Dictator by Robert Harris - review

If not at the heart of the action, Cicero was still a man whose connections counted, and whose formidable powers of persuasion in any cause were eagerly sought.

Staying close to the sources, Harris picks his way masterfully through Cicero’s personal and political dilemmas: on the one hand, his increasing estrangement from his wife Terentia, financial problems as a result of his agent’s dodgy dealings and the shattering death of his beloved daughter Tullia following childbirth; on the other, the growing tensions between Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, and increasing political violence as law and order fragment.

Throughout this dreadful period Cicero’s vision remains constant — the restoration of law and the republic. When he returns from his provincial governorship in Asia Minor in 50 BC, he devotes his energies to writing up invented dialogues on the duties and responsibilities of power and government, which Harris grafts into Cicero’s grappling with the disintegrating political situation. The defeat of Pompey in the civil war of 49BC realises Cicero’s worst political fears and sends him back to his books.

It is with the assassination of Julius Caesar, in which he had no hand, that Cicero explodes back into political life (though it beats me why Harris refers Caesar’s famous final words — which were in Greek, not Latin, and meant “And the same to you!” — to the nondescript conspirator Decimus, not Marcus, Brutus). In a series of laceratingly brilliant speeches Cicero takes on Caesar’s old sidekick Marc Antony in an heroic effort to split him from Caesar’s old nominated heir, Octavian, and save the republic.

Here Harris rises dramatically to the occasion, as Cicero comes within a whisker of success. But it ends in blood: Cicero’s head and right hand nailed up in the forum, his all too fluent tongue repeatedly pierced with a hairpin by Antony’s vengeful wife.

It makes a moving end to Harris’s superb trilogy, which does full justice to one of Rome’s most interesting, complex and humane statesmen, whose pragmatic political treatises proved so influential during the renaissance and enlightenment.

Peter Jones’s Veni Vidi Vici is published by Atlantic Books