the age of 63, weeks before his death and with no cards left to play — was contemplating a comeback in the form of a second consulship. He was the ultimate homo politicus.

Which is why, for all his absurdities and weaknesses, and despite Mommsen’s contempt, I cannot help but admire him. Cicero encapsulated the energy of politics — by which I mean politics not as a dreary procession of policies and social casework, which is what it has mostly become today, but politics as the great game: the ultimate contact sport, in which human beings clash, argue, orate, strategise, manipulate, rise and — always — fall.

At one point in my novel, Cicero’s sister-in-law, the tiresome Pomponia, observes that politics is “boring”, a remark which drives the senator into a frenzy of irritation: “Such a stupid thing to say! Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men’s souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring!”

© Robert Harris 2006

There was nothing about the electoral map of Italy which these two rascals did not know: who among the local knights would be offended if Cicero did not stop to pay his respects, and who should be avoided; which were the most important tribes and centuries in each particular district, and which were most likely to come his way; what were the issues which most concerned the citizens, and what were the promises they expected in return for their votes. They had no other topic of conversation except politics, yet Cicero could sit with them late into the night swapping facts and stories, as happily as he could converse with a philosopher or a wit.

I would not weary you with all the details of the campaign, even if I could remember them. Dear gods! What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them! I used to be able to name every consul for the past one hundred years, and most praetors for the past forty. Now, they have almost entirely faded out of my memory, quenched like lights at midnight around the Bay of Naples.

Little wonder that the towns and crowds of Cicero’s consular campaign have all merged into one generalised impression of hands shaken, stories listened to, bores endured, petitions received, jokes told, undertakings given, and local worthies smoothed and flattered.

The name of Cicero was famous by this time, even outside Rome, and people turned out to see him en masse, especially in the larger towns where law was practised. He was a hero to both the lower classes and the respectable knights, who saw him as a champion against the rapacity and snobbery of the aristocracy. For this reason, there were not many grand houses which opened their doors to him, and we had to endure taunts and even occasionally missiles whenever we passed close to the estates of one or other of the great patricians.

We pressed on up the Flaminian Way, devoting a day to each of the decent-sized towns before finally reaching the Adriatic coast. It was some years since I had gazed upon the sea, and when that line of glittering blue appeared above the dust and scrub I felt as thrilled as a child. The afternoon was cloudless and balmy, a straggler left behind by a distant summer which had long since retreated.

A few days later, at Ariminum, we picked up the Aemilian Way and swung west, away from the sea, and into the province of Nearer Gaul. Here we could feel the nip of winter coming on. The black and purple mountains of the Apenninus rose sheer to our left, while to our right, the Po delta stretched grey and flat to the horizon. I had a curious sensation that we were mere insects, creeping along the foot of a wall at the edge of some great room.

The big political issue in Nearer Gaul at that time was the franchise. Those who lived to the south of the River Po had been given the vote; those who lived to the north had not. The populists, led by Pompey and Caesar, favoured extending citizenship across the river, all the way to the Alps; the aristocrats, whose spokesman was Catullus, suspected a plot further to dilute their power, and opposed it. Cicero, naturally, was in favour of widening the franchise to the greatest extent possible, and this was the issue he campaigned on.

They had never seen a consular candidate up here before, and in every little town crowds of several hundred would turn out to listen to him. Cicero usually spoke from the back of one of the wagons, and gave the same speech at every stop, so that after a while I could move my lips in synchronicity with his. He denounced as nonsense the logic which said that a man who lived on one side of a stretch of water was a Roman and that his cousin on the other was a barbarian, even though they both spoke Latin.

“Rome is not merely a matter of geography,” he would proclaim. “Rome is not defined by rivers, or mountains, or even seas; Rome is not a question of blood, or race, or religion; Rome is an ideal. Rome is the highest embodiment of liberty and law that mankind had yet achieved in the ten thousand years since our ancestors came down from those mountains and learnt how to live as communities under the rule of law.”

So if his listeners had the vote, he would conclude, they must be sure to use it on behalf of those who had not, for that was their fragment of civilisation, their special gift, as precious as the secret of fire. Every man should see Rome once before he died. They should go next summer, when the travelling was easy, and cast their ballots on the Field of Mars, and if anyone asked them why they had come so far, “you can tell them Marcus Cicero sent you!” Then he would jump down, and pass among the crowd while they were still applauding, doling out handfuls of chickpeas from a sack carried by one of his attendants, and I would make sure I was just behind him, to catch his instructions and write down names.

I learnt much about Cicero while he was out campaigning. Indeed, I would say that despite all the years we had spent together I never really knew him until I saw him in one of those small towns south of the Po — Faventia, say, or Claterna — with the late autumn light just starting to fade, and a cold wind blowing off the mountains, and the lamps being lit in the little shops along the main street, and the upturned faces of the local farmers gazing in awe at this famous senator on the back of his wagon, with his three fingers outstretched, pointing towards the glory of Rome.

I realised then that, for all his sophistication, he was really still one of them — a man from a small provincial town with an idealised dream of the republic and what it meant to be a citizen, which burnt all the fiercer within him because he, too, was an outsider.

©Robert Harris 2006

Extracted from Imperium by Robert Harris to be published tomorrow by Hutchinson at £17.99. Copies can be ordered for £15.99 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585