By Paul Carrier
Every literate political junkie is familiar with those you-are-there tomes specializing in fly-on-the-wall anecdotes about who said what to whom at some critical juncture in an election campaign or a presidential administration.
But how many books apply that appealingly gossipy approach to the maneuverings of politicians in ancient Rome? That’s what Robert Harris has done in Conspirata, a novel set in the Roman Republic during and after the period when the famed lawyer and orator Cicero was consul in 63 B.C.
In fact, Conspirata, a sequel to Imperium, is Cicero’s story - or part of it, anyway. Cicero’s real-life slave and secretary, Tiro, who wrote a lengthy but now-lost biography of his master, narrates Conspirata, which Harris describes as an attempted “re-creation of Tiro’s vanished work.”
Yet Conspirata is not hagiography. Harris gives us Cicero in all his complexity: a stuttering but eloquent statesman and patriot with a biting wit, a skeptic who dismissed augury as silly superstition, an egotist who occasionally engaged in extortion and other underhanded schemes.
In Harris’ hands, Tiro tells his tale in a conversational style that immerses the reader in the life of the republic as it existed only a few years before Julius Caesar effectively killed it, paving the way for the creation of the Roman Empire and its all-powerful emperors.
The untested Caesar initially appears in these pages as a rising star who had yet to secure his greatest accomplishments, including the conquest of Gaul. Here too is Pompey the Great, the military leader and politician who would, over time, abandon his friend Cicero and join forces with Caesar in crushing the republic.
The result is storytelling at its best - a real page-turner that makes for a quick read because of its breezy style. Conspirata is peopled by a veritable who’s who of ancient Rome, as Tiro introduces us to the republic’s noble leaders, would-be dictators, influential women, and political hacks whose reach far exceeds both their grasp and their abilities.
 |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero |
Tiro also offers up telling and vivid descriptions of key players on the Roman political scene, such as the stern and incorruptible Cato the Younger, who makes this entrance during a session of the Senate: “He came down the gangway barefoot and stood in the aisle, that harsh and remorseless voice grating away like a blade on a grindstone.”
Harris (as Tiro) is especially compelling when he describes episodes of high drama, such as Cicero’s pivotal role in quashing a conspiracy launched by Lucius Sergius Catilina to overthrow the republic. What follows later is even more chilling - the beginning of the republic’s demise when Caesar, Pompey and Crassus effectively stage a coup d’état.
It is a credit to Harris’ skill that reading about the republic’s death throes is so moving. As flawed and corrupt as it was, the Roman Republic remained a democracy of sorts. The eventual rise of an oligarchy that gradually but permanently strangled republican principles makes for a powerfully disheartening tale.
In Harris’ telling, no one laments the crumbling of the republic more than Cicero, as befits one of its greatest champions. No one, that is, except Tiro and his audience . . . the readers of Conspirata.
