What we describe as a greasy pole the Romans called the ‘Cursus’. This was a word with several shades of meaning. At its most basic level it could be used of any journey, particularly an urgent one. Among sporting circles, however, it had a more specific connotation: not only a racetrack, but the name given to the chariot races themselves, the most popular event held in the Circus Maximus, that great sounding board of public opinion. To call a nobleman a charioteer was an insult – little short of describing him as a gladiator or a bandit – yet there, embedded in the language of the racing fan, the comparison persisted, a hint of what was perhaps an unpalatable truth. In the Republic sport was political and politics was a sport. Just as the skilled charioteer had to round themetae, the turning posts, lap after lap, knowing that a single error – a clipping of a meta with his wheel-hub, or an attempt to round it too fast – might send his vehicle careering out of control, so the ambitious nobleman had to risk his reputation in election after election. To the cheers and boos of spectators, charioteer and nobleman alike would make their drive for glory, knowing that the risk of failure was precisely what gave value to success. Then, once it was over, the finishing line breasted, or the consulship won, new contestants would step forward and the race would start again.
‘The track which leads to fame is open to many.’11 Such was the consolatory maxim – but it was not strictly true. Because the track in the Circus was narrow, only four chariots could compete on it at a time. In elections, too, there was a similarly restricted field. Glory was not on infinite supply. Only a limited number of magistracies could be held each year. Sulla, by increasing the number of annual praetorships from six to eight, had attempted to broaden the opportunities on offer. But because he had simultaneously neutralised the tribunate and doubled the size of the Senate, his legacy was in fact one of increased competition. ‘The clash of wits, the fight for pre-eminence, the toiling day and night without break to reach the summit of wealth and power’12 – this was the spectacle that the Cursus provided. Over the succeeding decades it would become ever more gruelling, carnivorous and frantic.
As they had always done, established families dominated the competition. The pressure that afflicted Caesar, of belonging to a family with few consulships to its name, was no more burdensome than the pressure on a consul’s son. The greater the ancient triumphs of a house, the more horrific was the idea that these might end up squandered. To an outsider, it might appear as though all a nobleman had to do was stay in his bed, ‘and electoral honours would be given to him on a plate’13 – but nothing in Rome was ever given to anyone in that way. Nobility was perpetuated not by blood but by achievement. A nobleman’s life was a strenuous series of ordeals or it was nothing. Fail to gain a senior magistracy or – worse – lose membership of the Senate altogether and a nobleman’s aura would soon start to fade. If three generations passed without notable successes, then even a patrician might find that he had a name known only ‘to historians and scholars, and not to the man in the street, the average voter, at all’.14 No wonder, then, that the great houses so resented intruders into the Senate. The election of arrivistes to the quaestorship, first and most junior of the stages on the Cursus, they might just about tolerate, but access to the more senior magistracies – the praetorship and the consulship – was ferociously guarded. This made the task of an ambitious parvenu – a ‘new man’, as the Romans called him – all the more arduous. Yet it was never impossible. As old families crashed out of the race, so new ones might find themselves in pole position to overtake. The electorate was capricious. Sometimes, just sometimes, talent might be preferred to a celebrated name. After all, as new men occasionally dared to point out, if magistracies were hereditary, then what would be the point in holding elections at all?15
Marius, of course, provided the great example of a commoner made good. If it were sufficiently dashing, a military career might well provide a new man with both glory and loot. All the same, it was hard for anyone without contacts to win a command. Rome had no military academy. Staff officers were generally young aristocrats adept at pulling strings. Caesar would never have had the opportunity to win his civic crown had he not been a patrician. Even once it had been obtained, a military posting could bring its own problems. Lengthy campaigns, of the kind that might win a new man spectacular glory, would also keep him away from Rome. No one on the make could afford long-term leave of absence. Ambitious novices in the political game would generally serve their time with the legions, and maybe even win some honourable scars, but few made their names that way. That was usually left to established members of the nobility. Instead, for the new man, the likeliest career path to triumph in the Cursus, to the ultimate glory of the consulship and to seeing himself and his descendants join the ranks of the elite, was the law.
In Rome this was a topic of consuming interest. Citizens knew that their legal system was what defined them and guaranteed their rights. Understandably, they were intensely proud of it. Law was the only intellectual activity that they felt entitled them to sneer at the Greeks. It gratified the Romans no end to point out how ‘incredibly muddled – almost verging on the ridiculous – other legal systems are compared to our own!’16 In childhood, boys would train their minds for the practice of law with the same single-minded intensity they brought to the training of their bodies for warfare. In adulthood, legal practice was the one civilian profession that a senator regarded as worthy of his dignity. This was because law was not something distinct from political life but an often lethal extension of it. There was no state-run prosecution service. Instead, all cases had to be brought privately, making it a simple matter for feuds to find a vent in the courts. The prosecution of a rival might well prove a knockout blow. Officially the penalty for a defendant found guilty of a serious crime was death. In practice, because the Republic had no police force or prison system, a condemned man would be permitted to slip away into exile, and even live in luxury, if he had succeeded in squirrelling away his portable wealth in time. His political career, however, would be over. Not only were criminals stripped of their citizenship, but they could be killed with impunity if they ever set foot back in Italy. Every Roman who entered the Cursus had to be aware that this might be his fate. Only if he won a magistracy would he be immune from the prosecutions of his rivals, and even then only for the period of his office. The moment it ended his enemies could pounce. Bribery, intimidation, the shameless pulling of strings – anything would be attempted to avoid a prosecution. If it did come to the law courts, then no trick would be too low, no muck-raking too vicious, no slander too cruel. Even more than an election, a trial was a fight to the death.
To the Romans, with their inveterate addiction to passionate and sensational rivalries, this made the law a thrilling spectator sport. Courts were open to the general public. Two permanent tribunals stood in the Forum, and other temporary platforms might be thrown up as circumstance required. As a result, the discerning enthusiast always had a wide choice of trials from which to choose. Orators could gauge their standing by their audience share. This only encouraged the histrionics that were anyway part and parcel of a Roman trial. Close attention to the minutiae of statutes was regarded as the pettifogging strategy of a second-class mind, since everyone knew that only ‘those who fail to make the grade as an orator resort to the study of the law’.17 Eloquence was the true measure of forensic talent. The ability to seduce a crowd, spectators as well as jurors and judges, to make them laugh or cry, to entertain them with a comedy routine or tug at their heart strings, to persuade them and dazzle them and make them see the world anew, this was the art of a great law-court pleader. It was said that a Roman would rather lose a friend than an opportunity for a joke.18 Conversely, he felt not the slightest embarrassment at displays of wild emotion. Defendants would be told to wear mourning and look as haggard as they could. Relatives would periodically burst into tears. Marius, we are told, wept to such effect at the trial of one of his friends that the jurors and the presiding magistrate all joined in and promptly voted for the defendant to be freed.
Perhaps it is no surprise that the Romans should have had the same word, ‘actor’, for both a prosecutor and a performer on a stage. Socially, the gulf between the two of them was vast, but in terms of technique there was often little to choose. Rome’s leading orator in the decade following Sulla’s death, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, was notorious for apeing the gestures of a mime-artist. Like Caesar, he was a celebrated fop, who ‘would arrange the folds of his toga with great care and exactness’,19 then use his hands and the sweep of his arms as extensions of his voice. He did this with such grace that the stars of the Roman stage would stand in the audience whenever he spoke, studying and copying his every gesture. Like actors, orators were celebrities, gawped at and gossiped about. Hortensius himself was nicknamed ‘Dionysia’, after a famous dancing girl, but he could afford to brush all such insults aside. The prestige he won as Rome’s leading orator was worth any number of jeers.
Naturally, there were always opponents looking to snatch his crown. It was not in the Romans’ nature to tolerate any king – or queen – for very long. Hortensius’ own pre-eminence had been established during the years of Sulla’s dictatorship, when the law courts had been muzzled. Committed to upholding the Senate’s authority, he was strongly identified with the new regime. Such was his friendship with the dictator that it was Hortensius who had delivered Sulla’s funeral speech.* In the following decade his authority as a dominant member of the Senate inevitably served to buttress his legal reputation. But as the seventies BC wore on Hortensius’ pre-eminence came increasingly under threat, not from a fellow member of the senatorial establishment, not even from a member of the nobility, but from a man who was an upstart in every way.
Like Marius, Marcus Tullius Cicero was a native of the small hill town of Arpinum – and, like Marius, he was filled with ambition. There the resemblance ended. Gawky and skinny, with a long, thin neck, Cicero was never going to make a great soldier. Instead, even from his childhood, he planned to become the greatest orator in Rome. Sent to the capital as a boy in the nineties, Cicero’s precocious aptitude for rhetoric was such that the fathers of his fellow students would come to his school just to hear him declaim. The anecdote can only have derived from the infant prodigy himself, and even to the Romans – who never regarded modesty as a virtue – Cicero’s conceit was something monstrous. Not unjustified, however. His vanity was as much prickliness as self-promotion. A deeply sensitive man, Cicero was torn between a consciousness of his own great talents and a paranoia that snobbery might prevent others from giving them their due. In fact, his potential was so evident that it had been spotted early by some of the most influential figures in Rome. One of these, Marcus Antonius, provided the young Cicero with a particularly encouraging role-model. Despite coming from an undistinguished family himself, Antonius’ powers of oratory had succeeded in elevating him to both the consulship and the censorship, and a status as a leading spokesman of the senatorial elite. He was one of a clique of orators who dominated both the law courts and the Senate throughout the nineties, the spokesmen for an aggressive conservatism, strongly opposed to Marius and to anyone who threatened the traditional status quo. Cicero, who was always prone to hero-worship, never forgot him. Antonius and his colleagues were to prove a formative influence on what was already a passion for the Republic’s ancient order. Despite the fact that it was this same order that placed so many obstacles on the path of his advancement, Cicero never wavered in his belief that it embodied the acme of constitutional perfection. During the eighties, as the Republic began its collapse into civil war, this conviction was only reinforced.
Antonius himself was murdered following Marius’ putsch in 87 BC. His head was displayed in the Forum and his body fed to birds and dogs. The finest orators of their generation were culled along with him. The stage had now been swept clear of competition, but Cicero, unnerved by the murder of his patrons, elected to keep his head down. He spent the years of civil war studying and honing his rhetorical skills, and not until 81, when he was already in his mid-twenties, did he finally plead in his first trial. Sulla had just resigned the dictatorship, but Cicero still had to move warily. A year after his debut in the law courts he agreed to defend the son of an Umbrian landowner charged with parricide. The case was politically highly sensitive. As Cicero was to demonstrate, the murdered man’s name had been illegally slipped on to a proscription list by one of Sulla’s favourite freedmen, who had then trumped up the charge of parricide to cover his tracks. The defendant was duly acquitted. Sulla did nothing to indicate that he was in any way displeased. Cicero’s reputation was made.
But not yet to his own satisfaction. Aiming for the political heights as he was, he knew that he first had to seize Hortensius’ oratorical crown. Accordingly, he threw himself into defence work, taking on other prominent cases and using the courts to test himself to the emotional and physical limits, ‘drawing on all the strength of my voice and the effort of my whole body’.20 After barely two years of public life he found himself near breakdown. Warned by his doctors that he was putting a terminal strain on his throat, Cicero took leave of absence and headed for Greece. For six months he stayed in Athens, sight-seeing and indulging in a spot of recreational philosophy. The city still bore the scars left by Sulla’s legions, but for the Romans, Athens remained inviolably the home of beauty and culture. Tourists had begun returning there even as blood was drying in the streets. Among them had been an old schoolfriend of Cicero, Titus Pomponius, a prudent refugee from the judicial murders back in Rome. Recognising the bottom of a market when he saw it, Pomponius had invested his inheritance in provincial real estate, then used the profits to fund a life of cultured leisure in the shadow of the Parthenon. Eight years later he still had not the slightest intention of returning to Rome. His friends called him ‘Atticus’, a nickname that suggests how distinctive his expatriate lifestyle was perceived to be. Even so, he was a straw in the wind. ‘Atticus’ was not the only wealthy citizen to have witnessed a decade of violence and political collapse, and decided that there might be no shame in embracing a life of secluded ease.
Sometimes Cicero was tempted to agree. He was perfectly capable of acknowledging that ‘electioneering and scrabbling after office can be a wretched business’.21 But whether his breakdown had been purely physical, or perhaps something more, he retained his passionate conviction that public life was the ideal. Leaving Athens, he crossed the Aegean to Asia. There he met Rutilius Rufus, the old enemy of the publicani, and still in exile fifteen years after being convicted in the most notorious scandal in Roman legal history. Rutilius was an object lesson in how dangerous it could be to uphold ancient values against the predatory greed of corrupt officials, and yet, despite his hounding, he had not despaired of the Republic. For several days the old man entertained his guest with anecdotes about the heroic figures of his youth, then sent him onwards to visit his friend, the philosopher Posidonius, on Rhodes. The great sage’s conversation would have been even more motivational than that of Rutilius. Posidonius had lost none of his faith in Rome’s global destiny, nor in the traditional virtues that she could bring to such a mission: ‘Rugged fortitude; frugality; a lack of attachment to material possessions; a religion wonderful in its devotion to the gods; upright dealing; care and attention to justice when dealing with other men.’22 So the list ran on. Cicero, who had always dreamed of being the most traditional kind of Roman hero, was thrilled. What was a sore throat to stand in the way of fulfilling such a destiny? By a fortunate coincidence, the world’s most famous oratory clinic was also to be found on Rhodes. The rhetorician Molon, who ran it, was typical of a new breed of celebrity professors who had begun tailoring their courses to suit high achievers from Rome. Cicero was soon able to establish himself as Molon’s star pupil. Having encouraged him to adopt a more restrained manner of speaking, the teacher ended up in a theatrical state of despair, lamenting that even in the field of oratory Greece had now been surpassed by Rome. Cicero, always a sucker for flattery, was delighted. ‘And so I came home after two years not only more experienced,’ he recalled later, ‘but almost a new person. The excessive straining on my throat had gone, my style was less frenetic, my lungs were stronger – and I had even put on weight.’23
Energy and self-confidence now fully restored, he returned to his legal practice in the Forum, where he continued to speak for the defence. Favours were duly earned and obligations totted up. Cicero was starting to close the gap on Hortensius. At the same time he was also picking up speed in the Cursus. At the age of thirty, the youngest legitimate age, he was elected to the quaestorship, the most junior of the Republic’s great offices, it was true, but a start all the same and, considering his background, an impressive one. The provincial from Arpinum was now not only a magistrate of the Roman people, but a member of the Senate. Assigned to Sicily, he spent a year there, attempting to put the example of Rutilius to good use, earning the respect of the provincials, and efficiently organising shipments of grain back to Rome. The brilliant young quaestor, with his customary lack of modesty, imagined that his fellow citizens would be talking of little else. Landing at Puteoli on his way home, however, Cicero was appalled to discover that no one had even realised he had been away. Typically, however, he soon managed to put the lesson to good account:
I now believe the incident benefited me more than if everyone had been offering me congratulations. I realised that the Roman people are prone to deafness, but that their eyesight is keen and observant, and so I stopped worrying what people might hear of me, but made sure that they saw me in person every day. I lived in the full glare of their observation, I was always in the Forum. Neither sleep nor the bouncer by my door ever prevented anyone from getting to see me.24
For those on the Cursus, exposure was all. A new man had to hype himself or else he was nothing. This was a lesson that Cicero would never forget.
He was now fast becoming a fixture in Rome. People who mattered were waking up to the fact that Cicero’s estimation of his own talents was not merely insufferable egotism, and that his genius as an advocate was indeed something exceptional. The more this perception gathered pace, the more Cicero could begin to eye the prospect of a real breakthrough, past the staging-post of the junior magistracies and into the laps where only the aristocracy might normally be expected to advance. To achieve that, however, he would first have to establish his dominance as an orator beyond all doubt. Hortensius had to be toppled, and not only toppled, but comprehensively drubbed. His ‘tyrannical rule of the law courts’25 had to be brought to a public end.
So it was that when Cicero finally met Hortensius face to face, in a case ripe with scandal and prurient detail, the stakes could hardly have been higher. The defendant was a former governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, and it was Cicero, breaking the habit of a lifetime, who brought the prosecution. This was a risk, but a well-calculated one. Even upon the modest record of Roman provincial administration, Verres appears to have been a spectacular blot. Treachery and greed had been the keynotes of his career. A supporter of the Marians for as long as the Marians clung to power, he had soon sensed the way the wind was blowing, and absconded to Sulla with his commanding officer’s cash box. Armed with the favour of the new regime, Verres had duly found himself launched on a series of increasingly lucrative overseas postings. Whether he was really, as Cicero was to claim, ‘distinguished by nothing except his monstrous offences and his obscene wealth’,26 he certainly seems to have had an eye for ready perks – ships, disputed wills, the daughters of his hosts. Verres’ real specialisation, however, was antiques. Years of pillaging the Greek world had given the Roman upper classes an immense enthusiasm for high art. Officially, this was despised as effete self-indulgence, but behind the scenes Roman grandees would chase frantically after any valuable painting or statue that was going. Now that the days of sacking Greek cities were over, the world’s first art market had developed to plug the gap. Prices had duly spiralled and dealers made fortunes. Verres’ own refinement had been to bring the methods of a gangster to the trade. Even as he was mass-producing fakes he was employing a team of experts, ‘bloodhounds’,27 to sniff out genuine masterpieces. Verres had a talent for making offers that no one dared refuse. One provincial elder who had tried to outface the governor had been stripped naked and lashed to an equestrian statue in the town’s main square. Since it had been the dead of winter, and the statue had been made of bronze, the old man had soon changed his mind. Other trouble-makers, even Roman citizens, Verres had simply had crucified.
This, then, was the man whom Cicero had decided to go after. Despite the defendant’s record, he knew that the case would be no walk-over. Verres had friends in high places and a long reach. When Cicero travelled to Sicily to pursue the case in person, he found that witnesses had a suspicious tendency to fall silent or disappear. Fortunately, following his quaestorship, he had plenty of Sicilian contacts of his own. Evidence was everywhere, even in the silence of the countryside, its farmers ruined by Verres’ depredations. Clearly, as a prosecutor, Cicero relished what he found, but as an aspiring statesman he was simultaneously appalled. Verres’ corruption struck at two of his most passionately held convictions: that Rome was good for the world, and that the workings of the Republic were good for Rome. This was why Cicero could argue with a perfectly straight face that the stakes in the coming trial were apocalyptic. ‘There is nowhere, no matter how distant or obscure, within the boundary of the encircling Ocean, that has not suffered from the lust for oppression which drives our people on,’ he warned. If Verres were not convicted, then ‘the Republic will be doomed, for this monster’s acquittal will serve as a precedent to encourage other monsters in the future’.28Magnificently over the top though all this was, there was more to it than a mere lawyerly desire to make the flesh creep. For the sake of his political ideals, and his own self-respect, Cicero had to believe what he was saying. If the Cursus rewarded greed rather than patriotism, and if a man such as Verres could emerge triumphant over a man such as himself, then the Republic was rotten indeed. Here was an argument that Cicero would cling to all his life: that his own success was to be regarded as the measure of the health of Rome. Genuine principle fused seamlessly with inordinate self-regard.
It did not take Hortensius long to recognise what he was up against. Rather than argue the case on Cicero’s own terms, he instead sought to have the trial postponed. It was finally set for a date just before the law courts went into a lengthy recess. For the prosecution, this was a potentially devastating setback. The conventions governing an advocate’s mode of address were time-consuming, and, if Cicero were to stick to them, the trial might be expected to drag on for months. The longer it continued, the more opportunities for bribery and arm-twisting Verres would have. As the trial opened the defendant had every reason to crow. Cicero, however, had prepared a devastating ambush. Rather than follow the customary rituals of the law courts, he took the unprecedented step of laying out his evidence immediately in a series of short speeches. Hortensius needed to hear only the first of these to realise that the game was up. He waived his right of reply and the trial promptly collapsed. Verres, not wanting to wait for the inevitable conviction, cut and ran with his art collection to Marseille. Cicero celebrated by publishing the full text of the speeches he would have given, no doubt nicely sharpened for popular consumption, and with a few well-aimed jabs at Hortensius thrown in for good measure. The news was broadcast all over Rome: the king had lost his crown; Hortensius’ rule of the law courts had been brought to a close.
Cicero’s own supremacy was to last a lifetime. The advantages this brought him in terms of influence and contacts were immense. There were also more immediate spoils. At the start of his prosecution Cicero had claimed to have no concern with personal gain. This had been disingenuous in the extreme. As Cicero would well have known, a prosecutor had the right to claim the rank of any criminal he successfully brought to justice. Verres had been a praetor, and so, once he had been convicted, all the perks of his status passed directly to Cicero. Among these were the right to speak in debates ahead of non-praetorian senators. For a man of Cicero’s eloquence this was a crucial privilege. His oratory could now start to weave its magic not only in the law courts, but also in the very cockpit of politics.
Of course, he still had a long way to go, but he had taken great strides. ‘Reflect on what city this is, on the nature of your goal, and on who you are,’ his brother advised him. ‘Every day, as you are walking down to the Forum, turn these thoughts over and over in your mind: “I am a new man! I want the consulship! This is Rome!”’29
The ultimate prize was no longer an impossible dream.