Steven Saylor - A murder on the Appian way

But now his voice shook. "Distinguished jurors! Distinguished… what an opportunity you have today! What a vital decision is yours to make… yours to make, and yours alone. Shall a good man, an upstanding citizen, an untiring servant of the state… should he be forced to pine away in miserable hardship… indeed, shall Rome herself be made to suffer endless, ongoing humiliations… or shall you put an end — that is, by your staunch, courageous, wise decision, shall you put an end to the long persecution of both the man and his city by lawless hooligans?"

There was another outburst from the crowd. The noise was almost like a physical assault. Cicero appeared to quail before it, shrinking back on the Rostra. Where was the strutting cock who tended to swagger rather than fret before a hostile crowd? I was still inclined to think that his timidity was some sort of pose. What other possibility was there?

The furore at last quieted enough for him to continue. "When my client… and myself… when we first took up politics…"

"Yes, but when will you give it up?" shouted someone in the crowd.

"Not soon enough!" answered a chorus of voices, to raucous laughter.

"When we first took up politics," Cicero went on at a higher pitch, "we held high hopes that honourable rewards for honourable service would come our way. Instead we suffer a constant burden of fear. Milo has always been especially vulnerable, for he has deliberately… deliberately and bravely… placed himself on the foremost… I mean to say, in the forefront… in the struggle of true patriots against enemies of the state — "

There was another outburst, so loud it hurt my ears. Milo had sunk so low in his chair and hugged himself so tightly that he appeared to have melted. His expression was one of utter disgust. Tiro flinched every time Cicero stammered, and began to bite his nails.

From that point on the roar of the crowd was almost constant. "Whenever Cicero did manage to make himself heard, he seemed to be uttering confused fragments from more than one speech. On several occasions he clearly lost his place, muttered to himself, and started at some point he had already covered. His voice continually shook. Even knowing his general intention — to accuse Clodius of an ambush and to exonerate Milo completely — it was impossible for me to make any sense of his argument. From the looks on their faces, the jurors were equally confounded.

Cicero's orations had roused many reactions in me over the years — outrage at his willingness to twist the truth, admiration approaching awe at his ability to construct a logical argument, simple wonder at his prodigious ego, grudging respect for his loyalty to his friends, dismay at his shameless demagoguery, for Cicero was always ready to exploit his listeners' religious sentiments and sexual prejudices to his own-ends. Now I began to feel something I had never felt before, something I would have thought impossible: I began to feel embarrassed for Cicero.

This should have been his finest hour. When he defended Sextus Roscius and risked offending the dictator Sulla, he had been too young to know better; inciting the people against Catilina had been almost too easy; destroying Clodia in his speech for Marcus Caelius had been an act of personal vengeance. This was a situation that required true bravery and heroic stamina. If he could have stood his ground against the angry mob, if he could have stared them down and by the sheer power of his oratory compelled them to listen, what a crowning accomplishment that would have been, whether he won the case or not. He could have attained a kind of glory even in failure.. Instead, he was the very portrait of a man cowed by fear. He stuttered, averted his eyes, broke out in a sweat, stumbled over his lines. He was like an actor crippled by stage fright. No man could be blamed for being intimidated by that crowd, but from Cicero such a reaction was difficult to stomach. The wretchedness ofhis performance robbed his words of any weight they might have possessed. The few audible portions of his speech seemed disconnected, forced, artificial, insincere. I seemed to be watching a second-rate actor doing a poor parody of Cicero. More than feeling embarrassed, I almost felt pity for him.

Milo became increasingly agitated until he seemed about to come out of his skin. He kept jumping towards Tiro, engaging him in whispered arguments. Milo, I suspected, wanted to call Cicero from the Rostra and speak extemporaneously in his own defence; Tiro managed to argue him out of it.

The crowd soon learned to make a game of their outbursts. I have seldom seen a mass of people act with such seeming single-mindedness. They would grow just quiet enough to allow Cicero to be heard, then would laugh when he stuttered or misspoke, then would wait until the critical moment of the point he was making and let out a deafening roar. Their performance was uncanny, as if orchestrated by an invisible hand. The spirit of Clodius himself seemed to guide them that day.

The debacle seemed to go on forever. In fact, it lasted for considerably less than the three hours allotted for the defence. Eventually Cicero neared the end of his speech. "Milo was born to serve his country. Surely it cannot be right that he should be forbidden to die within her boundaries — "

"Then let him take his own life, right now!" someone shouted.

"Distinguished jurors, can you possibly see fit to banish him from our soil? Send a man such as Milo into exile, and he would be eagerly welcomed by every other city in the world — "

"Then send him! Send him! Exile! Exile!" The word became a chant that echoed all through the Forum.

Cicero did not wait for the chant to die down in order to finish his speech. He continued in a hoarse voice amid the growing roar of the crowd. I strained to hear him. "Urgently I ask you, honourable jurors, when you cast your votes, be brave enough to act as you truly think is right. Do that, and believe me, your integrity… and courage… and sense of justice will surely please the one who chose this jury by fixing on the best and bravest and wisest men in Rome."

Was that, then, the ultimate appeal? That a vote to acquit Milo would be pleasing to the Great One, the sole consul and selector of judges and juries? If that was his final argument, it was just as well that Cicero's voice was drowned out by the mob.

Once the speeches were finished, each side was allowed to excuse fifteen of the jurors. This was done quickly, as both prosecution and defence had already drawn up their lists of those they considered undesirable.

All that remained was for the fifty-one remaining jurors to vote. Each was given a tablet with wax on each side, with the letter A (for absolve) stamped on one side and the letter C (for condemn) stamped on the other. The juror wiped out one of the letters, leaving the other to show his judgment These were collected before they were counted, so that the vote of each juror was kept secret Domitius presided over the counting of the tablets as they were separated into two groups. From where I sat, I could see that one group was about three times higher than the other.

Domitius announced the results. The vote to condemn was thirty-eight. The vote to absolve was thirteen.

The defeat was crushing. Even so, Milo had gathered more support from the jury than I expected. Strangely enough, I felt a sudden twinge of sympathy for him. He was responsible for some of the darkest days of my life; he had deliberately separated me from my family and treated me like an animal. Yet the time I had spent in captivity had also made me consider the harsh reality of the exile's existence, ait off forever, from his heartland, from the places of his childhood and the people he loves, from the only life he has known, forbidden ever to return, even in death. I had had a taste of that despondency, at Milo's hand. Now Milo's world was at an end. Just as I had almost felt pity for Cicero, I almost felt it for Milo.